Secret on the Thirteenth Floor

by Gertrude Chandler Warner

  “He has so many superstitions, and I can’t tell if Gwen shares them,” Jessie said.

  “I don’t think he’s trying to scare people on purpose,” Violet said. “But on the other hand, he’s the only other person who has a key to the control room for the elevator.”

  “This conversation sounds just like jury duty,” Grandfather said. “Everyone trying to figure out who did what.”

  The children turned to their Grandfather. “What was the case about?” Jessie asked.

  “Well, I can only talk about it because it was dismissed by the judge,” Grandfather said. “Otherwise, I’d have to keep it a secret. But it was a robbery. And the only reason the person got caught was that he returned to the scene of the crime. This happens in a lot of cases. Someone who made a bad choice and committed a crime just can’t help going back to the place where it happened.”

  Jessie sat up straight and grabbed Henry’s arm. “Does that remind you of anything?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?” said Henry.

  “It’s like that squirt gun Benny found,” Jessie said. “He put it in the cupboard, planning to come back for it later, but when he did, it was gone. Someone came back for it. Someone returned to the scene of the crime!”

  Henry nodded. “I think you must be right, Jessie.”

  “But why was that thing so important that it would be worth coming back for?” Jessie asked.

  The Big Spill

  The next day, the Aldens woke up early to cook breakfast for Gwen, Felix, and the workers, who had been putting many hours into restoring the apartment damaged in the fire. Jessie and Violet made an egg-and-broccoli casserole, and Henry and Benny toasted a whole loaf of bread and arranged dishes of butter and jam on the long dining table in the guest suite. They set the places with pink china rimmed in gold, which they had found in the hutch.

  “This smells wonderful!” Gwen said as she led the group to the table. “And I’m so happy to see this old china getting some use.”

  The workers and Felix echoed her good mood as they took their places. Grandfather began passing the food around.

  Jessie dried her hands on a towel. She and the other children had eaten breakfast when they first woke up, so they were ready to get to work. “Enjoy your food,” Jessie said. “We’ll see you in a little while.”

  “Don’t work too hard!” Gwen called after them.

  The Aldens took the elevator upstairs and walked down the hallway to the apartment. With the electricity out the day before, they hadn’t been able to finish hanging pictures on the walls, and they hoped to get it done now. As they walked, Violet stopped every few feet and turned to look behind them.

  “Violet, what are you doing?” Jessie asked.

  “Looking for the cat,” Violet said. “I know we didn’t just imagine it. It has to be around here someplace.”

  Inside the apartment, a bad surprise was waiting. “Oh no!” Henry said when he saw the kitchen. The cabinets were finished and the island was complete, but the newly finished wood floor was now covered in two shades of blue paint, one light and one dark. Two cans lay on their sides in the middle of an enormous paint puddle.

  “I don’t think this is part of the new design,” said Benny.

  Violet’s hands flew to her mouth. “This is terrible,” she whispered.

  “Do you think someone did this on purpose?” Henry asked.

  “They must have,” Jessie said, shaking her head. “The last time we were here, those cans were in the bedroom with their lids on tight.”

  “Or maybe the broken mirror and the black cat passed bad luck onto the person who spilled them!” Benny said.

  The children ran down the hallway. They were in too much of a hurry to wait for the elevator, so they took the stairs instead and raced into the guest suite.

  Gwen dropped her fork and stood up when she saw their faces. “What’s wrong?”

  “Something’s happened in the apartment,” Henry said. “Paint is spilled all over the kitchen floor…and it looks like someone did it on purpose.”

  Felix threw down his napkin. “I was afraid of this,” he said, and grabbed the rabbit’s foot he wore on his chain. “After all, it is May thirt—well, it’s the day after the twelfth. Oh, how I hate that number.”

  “Now, Felix,” Gwen started.

  Felix shook his head. “Bad signs always come in threes: first there was the fire, then the broken mirror, and now this.”

