Hauntings and Heists

by Dan Poblocki

  What: Official Meeting

  Where: The Four Corners (of course!)

  When: Today (ASAP)

  By late afternoon, Woodrow and Rosie had found their way to the backyard and met Viola, who was sitting in the grass with her notebook.

  “Thanks for coming,” said Viola when Sylvester, who’d been at his parents’ restaurant all day, finally showed up. “I think I need your help.” She told them about the noises she’d heard coming from the basement the previous night.

  Rosie gasped.

  “What’s the matter?” said Viola.

  “My mom was friends with the couple who lived there before you moved in. Mrs. Denholm used to complain that she heard noises at night too. She wondered if the house was haunted.”

  “Haunted?” said Sylvester. “Like … by a ghost?”

  “No,” Woodrow said, rolling his eyes, “by leprechauns.”

  “Really?” Sylvester blushed, glancing around the yard, as if he might catch a glimpse of one. “Here? In Moon Hollow?”

  “You want us to check it out with you?” Woodrow asked, ignoring his friend.

  “Well, I suppose so,” said Viola, happy that she didn’t have to suggest it herself.

  Less than a minute later, the group stood at the top of the Harts’ staircase. Even with afternoon light pouring in the back of the house, the basement was pitch-black. Viola thought that she wouldn’t be as terrified surrounded by her new friends, but staring into the shadows, she couldn’t stop her imagination from running wild—especially after what Rosie said about the ghost. Viola tried the light switch again, but it still didn’t work.

  “Maybe a flashlight would help,” said Rosie.

  Upstairs, Viola removed a small box from under her bed—her detective kit. She opened the box and found her old plastic flashlight. She flicked it on, and it emitted a dim glow.

  “The batteries are low, but I guess this will have to do,” she said, meeting the group back at the basement door. Viola took a deep breath as she led the way down, the others following closely behind her.

  Downstairs, they found an empty room with a low ceiling. A cracked, concrete floor spread out before them, leading to a small hole in the corner—a sub-pump, Viola recognized from her old house, in case of flooding. A row of wooden shelves lined one wall, but other than that, there didn’t even seem to be a place where someone might make the tapping sound Viola had heard the night before. The walls were old stone.

  “Huh,” said Sylvester. “There’s nothing here. No way to get in or out except for the stairs, and you said you were standing there last night.”

  “Maybe someone was down here, but they waited for you to leave before they crept back up and snuck out of the house,” said Rosie.

  Viola grimaced. “Somehow, I think I’d be more comfortable with a ghost.”

  “I guess all you can do is wait and listen to see if you hear it again,” said Woodrow. “Looks like we’ve got another mystery to solve, though this one might be a little more difficult than the first one.”

  “It might take some time,” said Rosie. “But I’m sure there’s a rational explanation,” she added uncertainly.

  “Speaking of mysteries,” said Viola, relieved to lead the way back upstairs, “I have an idea. Let’s go back outside.”

  4

  THE QUESTION OF THE MAKESHIFT COMPASS

  They sat on the lawn in the Four Corners. The sun was headed toward the line of trees at the horizon. “So,” said Viola, cradling her ever-present notebook, “if we’re really going to do this whole mystery club thing, we should make it official.”

  “How?” said Rosie.

  “I have a few ideas,” said Viola, opening her notebook. “First, I think we should make a plan to meet here when we can.”

  “That’s easy enough,” said Woodrow. “Your notes on our doors worked.”

  Viola nodded. “I was thinking we should each bring a mystery to the meeting.”

  “How do you ‘bring a mystery’ to a meeting?” asked Sylvester.

  “By telling a story?” Rosie offered.

  “Exactly,” said Viola. “We pay attention to weird stuff we notice around town. Like, say we read about a crime in the newspaper. We try to figure out the clues that lead to the culprit. Then, here, we can challenge each other to figure out the solution. We might even be able to help people out … without, you know, being too nosy.”

  “Oh, Sylvester loves being nosy,” said Woodrow. “So that might be a problem for him.”

