Who Stole Halloween? Page 5

  “Speaking of the Harvey house,” Dad said, and he told Mom about buying the pumpkin and the lights going out. I noticed he didn’t say anything about his new pills, so I didn’t say anything either.

  Full of macaroni, Mom cheered up some and asked if there was anything new with Yasmeen’s and my detecting. If I told her we were annoyed with Officer Krichels for not listening to Kyle’s little sister, she would think I was dissing a fellow police officer. So instead, I stuck to what Kyle said in the cafeteria and how Bub thought maybe Kyle had received a ransom note.

  “Ransom note?” she said. “Hmmmm. Then I guess maybe tomorrow I should go on over to Kyle’s house myself. Fred Krichels might have missed something.”

  “That is a really, really good idea,” I said.

  Chapter Fifteen

  After dinner, Dad and I planned to carve the jack-o’-lantern. When I stood up I deprived Luau of his bed, also known as my lap. So Luau would forgive me, I put a cat treat on the floor for him. Luau watched it for a few seconds. It didn’t move, so he sneaked up to it, wiggled his rump, and pounced.

  Dad shook his head. “For a cat who is so smart sometimes, he sure is stupid other times.”

  We talked about school while Dad got out newspaper, a big spoon, a marker, a carving knife, a paring knife, and a bowl—in other words, jack-o’-lantern tools. My job was the gooshy one—scoop out the seeds and the stringy orange crud, and then put them in the bowl. Boy, was I glad to wash my hands when that was done.

  “Scary or funny this year?” Dad asked me.

  “Funny,” I said, and I drew a face that had extra-wide nostrils. That way I’d be sure to cut out all of the green spot. While I was drawing, Mom came in. She was wearing ratty pink sweats and the fuzzy slippers I had given her for her birthday. Sometimes I wonder what bad guys would think if they saw her like that.

  “Can I help?” she asked.

  “You can separate the seeds from the goop,” Dad said, “so we can roast them.”

  Mom poked the contents of the bowl with her fingertip and made a face. “How come I always get the glamour jobs?”

  Dad kissed her cheek and said, “Because you are such a glamour-puss.”

  Mom rolled her eyes, but then she went ahead and dunked her hands into the bowl and started picking out seeds. Meanwhile, Dad and I took turns using the paring knife to carve the face. When we were done, we lit the stumpy little candle inside the jack-o’-lantern and turned off the lights.

  “Oooooh,” Mom said, like she does every year. “We have two real artists in the family.”

  “Thanks, honey.” Dad put his arm around her.

  “Can we put him on the front step now?” I asked.

  Dad shook his head no. “Halloween’s Friday,” he said. “You can wait four days.”

  Walking to school the next morning, Yasmeen and I came to a significant conclusion about who stole Halloween: We didn’t have the faintest idea.

  Was it the same person who stole the other four cats?

  Did Kyle make the whole thing up?

  Was there a ransom note like Bub thought?

  Yasmeen said we only knew one thing for sure: Ghosts had nothing to do with it.

  I didn’t tell her, but I wasn’t even positive about that.

  School did nothing to cheer us up. We hardly said a word on our way to Mr. Stone’s house that afternoon. Inside, I pulled the fancy organic marshmallows out of my backpack. They were slightly smooshed after spending so much time with my math book and my social studies binder.

  Mr. Stone smiled. “Thank you, Alex. And be sure to thank your dad, too. Let’s try them right out, shall we?”

  I could smell the hot chocolate on the stove.

  Mr. Stone’s house is pretty big, and he has lived there all by himself since his wife died. Most of the house seems kind of cold and deserted, but the kitchen is warm. That’s where Yasmeen and I always sit when we visit.

  Now he poured a mug of hot chocolate for each of us. “You kids don’t really want to hear—” he began.

  I cut him off. “We do really want to hear.”

  “My mom told me that this is a story from your childhood,” Yasmeen said.

  “Gracious, Miss Popp, how old does your mother think I am?” Mr. Stone said. “This story comes from my grandfather’s childhood. It was my grandfather who told my dad and my dad who told me.” Mr. Stone shifted in his chair like Luau does when he’s settling in for a while. He took a sip of cocoa.