  Two women who lived on the tenth floor popped their heads into the guest suite, each of them holding a tennis racket. “Gwen, we’ve been looking for you,” one woman said. “We just heard what’s happened on the thirteenth floor. Everyone is talking about the bad luck. Today is our league championship match—what if we lose? Something has to be done about the thirteenth floor!”

  Felix put his hands over his ears. “Ugh! Don’t say that number.”

  The other tenant pointed her racket at Gwen. “If this doesn’t stop soon, we are going to break our lease and move out!”

  Everyone at the table began discussing their opinions on the strange events, and the talk soon broke into an argument. Gwen raised her voice above the others. “Please, everyone! Let’s try to stay calm.”

  Grandfather sighed. “Yes, Gwen is right. We have to keep our heads.”

  “Felix,” Jessie said, trying to keep her voice friendly, “I know it seems like all these things are related, but it really is just a coincidence that so many bad things have happened upstairs. The numbers are just numbers, whether you are talking about three or thirteen. Not only that, but when you said bad things happen in threes, you forgot to include the broken fireplace, the stuck elevator, and the electricity going out. So that actually makes six things. If you string enough superstitions together, you can make up a story for just about anything. But that doesn’t mean it’s true.”

  “Well said,” said the worker who had helped the Aldens look inside the electrical outlet the day before. “There is a reasonable explanation. We just don’t know what it is yet.”

  But Felix and the tenants from the tenth floor did not look convinced. And poor Gwen looked more worried than ever. Behind her cheerful red glasses, her eyes began to fill with tears.

  Grandfather crossed to her side of the table and patted her shoulder. “Don’t worry, my friend. We are going to get to the bottom of this.”

  “And in the meantime,” Violet said, “we are going to clean up that paint.”

  Gwen and the children returned to the apartment on the thirteenth floor and got to work with a stack of rags, mopping up as much of the paint as they could and then using buckets of hot, soapy water to wash up the rest. The floorboards would probably have to be sanded down and refinished to get rid of all the blue marks.

  Violet gazed at the floor with her artist’s eye. “If you can get over the damage, the streaks of blue are sort of pretty in a way.”

  Gwen laughed. “I love how you always see the possibilities in things, Violet. Maybe we should leave it as it is. We could start a new trend—paint-smeared flooring!”

  Violet laughed. “Well,” she said, “I prefer the blue spots to all the black burn marks that must have been on the floor after the fire.”

  “You know,” Gwen said as she squeezed blue water out of a sponge, “all the burn marks were actually on the ceiling. We just decided to use the opportunity to redo the floor while the apartment was empty.”

  “But how come the fire only damaged the ceiling?” Violet asked.

  “Heat rises,” Jessie said. “Smoke always goes up. So if this building had a fourteenth floor—a real fourteenth floor—people on that floor would have been the first to smell the smoke.”

  Henry thought about this. “That’s right, Jessie. And that makes me wonder something: If the smoke was rising, damaging the ceiling and not the floor, why did Hayes smell smoke down on the twelfth floor?”

  Benny opened his mouth to suggest an answer, but before he could get a word out, a loud siren
began echoing through the Bixby’s hallways.

  “Oh no!” Gwen said. “That’s the smoke alarm!”

  Smoky Secret

  Gwen and the children raced down the stairs and through the hallway on the twelfth floor, following the sound of the screeching smoke alarm. It led them to Hayes’s apartment, and they found him in his kitchen, waving a towel in front of the open window. Black smoke poured from a muffin tin sitting on the stove top.

  Hayes cringed when he saw the Aldens. “I’m so embarrassed!” he said. “I was baking these cupcakes for my friend’s birthday. I doubled the recipe but then completely forgot about the second pan in the oven and went into my room to read. I guess I must have fallen asleep and”—Hayes threw up his hands in frustration—“well, you can see what happened.”

  He swished the towel above his head, where the smoke detector was mounted on the ceiling. After a moment, the loud screeching finally stopped.

  “Don’t worry, Hayes,” Henry said. “Everyone makes mistakes.”

