Who Stole Halloween? Read online

  “I told you about the gravestones, what they said?”

  “Right,” said Yasmeen.

  “Well, didn’t it seem strange to you—especially Mr. Harvey’s?”

  “It’s unusual,” she agreed, “but every Christian believes Jesus rose from the grave so that we will, too. Isn’t that all he was saying?”

  Something hit me. “Wait a second. Isn’t that all who was saying?”

  “Who else are we talking about?” Yasmeen said. “Gilmore Harvey.”

  “Gilmore Harvey wrote what it said on Marianne’s headstone. He was there to do it after she died. But when did he write his own?” I asked. “He died all of a sudden. It’s not like he had time to be composing his own—what do you call it? An epo—?”

  “An epitaph,” Yasmeen said slowly, like she was thinking as she spoke. “So unless he had it ready to go in advance, he didn’t write it. Someone else did.”

  “Someone else,” I repeated, “but who?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, still like she was thinking. But then her voice changed. “Look, Alex, this is all ancient history, right? It’s not helping us find the missing cats.”

  “You sent me to the cemetery!” I protested.

  “That was because I thought you might find a clue to what’s going on in this century—the twenty-first century, not the nineteenth. I think we better forget about the cemetery for now. Don’t you want to hear about the baby? And Mr. Lee was even there.”

  “Amazing.”

  “That’s what my mom said. You know what’s kind of a weird coincidence? The baby’s room is all decorated with pictures of cats—big ones like lions and cheetahs and lynxes. Mrs. Lee told us it’s because of Mr. Lee’s business.”

  “What is his business anyway?” I asked. “All I know is that nobody ever sees him.”

  “His business is exotic pets,” Yasmeen said. “He travels all over the world buying and selling. His customers are super-rich people who want something unusual.”

  “Pets?” I said. “Yasmeen, what if . . . ?”

  “What if what?”

  “What if Mr. Lee has something to do with the missing cats?”

  “You aren’t listening, Alex. No offense to Luau, but there is nothing exotic about a house cat.”

  “Not here in Pennsylvania,” I said, “but maybe somewhere house cats are exotic, or—what about this? What if he does something to them to make them exotic?”

  There was a pause, and I could hear Yasmeen breathing. Then she said, “No. No way. If you ever got a chance to talk to Mr. Lee, you’d see. He’s nice, really.”

  My head hurt. And arguing with Yasmeen would only make it worse. So I didn’t. But all the same, this is what I was thinking: Was Mr. Lee really the nice guy she thought he was? Or could he be a serial catnapper?

  Chapter Nineteen

  Mom walked into the family room as I was hanging up the phone. She was just getting home and still had her uniform on. She tried to smile at me and say, “Hi, honey,” but she was yawning, so her face got twisted and her words came out, “Hi-yuh-ee.” Then she took a good look and woke right up. “What on earth happened to your head?” she asked.

  I touched the bandage. “Little accident. I’m okay.”

  “Did your dad clean it up?” she asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “I think he used steel wool.”

  Mom looked sad. “I wish I had been home to do it, but somebody’s got to make College Springs safe for decent people—and decent cats.”

  “Anything new?” I asked.

  “Another cat is missing,” Mom said.

  “Another negligent owner?” I asked.

  Mom dropped into the big, comfy chair, closed her eyes, and nodded. “I may never figure this one out, but at least you got a new vocabulary word.”

  “And did this one see the thief in action?”

  “Saw something, but no good description,” Mom said. “I swear, whoever this is moves like a ghost.”

  My ears pricked up. “A ghost?” I said. “See, Mom. Maybe it really is—”

  Mom silenced me with a look. Obviously, she did not want to hear any more from me about ghosts. Should I tell her my suspicion about Mr. Lee? But I didn’t think she’d appreciate me suspecting our next-door neighbor without an atom of evidence either. So I asked a different question. “Did you have a chance to talk to Kyle’s family?”

  “For quite a while,” she said. “They were a positive joy after the other folks I’ve been visiting lately. Except that boy is morbid, don’t you think? I asked what he does for fun, and he said, ‘I visit the cemetery across the street.’ ”

  “Did you notice anything else about Kyle?” I asked Mom. “Like was he—I dunno—scared of you or anything?”

