Christmas Chiller Read online

  No gum. Nothing. I handed the file back to Stacey. “It looks like it’s just not working.”

  “Great!” In frustration Stacey slammed her hand against each and every floor button. “Maybe one of the others will.”

  All the buttons lit up. The elevator gave a little jolt and began to rise upward. Stacey said crossly, “Well, we’ll just have to walk back down to our floor, no matter what kind of work they’re doing on the stairs.”

  My feet protested, but I kept my mouth shut. We didn’t have a choice. And by now, what I wanted more than anything was just to be back in the apartment.

  The elevator shuddered, jerked up, and dropped several inches. My heart did the same. I put my hand out and braced myself against the wall.

  The elevator rose again, smoothly. Just a few more minutes and we’d be inside the apartment. We’d be … the word came to my mind unexpectedly … we’d be safe.

  The elevator lurched even harder, dropped even more, and then jerked to a stop so suddenly that I dropped my shopping bags to clutch Stacey. I closed my eyes and waited for the worst to happen, waited to plunge a million feet to the bottom of the elevator shaft.

  Nothing happened. I opened my eyes to see my white-knuckled hands clutching Stacey’s arm. Her white-knuckled hands were wrapped around my arms. Her eyes were still closed.

  “Stacey,” I whispered.

  She opened her eyes.

  “I think we’re stuck,” I whispered, as if a loud voice might jar the elevator loose and send it hurtling downward.

  “Right,” said Stacey. She took one hand off my arm, transferring her grip to the red phone that hung next to the control panel. She picked it up and pressed the button. She held the phone to her ear.

  “Tell Carl to do something fast,” I said. I glanced up. It looked as if we were trapped between floors four and five. A five-story drop would be more than enough to turn Stacey and me into pancakes. Big dead pancakes. I made a face. That sounded like the name of a punk singing group. Any other time I would have laughed.

  But not now.

  Stacey punched the button again and again. I tried to pretend that I wasn’t completely freaked out, that the walls weren’t closing in around me. You will not panic, I told myself sternly, over and over again.

  Then Stacey’s face brightened and she said, “Carl! Carl, can you hear me? It’s Stacey. We’re trapped in the elevator.” She listened a moment and said, “The buttons on the control panel are out of whack, I think…. No…. Well, how long do you think it will be? … Okay. Okay, but if nothing happens soon, I’m calling back.”

  She spoke with a bravado I knew she didn’t feel. As she hung up the phone, I wanted to scream, “Don’t!” Who knew if it would work again? Who knew when we would talk to someone again? Who knew how long we would be here?

  We could be in very big trouble. I looked at Stacey’s pale face and became especially worried. “Stacey,” I said. “Do you have your insulin kit?”

  “Yes. Thanks for thinking of it, Claud,” Stacey said. “You know I always take it with me, just in case. And Life Savers in case my blood sugar gets low.” She reached into her hip pack and pulled out a large roll of the candy. “In fact, I think I’ll have a couple now. I’m feeling — well, not shaky, but not quite one hundred percent. Want one?”

  “No, thanks,” I said. I had immediately started on a new worry. What if we were here so long that we ran out of Life Savers? Or insulin?

  What if I needed to go to the bathroom?

  Stacey spoke again. “Carl said the elevator maintenance crew is on its way. We should be out of here in no time.”

  “What I want to know,” I said, “is how we landed in this mess in the first place. Either we are having the world’s most monumental case of bad luck — or someone is out to get us.”

  Stacey nodded soberly. “I know. And I don’t think it’s just bad luck.”

  “Me either. But who would do this to us? And why?”

  “I keep thinking of Ethan,” Stacey confessed. “I don’t know why. I don’t see how he could possibly do something like this, but, well, he’s been acting so strange.”

  “True,” I said. I paused. “Someone has to be watching us pretty carefully to know when we’re coming and going. I mean, if we were trapped in here on purpose, that took some planning.”

  “Are you thinking of Carl?” said Stacey. “Carl has always been on duty when these things happened. But why? Why would he do them?”

