Sydney: 4-in-1 Mysteries for Girls

by Jean Fischer

  Sydney gave him a quizzical look.

  “Just God and me talking again,” the captain announced.

  Sydney knew that Bible verse from camp. It had given her courage when she was afraid.

  “I want you to go first, Bailey,” said the captain. “Your friend here—what’s your name?” he asked, turning to Sydney.

  “Sydney Lincoln,” Sydney replied.

  “Sydney Lincoln and I will be right behind you. We’ll take very good care of you all the way. There’s nothing to worry about. Absolutely nothing. I climbed these stairs a lot—back in the day.”

  The captain’s voice echoed inside the tower. It seemed to drift all the way to the top and then disappear.

  “I’ll watch every step you take,” Sydney told her. “You’ll be fine. I promise.”

  Tentatively, Bailey put her right foot on the bottom step. She looked down to make sure that her shoes were tied. She didn’t need to trip over any loose laces. Then she breathed deeply and whispered, “‘I can do all things through Him who strengthens me.’”

  She put her left foot on the first step, and then Bailey Chang was on her way. She was ready to conquer her fear of heights and tackle all 214 steps. “One. Two. Three. Four.” She counted each step unwaveringly, bravely marching upward. But then, she made the mistake of looking down. The stairs weren’t solid. They had holes, like Swiss cheese, and when Bailey looked down at the fifty or so stairs she’d already climbed, she felt sick to her stomach. She stopped and Sydney almost tripped over her.

  “Bailey! What?” Sydney wondered.

  “I can’t,” Bailey whispered. “I’m afraid.”

  “Just move!” said Sydney. “This staircase is only wide enough for one person, and right now you’ve got us stuck here.”

  Bailey gripped the railings with both hands. Her feet wouldn’t move. She was afraid to look up and afraid to look down. Her mind drifted to a strange place where she imagined she was the main character in a ghost story. She was stuck forever on that one step, an eerie mist that visitors sensed as they climbed to the top. Bailey Chang, Ghost of the Currituck Beach Lighthouse.

  “Bailey.” The captain’s calm voice startled her. She grasped the railings even tighter. “I’m right here with you,” he said. “I won’t let anything happen to you. We’re on our way now. You can do it. Just keep telling yourself that.”

  Bailey’s heart slammed in her chest. Her mouth felt like sandpaper. She couldn’t speak.

  “Just one step, Bailey,” said the captain. “Take one more step.”

  Bailey’s feet moved up to the next step, whether she wanted them to or not.

  “That’s good,” said the captain. “Now, one more.”

  Bailey felt Sydney close behind her. She decided if she fell backward onto her friend, and Sydney fell too, the captain was strong enough to catch them both. So Bailey took the next step, and the next, and she kept going. Whenever she got to a landing and one of the tall, narrow windows, Bailey avoided looking out. She wouldn’t look down or up either. She just concentrated on one step at a time.

  “‘I can do all things through Him who strengthens me,’” she murmured.

  As she climbed the last steps, Bailey noticed a small landing and an old wooden door that stood wide open. She couldn’t see where it led, but from where she stood Bailey caught a glimpse of blue sky and puffy, white clouds on the other side of it. She took the last step to the top and then turned away refusing to look beyond the door.

  “You did it!” Sydney exclaimed. She stepped onto the landing and hugged her friend, but Bailey stood frozen.

  “I’m not going out there,” Bailey said. “I don’t even want to see.”

  The captain stood between Bailey and the door. “It’s your decision,” he said. “But someday you might regret that you didn’t. You might be sorry that fear got in your way.”

  Bailey swallowed hard.

  “Come on, Bailey,” Sydney coaxed. “Do you want to be an old lady telling your grandkids how scared you were? What kind of an example will that set?”

  Bailey turned around. Beyond the captain’s broad shoulders, she saw nothing but sky and clouds. Then, slowly, Captain Swain stepped aside. Bailey suddenly saw the tops of trees and in the distance, the Atlantic Ocean. She felt like she was back in the airplane flying over North Carolina. But this time, if she chose to, she could step outside onto a narrow, open platform that was rimmed by a thick, iron railing.

  The captain stepped outside. “I won’t let anything happen to you,” he said. “Sydney Lincoln, would you like to join me out here?”

