Hauntings and Heists (11 page)

“Aw, nuts,” said one of the figures, backlit by the streetlamp in the distance. “She knows.”

“Of course she knows,” said another, hidden in shadow. “She’s Viola Hart, after all.”

That comment made her proud. “I know you’re not zombies,” she said. “You’re also not candy thieves.”

“Then who are we?” asked a third.

“My so-called friends!” said Viola. “Sylvester, Woodrow, Rosie … and is that Kyle Krupnik? You were in on this too? How could you all do this to me? I almost totally freaked out.”

“This is your surprise, Viola,” said Rosie, sounding guilty. “We wanted to give you a mystery to solve. Sorry to scare you. But it’s Halloween, after all.”

“Well, it worked. I was really surprised!”

“Before you flashed the camera, I could see your face,” said Kyle. “You seemed so certain of us. How did you know who we were?”

“Well, I had several clues that gave away each of you,” said Viola. “They slowly came together.
What about you, Rosie? Do you know what detail gave you away?”

Rosie glanced down at herself. Underneath the long black coat she’d thrown on back at home, she still wore her Scarecrow costume. She picked a piece of straw from her collar. “Oops,” she said, holding it up. “You’ve got good eyes.”

Viola nodded. “Thanks. That straw plus something about each of the others made me more certain.
Do you know your clue, Sylvester?”

“I thought I covered up my costume pretty well,” said Sylvester, running his fingers through his hair. He pulled his hand away and looked at it. “Oh, wait. My silver hair spray …”

“The street light reflected off your head,” said Viola. “At first I thought it was something creepy, like spiderwebs, but added to Woodrow’s clue, the glimmer only made me more certain that I knew who was coming for me.
What was your clue, Woodrow?”

Woodrow didn’t have an answer. He shrugged, and when he did, his key ring rattled. “Oh, no,” he said, clutching at the keys, quieting them. “I never realized I was so loud.”

“I thought the jangling sound was chains,” said Viola. “But then, with Kyle’s clue, I almost had a full deck.
Kyle, do you know what clued me in about you?”

“I guess so,” said Kyle, kicking at the grass. “I wasn’t planning on coming along, but Seth’s mom changed her mind and wouldn’t let him come out trick-or-treating. On my way home, I ran into Woodrow and he invited me. He loaned me this coat from his mom’s closet. It’s really big on me, but it still doesn’t cover my dinosaur tail. I bet you saw it dragging behind me.”

“I sure did. And it might have freaked me out even more if one of you hadn’t called out, ‘Brains!’ That let me know for sure that my best friends had played a trick on me.”

Woodrow smacked Sylvester’s shoulder. “You gave us away!”

“Hardly,” said Sylvester. “You heard her. We
all
gave us away.”

“Back at school, we were talking about
Scarecrow’s
brain,” said Viola. “Remember? Sylvester said it, I assume, to make me think of zombies. But it also made me think of
you
guys! I recognized his voice.”

“What can I say,” Sylvester replied. “I was in character!”

“So … I’m guessing that there was no candy thief?” said Viola. “Now that I think about it, if there was a bad guy, you would never have sent any of us out by ourselves. I might have thought
that was weird sooner, but in the moment, I wanted to save the day.”

“As usual,” teased Woodrow. “No thief. No danger. Just a creepy Halloween fright.”

“Instead of going to our candy-thief locations,” said Sylvester, “we followed you. At least one of us was watching you the entire time, so you were never completely alone.”

“Thanks — I think,” said Viola. “Hey, do you guys want to come back to my house and watch a scary movie? I’m sure there’s something freaky on TV.”

They all agreed. Viola came down the gazebo steps and retrieved her bike from where it lay in the grass.

“We should have known better than to try to pull one over on Viola,” said Rosie proudly. Kyle looked on in admiration.

Viola simply smiled and said, “I’ll get you back someday. Just wait. You and your little dog too!” Laughing to herself, she led the group out of the shadows toward the street.

“But I don’t have a dog,” said Sylvester, tagging behind.

All together, the rest of the group groaned. If someone nearby had been listening, he might have imagined monsters. Being Halloween, it was a good night for a zombie sighting, after all.

Dan Poblocki is the author of
The Stone Child
and
The Nightmarys.
Like many writers, he’s had a long list of strange jobs. Dan has traveled New Jersey as a bathing suit salesman, played the role of Ichabod Crane in a national tour of
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,
wrangled the audience for
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?,
sold snacks at
The Lion King’
s theater on Broadway, recommended books at Barnes & Noble, answered phones for Columbia University, and done research at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He has never been a detective though, and after writing this book, he thinks he might just give it a try.