  “You’re nosy!” Sylvester shot back.

  “You’re nosier!”

  “You’re the nosiest!” Sylvester leapt across the small circle and tackled Woodrow. They rolled on the grass trying to grab at each other’s noses, laughing hysterically.

  The girls just looked at each other and shook their heads. “Anyway,” said Viola, “what do you think?”

  “I think we can do it,” said Rosie. “It’ll be nice to have something to do that doesn’t belong to my brothers and sisters first.”

  “Yeah,” said Viola. “This will belong just to us.” She opened up her notebook. “I was looking at the notes you guys took yesterday when you tried to solve the mystery of me.” Out of breath, the boys finally settled down and paid attention. “There were five questions you guys came up with.” She stared at the notebook and bit her lip. “Maybe for each story we bring to the group, we can categorize the mystery by the number of questions.”

  Woodrow paused, thinking. “Every mystery has a certain number of questions behind it, right? Like, every question led us to another answer about Viola.”

  “I like that,” said Viola. “Questions.” She wrote this in her notebook, clicking open her pen over and over. “Our first case, The Five Clues of Viola Hart, was a Five-Question-Mark Mystery. I think judging on the difficulty of every story we bring to the meeting, we can assign a number of question marks to each mystery. We can have One-Mark Mysteries or two or three. Every number gets harder and harder. Although we should probably have a limit. Let’s say six.”

  “So a Six-Mark Mystery would be the hardest to solve?” Sylvester asked.

  “Yeah,” said Viola. “What do you guys think?” Everyone nodded. “All right, then. So … what else?”

  “What else what?” said Woodrow.

  “For the mystery club,” said Viola.

  “The Question Marks,” said Sylvester. “Do you guys like that name better than the Four Corners?”

  Everyone nodded in agreement.

  Rosie raised her hand. “What if each of us had nicknames?”

  “Yeah!” said Sylvester. “I’ll be Sly Fox, Master of Illusion.”

  Woodrow cracked up. “Master of Idiocy is more like it.”

  “Watch it, dude,” Sylvester said, warning him with a wave of nose-tweaking fingers.

  “Um,” Rosie continued, “I was thinking of something a little more … simple.”

  “Like what?” said Viola.

  “Well,” said Rosie, leaning forward, “we’ve got four corners. Four yards. Four quadrants where each of us belongs. What if our nicknames corresponded to our quadrant? Like on a map?”

  “How?” Woodrow asked. “What kind of four-way nickname would come from a map?”

  “North, South, East, and West?” said Viola.

  Rosie beamed. “Right! A compass. Your house is in one quadrant—you get the corresponding nickname. Like if my house sits in the north, call me North … at least here at these meetings.”

  “Hmm,” said Sylvester. “People would think we were weird if I saw you in math class, and I was like, ‘Hey, what’s up, North?’ And you were like, ‘Uh, Canada.’”

  “That’s why you wouldn’t say that to me in math class,” Rosie said, raising an eyebrow.

  “No, I like it,” said Woodrow. “It’s cool, like we’re in a spy video game or something.”

  “I like it too,” said Viola. “Do any of you have a compass so we can figure out whose house sits where?�
� Everyone shook their head. “Shoot. I think I have one that I got at a science museum packed away somewhere, but I have no idea what box it’s in. I should have put it in my detective kit.”

  “We don’t need a compass,” said Woodrow. “We can make one. I read about it in a book. All we need is a magnet, a cup of water, a cork, and a sewing needle.”

  “Dude,” said Sylvester, “if none of us even has a compass, how the heck do you expect us to find all that other stuff?”

  “I’m positive I can find a cup of water at home,” said Woodrow, crossing his arms.

  Rosie spoke up. “We actually don’t need that stuff. All we need is right here with us.”

  “What do we have?” said Viola, looking around the yard. All she saw was grass, the maple tree with the initials carved into it, and their four houses.

  “We have another mystery,” Rosie said, leaning back, proud of herself. “How do we find our way without a compass?”