  I was thinking of how nervous he had seemed in the cafeteria when he told Yasmeen and me to stop detecting. If it scared him for us to investigate Halloween’s disappearance, wouldn’t he be terrified by a police detective asking questions?

  “He did seem anxious,” Mom said. “But it fit in with him being an odd kind of kid. What did Fred call him? A Gloomy Gus?”

  “What else did you find out?” I asked.

  “That Fred Krichels was right about something else,” Mom said, “that little sister of his—Cammie. I think I am now a leading authority on the life of Cammie. She’s making a unicorn out of play dough at preschool. Her favorite song is ‘The Cat Came Back.’ ” Mom shook her head and laughed. “Yah-yak-yak—gosh, a kid like that can get on your nerves!”

  Shoot, I thought. Was my mom as bad as Officer Krichels? People who are little and annoying are not necessarily dumb, too. Mom pulled her notebook out of her back pocket and flipped through the pages.

  “Here it is,” Mom said. “According to Cammie, Kyle tortured the poor cat.” She read from the notebook: “ ‘He always went around yanking Halloween’s ears and pouring poison in them.’ ”

  “What?” I tried to picture pale, sad-faced Kyle hurting a fly, let alone his own cat.

  Mom laughed, which wasn’t precisely what I expected when she had just told me about a kid torturing a cat. “Alex,” she said, “haven’t you ever yanked on Luau’s ears and poured poison in them?”

  I was shocked. “Of course not. Luau’s my buddy!”

  “Oh yes?” She was still smiling. “Let me ask you something else. Do the words ear mites ring a bell?”

  Ohhhh. Now I got it. Ear mites are tiny, itchy bugs. If your cat gets them, it goes crazy trying to scratch, so the vet gives you a bottle of eardrops. When I gave them to Luau, he hated it—kept trying to wriggle away while I held tight.

  “Cammie must have seen Kyle treating the ear mites and thought he was torturing his cat,” I said.

  Mom nodded. “Plus she’s a typical kid, loved tattling on her big brother. I double-checked with his parents. They even showed me the bottle from the vet.”

  Good old Mom. She had solved one mystery, at least. Kyle did love his cat. You would never go to the trouble of “yanking its ears and pouring poison in them” if you didn’t.

  Chapter Twenty

  The next day turned out to be one of those unusual ones where everything we did in school actually required the use of my brain. That meant I didn’t have a chance to think about who stole Halloween—not to mention five other cats—till Yasmeen and I were on our way home.

  As we turned the corner onto Chickadee Court my stomach rumbled. Dad hadn’t made it to the grocery store yesterday, so instead of a sandwich there was a Ziploc bag of Pirate Berry Crunch in my lunch. And Pirate Berry Crunch just doesn’t stick with you.

  Thinking of soup, I said, “What if we talk to Bub again?”

  Yasmeen was hungry, too. “Good idea.”

  Bub had another guest in his living room when we walked in. This one was curled up on the recliner with his head resting on the remote. On TV was a black-and-white movie with the sound turned down. In it a pretty lady on scaffolding was trying to fix a big dinosaur skeleton.

/>   Bub nodded at the set. “Bringing Up Baby,” he said. “ ‘Baby’ is a leopard—and from the feline point of view, a dish. Luau purrs every time she comes on.”

  Luau heard his name, stretched, and rolled over, exposing his tummy. I tickled him, and he mrrrrowed and batted at my hand, which meant, Please, Alex, not in front of the neighbors!

  Bub served us lentil soup and sat down at the head of the table. “How’s the other guy look?” he asked me.

  It took me a second to realize he was talking about the Band-Aid on my forehead. “The other guy was a tree,” I said.

  Bub nodded thoughtfully. “There’s been a lotta that lately,” he said, “trees attacking innocent kids. I saw it on Fox.”

  Bub tried to keep his face straight but couldn’t. He laughed and laughed, which made me laugh, too. Yasmeen shook her head like we were a couple of kindergartners. Finally Bub wiped the tears from his face with a paper towel and asked us how the case was going.