  Sydney’s heart did a little flutter. She would never admit that she was scared too. She had never climbed to the top of the lighthouse, and it was higher than she had imagined. Still, she wouldn’t make Bailey more afraid than she already was.

  Bravely, Sydney stepped through the door. She leaned against the captain and felt his strong arm holding her steady.

  “It’s not so bad, Bailey,” she said, holding onto the railing. “Come on, we’ll help you.”

  The captain held out his hand.

  The image of herself as an old woman flashed through Bailey’s mind. She heard herself say, “When I was little, I almost went out that door.”

  Bailey took the captain’s hand, and then nothing stood between her and the world but the black, iron railing. Her stomach churned, but she inched along the lookout with her friends. They rounded the bend. Now, instead of seeing the ocean, they could see the sound—the strip of water between the Outer Banks’ island and the shore of North Carolina.

  “I knew you could do it, Bailey,” said Sydney. “I watched you all the way, and you were really brave. I’m glad I convinced you to do it.”

  Bailey grabbed Sydney’s arm. “Syd,” she said. “Where’d the captain go? He was right behind me.”

  Captain Swain was gone! Just as if he had vanished into thin air!

  A Mysterious Mug

  “That’s odd,” said Sydney. “Where is he?”

  A strong wind swept across the lighthouse. Sydney noticed Bailey’s fingers gripping the railing. She grabbed Bailey’s hand, and they carefully walked back to the door. When they got there, a lady whose name tag read MEGHAN was waiting.

  “I was wondering if anyone was up here,” she said. “I’m closing the lighthouse now. Storms are coming, and it’s not safe up here when there’s lightning.”

  The woman led the girls down the curving staircase. It was scarier going down than up because Sydney and Bailey had no choice but to look at their feet and imagine how far they’d fall if they tripped.

  To keep her mind off it, Bailey began to talk—she tended to talk a lot whenever she got nervous. “So, do you like working in a lighthouse?” she asked.

  “It’s fascinating!” Meghan answered. “It’s fascinating to go up to the top and see how the ocean changes every day.”

  “I live like two-and-a-half hours from Lake Michigan,” Bailey told her. “And we go there in the summer to the beach and I think the lake looks a lot like the ocean, only it’s not as big, and we have perch and trout instead of sharks and jellyfish.”

  She gulped a breath and went on. “Lake Michigan has fresh water and, of course, the ocean has salt water. This is the first time I’ve climbed a lighthouse. I’m afraid of heights, you know, but I climbed to the top—”

  Sydney interrupted her. “Did you see Captain Swain come down the stairs?”

  “Captain Swain? No,” said Meghan. “Why?”

  “He took us up to the lookout but disappeared. We didn’t see him leave. We were wondering where he went.” They were almost to the bottom of the stairs now, and Sydney sighed with relief.

  “When was this?” the woman asked.

  “Just a few minutes ago,” said Sydney.

  “I didn’t see him come downstairs,” Meghan replied as they reached the main floor. “As far as that goes, I didn’t see him go up either. I must not have been paying attention.”

 
“You weren’t here,” said Sydney. “When we came in, no one was around.”

  “That’s odd,” said Meghan. “I’ve been here for the past hour or so. I don’t know how you got by without me seeing you, unless I was in my office. Did you say this was your first lighthouse visit?”

  “It is,” Bailey answered. “I’m visiting from Peoria. That’s in Illinois.”

  “You know what?” said the lady. “I have something for you.” She went to a desk in a little room nearby and picked up two small cardboard folders. “These are lighthouse passports,” she said. She gave one to each of the girls. “You can visit lighthouses all over America and get stickers to put in your passport book. There’s already a sticker from this lighthouse inside.”

  “Wow!” said Bailey. “I’m going to visit every lighthouse and collect all the stickers.”

  “If you do that, come back here and show me your passport. I’ll buy you a cheeseburger,” said Meghan.

  “It might take me awhile to get them all,” Bailey responded.

  “Like, years!” Sydney added.

  The woman smiled. “I imagine I’ll be here.”

