Baby-Sitters at Shadow Lake Read online

  I caught up with my friends who had decided to check out the shore first, by walking around the island.

  “Boy, this is a beautiful place,” I said as we tramped along.

  “Yeah,” agreed Dawn. “But you know what? I can’t stop thinking about the Bayards. How could an entire family disappear, along with their maids and the gardener and everyone?”

  Claud shrugged her shoulders. “That’s what makes the mystery intriguing.”

  “What happened to their house, Dawn?” I asked. “Why isn’t it here?”

  “I’m not sure. Stephan just said it was gone. He was in the middle of the story and I didn’t want to interrupt him. It was probably torn down.”

  “Oh, you know — Ow!” I squawked.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Sam.

  “Something bit me.”

  “Again?” said Kristy.

  I stuck out my tongue at her. “Yes, again. And it felt like a tick.”

  “Mal, how on earth do you know how it feels to be bitten by a tick? You can’t feel tick bites. I mean, not until after you’ve gotten them and they’re irritated and everything,” said Kristy.

  “Thank you, Dr. Spock,” I replied.

  “Mallory, put some calamine lotion on it and let’s keep going,” said Sam, turning to face me. He was several yards ahead, hiking along with a large stick he’d found. “I want to get back before the entire day is shot.”

  What a grouch. Oh, well.

  I reached obediently into my knapsack and emerged with one of my bottles of lotion. I stopped, sat down, and applied some lotion to the bite with a Q-tip. Then I replaced the bottle carefully.

  “Ready?” asked Sam, and I nodded.

  We walked all the way around the island. We didn’t stop until we had returned to the boats and our gear. We had not noticed one sign of any other people. No litter, no campfires, no shouts or calls, not even a footprint anywhere. Sam took a quick tour through the woods and decided the island was safe for us BSC members. Then he put Lake Mist back in the water and climbed in.

  “See you tomorrow!” Kristy called.

  “With any luck,” Sam replied. (I think he was hiding a smile.) Then he added, “Stacey, dahling, do enjoy yourself.” He turned away before he could see the face she made.

  For a moment, my friends and I stood where we were and just gazed after Sam as he motored away.

  “He did not investigate the woods thoroughly at all,” said Dawn.

  “If any ghosts are in there you don’t think they’d walk up and introduce themselves, do you?” Claud asked her.

  “I guess not.”

  “Boy, this is kind of like Gilligan’s Island,” spoke up Mary Anne.

  “Hey, yeah!” agreed Jessi. “Let’s see. How does that song go?”

  “Like this!” I exclaimed. “Come and listen to a story ‘bout a man named Jed, a poor mountaineer barely kept his —”

  “No!” cried Kristy, giggling. “That’s The Beverly Hillbillies!”

  KER-RASH!

  “Aughhh!” screamed the seven of us. And Dawn added, “It’s Mr. Bayard! His spirit is here!”

  We were about to become hysterical when Kristy said, “Wait a second. That wasn’t any ghost. This branch just fell down. See?”

  Everyone believed the fallen branch theory except for Dawn.

  “How do you know?” she shrieked.

  “Because it wasn’t here a minute ago.”

  “Oh.”

  “Come on, you guys. Let’s set up our camp. Then we can really explore the island. Maybe,” Kristy added, glancing at Dawn, “we’ll find some clues that will solve the mystery.”

  “I was hoping to solve it from a distance,” said Dawn. “Not with Mr. Bayard’s ghost looking over my shoulder.”

  “Well, you’re here now,” snapped Kristy. I could tell she was fed up with Dawn. “Let’s get going.”

  Our camp was not very elaborate. We were going to slumber away in sleeping bags under the stars. (We had brought along two tents, but we didn’t plan to put them up unless rain threatened.) So we piled our sleeping bags on the shore and then cleared an area for a campfire. We lined the circle with rocks and gathered dry sticks and twigs from the woods. Finally we stowed our gear in the shade.

  “Okay, let’s explore!” said Kristy, and, like ducklings, the rest of us followed her into the woods.

