Who Stole Halloween?

by Martha Freeman

  Dad looked surprised. “You love your career,” he said, “don’t you?”

  “Some days more than others,” Mom said, “same as you love being home some days more than others.”

  “I had a good day,” Dad said. “I did the grocery shopping, made the ears for Alex’s costume, and fixed the leaky toilet in the downstairs bathroom. I guess your day wasn’t so hot, though?”

  “No, it sure wasn’t,” Mom said.

  “What happened?” I asked her.

  “Two missing cats,” she said.

  “You’re kidding,” I said, “because—”

  Dad interrupted. “Is that all that went wrong?” he asked. “You seem pretty upset.”

  Luau bumped Dad’s leg, which meant, What could be more upsetting than missing cats?

  “It’s not only the cats that got to me. It’s where they were missing from.” Mom paused, remembering something unpleasant. “I’ll spare you the details, but it was a real strange coincidence. Two houses, opposite sides of town, but in both cases the cat owners seemed to me to be . . . how do I put it delicately? Negligent?”

  “What’s negligent?” I asked.

  “Irresponsible. Like they didn’t take such good care of their cats, didn’t feed them well. I guess the bottom line is that they didn’t seem like very nice people. And, I don’t know, seeing animals treated badly? It’s upsetting.”

  “How do you know they were bad cat owners?” I asked.

  “There were other pets, too,” Mom said. “A dog at one of the houses was chained to a tree—you could see its ribs, poor guy. At the other house there were some guinea pigs. . . .” Mom wrinkled up her nose. “Like I said, I’ll spare you the details.”

  Dad said it seemed odd that people would call the police about cats they didn’t even bother to care for properly. Mom was nodding. “I thought so, too,” she said. “And if the cats had simply disappeared, neither owner would’ve bothered, I don’t think. But the cats didn’t just disappear. Both owners claim somebody sneaked onto their property at night, grabbed their cats, and ran.”

  “That’s just what happened to Kyle who lives over on Groundhog!” I said, and then I explained about the flyer and visiting Kyle’s house.

  “You say Fred Krichels was already out there to talk to them?” Mom said. “Then I’d better sit down with him and compare notes. I hope it’s not that Halloween business starting up again. I thought that old ghost story was forgotten by now.”

  “What old ghost story?” I asked, remembering what Kyle had said.

  “Hey.” Dad looked at his watch. “We don’t have time for ghost stories—not if there’s going to be any food left at the party. Alex, run along and get dressed. Scoot!”

  All this time we’d been talking, Mom and Dad were still attached with the handcuffs. Now when Dad said “scoot,” he made a sweeping motion that yanked Mom’s arm along for the ride.

  “Ow!” Mom said.

  “Ow!” Dad rubbed his shoulder. “Uh, sorry.”

  “Give me the key,” Mom said. “I still have to do my makeup.”

  “You have the key,” Dad said.

  “Since when does the prisoner keep the key?” Mom asked.

  “Oh, come on,” Dad jangled the handcuffs. “Stop clowning, honey, and unlock them.”

  Mom looked at him. “Me?” she said. “Clowning?”

  Dad made a face. “Uh-oh.”

  Chapter Five

  Our neighborhood is big on celebrations. We have a Christmas party and a Fourth of July picnic. We have an Easter egg hunt and a Passover dinner. We celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and Chinese New Year.

  And when there’s something special like a new baby coming, there’s a party for that, too.

  The Lees live right next door—the other side from Yasmeen’s family—but even so, we were late getting to their house. My parents hadn’t found the handcuff key, and it took my mom a long time to do her makeup left-handed and attached to Dad. As we walked in the door they were both crabby and blaming each other.

  Mrs. Ryan spotted them first and laughed. She was dressed like a little girl going to a party: short skirt, ankle socks, and a big bow in her hair. This made sense because Mrs. Ryan teaches first grade.

  “Well, aren’t you two cute?” she said. “Whose idea was it—don’t tell me. Dan’s? Am I right?”

  Mom took a deep breath; Dad smiled an uncomfortable smile.

  “What’s wrong?” Mrs. Ryan said.

  “Nothing,” Mom said. “Everything is ducky.”

