Baby-sitters Beware Part 6

Famous last words.

Chapter 8.

Shannon.

"Shannon."

"Hi, Kristy. What's up?" I asked.

"Can you go to the library with some of us 'tomorrow?"

"Sure," I said. Then I remembered to ask, "What for?"

Kristy told me about Mr. Seger and his mysterious burglary. She also told me about the mystery notebook.

"It's a fact-gathering mission," she said. "We're looking for information."

"Also known as dues?" I suggested.

"Of course," said Kristy. "We're going to put everything we learn into our notebook and see what we come up with."

"See how things add up. See what V is in the equation," I said.

"Have you been talking to Stacey already?" asked Kristy.

"No," I answered, trying not to laugh. Kristy can be pretty intense sometimes. But then, scary things had been happening to the BSC - and they would be even scarier if they were tied together.

Maybe that's why I wanted to laugh - I was scared. Sometimes being scared affects people that way. We made plans to meet.

Shannon.

The next afternoon, Kristy, Claudia, and Abby were waiting for me on the front steps of the Stoneybrook Public Library.

"Mal's on a stakeout," said Kristy. "We're going to take separate notes and incorporate them into the mystery notebook as soon as she's brought it up to date." "Stakeout?" I said.

"Sitting at the Rodowskys'. Keeping an eye on the Seger residence," Kristy explained in what sounded suspiciously like police-ese. "Okay, okay," I said. "Lead on, Sherlock." "Agatha," said Abby. "Agatha Kristy. Get it?"

We all groaned and went inside. Where does Abby get her awful puns? As we pa.s.sed the desk, Abby whispered, "Okay, spread out and try to act normal." She waved to Mrs. Kis.h.i.+ and gave her a big grin. "Hi!" she said. "Read any good books lately?" Claudia said, "You are so weird. And my mom's heard that line about a thousand times." She waved to her mom, too, and shrugged her shoulders. Mrs. Kis.h.i.+ gave us a puzzled smile and we walked toward the computer catalogue. "How do you look someone up in the library?" Kristy asked. "Apart from the phone book, I mean."

Claudia said, "You can look in the Stoneybrook Who's Who. Also the news index of the newspaper."

"Wow. Okay." Kristy nodded approvingly. "Let's start with the Who's Who."

"How did you know that, anyway?" Abby asked Claudia.

."My mother is a librarian and my sister is a genius," Claudia replied. "I know these things." She grinned. "Besides, I asked Janine last night."

"Did you tell her what was going on?" asked Kristy.

"No." Claudia grinned again. "You know Janine. She likes knowing the answers to questions. So I asked her a bunch of questions and this was just one of them."

"Sneaky. Devious. Excellent," said Kristy. She turned and stopped again. "Where is the Stoneybrook Who's Who?"

"That I didn't ask her," Claudia admitted.

"I'll go ask at the desk," I volunteered. "If your mom has any questions, I can just say I'm doing research and she'll think it's for my homework."

But Mrs. Kis.h.i.+ didn't ask any questions. She just smiled and said h.e.l.lo and asked me how I was doing, and then told me where to find what we were looking for.

A few minutes later we'd staked out a table in the corner of the library, with our backs to the wall (at Kristy's insistence).

"Here it is," said Abby. "Mr. Seger. He's a member of the Stoneybrook Business Bureau - that sounds pretty respectable - his wife is deceased, and he has one son who is in high school, going by his date of birth."

"What's his son's name?" asked Claudia.

"Noah." Abby looked from Claudia to Kristy. "Do you think he's in high school here? Do you think your sister or your brothers would know him?"

Both Kristy and Claudia shrugged. Then Kristy asked, "Is that all?"

"That's it." I said. I was disappointed. The Who's Who didn't have very much what's what, in my humble opinion.

"Yeah." Abby sounded disappointed, too.

"Let's photocopy it," said Kristy. "There could be a clue there."

Abby picked up the book. Pretending to stagger slightly under its weight, she turned toward the photocopy room. "Anybody have change?" she asked.