  “What are we looking for?” asked Jessi, a few minutes later.

  “Nothing,” answered Dawn pointedly.

  “Adventure,” said Kristy.

  We walked along in silence.

  Several more minutes later, Claud said, “I don’t see anything but trees.”

  “And rocks,” said Stacey.

  “And bricks,” I added.

  “Bricks! What are bricks doing on the island?” screeched Dawn. “Bricks are man-made. They aren’t natural. Someone has been here!”

  “Of course someone’s been here. The ghosts of the Bayards,” said Kristy.

  Kristy was laughing. She was teasing Dawn. But as it turned out, she wasn’t far from the truth. Claud and Jessi immediately ran for the bricks and even before the rest of us had caught up with them, Claudia was exclaiming, “Oh, my lord!”

  “What?” screamed Dawn.

  “I think we just found the Bayards’ house. Or what’s left of it.”

  That did it. Every one of us, even Dawn, dashed headlong to the spot where Claud and Jessi were now crouching.

  “Claud’s right,” whispered Jessi. “Look at this.”

  I knelt down next to her. I picked up a piece of scorched brick. I looked around. Bricks, all of them scorched, stretched away from me in two jagged lines. The lines were at right angles to each other and met near where my friends and I were clustered.

  “I think,” I said, whispering, too, “that this is the foundation to some building that burned down. It must have been the Bayards’ house.”

  We were quiet for several seconds. Then we all began talking at once.

  “You mean the house burned down?” said Kristy.

  “I thought the Bayards disappeared during a storm,” said Mary Anne.

  “They did, but their house didn’t,” said Dawn, frowning.

  “I wonder if the Bayards even know their house burned down,” mused Stacey. “They might not, you know. I mean, if they’re still alive.”

  “I bet their spirits know,” said Dawn. “Spirits usually know about awful things like that. And I bet they’re mad. They probably roam around and haunt the island, just like they haunt the lake. I told you guys the island was haunted.”

  “Dawn, you are jumping to conclusions,” said Mary Anne. But her hands were shaking and her voice was trembling.

  “Hey, where are you going?” called Kristy.

  “Back to our stuff,” said Dawn. “We’re moving.”

  “We’re what?” I shouted.

  “We’re moving. We are much too close to these ruins. I’m not spending the night with this ghost-house right next to me.”

  “Dawn!” yelped Kristy.

  But Mary Anne said, “Maybe she’s right….”

  “You guys!” Kristy stamped her foot. The rest of us were following Dawn, though, so Kristy trailed after us. By the time she reached the shore, each of us was grabbing a sleeping bag. And I was juggling my bags of insect artillery. I did have an awful lot of gear.

  “Do you really want to rebuild our campfire?” Kristy asked us.

  I glanced at the neat circle of stones which had taken half an hour to arrange, and at the sticks which had taken even longer to collect. Then I glanced at my friends. And then I glanced across the lake.

  “I see him!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “I see the monster! He’s out there. And he’s —”

  “Mal, what are you looking at?” asked Claudia.

  “That … that … ” I shaded my eyes. “That tree branch,” I said, letting out my breath. “Oops. It was a tree branch. Never mind.”

  By the time we’
d recovered from that trauma, and I had reapplied my insect repellent, nobody felt like moving camp. So we stayed put. We began to fix dinner, which consisted of canned stuff, fruit, and junk food. We lit our fire and ate supper contentedly. Dawn insisted on facing the woods, in order to spot danger immediately, but that was okay with us.

  We barely noticed when darkness began to fall.

  Wink, wink. Wink, wink.

  I was huddled by our campfire, facing the woods. I was sitting in the same position in which I’d been sitting since we’d eaten supper. And something was winking at me from the dark beyond the trees. I almost screamed, “Ghost eyes! The Bayards are here!” Then one of those ghost eyes flew in front of my face and winked on and off.

  It was a firefly, a lightning bug. And so were those other ghost eyes.

  I relaxed. (Just a smidge.)