  “Noreen,” Mrs. Ryan said to my mom, “I have known you for ten years, and something is much less than ducky. Wait a second—don’t tell me—you’ve lost the key!”

  I had to hand it to Mrs. Ryan. Not much gets past a first-grade teacher. Unfortunately, it did not improve my parents’ mood when the next thing she did was crumple up in a laughing fit.

  “Bill!” she called to her husband between cackles. “Come over here. You won’t believe it!”

  This was a bad time to hang out with my parents, so I aimed for the living room. The lights were dim there, and the whole place felt haunted. In the corners were gauzy spider-webs loaded with black plastic spiders. Fake bats dangled from the ceiling on elastic threads, so when you bumped them, they bounced. The food was creepy-looking, too: eyeball appetizers, hot dogs that looked like bloody fingers, Jell-O in the shape of a brain, a cake with a cardboard dagger stuck in it.

  There were a lot of people around the food table, but Yasmeen was easy to spot. Her costume was bright yellow and black stripes; she was a bumblebee.

  Before I could tell her about the two new catnappings, she frowned and said, “Okay, I give up. What are you supposed to be?”

  “What do I look like?” I answered.

  “A boy in orange sweat pants and an orange sweatshirt that doesn’t exactly match, and you have two construction paper triangles on your head,” she said.

  I turned around and showed her my tail. “I’m Luau!” I said. “Duh!”

  “Where are the claws?” Yasmeen said. “The sharp teeth? The intelligent expression?”

  “Ha-ha,” I said, and bit down on a taco chip.

  Besides Yasmeen and Jeremiah and me, five other kids live on our street. There’s Toby Lee, who is not quite three and about to be bugged by a new baby. There’s Michael Jensen, who is rich and smart and, Yasmeen tells me, “really cute.” There’s Michael’s little brother, Billy, who is always listening to his new iPod, so it’s like he doesn’t live here among us but in some other dimension. And there are the Sikora kids, Sophie and Byron. Sophie is the bad kid in the neighborhood, a year younger than Yasmeen and me, big for her age and spoiled. She can’t walk into a room without breaking something, and she talks all the time. Her brother, Byron, is as quiet as wallpaper—I guess because Sophie has never let him talk.

  All us kids were hanging out by the food, of course. Michael was dressed as Superman, and, wouldn’t you know, Billy was a CD sandwich. His mom had covered two giant cardboard disks with foil, then suspended them on straps over his shoulders. I tried to tell him, “Good costume!” but he had his headphones on and couldn’t hear me. Sophie was dressed as an angel, which had to be somebody’s idea of a joke.

  “You ought to see Mrs. Lee.” Michael blew up his cheeks and stretched out his arms. “Her costume’s a pumpkin, and she didn’t have to use padding.”

  “Let’s go,” said Yasmeen.

  The family room was crowded. Mrs. Lee sat in a big chair in the corner. Michael was right—she made a very convincing pumpkin. Next to her was her friend, Deirdre, the preschool teacher. Only she didn’t look like her usual ditzy, cheerful self. She was wearing some kind of spooky gray costume with a gray wig and ghoulish black-and-gray face makeup. She was knitting with rainbow yarn.

  “What do you think she’s making?” I asked. “It sure is teeny.”

  “A sweater for the baby, I guess,” Yasmeen said.

  Somebody came up behind me and tapped my head
with a big fist. I knew without turning around it was Bub.

  “Hey,” I said, and elbowed him in the belly. It was the easiest place because so much of Bub is belly.

  “What’s this in your hair?” he asked. “Oh, now I see, orange cat ears. You’re supposed to be Luau, is that it?”

  “I’m glad somebody understands,” I said. Then I took a good look at him and laughed. Bub is an old guy who lives by himself at the end of our street. Some of the neighbors say he’s original, and some of them say he’s a slob. For the party he had dressed in red long johns, which are like old-fashioned one-piece pajamas that button up the front. He had a mask on, too, but he had pulled it up over his head, so I couldn’t see what it was.

  “What are you supposed to be?” I said.

  He pulled the mask down over his face.

  “You’re a fish?” I said.

