Kristy and the Cat Burglar Page 9

  I whirled to face Golem. “Let us out of here!” I said.

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” Golem answered calmly. By now he was standing, facing us. “You know too much.”

  “Too much about what?” I asked, trying to sound innocent.

  He just laughed. I saw his glance slide toward the blue lamp and back to me. “I have a flight booked to Paris in, let’s see,” — he shot out a wrist to check his watch — “four hours. Until I leave, you’ll all have to stay here with me.”

  “But,” Abby said, “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m sure your friend will be happy to explain,” said Golem. Smirking, he gave me a mock bow.

  I was furious. “It’s him!” I said. “He’s the Cat Burglar. He’s the one who framed Sergeant Johnson, and he used us to do it. He hid in his own house and stole his own diamonds. He faked a burglary and planted those clues for us — or someone else — to find. And he probably manipulated Sergeant Winters and Officer Hopkins too.”

  “Very good,” said Golem smoothly. He seemed totally unruffled, which made me even angrier.

  “You’re going to be in trouble if you keep us here against our wishes,” said Cary.

  Golem just raised his eyebrows. “I’ll be halfway across the ocean before anyone even figures out where you are.”

  I heard a stifled sob and looked at Mary Anne. “It’s okay,” I told her.

  “It certainly is,” said Golem. “Once I’m safely gone, you’ll eventually be discovered and freed. Then everyone will be happy.” He smiled and touched the tips of his fingers together. “Now, let’s see. I suppose I’ll need some rope.” He turned to open a closet door.

  Everything happened very quickly after that.

  The second Golem’s eyes weren’t on him, Cary lunged for the box with the button. If he could reach it, he’d be able to unlock the door. But Cary had only taken a step or two before Golem whirled around and ran to block him.

  I heard Mary Anne gasp as Golem knocked Cary to the floor. Cary pulled Golem down as he dropped, and the two of them wrestled for a moment.

  Somehow I managed to make myself move. Three big steps brought me to the box and I reached for the button. I pushed it and heard a satisfying click. “Try the door!” I yelled to Abby.

  But my voice was nearly drowned out by the sound of sirens. The police! Did they know how badly we needed them?

  Golem swore as he struggled to his feet. But he wasn’t quick enough to stop Mary Anne and Abby, who were out the door in a flash. It closed again behind them.

  He glared at me. He wasn’t unruffled now. In fact, his smoking jacket was torn, his hair was standing up in spikes, and he had a scratch on his cheek. Also he was angry. Very, very angry.

  “Cary, come on,” I said, reaching down a hand to help him up. Cary looked awful. There was a gash across his forehead and his face was white. “Let’s get out of here.”

  My words seemed to jolt Golem into action. “Out of here!” he said. “What an excellent idea.” He glanced wildly at the door and then at the curtained windows. I could tell he was desperate to escape before the police found him.

  Too late. The pounding of feet told me — and Golem — that the police were storming the house.

  “In here!” I heard Abby shout, from just outside the door. Two seconds later, Chief Pierce burst into the room.

  He glanced at Cary and me but headed straight for Golem. “You’re under arrest,” he said.

  I expected Golem to try to make a break for it, or smooth talk the chief. Instead, he just nodded. Wearily, he held out his hands, and the chief snapped a pair of handcuffs onto his wrists. “You have the right to remain silent,” Chief Pierce began.

  Cary and I exchanged a glance. He was standing by then, and he and I nodded at each other in agreement. Then we turned and slipped out of the room.

  Guess who was standing in the hall? Every member of the BSC. Not just Mary Anne and Abby but Stacey, Claudia, Mal, and Jessi too. Mary Anne rushed to Cary’s side. “Are you okay?” She touched his forehead gently. “You’re bleeding.”

  “Am I?” he asked. “It doesn’t really hurt. I’m okay.” He sounded dazed.

  “What are all of you doing here?” I asked.

  “It’s a long story,” said Stacey.

  Just then the chief walked by, with Reinhart Golem ahead of him.

  Golem scowled at us.

  “Why don’t you all head out now,” the chief said gently. “We’ll be in touch.”

  “Let’s go back to my house for an emergency meeting,” I proposed. “Cary, you come too. We’ll clean up that cut and bandage it for you.”

  “We can order a pizza,” said Stacey. “There’s plenty of money in the treasury.”

  Half an hour later, we were happily pigging out on a large extra-cheese pie.

  And we were talking. Putting all the pieces together.

  First, Cary and I explained to Mary Anne and Abby about the lamp, and how seeing it had made us understand the truth about Reinhart Golem.

  “Boy, was I confused,” said Abby. “I didn’t know what you were talking about when you said we had to leave. Now I see. But what I still don’t understand is how the police knew to come.”

  “We told them you might be in trouble,” said Claudia.

  “But how did you know that?” asked Mary Anne.

  “Because we went to Chez Maurice,” said Stacey. “Golem wasn’t there, obviously. But while Stacey was talking to the maître d’, Jessi decided to flip through the reservation book.”