  “The sun!” Woodrow shouted, pointing toward the trees where the sun was descending. “It always sets in the west.”

  “And that’s all we need to figure out the rest of the compass,” said Viola.

  “Hey!” said Sylvester. “So I guess I’m West.”

  “And I’m South,” said Woodrow.

  “East,” said Rosie.

  “And North,” said Viola, pointing at herself. “Cool. Nice job, Woodrow.”

  Rosie smiled. “Good job, everybody. We just solved our first Two-Mark Mystery!”

  Viola was nervous to climb into bed that night. What if the tapping sounds returned? What if they were closer this time, not just in the basement? During dinner, she’d mentioned it to her parents, but they didn’t seem concerned. “Old houses make strange noises,” they told her. After hearing that, she decided to keep Rosie’s ghost story a secret.

  In her room, she distracted herself with thoughts about the mystery club. If things in her house got weirder, she was happy to have help.

  When morning came, Viola realized she’d fallen asleep without distraction.

  The next few days rushed by. One afternoon, Woodrow invited Viola, Sylvester, and Rosie to go swimming up at Loon Lake in the mountains. Mrs. Knox drove. They splashed and raced and cannonballed off the small floating platform out in the middle of the water. The whole day passed, and no one could think of any mysteries. Viola wondered if the club might have already solved its last.

  Then, the evening before school started, Sylvester frantically knocked on each of their front doors, calling the group to the backyard. Viola asked her parents’ permission, then, grabbing her notebook, rushed to find her friends at the Four Corners.

  When they were all seated, Sylvester began his story.

  5

  THE CASE OF THE PSYCHIC SWINDLE

  (A ?? MYSTERY)

  “Everyone already knows I help my parents out at the diner sometimes, even more now that my mom is home a lot with my baby sister, Gwen. We have our regular customers, but we also get a whole bunch of people passing through. Sometimes, the passers are really weird.”

  “Weirder than you?” Woodrow teased.

  Sylvester rolled his eyes and continued. “Today, breakfast was freakishly busy. I was bussing tables, filling water glasses, stuff like that, when I saw a group of regulars crowded around a booth near the front window. My dad was in the back, talking with one of the cooks, so I went over to see what was going on.

  “Sitting in the booth were an old woman and a little boy. She looked my grandmother’s age, and he was maybe six or seven, I guess. She wore this long multicolored tunic thing that draped down to the floor. Around her neck were bunches of shimmery glass beads. She had on these huge bifocal glasses that made her appear bug-eyed. The kid was pretty normal, I guess, except that he sort of looked embarrassed to be there sitting across the table from her. If they were from Moon Hollow, and I don’t think they were, they’d never come into the diner before.

  “She was shuffling a deck of cards, and the crowd was getting bigger and bigger. She’d told everyone that her grandson, Louie, could read her mind. The regulars laughed at first but realized she was serious. Even though they didn’t really believe her, everyone was curious to see what she was talking about.”

  “Me too,” said Rosie, leaning forward.

  “I love card tricks,” Sylvester went on. “Woodrow can tell you that I’m always on the lookout for a new one, so I was probably the most curious of all. But the woman made her eyes even wider and promised that this was no trick. She insisted that Louie was a genuine psychic.

  “She handed the cards to Mr. Lawrence, this big truck driver dude who stops for breakfast every morning. She told him to shuffle. Mr. Lawrence mixed up the cards really well, straightened them out, then handed them back to her. She put the deck facedown on the table in front of her. I watched her the entire time just to make sure she didn’t try anything funny. Louie looked scared, but she smiled at him and grabbed his hand and didn’t let go, then she took a card from the top of the deck. She kept the card hidden from him, held it in front of her face, then squeezed her eyes shut in concentration.

  “Then, really quietly, Louie guessed. ‘Is it the jack of spades, Gramma?’

  “The old woman opened her eyes and smiled, showing us the card. Everyone gasped. It was the jack of spades.