  Our supper was over. Everyone except Stacey and me had eaten canned baked beans, apples, potato chips, and s’mores. Stacey and I had eaten the beans, the apples, and some stoned wheat thins, and later I had also eaten a slice of watermelon. (Guess what. When my brother Jeff was little he used to say “water-lemon.”) Not a bad supper, all things considered.

  Now the seven of us were sitting around the fire. Claud, Kristy, and Mal were still making and eating s’mores.

  “You guys are going to get sick,” said Stacey, eyeing them nervously. (She absolutely cannot stand to see, or hear, anyone puke.)

  “Nah,” said Kristy. “Once I ate four s’mores, large ones, and nothing happened except that Mom got mad because I’d used up the graham crackers.”

  We sat in silence for a few minutes. I shivered. The night air on the island was cooler than it was on the mainland. As if she were reading my mind, Jessi said, “Brrr. I’m freezing.” She was already wearing jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and a sweater. Now she pulled a sweatshirt on over the sweater and edged closer to our fire.

  I shivered again. “You know,” I said, “sometimes when a ghost is hanging around, the temperature drops.” I happen to know quite a bit about ghosts. I read about them constantly. And personally, I think a ghost lives in the secret passage at my house. (The house is centuries old, and the passage used to be part of the Underground Railroad, which helped slaves escape from the South to safety in the North.)

  Kristy rolled her eyes at me. “The temperature also drops,” she said, “when you’re on an island in the middle of a lake and it’s almost nighttime.” She popped the last bite of her s’more into her mouth.

  “Well, anyway,” said Mary Anne, “you guys have to admit that Shadow Island is a little spooky.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Mal, whose back was to the woods. She turned around and stared into the trees. “I wonder what really happened to the Bayards.”

  “You know what I think is the strangest part of the story?” asked Jessi. “That everyone on the island disappeared — the Bayards plus the gardener plus the maids, or whoever their servants were. If just the Bayards had vanished, I would think maybe the family was in trouble and they wanted to disappear. But then they wouldn’t bring along their gardener and everyone. So there must have been some kind of natural disaster.”

  “But nothing had happened to the mansion,” I pointed out. “Not right then.”

  “Yeah,” said Stace. “A storm would have damaged the house.”

  “I want to know when the house burned down,” said Mary Anne.

  “I think that’s one thing we can find out,” I told her. “I’m sure Stephan knows. He just didn’t mention it because he got so caught up in the story about the night the Bayards vanished. Boy, I sure would love to solve that mystery. All those missing people.”

  “Somehow the mystery seems scarier when it’s unsolved,” said Jessi. “The weird possibilities are endless.”

  “Maybe,” said Claudia, lowering her voice so we had to lean toward her to hear her, “a maniac sailed to the island in the dead of night and murdered everyone he could find.”

  “What did he do with the bodies?” I challenged her.

  “Buried them?”

  “He must have been an awfully tidy killer. No bloodstains anywhere,” I said. “Nothing out of place in the house, no furniture turned over.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  Mallory frowned slightly. “You know,” she said, “I’ve read plenty of stories, true stories, about regular, everyday people who were abducted by aliens and put aboard spacecrafts for science experiments or something. Most of them were returned to earth, but maybe the people on the island were whisked off to some other planet.” Mal glanced around at our faces in the firelight. “Well, it could have happened!”

  “We didn’t say anything,” I said.

  “I know, but you were going to. Anyway, that theory is just as reasonable as any other one. I was watching this TV show once —”

  “SHHH!” I hissed suddenly.

  “Dawn,” Mal protested.

  “SHHH!” I hissed again. “I heard something.”

  Everyone became silent. We didn’t hear a thing.

  “What did it sound like, Dawn?” Claudia whispered.

  “Like someone walking around in the woods.”

  “Oh, my lord.”

  The seven of us listened for a few more moments. Nothing.

  “It was probably a squirrel or a rabbit,” said Mary Anne.

  “Probably,” I replied, but I didn’t believe that for a second.

  Slowly we began to talk about other things — the boat show, the dance … Sam. “He really likes you, Stace,” I said.