  “I’m a red herring!” he said. Then he laughed and laughed.

  In mystery stories a red herring is a clue that points to the wrong person. Bub loves mysteries. When he’s not watching old mystery movies, he’s reading old mystery books.

  “What’s he laughing at?” Yasmeen asked.

  “Himself, as usual,” I said.

  “What’ve you been up to lately?” Bub asked me.

  I told him about Kyle’s missing cat, Halloween, and then I told him and Yasmeen what my mom had said—that two more cats were missing, too.

  “Two more?” Yasmeen said. “Now we’ve got an even better mystery to solve!”

  “Can’t we leave it to the police?” I said. “My mom’s a really good detective.”

  “And so are you,” Yasmeen said. “It must be genetic.”

  I knew Yasmeen was buttering me up so I’d help her. Even so, it was nice, not to mention totally rare, to get a compliment from her. Mean-while, Bub thought it would be great if Yasmeen and I went to work on another mystery, and he offered to help.

  “Maybe you can,” I said. “Mom said something about the missing cats being connected to a Halloween story. Do you know anything about that?”

  Bub nodded. “I think I know what she’s talking about. It has to do with the old Harvey house downtown, the one the Blancos put all that work into.”

  “The one that’s haunted,” I said, looking at Yasmeen.

  “That’s how the story goes,” Bub said. “Supposed to be that the ghost has it in for cats—black cats in particular. It’s been years now, but I can remember cats disappearing around Halloween time and the Harvey ghost taking the blame.”

  “There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Yasmeen said.

  Bub shrugged. “I don’t know if there is or there isn’t. But if you want to know more about the story, we have an authority nearby—Jonathan Stone. He was born here in town—knows where all the bodies are buried, so to speak.”

  Mr. Stone also lives on our street. He’s an older guy. His wife is dead, and his kids are grown-up.

  “Have you seen him tonight?” Yasmeen looked around.

  Bub shook his head no. “He’s not much for parties.”

  This was true. In fact, Yasmeen and I used to be afraid of him. But then last year when he caught us trespassing in his yard, he didn’t yell, he invited us in, served us hot chocolate, and even gave us a really important clue to the mystery we were working on. That was the first one Luau, Yasmeen, and I solved, and it turned out to be pretty scary, as well as confusing. Somebody had been stealing pieces of our neighborhood’s annual Twelve-Days-of-Christmas display.

  “You know who else is missing tonight?” Bub asked. “The father.”

  It was my turn to look around. “Mr. Lee?”

  “Ah-yup,” said Bub. “I hear a business deal came up, and he’s out of town.”

  This was no surprise. Mr. Lee works all the time, same as my dad did before he quit to be a househusband.

  Now Miss Deirdre stood up and clacked her knitting needles to attract everyone’s attention.

  “Boys and girls?” she said. Then she looked all embarrassed and shook her head. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s force of habit. What I meant to say was welcome!”

  She said a few more smiley words about the wonders of new babies and moms and all that. Then it was time for presents.

  The first one was a baby monitor, one of those walkie-talkie things. You put the microphone by the crib so you can hear on the receiver if the baby fusses or burps or tries to escape. Bub had never seen one, so I explained.

  Bub shook his head. “I never knew a baby that had trouble making itself heard.”

  Next, Mrs. Lee opened a tiny outfit with bears on it, and all the moms in the room said, “Awww.” After that came a blanket with pictures of sailboats. Then another baby monitor. This one was what my dad would call high-tech, everything really small and shiny.

  After a while, I learned something about baby showers: The presents are boring. About the only interesting one was a teddy bear that played music by Mozart. It came from Mr. and Mrs. Sikora, who explained that classical music makes babies smart.

  “If that’s true, they must have forgotten to plug in Sophie’s bear,” Yasmeen whispered.

  I laughed, but Bub shook his head. “You kids are wrong about her. She’s rambunctious, but she’s smart as a whip. When my doorbell busted, who do you think rewired it?”

  Yasmeen and I looked at each other. Was it possible Sophie was some kind of genius with electronic stuff?

  Or maybe this was another one of Bub’s famous jokes.