  “That’s right,” Benny said. He was about to share the story of the time he tried to make cookies but left out the eggs by accident. But then he noticed something surprising—and familiar. On the counter, next to a tray of cupcakes covered in frosting, lay the tool he had thought was a squirt gun when he’d found it in the damaged apartment. It had disappeared, and now here it was in Hayes’s kitchen! It was a kitchen tool, for piping frosting onto cupcakes.

  “Hayes,” Benny said, “why didn’t you tell me that frosting tool belonged to you when I found it? I would have given it back to you.”

  Hayes sighed. “Boy, nothing gets past you kids.” He took a moment to hang the towel back on the rack. He seemed to be thinking. When he turned around, he said, “Gwen, I need to be honest with you about something.”

  “I always appreciate honesty,” Gwen said encouragingly.

  “You’ve given me so much credit for alerting everyone about the fire in time to save the building, and I guess I did do that, but I haven’t told you the whole truth about how I discovered there was a fire. I didn’t smell smoke and run upstairs to see what was happening. I was already on the thirteenth floor. I was in that apartment.”

  Gwen’s eyebrows shot up. “You were? But why?”

  Hayes sighed. “I was making a complicated layer cake that required the two parts of the cake to be baked at different temperatures. I needed a second oven. I knew no one was living up there, and I didn’t think it would do any harm to borrow the oven for an hour.”

  “Oh, Hayes,” Gwen said.

  “I put one cake layer in on the thirteenth floor, and then I ran back downstairs to my apartment to put the second layer in my oven. When I went up to check on the first layer, I came upon the fire in the kitchen.”

  “So the fire started in the oven?” Henry asked.

  Hayes shook his head. “I don’t think so. When I went up to the apartment on thirteen, I turned on the light and the oven and put my cake in. There was a little burning smell, but I figured it was just old crumbs in the bottom of the oven, because it hadn’t been cleaned in a long time. So I went back downstairs. But when I returned a few minutes later, there was a fire.”

  “I figured it was the wiring,” Gwen said. “But by the time the firefighters got here, all the walls in the kitchen were black. It was hard to tell where the fire started and what path it took as it spread.”

  “I suppose you would have found out eventually,” Hayes said, “when the firefighters filed their report.”

  “Probably so,” Gwen said, “but either way, I’m glad you told me.”

  “I’m sorry I lied,” Hayes said. “I have regretted it ever since. It feels terrible to keep a secret like that.”

  “It’s okay,” Gwen said. “It sounds like one bad choice that just got out of hand.”

  “Yes,” Hayes said. “It was a bad choice. But I swear to you that I don’t know anything about the other strange events up there since the fire. I know my word doesn’t mean much anymore, but I hope you will believe me. I did not break the mirror or spill that paint.”

  “I believe you,” Gwen said.

  “So do I,” said Jessie.

  “And you’re sure you can’t remember anything else that might help us figure out who is responsible?” Henry asked.

  Hayes pressed his lips together. “There is one thing,” he said. “The night you first arrived, I snuck back into that apartment to get my piping tool. I was worried the apartment would be locked, but it wasn’t. And not only that—someone else was inside! I heard them moving around in the bedroom, and then I heard the mirror break. I grabbed my tool and ran out of there.”

  “And how did you get back to the twelfth floor?” Benny asked.

  “I didn’t want to wait for the elevator and risk being seen, so I took the stairs,” Hayes said.

  “We must have just missed you,” Benny said. “Because we took the stairs up to see what made the noise.”

  “Hayes, did you get a look at the person who was in the apartment?” Gwen asked.

  “No,” Hayes said. “But there was one thing: I heard a kind of clicking sound on the hardwood floor. Could that be a clue?”

  The Aldens looked at one another. They had heard clicking on the hardwood floor that night too. “I think I know who we should talk to next,” said Jessie.

  A Blue Clue

  When the Aldens knocked, it took a while for Mrs. Mason to answer the door. They heard the clicking of her cane as she approached.

  “What is it?” she said, opening the door. Her reading glasses were pushed up on her hair, and she had a newspaper under her arm. “I guess there really is no such thing as peace and quiet around here.”