  “We’re kind of at a dead end,” Yasmeen said. Then she told him about the missing cats with their negligent owners and about Halloween’s ear mites. She did not tell him about Mr. Lee, I noticed. She still thought I was crazy to suspect he might be stealing cats for his exotic pet business.

  “Still no sign of a ransom note, though?” Bub said.

  “Mom said Kyle seemed anxious,” I told him. “But he didn’t say anything about a ransom note. And I guess none of the other cat owners did either.”

  Yasmeen and I were finishing our soup when we heard the doorbell ring. Officer Krichels? Al, the delivery man? It could even have been Dad. “Come on in, it’s open!” Bub called, and into Bub’s house walked the last person we wanted to see, Sophie Sikora.

  I looked at Yasmeen, who looked at me, and our identical expressions said, Oh, no.

  On her way in, Sophie bumped the recliner, which made Luau mrrrrrow. When she got to where we were sitting at the table, she ran into that, too. It’s a good thing our bowls were almost empty, or there would have been a couple of soup tsunamis right into our laps.

  “Hey, Bub!” Sophie greeted us. “Hey, Yazzie and Al! What’s the haps?”

  Nobody calls me “Al.” And my dad is the only person allowed to call Yasmeen “Yazzie.” We both opened our mouths to set Sophie straight, but she kept right on talking. “I just fixed Billy’s remote control jeep,” she said. “Mrs. Jensen paid me, too. It was a whole lot she paid me, but I can’t tell you how much, because you’d be so jealous, and my mom says I shouldn’t brag, even though my dad says it’s okay provided you have something to brag about, like I do, because I’m so good at fixing stuff, so how much she paid me was ten dollars.”

  Bub set a bowl of soup in front of her, and she started shoveling. For a moment I understood what my mom means when she talks about “blessed silence.” But soon she slurped the last of her soup and started in again.

  “Did you notice how Bub’s doorbell worked so good when I rang it?” she said. “I’m the one that fixed it. Bub didn’t pay me though, but I’m not saying I care, because some people don’t have money like the Jensens do. My family has a lot of money because my dad earns thousands and thousands every year—I forget how many thousands—only my mom says the Jensens have an ungodly amount of money. Ungodly is a word that means ‘even more than us.’ My mom also says—”

  “Sophie?” Bub’s expression was patient.

  “Yes, Bub?”

  “Sometimes the things mom says are best left with mom.”

  It took a second for that to sink in. Then Sophie said, “You mean I should shut the heck up?”

  Bub nodded.

  Sophie shrugged. “Okay.”

  I got up and took Yasmeen’s and my bowls to the kitchen. When I came back to the table, Bub was twiddling his thumbs, a sure sign he was thinking.

  “Have you got an idea about the case?” I asked him.

  He nodded. “Ah, yup. But I don’t know what good it’s gonna do you. Think a bit—except for Kyle’s, what do the missing cats have in common?”

  “The owners were negligent,” Yasmeen said.

  Bub nodded. “So it seems like your thief is particularly after cats that aren’t well taken care of. Now, why would that be?”

  Of course I knew about the coincidence. But I hadn’t thought much about what it might mean. And there was the problem that Kyle’s cat Halloween didn’t fit the pattern. Maybe because Halloween was stolen by a different thief? But then I thought of something else. “Kyle’s little sister didn’t think he was taking good care of Halloween either!” I said. “Maybe she told other people, and—”

  Bub nodded. “She was happy enough to tell the police.”

  “So,” Yasmeen said, “it might be that the thief isn’t really stealing cats. Maybe he’s rescuing cats. Maybe he’s a good guy, not a bad guy.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Bub said. “Stealing is stealing even if your motives are good. Think what would happen if everybody took it into their heads to ‘rescue’ other folks’ possessions.”

  My mom would have to work even more overtime, I thought, and I was about to say so, but the phone rang and Bub got up from the table to answer it.

  It is funny how sometimes one thing leads to another. Later, we found out it was Jo, Bub’s niece, on the phone. Jo is a student at the university. The dryer in her dorm was broken. She called to ask if she could use Bub’s.

  If the dorm dryer hadn’t broken, Jo wouldn’t have called. If Jo hadn’t called, Bub never would have left us alone when he did.