  “My father,” he said, “was a minister, accustomed to giving sermons, and he had quite the flair for the dramatic, something I fear that I lack. Every year at Halloween he’d gather us kids around and start this story the same way: ‘Wisps of cloud obscured the moon that Halloween night, the night old man Harvey met his maker, murdered by his very own cat.’ ”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Yasmeen and I looked at each other, then spoke at the same time: “His cat?”

  Mr. Stone nodded. “A big cat, black as midnight, with eyes as green and bright as emeralds. A smart cat, too! He was known throughout the town for his intelligence. One time a child fell through the ice, and the cat stayed on the bank howling till someone came to the rescue. Another time Mrs. Harvey couldn’t find her diamond necklace—the Harveys were the richest people in town—and who led her directly to it? That big black cat.”

  “But why would a cat want to murder its owner?” I asked. I admit I was thinking of Luau. He’s smart, too. Didn’t he find the key to the handcuffs? Maybe he was a descendant of Old Man Harvey’s cat. Maybe I should watch my back.

  Mr. Stone continued: “The way my dad told it, Old Man Harvey was rich for three simple reasons: He worked hard. He was greedy. And he was mean. The only person he cared about was Marianne Harvey, his wife. Supposedly, she was a great beauty, and he wooed her for a long time, showering her with extravagant gifts like that necklace. Her sister—she married my grandmother’s cousin—always said that Marianne got married against her better judgment. She was finally so sick of being pestered that she said yes. Besides, in those days a girl didn’t have so many options.”

  Mr. Stone took more marshmallows from the bag and put them in our mugs. “The scary part’s coming,” he said. “You’ll need your strength. Now, as I was saying, Mr. Harvey adored his wife and didn’t give a fig about anybody else.”

  “How did he feel about his cat?” I asked.

  Mr. Stone looked at me. “I am pretty sure, Mr. Parakeet, that when my dad used to tell this story, we kids didn’t ask questions.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Well, one day—it was in October, not so very long before Halloween—Mr. Harvey didn’t come in to work. Now, I know you’re going to ask, Mr. Parakeet, so I’ll go ahead and tell you: Mr. Harvey owned a dry goods store, the first in College Springs, and it was unlike the old miser to miss a workday. Along about noon one of his employees, a fellow by the name of Floyd, went to the house to check up on him.

  “Floyd rang the bell. No answer. Floyd knocked on the door. No answer. Floyd called out.” Mr. Stone looked at us.

  “No answer!” Yasmeen and I chorused.

  Mr. Stone nodded. “That’s right. Now Floyd was worried. He probably ought to have run for the authorities. But he was a strong and steady fellow, and he decided first to have a look around on his own. As luck would have it, the parlor window was open a crack, and Floyd wedged his fingers under, pushed the window up, and climbed inside.”

  Mr. Stone paused and shook his head mournfully. I wanted to ask about ten questions—like how old was Floyd? and where was the dry goods store?—but I clamped my lips together and kept quiet.

  “Well,” Mr. Stone sighed, “what a sight in that parlor, that same parlor where only the day before Mrs. Harvey had entertained ladies for tea. Tables were overturned; lamps and precious gewgaws were shattered—you’d have thought a typhoon had passed through. But it was on the silk-brocaded chaise that poor Floyd beheld the most awful sight of all, a sight that w
ould have stopped any but the stoutest heart, the strangled, lifeless body of—”

  “Mr. Harvey!” I said.

  Mr. Stone closed his mouth and narrowed his eyes. “No, smarty-pants, not Mr. Harvey. Mrs. Harvey.”

  “But you said—” I started to argue.

  “I am not done yet,” said Mr. Stone. “Here.” He held out the bag of marshmallows to me. “Stick a couple in your mouth and keep them there. Now,” he went on, “where was I? Oh, yes—and this is one of the queer parts—that big black cat was curled up in her lap, and later Floyd told people it was as though the cat was trying to bring back the warmth to his mistress’s cold, dead body.”

  When Mr. Stone paused to sip his hot chocolate, neither Yasmeen nor I said a word. We were too caught up in the spookiness.