  After the girls left the lighthouse, Sydney pointed at two girls on the other side of Schoolhouse Lane. They were eating ice cream by the Corolla Village Bar-B-Q. “Come on,” she told Bailey. “I want you to meet my friends.” She led Bailey to a picnic table where the girls were sitting outside the restaurant. “Hi, Carolyn. Hi, Marilyn,” said Sydney.

  “Hi, Sydney!” the twins answered in unison. The Kessler twins often spoke in unison, Sydney had noticed. They were so much alike that Sydney still had trouble telling them apart, and she had known them for six years. The Kessler family owned a house near Sydney’s grandparents’ place. She knew they lived there year-round since Mr. Kessler ran a company that made recreational water vehicles and racing boats.

  “What are you guys doing here?” Sydney asked.

  “Hanging out,” they answered together.

  “This is my friend, Bailey Chang,” said Sydney.

  “I thought so!” said Marilyn.

  “I thought so too,” Carolyn echoed. “You’re one of the Camp Club Girls. Sydney talks about you guys all the time.”

  Bailey slid onto the bench at the picnic table. “Nice to meet you,” she said. “We just finished climbing the lighthouse.”

  “You did!” the girls exclaimed.

  “I’ve lived here since I was five, and I’ve never climbed it,” said Marilyn.

  “I haven’t either,” said Carolyn.

  They both looked at Sydney as she slid into the bench next to Bailey. “Okay, I confess. I hadn’t either,” she said.

  Bailey couldn’t believe her ears. “What do you mean, you hadn’t either? You acted like you’d climbed it a million times.”

  “I’ve always wanted to climb it,” Sydney told her. “Would you have gone if I’d acted scared?”

  Bailey thought for a second. “Well, no,” she conceded. “But I wish I had known.”

  Two odd-looking bikes were propped against the picnic table. Each had two seats, two sets of handlebars, and two sets of pedals. “Are those your bikes?” Bailey asked the twins.

  “They’re tandems,” said Carolyn.

  Marilyn nodded in agreement. “Bicycles built for two.” She took a lick of the chocolate ice cream that was melting in her cone.

  “How come you each have one?” Bailey wondered. “Can’t you both just ride on one?”

  “One of them belongs to our brothers,” said Carolyn. “The other one is ours.”

  “We just dropped them off at a friend’s house on the Sound,” said Marilyn. “They’re spending the night there.”

  “And we’re taking their bike home,” Carolyn added. She popped the last bit of ice-cream cone into her mouth and Marilyn did the same with hers. “You can ride back with us if you want to,” she said. “We have our brothers’ helmets you can wear.”

  Bailey looked at Sydney hoping she would agree.

  “Okay,” Sydney answered. “We probably should get home soon anyway. Gramps said Nate Wright might try to take a cluster balloon flight off the beach this afternoon. That’ll be cool to watch.”

  “Who’s going to do what?” Bailey asked. She looked at her reflection in the side-view mirror of one of the tandem bikes and smoothed her jet-black hair.

  “Nate Wright is going to do a cluster balloon flight,” said Sydney. “He ties a bunch of extra large helium party balloons to a chair contraption and sails up into the sky. Then he releases the balloons gradually to come back down.”

  “Why would he want to do that?” Bailey asked.

  Carolyn climbed onto the front seat of one of the tandems and put on her helmet. “Mr. Wright’s an inventor,” she said, pointing for Bailey to get on the back seat.

  “Well, sort of,” said Marilyn, picking up the other bike and climbing onto the front seat. “He’s kind of strange. He’s always trying to invent weird ways to get around. Lately he’s been experimenting with cluster ballooning.”

  “Mr. Wright’s a distant relative of the Wright brothers,” Carolyn explained. “Usually, people cluster balloon in the early morning when there’s no breeze, but today, he’s doing it in the afternoon.”

  “We saw his son on the beach this morning,” Sydney said. “What’s his name? Drake?”

  “Yes, that’s Drake Wright, Nate Wright’s son,” Marilyn said. “He’s a beachcomber.”

  “They call him Digger,” said Carolyn.

  “He picks up junk along the beach and digs stuff out of the sand. Then he sells it to people who sell it in their shops or use it for crafts. Driftwood and glass floats and old fishing nets and stuff,” Marilyn added. “And he hardly ever talks.”