  Anyway, after that, Mrs. Lee opened a battery-powered wastebasket for smelly diapers, and Yasmeen and I decided we couldn’t take any more. Back in the living room, I dared her to eat one of the hot-dog fingers, but she couldn’t, and it turned out neither could I. We took the dagger out of the cake instead, and shared a big piece.

  “After church tomorrow,” Yasmeen said, “we’ll look for clues.”

  “I don’t have time for detecting tomorrow,” I protested. “I have homework.”

  Yasmeen ignored my argument. “The thief was in a hurry. People in a hurry drop things. I bet anything there’s a clue. Don’t worry,” she said. “This case will be easy to solve. I swear.”

  Chapter Six

  “So what are you proposing?” my mom asked my dad. We were home after Mrs. Lee’s shower. Their door was closed, but I could hear them from the hallway. “Are we supposed to sleep like this?”

  “Look at it this way,” Dad said. “It’s going to make a very funny story one day.”

  “Who would we tell?” Mom said. “Thanks to Beth Ryan, we’re the laughingstocks of the neighborhood now!”

  I knocked on their door.

  “Come in,” Dad said. When I did, I saw they were standing as far apart as two people handcuffed together can stand.

  “Can I help?” I asked.

  “No,” Mom said.

  “Honey,” Daddy said.

  “Sorry,” Mom said. “That wasn’t fair. I’m not mad at you, Alex. I’m mad at him.”

  “Go ahead and look around,” Dad told me. “It seems like we’ve eyeballed every cranny, but metal keys don’t vaporize. It has to be somewhere.”

  Luau was right behind me, nose in the air like maybe he was trying to smell the key. I shook my parents’ bedspread, opened bureau drawers, crawled around on the rug.

  Luau, meanwhile, leaped onto my dad’s bedside table, sat down, and watched me. Then he pulled one of his favorite tricks, one he usually uses for waking me in the middle of the night. He batted things onto the floor. The alarm clock. Two books. A magazine. A seashell from our vacation last summer.

  A key.

  I reached down for it. “Does this look familiar?” I asked.

  “The key!” Dad said.

  Mom smiled. “Where was it?”

  I took a deep breath and tried to speak in my best let’s-all-remain-calm voice. “On your bedside table, Dad.”

  “I looked there!” Dad said.

  “Well, you didn’t look very hard,” Mom said.


  “Well, possibly if you hadn’t been dragging me toward the bathroom so you could do your makeup. . . .”

  I unlocked the handcuffs for them. They shook out their arms and rubbed their shoulders but never stopped arguing.

  “You really must have your eyesight checked, Dan,” Mom said. “You know, at your age—”

  “My age?” my dad said. “You’ve got six months on me, Noreen.”

  Luau gave me a look that meant, Cats have excellent eyesight, in case you didn’t know. Then he jumped to the floor and padded out the door toward my room. I followed.

  “Good night, honey, and thanks!” my mom called.

  “Yeah, Alex, thanks!” Dad called.

  Don’t thank me, I thought. Thank Luau.

  The next day was Sunday. I slept late, ate my bagel and cream cheese, then played Lousy Luigi Brothers on the PlayCube. It was looking like pretty much a perfect day—the kind when you never get out of your pajamas—until Dad said, “Don’t I remember something about math homework?”

  And Mom said, “The day’s half gone and you’re not even dressed, Alex? You’re squandering daylight!”

  When Mom makes one of her “squandering daylight” speeches, resistance is futile. So I pulled on sweatpants and a T-shirt that didn’t smell too bad.

  The math homework turned out to be easy. When that was done and Yasmeen still hadn’t called, I hoped that maybe she had forgotten all about detecting.

  Yeah, right.

  At three o’clock she knocked on the door.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said.

  “That’s totally okay,” I said.

  “Mom and Dad were hosting the fellowship hour after church, so we had to clean up. It took forever. The people at our church can really put it away, that’s what my dad says.”

  “It’s probably too late to do any detecting now, right?” I said.

  “What do you mean?” Yasmeen said. “There’s plenty of light left. Come on. We’ll go over to the cemetery and walk from there back to Kyle’s house. Bring the ace detective, too. Since we’re on the trail of a catnapper, he’s going to want to help.”