  “Two days later,” Mr. Stone continued, “Marianne Harvey was buried—right here at St. Bernard’s, by the way, the marker is there for all to see—and her grieving husband wept at the graveside. Mr. Harvey told the police he had been unexpectedly called over the mountain to Belleburg the morning of the murder. While he was gone, he said, some thief must have broken in and surprised his wife.

  “Well, the thief was never caught. In fact, no one ever saw hide nor hair of any thief. Add to that the fact that Mr. Harvey was not a popular man, and you can infer the rumors that flew. Some people speculated that Marianne Harvey was miserable in her marriage, that her husband had mistreated her, that she had had a sweetheart and when Mr. Harvey found out, he killed her in a jealous rage. Some speculated that it was poor stouthearted Floyd himself who was the sweetheart. But if there was evidence one way or the other, I never heard about it. And in those days no one had the guts to stand up to the richest man in town.

  “A few days passed, and the weather grew colder. Finally, it was Halloween night. Wisps of cloud obscured the full moon. A gentleman walking home from a local tavern passed the Harvey house and heard a ruckus inside. Now, this gentleman had been at the tavern for some hours, and so not everyone credited his account with perfect accuracy. What he claimed he heard were three sounds at once—a mountain lion’s scream, the howl of a madman, and the rough-and-tumble of a barroom brawl. This cater-wumpus lasted perhaps one minute. And then there was an eerie silence.

  “Not being so stouthearted as Floyd, the fellow hightailed it to the courthouse, which in those days was also the headquarters for the police. And so it was an officer of the law who opened the parlor door at the Harvey house on Halloween night and found the mangled corpse of . . .”

  Yasmeen said, “Mr. Harvey.”

  Mr. Stone nodded. “It was a grisly scene. Mr. Harvey had locked up the parlor after his wife died there, but he or someone else had opened it up that night. There was blood everywhere—streaking the rugs and the walls, splattered on the ceiling. And the body”—Mr. Stone shuddered as if he had seen it himself, which I guess he had in his imagination—“it was unrecognizable, just as though some beast of the jungle had wrought revenge.”

  “Where was the cat?” Yasmeen asked.

  Mr. Stone nodded. “Well you might ask,” he said. “There had been a fire in the fireplace, and a few hot embers remained. The cat was on the hearth, absorbing the last of the warmth and cleaning something red and sticky from its paws.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Ewwwww!” Yasmeen and I said.

  Mr. Stone smiled and folded his hands in front of him on the table. He looked pleased with himself. “That’s the story, just as my dad told it. I’m surprised I still remember.”

  “But what about the ghost?” I asked.

  Mr. Stone got up from the table and cleared our cups. “Ah yes, the ghost,” he said. “It seems that old man Harvey’s ghost still haunts the mansion he built for himself and his bride, and those who have lived there since have spent many a sleepless night.”

  “I’ve heard cats in College Springs often get catnapped around Halloween,” I said. “And sometimes whoever it is blames the ghost. This year there are five missing cats already.”

  “Really?” said Mr. Stone. “That’s a shame. It would seem the Harvey ghost is not entirely rational. Having been killed by his wife’s cat, he seeks revenge on all cats.”

  Yasmeen looked disgusted. “You don’t really believe in ghosts, do you, Mr. Stone?”

  “The older I get, the more I find the world to be mysterious,” Mr. Stone said.

  “In the story, what happened to the poor cat? Marianne Harvey’s cat?” I asked.

  “The ‘poor cat’?” Mr. Stone said. “The ‘poor cat’ was a bloodthirsty killer!”

  “But it doesn’t sound like his victim, Mr. Harvey, was a very nice man,” Yasmeen said.

  “Or a very nice ghost,” I said.

  “We don’t know for certain what kind of man Mr. Harvey was,” Mr. Stone said.

  Yasmeen disagreed. “The cat knew,” she said.

  I looked at Yasmeen. “It seems kind of strange that you’re totally ready to accept a cat witnessing a murder and getting revenge, but you’re totally rejecting the idea of ghosts.”

  “What’s so strange about it?” Yasmeen said. “I don’t believe in ghosts. I do believe in cats.”