  “Maybe he’s just not wrapped right,” I said. “Who knows?”

  “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Well, then, someone else in the building,” I said. “Someone who can come to your floor, take your lights, splash red goop around, and then escape back to his — or her — apartment.”

  “But I don’t know anybody else in the building!” Stacey practically wailed.

  “That leaves the apartment building ghost,” I said. And in spite of myself I shuddered.

  “There is no ghost,” said Stacey. She looked around at the elevator walls and said in a lower voice, “At least, I hope there isn’t.”

  I wasn’t so sure. Which was worse: a ghost, or an actual person?

  The elevator lurched again (along with my heart) and then all of a sudden it was moving. We glided down to the first floor and the door opened.

  “Dad!” cried Stacey.

  Mr. McGill wrapped Stacey in a hug. “I couldn’t believe it when Carl told me. Are you all right?”

  “We’re fine,” Stacey said.

  “Fine,” I echoed. I smiled at our audience: Mr. McGill, relief on his face; Carl, looking worried; the girl we had seen on the elevator, the one who had been friendly to Ethan, looking from us to the elevator and back again; and one of the maintenance men with a large toolbox, who was wiping his tools, utterly indifferent to us all.

  The girl said to Carl, “Is it — is it safe to use the elevator?” Carl turned to talk to the maintenance guy, then nodded.

  She smiled at us. “Wish me luck,” she said and pushed the button. The door closed and she was whisked away.

  I said, “I think I’d prefer to walk, no matter how bad the stairs are.”

  Carl was still talking to the maintenance guy and didn’t seem to notice as we walked to the stairs, pushed the door open, and began to walk up.

  “I guess they finished their repair work,” said Stacey in a puzzled voice.

  “What repairs?” asked Mr. McGill. “These stairs look just the same as always. I used them this morning. I try to take the stairs. It helps keep you in shape, you know.”

  It was an enormous relief to walk into the apartment. Mr. McGill said, “Let me go change into something more comfortable and we’ll get some dinner.”

  “Great,” I said. I flopped down onto the sofa.

  Stacey sat down beside me. She was holding a piece of paper in her hand.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “A note. It was outside the door. I picked it up before Dad saw it.”

  “Not another note!” I groaned loudly.

  “It’s from Ethan. He didn’t sign it, but I recognize his handwriting,” said Stacey. “He must have left it here sometime today. But why didn’t he just give it to Carl? How did he get up here to leave it?”

  “Carl probably let him up and forgot to mention it,” I said. “What does it say?”

  She handed me the note.

  It read, meet me in the basement. tomorrow. 5 p.m.

  Monday night is leftovers-and-pizza night at the Pike house. That means we make pizzas and eat leftovers and sometimes add the leftovers to the pizzas as toppings.

  I took the last pizza out of the oven and carried it to the table. My parents said grace and then we began to pizza out.

  I’d just taken a big bite of salad pizza (I think you can guess what the toppings were and where they came from) when Mom smiled at me and then said to the table at large, “I have an announcement to make.”

  The noise level dropped
— a little. Vanessa said, “I hope the announcement that we hear is one full of Christmas cheer.”

  “I think you will think so,” Dad said. He smiled and put his hand on Mom’s.

  Uh-oh, I thought immediately. We’re going to have another baby in the family! I glanced at Claire. She’s the youngest and can be very sensitive. I began to worry about how she would take the news.

  But it was not a baby announcement.

  Mom said, “We’re going to have a guest for the holidays.”

  “Yeah. Santa Claus,” said Adam, and he and Jordan and Byron cracked up at his dumb joke.

  “I think Santa Claus will be visiting,” agreed Mom calmly. “But that’s not who I’m talking about.”

  “Who? Who, who?” asked Claire.

  “You sound like an owl,” Nicky told her.

  “It’s someone Mal knows — Mary Doe,” Mom said.

  “Mary!” I exclaimed. “That’s great!”

  “She’s the lady who can’t remember her name, or from whence she came?” asked Vanessa.

  “Right,” Dad said. “She doesn’t really need to be in the hospital anymore, and besides it’s not the place to be in at Christmas if you can help it. So we invited her to come stay with us for the holidays.”