  “Mrs. Mason,” Henry said, “we were wondering if you could help us figure out what might have happened the other night with the broken mirror.”

  Just then, Violet noticed something strange about Mrs. Mason’s shoes: last time she had seen them, they were white, but now they had streaks of blue on the sides. Violet elbowed Benny and pointed at them.

  Benny’s eyes went wide. “You have blue paint on your shoes!”

  Mrs. Mason stared at the children for a moment. Her face started to turn red, as if she was getting ready to yell. But suddenly her anger deflated like a balloon, and her shoulders fell. She tossed the newspaper on the table behind her and opened her apartment door wide. “Please. Come in,” Mrs. Mason said.

  The Aldens gave each other bewildered looks, but they followed Mrs. Mason inside and sat on the living room couch. Gwen sat in a nearby chair, and Mrs. Mason took a seat across from them.

  “I suppose there’s no reason to keep on pretending,” Mrs. Mason said. “I broke the mirror and spilled the paint.”

  “You did?” Henry asked.

  Mrs. Mason nodded. “And after I saw you in the lobby, I stopped the elevator to make it seem like it was broken.”

  “But how did you get into the control room?” Violet asked.

  Mrs. Mason reached into the pocket of her pants and pulled out something that jangled. “I have a set of keys. Sam, the man who owned the Bixby before Gwen, gave them to me. He and I were close friends.”

  The children turned to Gwen, who was sitting very still with her hands in her lap and a shocked look on her face. In a timid voice, she said, “But why, Mrs. Mason? Why would you do these things?”

  “I heard Felix talking about his superstitions,” Mrs. Mason said, “and I noticed that some people in the building believed his idea that there was a curse on the thirteenth floor. They were afraid. I guess I saw the chance to stoke their fears. I didn’t want a new tenant to move into the apartment above me. Like I always say, I just want some peace and quiet.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell me your feelings about the upstairs apartment?” Gwen said. “Maybe we could have worked something out.”

  “You’re right,” Mrs. Mason said. “I should have. I’m sorry for what I did—sorry for scaring anyone and sorry for the damage I’ve
caused. I’d like to try to make it up to you.”

  “Well,” Gwen said, “for starters, we could use some help fixing the access box in the elevator control room. It’s still broken.”

  “I will pay for the repair,” Mrs. Mason said, “and for the floor to be fixed. I just wish so much wasn’t changing around here. The Bixby is a classic. Everything about this old place is perfect.”

  For the first time since the mystery was solved, Gwen smiled. “I love the Bixby too. You know I do. But this building is not perfect. No building is. If we want to make sure it’s still standing for another generation to enjoy, we have to make updates. I do agree with you that we should be careful about what we change. We don’t want to lose any of the things that make the Bixby so special.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Mrs. Mason said. Just then, a dark shape darted out from the hallway and leaped into Mrs. Mason’s lap.

  Violet’s hand went to her mouth. “You have a black cat!”

  “Well, now all my secrets are coming out,” Mrs. Mason said, smiling.

  Gwen looked at the cat in shock. “Mrs. Mason,” Gwen said, “this is supposed to be a pet-free building!”

  Mrs. Mason laughed. “I know. It’s funny—back when Sam owned the building, I never wanted to have a cat, but when you made a rule against it, the first thing I did was go out and get one. I really didn’t like the way you were changing so many things around here, but it wasn’t very nice of me to lie.”

  “If I let you keep the cat,” Gwen said, “I’m going to have to let other people have pets too.”

  “That wouldn’t be so bad, would it?” Mrs. Mason asked. “I like seeing life in the hallways here. It takes me back to old times, when the Bixby was a happier place.”

  Gwen thought for a moment and nodded. “You’re right, Mrs. Mason. Not all the changes I’ve made have been good ones. And as far as the building goes, maybe you could help me make a plan? We could take a walk around the halls and list the special pieces—artwork, lights, woodwork—that we want to save. And we’ll make sure the workers understand they can’t just rip things out. They have to work around the special pieces that give this building such great character.”