We pooled our change and Abby, still in her fake stagger mode, lurched away.

A few minutes later she came lurching back.

"Ha, ha ..." Kristy began. Her voice trailed off.

Abby's face was a ghastly greenish-white.

"What's wrong?" I asked, jumping up from the table. Abby dropped the Who's Who with a thump. She also dropped several photocopies of the page about Mr. Seger.

And one photocopy, very crooked but quite clear, of a photograph of Kristy, Mary Anne, Claudia, Stacey, and Dawn.

"Where did you find this?" demanded Kristy.

Abby sat down in the chair. Color was returning to her face. Her voice sounded normal, but abnormally serious, for her. "It was just sitting there, staring up at me from the recycle bin."

"Right on top?" I asked.

"Well, not right on top." Abby looked a little sheepish. "I was sort of going through it while the machine was making copies. You know, checking out what other people make copies of. Anyway, there it was, just underneath the first few pieces of paper. It was creepy. I mean, it freaked me out."

"It's the photo that was taken of us when we solved that pet-napping mystery, with Dawn," said Kristy. "The one that was in the Stoneybrook News. Remember? Jessi and Mal were on the ends and got cropped out and were majorly annoyed."

"That's where the burglar found our names!" Claudia exclaimed. "He must have looked up 'Kristy Thomas' in the news index and found our picture in the paper. That's why all the phone calls and weird stuff have been happening to just the four of us, unless Dawn, all the way out in California - "

"Mary Anne talked to Dawn on Sunday and told her what was going on," said Kristy. "Dawn would have told Mary Anne then if she'd been getting weird phone calls or anything, and she didn't."

"Talk about major clues," said Abby. "I mean, this proves that the burglars must be behind the vandalism, right? They saw your name, Kristy, and mine, and looked us both up in the newspaper index and since I'm not famous all over town - yet - they found you. Wow. I bet Jessi and Mal are going to be glad they got cropped out of the photo now!"

"It could be." Kristy had picked up the photocopies of the information about Mr. Seger and handed them around to each of us before tucking the extra ones in her notebook.

"Someone could have looked up any one of the five names in the newspaper index," I pointed out. "Not that I believe that. What I believe is that your burglar did get Kristy's name from her tag."

"That means he was here, in this library, not too long ago. Too bad we can't find out who made copies," Abby said regretfully. Then she brightened. "You think he's still here?"

"No!" said Claudia so firmly we all jumped..

We looked quickly and nervously around. But n.o.body sinister was lurking nearby. Or if they were, they were cleverly disguised as a teenaged boy helping his kid sister with her homework, two older women thumbing through a towering stack of financial reports, and someone who looked like a college student staring glumly down at an open book without turning a page.

"Let's check out Mr. Seger in the Stoneybrook News index," suggested Kristy.

Claudia put the Who's Who back on the shelf, and we went to the computers. We scrolled through the index twice, but Mr. Seger wasn't as famous as the Baby-sitters Club. He'd never made the news, at least not according to the index.

"Or not under the name he's using now," said Abby darkly.

We looked" at her. "Well, maybe it is a fake name," she said. "You never know."

It was time to go. We'd done all the investigating we could do for one day. We trudged out of the library silently. Abby even forgot to goof on Mrs. Kis.h.i.+ as we pa.s.sed the front desk on the way to the door.

"Find everything you need?" asked Mrs. Kis.h.i.+.

"Yes, thank you," Kristy answered. "Plenty."

"Yeah," I added under my breath. "We found out how much we don't know."

Chapter 10.

Mallory.

Have you ever noticed how when you are with kids, people remember you as a unit, like "a bunch of kids" or "a girl with two little kids (or three or four)"?

Anyway, I was sitting for the Rodowskys on Tuesday afternoon - and I was staking out Mr. Seger's house next door. The Rodowskys' kitchen was on the side of the house that was next to Mr. Seger's house, so naturally I'd decided we should do some kitchen-related activities.