  “And I saw Reinhart Golem’s name in there for the day of the burglary!” said Jessi. “When he was supposedly in France. An alarm went off in my head.”

  “So we went to the police station.” Stacey took over the story. “Officer Hopkins was there, and we told her what we’d found out. She’d started to suspect that Golem was manipulating Sergeant Winters, so she asked us to tell our story to the chief.”

  Mal jumped in. “When he heard that the four of you were at Golem’s house, he took immediate action. He rounded up a team and we rode over with them, with everybody’s sirens blasting.”

  “It was pretty cool,” Claudia said.

  “Wow,” I said, shaking my head. “I just can’t believe it.”

  “You can’t believe that Golem was caught?” asked Stacey.

  “No,” I said. “I can’t believe how I fell for all his flattery.” I felt like such a fool. “He really tricked us.”

  “I guess he tricked a lot of people,” said Stacey comfortingly. “On the way to his place, the chief told me they’d just discovered that Ben Birch was actually one of Golem’s aliases. He disguised himself all the time. We heard that the Cat Burglar was good at that, remember?”

  “So that was actually Golem in the woods that day!” said Abby. “Not Ben Birch.”

  “Well, both, I guess,” I said. “Now I see why Golem looked familiar to me.” I put down my slice of pizza and reached for the mystery notebook. I pulled out Ben Birch’s picture and examined it closely. Sure enough, I could see Reinhart Golem, now that I knew.

  “That’s why there weren’t any traces of Birch on the Internet or in the papers,” said Mal.

  “Back to Golem,” said Cary. “What about his motives? I mean, why would he rob himself — and why frame Sergeant Johnson?”

  “He robbed himself so he could cash in on his insurance money and still have the diamonds,” I said. I’d figured that out right away. “And he framed Sergeant Johnson with a couple of the diamonds because he was mad about being investigated that other time.”

  “It’s all coming together. He went to a lot of trouble to make Sergeant Johnson look bad,” mused Mary Anne. “He made sure Sergeant Johnson would be the first on the scene, by making that anonymous call that brought him to the neighborhood. He must have stolen a police pistol in order to shoot off the gun and leave a casing. And he made the call that sent Jack Fenton to the hospital, and took that marker and planted the d
iamonds —”

  “Plus, he figured out that it would be easy to turn Sergeant Winters against Sergeant Johnson,” said Abby. “Whew. This guy is really something.”

  “He sure is,” I said quietly. I was still in shock from the events of the evening. And I was scared. I mean, Cary was okay. He was just bruised and cut up. But what if Golem had used a gun? What if the police hadn’t shown up? We could have been in big, big trouble.

  “You know what I think?” asked Mary Anne. She still hadn’t finished her pizza, and now she put it down. “I think maybe we should just concentrate on baby-sitting for a while. Maybe this detective stuff is a little too dangerous.”

  I saw Stacey and Claudia nod. Jessi and Mal seemed to agree, and so did Abby.

  Just then, the phone rang. I picked it up. “Baby-sitters Club,” I said. It was Sergeant Johnson. He’d been freed from custody, and he was calling to thank us.

  “Thank us?” I said. I couldn’t believe my ears. “But we’re the reason you were in trouble in the first place. We thought we’d stumbled on some major evidence, but it was just a set-up.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Sergeant Johnson told me. “It wasn’t your fault. You were doing your best, but you ran into a very, very smart criminal.”

  “Well, I’m still sorry you had to go through all of that,” I said.

  “I am too,” he replied. “But it’s over now. And everything worked out okay, this time.”

  “Thanks for being so nice,” I said. It didn’t seem like enough, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “That’s okay. Just do me one favor, Kristy.”

  “Sure.”

  “Stay out of trouble for a while, all right?” I could tell that Sergeant Johnson was smiling.

  “We will,” I promised. I said good-bye, hung up, and told my friends what he’d said.

  That’s when we made a unanimous decision. The case of the Cat Burglar would be the BSC’s last mystery.

  At least for now.

  The author gratefully acknowledges

  Ellen Miles

  for her help in

  preparing this manuscript.

  About the Author

  ANN MATTHEWS MARTIN was born on August 12, 1955. She grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, with her parents and her younger sister, Jane.

  There are currently over 176 million copies of The Baby-sitters Club in print. (If you stacked all of these books up, the pile would be 21,245 miles high.) In addition to The Baby-sitters Club, Ann is the author of two other series, Main Street and Family Tree. Her novels include Belle Teal, A Corner of the Universe (a Newbery Honor book), Here Today, A Dog’s Life, On Christmas Eve, Everything for a Dog, Ten Rules for Living with My Sister, and Ten Good and Bad Things About My Life (So Far). She is also the coauthor, with Laura Godwin, of the Doll People series.

  Ann lives in upstate New York with her dog and her cats.

  Copyright © 1998 by Ann M. Martin

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. SCHOLASTIC, THE BABY-SITTERS CLUB, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First edition, August 1998

  e-ISBN 978-0-545-87461-8