  “How do you know?”

  I shrugged. “I can just tell, that’s all.”

  The longer we talked the darker the night became and the sleepier we felt. My eyes began to swim. “I think it’s bedtime,” I murmured and, fully clothed, I slid inside my sleeping bag. “’Night, you guys.”

  “Good night,” they replied.

  The next thing I knew I was waking sleepily. The fire had died to a dim glow. Above me, the sky was black and the stars shone fiercely. Clearly, it was not yet morning. But I could hear whispered voices.

  I raised myself onto one elbow and thought I could make out Mary Anne on the other side of the campfire. She was gesturing to Claudia.

  “What’s going on?” I murmured.

  Mary Anne and Claud jumped a mile. “We saw something in the woods,” Mary Anne answered. “Something whitish. And wispy.”

  Next to me, Mallory sat up and squealed, “You saw a ghost?”

  That did it. Pandemonium. In three seconds, the seven of us were wide awake and scrambling out of our sleeping bags.

  “I want to go back!” cried Mary Anne.

  “I’m coming with you!” added Jessi.

  “You guys, it’s two o’clock in the morning!” said Kristy. “I can’t take us across the lake now. It wouldn’t be safe.”

  “But this is an emergency!” I exclaimed. “If I had appendicitis, you’d take me back no matter what time it was.”

  Kristy looked thoughtful. “Well,” she said slowly, “the boat can only hold four people. That is its absolute limit. So who’s going to stay behind?”

  In answer, everyone except Kristy made a dash for the boat. When we turned around, we saw Kristy still standing by the campfire amid our rumpled sleeping bags. I think she was smiling.

  I began to laugh. “This is ridiculous,” I said. “Come on, everybody. Let’s go back to sleep.”

  My friends and I returned to our camp. We crawled into our sleeping bags and we fell asleep. Well, I assume the others fell asleep. At any rate, they became very quiet, their breathing deep and even.

  But not I. I was awake for the rest of the night. I remained on Ghost Alert until I could see the first rays of sunshine on the horizon. I smiled. We had survived the night.

  I sat up and gazed into the woods. I saw nothing but trees and rocks and ferns. I heard nothing but birds and insects. I sighed with relief. The woods seemed so peaceful that I decided to investigate them again. I
tiptoed away from our campfire and into the cool early morning smells of damp earth and awakening plants. I walked in the same direction we had walked the night before, and soon I reached the crumbling foundation of the Bayards’ house. I sat down on a pile of bricks.

  The walls (what was left of them) stretched away in different directions, intersecting bits of other walls, sometimes dwindling to nothing. The Bayards’ house must have been huge, I decided.

  I leaned over to examine the bricks — and my eyes fell on something gold gleaming at my feet. Whatever it was, I had nearly stepped on it. I picked up a very old, very fragile locket. It was shaped like a heart. Carefully I opened it. Nothing was inside, but when I closed it again I noticed the initials engraved on one side. AB in fancy script. Annie Bayard? Maybe. Probably. I just had a feeling about it. Often, my feelings are right. I decided the locket had appeared to me as a sign; a sign to let me know the Bayards’ spirits existed and to thank me for believing in them. The locket had not been there the day before. I was sure of that. If it had been, one of us would have seen it. It wasn’t hidden at all.

  So. It had appeared during the night. Had it appeared after Mary Anne and Claud had seen the whitish, wispy thing in the woods? I decided that was probably another question I’d never be able to answer. I added it to the Bayard Mystery, the Shadow Lake Mystery.

  Later that day, Sam arrived in Lake Mist, and the members of the BSC left the island. We motored safely to shore, and spent the afternoon telling everyone about our adventures. At one point, I snuck off for the boat dock and found Stephan in his grocery store. I asked him when the Bayards’ house had burned down.

  “One year to the day after they disappeared,” he told me. “No one knows how the fire started.”

  Then I gave him the locket I’d found. “This is for you,” I said. “It’s from Annie.”

  Wednesday was really, really scary. Well, not the whole day. Just the part when Shannon was gone.