Visit the author at www.danpoblocki.com.

The mysteries don’t end here! Viola, Rosie, Sylvester, and Woodrow are in for even greater challenges when they uncover a surprising secret—one that has them looking at their neighbors in a whole new light. Who can they really trust? Find out in …

CLOCKS and ROBBERS

Available July 2011

A spherical clock has sat atop a tall black iron pedestal in front of the Moon Hollow Public Library for as long as anyone can remember. The clock’s large, ornately designed, four-sided face gazes unassumingly upon busy and bustling Maple Street, where shops, restaurants, and office buildings stand side by side like books shoved tightly onto a shelf.

One day in early November, a girl named Rosie Smithers watched from the sidewalk as the four big clock hands leapt ahead five minutes in less than five seconds. Four loud chimes rang out and echoed up the street with stern authority.

Like the clock’s pedestal, Rosie was also tall and thin. Her skin was the color of cocoa. Her hair was long and twisted into braids that fell to her shoulders. “Did you see that?” she asked, turning to her friend Viola Hart. They had beens waiting for Mrs. Smithers, the town librarian, to get out of work.

“See what?” Viola answered. Her eyes grew wide with excitement. Viola was a smallish girl with a burst of red curls on top of her head and freckles on her pale cheeks.

“The minute hand on that big clock was stuck at three fifty-five for a while,” Rosie explained. “Then, it jumped forward to four o’clock.”

“The minute hand
jumped?”
Viola asked. From her knapsack, she pulled out a black-and-white composition notebook and pen. Flipping the book open, she carefully jotted down a note.

Rosie recited what had recently become Viola’s motto: “Mysteries are everywhere if you look for them.”

Surprised, Viola laughed. “I was just about to say that!”

“I know.” Rosie smiled. “I see that notebook, and I know what’s coming.”

“I’m no mystery, I guess.” Viola shrugged. “But what about the clock?”

“You think?” Rosie squinted as she glanced across the street. “That
would
be a fun mystery. It’s probably just broken though.”

Viola raised an eyebrow. As they’d recently learned, anything might be a clue to a great big secret. In fact, that was the reason the girls were waiting for Mrs. Smithers across the street from the library.

During lunch that day, Viola had come up with a new contest she’d named the Strangers Game. The point was to observe people they didn’t know, and try to guess who they were. So far, the girls had secretly watched a disheveled young woman carrying a huge load of picture books as she exited the library. She didn’t look old enough to have kids of her own, and she definitely was not a teacher at their school. So who would the woman share picture books with, other than some kids she was watching? They guessed she must be a babysitter—probably a student at the college who needed some extra cash.

“I’ve got another one,” Viola proclaimed, nodding at the library’s entrance. “I see a woman who has a huge family, works really hard, loves cooking, and records soap operas during the day so she can watch them later at night.”

All those details sounded vaguely familiar to Rosie … and very specific. “How did you figure all that out?” she asked, glancing up and down the street for someone who might fit the description.

Viola giggled as the woman who was standing in the library’s entrance waved at them. “She’s my next door neighbor.”

“Hey!” said Rosie, noticing her mother heading toward them across the plaza and past the broken clock. “My mom? That’s cheating!”

“Well … just a little.” Viola winked.

When he’d gotten to his parents’ diner after school, Sylvester Cho had found an odd-looking man sitting alone at a booth, drinking a cup of coffee. The man wore a black T-shirt and had a scruffy beard. His arms were covered with colorful tattoos. Sylvester immediately deduced that the man was in a biker gang. He kept watch on him, in case the man made trouble. But a few minutes later, a beautiful young woman in a flowing green dress, a black velvet jacket, and a thick gray scarf entered the diner. She was pushing a stroller. The man had stood up, kissed the woman, and then lifted a tiny baby from the carriage. “Did you miss your daddy?” he asked the infant, then cooed.

Instantly, Sylvester realized that he’d been wrong about the man. Tattoos and a beard didn’t mean he was a bad guy … or even that he rode a motorcycle. In fact, a few minutes later, when the family stood to go, Sylvester noticed the man grab a satchel from under the table. A logo on it read:
Hudson Valley Country Day School.
Paintbrushes, pencils, and rolled-up paper poked out from the bag’s canvas flap. The man was obviously an artist, and probably a teacher!

Sylvester couldn’t wait to tell his friends what he’d learned: Sometimes people are not what they seem.