  Mr. Stone didn’t give me time to puzzle that one out. “As the story goes,” he said, “Marianne Harvey’s cat suffered the sorry fate that is common to unwanted felines—he was put in a sack with a great number of rocks and thrown into a pool of water, in this case the Harveys’ well. People said his howling was enough to freeze your blood.”

  Yasmeen and I both felt better when we left Mr. Stone’s house. It couldn’t have been the gory ghost story that cheered us up. It must have been the hot chocolate and marshmallows.

  “Let’s go back to St. Bernard’s,” I suggested, “to see where Marianne Harvey is buried.”

  “I can’t,” Yasmeen said. “I’m going over to see the Lees’ new baby. My whole family has to. But—I know, Alex—why don’t you go over to the cemetery? Maybe what’s going on is a Halloween prank, and somebody’s eventually going to blame the whole thing on the ghost. You might notice something new at the cemetery.”

  This time it was me who opened my mouth and closed it again. I never thought of going to the cemetery alone. But Yasmeen already had plenty of reasons to call me a wimp. If I refused to go, she’d have plenty plus one.

  “No problem,” I said, trying to sound like I meant it. “I’ll call you after dinner.” Then I turned around and started walking toward St. Bernard’s, all the time thinking, “Provided the ghosts don’t get me first.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  The last time I had paid a visit to my local graveyard, my cat had paused to do a little personal grooming beside a statue of a grumpy angel. As it turned out, that angel was Marianne Harvey’s grave marker.

  Actually, the angel was pretty close to the gate, but that day I turned right when I walked in, and I wound around searching among a lot of other headstones before I came to it. By the time I did, the light was almost gone, and I had to stare to read the inscription:

  MARIANNE MCCLELLAN HARVEY

  BORN JULY 2, 1854

  DIED OCTOBER 28, 1879

  IN DEATH, THE ETERNAL WIFE.

  It was dark and cold. I was in a cemetery. The leafless trees looked sharp and thorny against the rising moon. Can you blame me for feeling creeped out?

  And that inscription didn’t help. It was like it condemned poor Marianne to be stuck with her murderous husband forever.

  Mr. Stone had said Mr. Harvey was buried next to Marianne, but searching still took me a few minutes. In the end, I had to brush away dirt to read the inscription. When I did, it was even stranger than his wife’s.

  GILMORE SAMUEL HARVEY

  BORN DECEMBER 2, 1836

  DIED OCTOBER 31, 1879

  SO SHALL THE RIGHTEOUS

  ESCAPE THE GRAVE.

  Now not only was I creeped out, I had something to think about. Maybe this was crazy, but it almost felt like that one was trying to tell
me something. But what?

  A cold gust made me shiver, and I noticed the bats were out again. If there was ever a moment for ghosts and vampires and werewolves to appear in a regular kid’s life, this was it.

  I started to run. I didn’t get very far.

  That night after dinner I called Yasmeen to fill her in. I swear, even over the phone line, I could hear her shake her head, exasperated. “That’s why I carry Band-Aids and antiseptic,” she said.

  I touched my forehead to see if it still hurt. It did. I think it was Dad’s scrubbing that inflicted most of the damage, but it hadn’t been such a hot idea to run into the tree in the first place.

  “Anybody would’ve been scared,” I said. “Anybody would’ve run.”

  “Anybody would not have run into a tree,” she said. “It takes the distinctive talents of my next-door neighbor Alex Parakeet to do that.”

  “Can we change the subject?” I said.

  “Absolutely,” Yasmeen said. “The new subject is how you’re going to help me do Mrs. Lee a favor.”

  “That wasn’t the new subject I was thinking of,” I said, “but what favor?”

  “We’re supposed to return one of the baby monitors—the fancy one from Mrs. Jensen. Marjie Lee says it’s too powerful. She keeps picking up cell phone conversations, and it’s embarrassing.”

  “But why are you doing this?” I asked her.

  “We are doing this because my mom volunteered us,” Yasmeen said. “Come on, Alex. It’s only over to Biggest Buy-Buy. We can walk there after school.”

  There was no way carrying one baby monitor required two people. But there was also no way I was going to get out of this if Yasmeen had made up her mind. So I said, “Sure. Now can we talk about my subject?”

  “Sure,” Yasmeen said.