  “Maybe we can help her remember,” said Byron.

  But Mom and Dad were both shaking their heads emphatically. Dad continued, “She still needs rest and quiet. Don’t forget, she’s been through a serious trauma, and she’s about to have a baby. We’ll all have to pitch in to help out, but you guys are going to have to go easy around her. In fact, I’d say minimum contact would be best.”

  “Oh, all right,” said Byron. The triplets looked disappointed. I suppressed a shudder as I envisioned what “memory recovery” techniques they might have dreamed up.

  Then, I admit, I thought, What if I could help her regain her memory? Wouldn’t that be a great Christmas present?

  I ate the rest of my salad pizza and finished dinner absentmindedly. I was busy thinking of how much work needed to be done before Mary came — not just getting the sofa bed in the study ready but also detective work.

  After dinner, I went to my room to pick up my gear for Kristy’s sleepover. And then I thought, Well, maybe I’ll just take a look at the clues in the mystery notebook. I pulled out the notebook and flipped it open to the page that said MARY DOE.

  I looked down the list of clues. It was a very short list. But one clue caught my eye: the clothing store label I had seen in Mary’s sweater, BABYBABY, DEL FLORES, CALIFORNIA.

  It was an unusual label. But then I thought it over and realized it wasn’t so strange. Mary was pregnant, so she had probably bought her sweater at a maternity store.

  I felt a sudden rush of excitement. Was it possible? I found the phone book and looked up the area code for the town of Del Flores, California. Then I called information. BabyBaby Boutique was a store in Del Flores, just outside San Francisco!

  I hung up the phone in a state of shock. Mary’s sweater had come from Del Flores. Did she live there? Did friends or relatives live there who had sent her the sweater as a gift? Would anyone in the store recognize her?

  First things first, I told myself, trying to calm down. It was late afternoon in California, still early enough for the store to be open. I picked up the phone again and called BabyBaby Boutique.

  Dead end. The saleswoman was really nice. She didn’t treat me like a bratty little kid or a crank caller. But she wasn’t much help. She didn’t remember seeing anyone who fit Mary’s description.

  I was about to hang up when I had another inspiration. “Do you have a fax machine?” I asked.

  “Yes,” the woman said.

  “If you give me the number, I could fax a picture of this person to you. Would that be all right?”

  “Of course,” she said, and gave me the number.

  I took the article with the photograph of Mary that had been published in the Stoneybrook newspaper and went into the study. It only took a minute to feed the photo into the fax machine.

  I waited until I was sure that the store had had time to look the photograph over and then I called back. The same saleswoman answered.

  “Yes,” she said. “We received the fax. I’ve looked at it and I’ve shown it to Carlotta, who owns BabyBaby. I’m sorry, but neither of us remembers seeing this woman.”

  “Oh,” I said. I was crushed. I took a deep breath and said, “Do lots of people from San Francisco come to your store?”

  The saleswoman thought for a moment and said, “Well, we do specialize in maternity clothes, so if a woman is trying to locate a hard-to-find item, she might make a special trip to our store. But I’d say that most of our customers are local.” She paused, then added, “Maybe the item was bought as a gift by her husband or a friend.”

  “Maybe,” I agreed.

  The saleswoman said, “If you would describe the item to me, it’s possible that I could tell you if it is something that we currently have in stock. That would mean that it was bought recently.”

  I described the sweater, and before I was through the saleswoman said, “Yes. That’s a new line. We’ve only been carrying that style in that material for about four months.”

  Hope came back to me. I said, “Could you check the receipts? I mean, I know it would be a lot of trouble, but this is very important.”

  “Yes, I understand that. I’ll see what I can do. And I’ll tell you what. I’ll post the photo and the news article you faxed. Maybe someone will recognize her.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I hung up the phone. I hadn’t done badly. I hadn’t solved the mystery, but I felt as if we were a little further along toward a solution. We, the BSC members, still had a chance to find out who Mary was in time for Christmas.