  And if Bub hadn’t left us alone, Yasmeen would have told him her idea, and he would have said it was too risky, and we would have forgotten about it.

  So in a way, everything that happened next was because the dryer in Jo’s dorm at the university broke down two days before Halloween.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Yasmeen’s crazy idea was this: Spread the word that Luau was a neglected cat, too, a cat that badly needed rescuing. College Springs is a dinky town. If we told enough people, pretty soon the thief would hear about it—same as he must have heard about Kyle “torturing” Halloween. When that happened, the thief would go after Luau.

  “And that’s when we get him!” Yasmeen said.

  There was a pause, and during the pause I expected her to say, “Ha-ha.”

  Only she didn’t.

  So finally I had to say, “What?”

  And Sophie said, “Wow, Yasmeen. I never saw before why people said you were smart, but now I finally see because that is just so smart—”

  “Hey—aren’t your lips supposed to be zipped?” I said.

  “Don’t be rude, Alex,” Yasmeen said. “Thank you, Sophie.”

  “Oh, that’s great, now you’re ganging up on me, not to mention poor, innocent Luau. . . .”

  My cat had been peacefully watching the glamorous leopard on TV, but now his ears perked up and he said, “mrrrrf,” which meant, Did I hear my name mentioned?

  “I admit the plan still has some bugs that need working out . . . ,” Yasmeen said.

  “No, it doesn’t,” I said. “No bugs because no plan. Not gonna happen.”

  “Listen a minute,” said Yasmeen.

  “No.”

  “Seriously.”

  “No.”

  “We could fix it so Luau isn’t in any danger,” she said. “We could be really careful.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest and shook my head. Luau, meanwhile, jumped off the recliner and walked toward us. I expected him to hide under my chair—seeking protection from the crazy person with the crazy plan—but Luau, that traitor, jumped into Yasmeen’s lap instead.

  “See?” she said. “He’s volunteering.”

  “You get down from there!” I said.

  Sophie interrupted. “I could keep him safe if I had the right equipment. I could ‘wire’ him like the FBI does. You know, hide a radio transmitter on his body so we could hear whatever was happening to him—”

  “That is totally
insane,” I protested. “I mean, apart from everything else, don’t you geniuses see the obvious problem? People wear clothes. Cats don’t. Where are you going to hide a transmitter?”

  “A collar would be enough,” Sophie said. “If the transmitter is small, it could dangle from it. Are there stores for teensy transmitters? I bet I could take something apart. Like a wireless phone? Or a walkie-talkie? It has to use radio waves—”

  As soon as Sophie said it, I remembered Yasmeen already had precisely the right source for such a transmitter. It was at her house, waiting to go back to Biggest Buy-Buy. Would Yasmeen remember it, too? I tried mental telepathy: Forget, forget, forget. . . .

  It didn’t work.

  “The baby monitor!” Yasmeen said. “Mrs. Lee says it’s too powerful! Plus it’s really small. I’ve got it at home. Instead of returning it, we can sort of, you know, borrow it.”

  “Steal it, you mean,” I said.

  “We’ll return it later—”

  “After Sophie takes it apart?” I said.

  Yasmeen shrugged. “We are not talking about Humpty-Dumpty, Alex. We are talking about simple electronics. After she takes it apart, she’ll put it back together.”

  I never officially changed my mind and agreed to go along with this nutso plan. But at some point it became unavoidable, like a thunderstorm when the clouds bunch up. And when Bub came back from talking to Jo, I didn’t tell him what was going on. Instead, the three of us—Yasmeen, Sophie, and I—looked at each other and it instantly became a kids-against-the-grown-ups alliance. I have noticed that this happens sometimes—usually when kids are about to do something totally clever that they know is also totally stupid.

  Later, we finalized our plans. Sophie is the most spoiled kid on Chickadee Court, which for once was coming in handy. She was pretty sure her mom would buy her the collar if she said it was for one of her millions of stuffed animals. Meanwhile, Yasmeen would bring the baby monitor to Sophie’s right away so she could work on modifying it for its new purpose. The big problem was that the transmitter’s signal would need to be amplified. Sophie had an idea for doing this, but she wasn’t sure it would work.