  Carolyn gave her bike a shove with one foot and then started to pedal. Bailey held tight to the handlebars. She didn’t know what to do when the pedals under her feet began to spin.

  “Don’t try to steer!” Sydney told her. “Just keep your feet on the pedals and help Carolyn push.”

  Soon the girls were riding down Schoolhouse Lane heading for Corolla Light. They were almost to Highway 12—the two-lane road that was the main road for the Outer Banks—when Sydney’s cell phone rang.

  “Can we stop for a second?” she asked Marilyn. The twins steered their bikes to the side of the road. Sydney pulled her cell phone out of the pocket of her shorts. “Hello?”

  “Sydney,” said a concerned voice that Sydney recognized as her grandfather. “Where are you?”

  “We’re biking home with the Kessler twins,” Sydney answered. “We should be there in about ten minutes.”

  “Come straight home, and don’t stop anywhere,” said her grandfather. “A bad storm is coming, and I don’t want you girls out in it.”

  “Okay, Gramps,” said Sydney. “We’re on our way.” She folded the phone and slipped it back into her pocket. “There’s a storm coming,” she said. “Gramps wants us home.”

  “The sky does look kind of greenish and black over there,” said Bailey, pointing to the right. “Do you guys have tornado warning sirens here?”

  “I don’t know,” Sydney answered. “If they do, I’ve never heard one.”

  “Me neither,” said Marilyn, steering her bike back onto the road.

  “I haven’t either. We don’t usually have tornadoes here,” said Carolyn, following her.

  “They go off a lot in Peoria,” Bailey said. “Sometimes, the sky looks ugly like this, and then we get a tornado warning.”

  Suddenly a bolt of lightning sliced through the black clouds.

  Whoosh! The wind picked up. The girls pedaled as fast as they could. By the time they got to their street, big droplets of rain started to fall. Then the rain turned into a rushing waterfall that spilled onto the girls’ helmets and soaked their clothing. The twins made a perfect turn into Sydney’s driveway, and Sydney and Bailey hopped off the bikes. Then the Kesslers sped off toward home.

  Sydney’s grandparent
s stood on the upper deck of the beach house. “Hurry!” Gramps called to the girls. “Come on up here.”

  Sydney ran up the two flights of stairs with Bailey close behind.

  Crash! At the sound of thunder, Bailey nearly tripped on the last step. She caught the railing and climbed up onto the covered deck.

  Bailey, Sydney, and her grandparents stepped inside the sliding screen doors and watched the storm from the safety of the family room. The fierce purple cloud was right over their heads now. To the south, near the ocean’s horizon, the sky was clear and the sun was shining. But north of the beach house, the scene was very different. A long, thin, white tail dropped from the cloud until it met the ocean. It turned brown as it sucked up water.

  Bailey screamed. “Oh my goodness! Oh my goodness! It’s a tornado!”

  “If they’re over the water, they’re called waterspouts,” Sydney’s grandmother explained. “Then when they come to land, they’re called tornadoes.”

  Bailey squeezed Sydney’s arm.

  “It’s heading away from us,” Sydney said as the cone swept out to sea. “Pretty soon it’ll dwindle to nothing.”

  Gramps added, “We’re safe here, but can you imagine being in a sailboat out in the ocean? A decent-sized waterspout could easily drop on one of those and smash a small boat to smithereens. In fact, that did happen. There are so many shipwrecks near the Outer Banks that folks have lost count.”

  “Maybe that’s what happened to the sailors on the ghost ship,” Sydney suggested. “They got sucked into a water spout.”

  Bailey watched the long, coiling twister disappear. Beyond it, in the distance, two more waterspouts formed as the ocean carried the storm away. The back edge of the dark cloud passed over the beach house now, and the rain turned to drizzle. Bailey wasn’t afraid anymore. She thought the tumbling waves and the waterspouts were awesome.

  “Lake Michigan has waterspouts too,” she said as the sun broke through the clouds. “I remember reading about them in current events, but I’ve never seen one. Very cool, although a bit scary.”

  “Look over there,” said Sydney. The end of a rainbow was barely visible near the beach opposite of where the waterspout had been. Its colors gradually became bright, clear ribbons of red, orange, and yellow, blue, green, indigo, and violet.