All three Rodowsky boys were enthusiastic about this idea. It was only after I'd suggested it that I began to have second thoughts.

A kitchen is filled with potential for disasters. And Jackie Rodowsky, age seven, is known, among the members of the BSC, as the Walking Disaster.

Trouble follows him wherever he goes - except when he is walking into it head-on. Jackie is used to it. But it is extremely hard on other people if they are not used to it.

Since I have four brothers, three of whom are triplets, I am used to chaos and catastrophe. In fact, when I write the first volume of my autobiography, I am going to call it Chaos and Catastrophe. Or maybe that will be the t.i.tle of the opening chapter. . . .

That day we decided to make cookies. (But Shea, who is nine, and Jackie weren't calling them cookies. They were calling them Edible Slammers, after their Pogs and Slammers games, and so was Archie, who is four and copies everything his two older brothers do, even when he isn't sure why they are doing it.) Of course I spent some time checking out the house next door from the kitchen window. The gla.s.s had been cleaned up. The window had been replaced. Not surprisingly, no tree branch was in sight.

In fact, the only tree of any size near the house wasn't near enough for one of its branches to fall through that window, unless the tree was bent toward it at a forty-five degree angle.

Shea said, "Jackie, if you put chocolate chips up your nose ..."

I spun around. "Don't you dare!"

Jackie grinned at me. "I wasn't really going to," he said. "I just said it would make a really excellent gross joke."

Great, I thought. Wait till Kristy hears about this. Something else to add to her gross food jokes at lunch. I'd heard plenty about her lunchroom jokes, enough to make me almost glad the sixth-graders have a different lunch period than the eighth-graders. I could hear Kristy now: "Hey, you guys, you know where they keep these chocolate chips?"

I saw that Archie was looking extremely interested in the idea and quickly moved the chocolate chips out of his reach to the middle of the table. I safety-pinned a large, dean, blue and white dishtowel to Archie's s.h.i.+rt for an ap.r.o.n, and Shea and Jadde put on old ap.r.o.ns. Jackie chose a bright pink ap.r.o.n, which looked startling, to say the least, with his hair. Shea opted for a flaming red one that said "BARBECUE ON, DUDES." His color combination was pretty eye-catching, too. * I settled on your basic navy blue ap.r.o.n - a nice, conservative choice that doesn't show spots.

Tying on my ap.r.o.n, I took another quick glance out the window, noted that no one seemed to be home, then turned back to the cookies.

Although members of the BSC have, at times, made very exotic cookies, we stuck to basics that afternoon. We made Tollhouse cookies and plain oatmeal raisin cookies (excuse me, Slammers).

After we put them in the oven, I made a game out of cleaning up the kitchen. The only disaster was when Jackie knocked over a chair with his enthusiastic sweeping. This would not have been a disaster at all, except that the chair somehow hit the trashcan, which tipped over and spilled garbage across the kitchen floor, and hit Bo's dog dishes, splattering dog food and water everywhere.

"Uh-oh," said Jackie.

Archie laughed delightedly. "A mess!" he proclaimed.

Bo, who had heard the commotion and naturally came to investigate the sound of his food bowl rattling, joined in, barking and doing a happy dog dance in the mess.

We went into action automatically (the Rodowsky boys know everything there is to know about cleaning) and we soon had the mess cleaned up - somewhat, I suspect, to the disappointment of Archie and Bo.

The stove timer went off and Jackie shouted, "The Slammers!" and lunged for the oven door.

I lunged for Jackie just as he pulled the oven door open. Steam billowed up and fogged my gla.s.ses.

"Hey!" I said and Jackie let the oven door slam shut.

A pot fell off the stove onto my toe. Fortunately, it was empty.

"Sony," said Jackie.

"It's okay. No problem," I said, taking off my gla.s.ses to wipe them and squint at him. "But why don't you let Shea take the cookies out of the oven - with an oven mitt, Shea - and put them on top of the stove. When they're cool, all three of you can help put them in the cookie jar."