Hauntings and Heists (3 page)

“Let’s see,” said Viola, racking her brain. Might they have seen her father’s diploma in his office? No. First, she didn’t think he had actually unpacked it yet. Besides, a diploma wouldn’t say that her father was a professor. Could they have read about his appointment in the newspaper? Uh-uh, Viola considered. None of her new friends seemed like the type to be interested in reading those kinds of articles, if there had even been an article to read in the first place. The clue had to have been something that the kids had encountered inside the house. Had her father said anything to them about himself after he’d hung up from his phone call?

No, Viola thought, but he
had
said something before, just as they’d all come in the front door.

“You overheard my dad say that he’d missed the first faculty meeting last week and had to call in for the teleconference,” said Viola. “He admitted being a member of a faculty. And he also mentioned his grad students, which meant it had to be college. And since there’s only one college around here …”

“You are a rock star!” said Sylvester.

“Hardly,” said Viola, taking back her notebook. “But thanks.”

“We should do this again soon,” said Woodrow.

“Oh, can we, please?” said Rosie.

“School starts in a few days,” said Viola, “but that shouldn’t stop us from meeting right here, where the four corners come together, whenever we feel like it. Mysteries are everywhere, if we look for them.”

After their parents began to call the kids home, the group said good-bye. Viola’s heart thumped as she came around the front of her new house. Smiling, she climbed the porch steps.

Mysteries
are
everywhere,
she thought. And now she had three friends to help her find them.

The first night in the new house, Viola awoke to a tapping sound. She sat up and listened, and the noise stopped. Viola wondered if she’d dreamt it, but then it started up again. For a moment, she worried that someone was at her bedroom window. But that was impossible — she was on the second floor.

Viola crept out of bed and into the hallway.

Her parents’ door was closed. If they’d heard anything, they didn’t seem to mind. Viola tiptoed to the top of the staircase, sharpening her ears to pick up any hint of sound. And there it was. Downstairs. A tiny, repetitious tapping, soft and dull, like a spoon on wood.

In her old house, sometimes the pipes popped and snapped when the heat turned on. Once, a mouse got in under the kitchen sink and made a
scritch-scratching
noise at night as it bit
through a box of doggie treats. This sound was not like either of those. It was creepier, as if someone were downstairs searching for something — a way in, perhaps. Viola steeled herself, then slowly descended to the small foyer. The tapping wasn’t coming from beyond the front door.

Instinct brought Viola to the door that led to the basement. She turned the knob and pulled the handle. The darkness down there was darker than the darkness up here, and Viola couldn’t stop chills from racing across her skin. Especially when the sound echoed up the stairs.

“H-hello?” she said, her voice weaker than she wished. And it stopped. Viola closed her eyes as she reached around the doorjamb, searching for a light switch. She found it and flicked it, but nothing happened. Either the bulb was a dud, or the socket was empty. Viola listened to her own breath passing back and forth through her lips. After several minutes, she decided that whoever (or whatever) had been down there was either hiding or gone.

As she crept back upstairs and into bed, thinking about terrible possibilities, Viola’s love of mysteries dampened with fear. She stared at the wavering shadows of leafy branches on the ceiling and then remembered the best remedy for this weird feeling. Daylight.

The next morning was busy, and, even if she’d had the nerve, Viola barely had time to think about exploring the basement. Her mother insisted on taking her along to run errands while Mr. Hart met his students at the college. They stopped at the grocery store and hardware store and finished at the pharmacy, where Mrs. Hart let Viola pick out a pack of pencils with fluorescent green erasers—Viola’s favorite color.

By the time they pulled into the driveway, Viola was practically bouncing off the ceiling. “Can I go find my friends?” she asked, whipping open the door, one foot already on the asphalt.

“After you help unload the car,” said her mom.

Viola pressed her lips together to stop from groaning.

Later, Viola visited each of the three houses that bordered her backyard, but no one was home. After running back to her house and grabbing paper, a pen, and a roll of tape, she stuck notes to her neighbors’ front doors.

Who: The Four Corners Mystery Club (You know who you are.)

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.”

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.