The phone rang, bringing Sylvester back to reality. Mr. Cho answered it. “Hi, Honey.” It was Sylvester’s mother, who had taken his baby sister, Gwen, to visit his grandmother, Hal-muh-ni, just outside of New York City. Listening in on his parents’ conversation, Sylvester started to rearrange plates on a nearby table. Behind the long counter, his father turned his back and edged away from Sylvester, tensing up. Sylvester paid even closer attention as his father lowered his voice, saying, “She agreed? Well that’s great news, isn’t it?” Mr. Cho glanced at Sylvester, who quickly looked back at the table he was pretending to clean. “No,” he continued, in an even lower voice. “I haven’t mentioned it to him yet.”

Now Sylvester was even more curious.

Mr. Cho hung up the phone and turned back to Sylvester. “I assume you heard all that?” his father asked. Sylvester nodded. “So what do you think?” his father asked.

“About?” Sylvester said. Should he have known what his father meant? Had he missed a clue?

“About your grandmother coming to live with us?”

“Hal-muh-ni?” said Sylvester, immediately thinking how cool that would be. Then another thought popped into his head. “But where will she stay?” Their house had three bedrooms, and each one was currently taken.

Mr. Cho was silent for a few seconds. “We were thinking she would stay in your room.”

“My
room?” Sylvester said.

“We can fix up the basement for you instead. Your own private spot. Sound good?”

“You want me to move into … the
basement?”
From behind the counter, Sylvester’s father stared back at him with an uncomfortable smile. How long had his parents been planning this? How long had they kept this secret? And how could they do this to him … shove him away in a dark corner of the house, like an unfortunate character in a creepy fantasy story by Roald Dahl or Lemony Snicket or Neil Gaiman? Sure, having his own private spot might be interesting, but after what the Question Marks had been through in the past couple of months, he knew how disturbing a basement could be. Sylvester reached out and straightened some silverware on a nearby table. He suddenly realized he’d been right: Sometimes people are not what they seem, even people you’ve known all your life.

That morning, Mrs. Knox had asked Woodrow to come home after school and start cleaning up the house. Woodrow had a habit of leaving his stuff in random places—comic books in the living room, video games in the den, schoolwork on the kitchen table, sports equipment on the floor. His mom had said she would have a surprise for him that evening, and as Woodrow worked, he wondered what it might be. He was hoping for a flat-screen television.

Woodrow was nearly finished tucking his little messes out of sight when he heard the car pull into the driveway. He rushed to the front door. Swinging it open, Woodrow noticed not one car parked in front of the garage, but two. Behind his mother’s forest green SUV was a bright red Mini Cooper. A man got out of it and rushed to open Mrs. Knox’s door. The man was tall. He wore a tweed jacket and dark blue jeans. His sandy blond hair was close-cropped and combed tightly to the side. Mrs. Knox hopped out of her own car, then nodded toward Woodrow, who stood on the front porch. The tall man turned, smiled at him, and waved.

Woodrow blinked, contemplating what this might mean. Viola’s new contest, the Strangers Game, popped into his head.
Notice the details of this man. Figure out who he is.
Obviously, the man was
not
here to deliver a flat-screen television … or anything else, for that matter. His car was barely big enough to fit another person inside it; he probably didn’t have any kids. He was dressed well—too well, as if he wanted to impress someone. As they came up the front walkway toward Woodrow, the man lightly touched his mom’s elbow. They were smiling in an unnatural way—too many teeth. Woodrow had seen his mom wear the same expression the day she had interviewed for her current job. He realized what those smiles meant: These people were terrified.

Slowly, the clues began to click into place. He could deal with the surprise not being what he’d hoped. Easy. You can’t mourn a television that never belonged to you. But he wasn’t sure if he was ready to meet his mom’s new boyfriend. And all the signs indicated that this stranger on the front walk was his mom’s big surprise.

“Woodrow,” said his mom, leading the tall man up the stairs, “I want you to meet my friend Bill. We’re all going to have dinner here tonight. Together.”

From the porch stairs, Bill extended his hand. “Nice to meet you, Woodrow. Your mom’s a pretty cool lady.” Mrs. Knox laughed, a little too loudly.

“I know that,” said Woodrow, shaking Bill’s hand like his father had taught him. He squeezed hard. “Nice to meet you too.”

Woodrow wasn’t sure if he liked Viola’s new game. Maybe sometimes strangers should remain strangers.

Even so, he wanted to tell Sylvester, Rosie, and Viola about this. He knew it was only a matter of time before they all met again.

As it turned out, the next morning, Woodrow got his wish.