  “Mr. Lawrence grabbed the card from her, examining it closely, and asked her how the heck she’d done it. She only smiled wider, looking like she’d just gotten away with something. ‘We’re psychic,’ she said. ‘I already told you that.’ Then she added, ‘We can do it again. Maybe you’d like to make a wager that we can’t.’

  “Mr. Lawrence turned red and said, ‘You got a bet, lady.’ And he pulled out a twenty. ‘But this time, I get to pick the card.’

  “'Suit yourself,’ she said. ‘But I still need to hold it, so I can concentrate on sending my psychic waves to Louie here.’

  “Mr. Lawrence glanced at Louie. ‘How about you let go of the kid’s hand?’ he said to the old woman. ‘You might be giving him some sort of message with a squeeze or a tap or something.’

  “With a flabbergasted sigh, the woman released Louie’s hand. ‘Is everybody ready now?’ she asked.”

  “Weren’t you scared that there would be trouble?” asked Viola.

  “Yeah, I was pretty nervous,” said Sylvester. “At that point, I started looking around for my dad, but it was all happening so quickly, I couldn’t find him in time. Mr. Lawrence shuffled the cards, then pulled one from the middle of the deck and handed it to the woman. Again she held it up in front of her face, so that Louie was looking at the back of the card. This time he guessed it was the ace of hearts. Right again.”

  “So weird,” said Woodrow.

  “The crowd went wild. People were insisting that it was just another lucky guess. This made the old woman smile even more. She asked them all to place their bets that he couldn’t do it a third time. But by then, I knew her game.

  “Everyone who comes to the diner regularly knows who I am. That’s why it wasn’t hard for me to speak up and tell them all that they’d better not place any more bets. They were destined to lose.”

  “Because Louie was psychic?” asked Woodrow.

  “Absolutely not,” said Sylvester. “It was a trick after all. How did it work?”

  “Her big bifocal glasses were acting like mirrors. Every time she held a card in front of her face, Louie caught a glimpse of it reflected in the glass. That’s how he knew what each card was. He wasn’t psychic at all. And neither was she.

  “Well, I knew that if I called her out on it, the regulars would totally freak out. Mr. Lawrence can be pretty scary sometimes. He’d already given the woman twenty bucks. I had to get her and Louie out of the diner quickly—and the best way to do that was to show her that I knew what she was up to. But I had to do it without telling the crowd that they had been fooled. Do you know how I got the old woman out of the diner without making a scene?”

&n
bsp; “I stepped forward and told her to try the trick again without wearing her glasses. She threw me the dirtiest look ever, but I stared her down. She knew she’d been caught. She mumbled something about being late for a meeting. I told her I’d get her bill so she could pay, and this made her even angrier. Scrambling to get up, she left the twenty Mr. Lawrence had bet her on the table. ‘Keep the change,’ she told me. She and Louie were out the door before any of the regulars even knew what had just happened.”

  “Ha!” Viola laughed.

  “I took the money off the table and tried to hand it back to Mr. Lawrence. He didn’t want to take it, saying she had won it from him fair and square and that my father needed it to pay for the food she ate. I knew there was nothing fair about what she’d done, but instead of arguing, I said okay. Then I slipped the twenty into his pocket when he turned away from me. Just like magic.”

  6

  THE SUPER-SPEEDY TEAM’S TRICK

  (A ?? MYSTERY)

  Thrilled by Sylvester’s excellent powers of observation and persuasion, the group said good night, more determined than ever to pay attention to mysterious events around them.

  The first day of school came and went with little fanfare. Rosie was thrilled to learn that her science class would be dissecting earthworms before the end of the year. Sylvester was disappointed that, yet again, he was forced to sit at the front of each of his classes. Woodrow was curious and slightly frightened that some of the girls seemed to be staring at him in the hallways. And Viola tried to be as outgoing as possible without seeming like a weirdo — or a zombie. The night before, she’d briefly thought she’d heard the tapping sounds again. Even though they did not return before morning, she had not slept well.

  The four of them all shared a few of the same classes, during which they passed along the message to meet once more in their yards after finishing any homework or chores.

  As the sun was setting, they found one another in the usual spot.