  Although I knew it would make me even later for Kristy’s sleepover, I sat down with the mystery notebook again. I wanted to write everything down while it was still fresh in my mind. Just in case it might help. There was plenty of room in the Pike Inn for Mary this Christmas, but I knew that even though she couldn’t remember where she came from, Mary surely must feel that there was no place like home.

  Mal burst into the sleepover late. The rest of us were gathered in the rec room. We had staked out our sleeping bag positions and were trying to decide whether we wanted to tell ghost stories. We forgot about the scare-fest, though, when Mal brandished the notebook and said, “I’ve just written up new clues in the Mary Doe mystery!”

  “Let me see,” said Kristy immediately. She snagged the book, and Abby said, “No fair.”

  “Nofe-air, nofe-air,” I murmured, in imitation of Mallory’s youngest sister, Claire. (She can launch into an awesome temper tantrum, punctuated with anguished cries of “No fair,” pronounced “Nofe-air.”)

  Mallory grinned. “Also, Mom and Dad have asked Mary to stay with us over the holidays. Wouldn’t it be a great Christmas present if we could help her remember who she is?”

  “The best Christmas present ever,” Jessi agreed. Then she said to Kristy, “Read the mystery notebook aloud.”

  “Oh. Right,” said Kristy, and read aloud the information about the BabyBaby Boutique and the fax.

  “Excellent work, Detective Pike,” I said.

  “Thank you,” Mallory answered, looking pleased. She retrieved the notebook from Kristy and stuck it into her briefcase (one of her father’s old ones, which she often uses instead of a pack). Then she unrolled her sleeping bag and sat down on it. “What’s happening?”

  “Let’s make holiday decorations. Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwaanza,” said Jessi. “Then we can tell scary stories.”

  “Hanukkah decorations?” Abby tilted her head. “Hmm. Well, why not?”

  As president of the BSC and part of a large family, Kristy naturally had all kinds of supplies for making ornaments. We gathered together paper, flour, and water for papier-mâché, tubes of glue and glitter, ribbon and old pieces of material from the scrap bag, spare buttons, and all
sorts of other goodies.

  Karen was at a sleepover of her own and Andrew and Emily Michelle had already gone to bed, but naturally, when David Michael heard what we were doing, he wanted to join in. He had a great time making papier-mâché reindeer with paper clips bent into horns. He even made a Rudolph ornament with a red nose.

  Then Watson looked in. “Time for bed, David Michael. It’s late.”

  “It’s not so late,” David Michael said.

  “Ten o’ clock,” said Watson. “Very much past your bedtime.”

  “But I’m not sleepy and I don’t have school tomorrow,” David Michael argued.

  “Let’s take your ornaments into the living room and put them on the mantel by the Christmas tree to dry,” suggested Kristy. “Then you can go to bed.”

  David Michael gave in. “Okay,” he said. And yawned hugely. When we laughed, he laughed too. “I guess I am a little sleepy,” he admitted.

  We continued making ornaments. “I feel almost guilty, doing art projects without Claudia,” commented Abby.

  “Let’s make a special ornament for her,” said Mary Anne. “And one each for Stacey and Shannon.”

  “Don’t forget Logan,” I teased, and Mary Anne blushed a little.

  “I’m going to make an ornament for Mary,” said Mallory. “A snowflake.” She began to fold a piece of paper so she could cut it into a snowflake pattern.

  Watson looked in again just before midnight. “Don’t stay up too late,” he said mildly.

  “Watson,” Kristy cried in mock surprise. “You don’t expect us to sleep at a sleepover, do you?”

  Watson smiled and shook his head, then went upstairs to bed.

  We heard the big clock in the hall chime midnight.

  I said, “If this were Halloween, it would be the scariest hour of all. Ghost Standard Time.”

  “It’s not Halloween and nothing is going to happen,” said Jessi firmly.

  As if on cue, an alarm split the night.

  We froze. Then Abby leaped up and said, “It’s coming from next door! Mrs. Porter’s house!”

  “The kitchen window,” gasped Kristy, and we all stampeded out of the rec room toward the kitchen.