“I don’t know. I wish I did.” Then I explained everything. I told my friends where I’d found the box and when. I told them about what the wrapper around it had said, and how it had taken me awhile to work up the courage to open the box. Kristy seemed a little ticked off that I hadn’t told her about the box right away, but she forgot about that when she heard it play.
When I lifted the cover and the first notes sounded, my friends fell silent. The song was so bright and innocent. It seemed to weave a spell around us.
I lifted the lid and played the song over and over, and still nobody said a word. We were focused on the beautiful box and its tinkling tune.
Then, suddenly, I noticed something very odd. When I opened the box and looked inside, I could see that the inner compartment was much smaller than the outside of the box.
The inside was lined in dark green velvet. I took a closer look and noticed a tiny black tab, almost hidden by the deep nap of the fabric. I pinched it between my thumb and forefinger and pulled. To my surprise, the entire compartment lifted away to show another space, lined in dark green satin, beneath the first one.
And this second, very secret compartment was not empty.
“Oh, my lord,” I gasped, staring into the box.
“What is it?” asked Kristy.
“Is there something inside?” Claudia leaned over my shoulder. “Oh, cool. An old picture.”
I was speechless, but I was sure my heart was pounding loudly enough to be heard on the next block. What was just an old picture to Claud was something much, much more to me.
The cracked and faded black-and-white photograph that lay face up on the smooth green satin was of a young man who looked about eighteen. Someone was in the picture next to him, but had been cut out, except for a hand and a wrist. On the wrist was an ID bracelet. I was pretty sure the person who had been cut out was a woman.
But it wasn’t the bracelet or the woman’s hand that made me feel as if I couldn’t breathe. No, it was something else. It was the young man.
You may have trouble believing this.
I know I do.
But it’s absolutely true.
The man in the picture was the same young man I’d been dreaming about. My sailor boy.
He wasn’t wearing his white sailor suit, but there was no mistaking him for anybody else. I knew that face. His eyes weren’t nearly as sad in this picture — was it because of the girl beside him? — but it was definitely him. Somehow the boy I’d been dreaming about was connected with the music box I’d found. How could that be? Was I going to be haunted by this sailor boy because I’d dared to ignore the warning and open the box?
“Mary Anne, are you okay?” Kristy asked. “You’re white as a sheet. What’s the matter?”
Her voice seemed to be coming from a long way off.
“Mary Anne?” she repeated. “Yo, Earth to Mary Anne!”
I shook my head, trying to clear it. “What? I mean, nothing’s wrong. I’m fine.” In a split second, I’d decided not to tell my friends why the person in that picture looked familiar to me. Why? Two reasons. One, they’d think I was out of my mind. Two, I needed some time to think about what it meant.
Kristy was still giving me a curious look. So were the rest of my friends. But I ignored them. “Look, there’s a letter, too,” I said, trying to distract them. I held up the small envelope that was nestled beneath the picture. It was slightly yellowed with age, and there was no name or address on the front.
“Ooh! Open it,” urged Mal. “What does it say?”
I hesitated. Was it ever really right to open and read someone else’s mail without permission? “I don’t know,” I said.
“Mary Anne,” said Kristy impatiently. “If you won’t open it, hand it over.”
“But —” I began.
Stacey took the letter out of my hand, and I let her. To be honest, I was just as curious as my friends were. Still, I felt better letting someone else do the actual opening.
The envelope wasn’t sealed. Stacey lifted the flap and pulled out a sheet of unlined paper. “It’s not really a letter,” said Stacey. “It’s more like a note.” She read it quickly to herself. Then she sighed. “Wow, that’s so romantic.”
“What?” asked Claudia. “Let me see!”
“Read it out loud,” said Abby. “We all want to hear.”
“I think it went with the music box,” said Stacey. “Somebody — the guy in the picture maybe? — gave the music box to somebody else, and this note was probably inside.” She sighed again.
“Stacey,” Kristy said with a warning tone in her voice.
I think Stacey was enjoying the drama of the situation, and I couldn’t blame her. But she was driving the rest of us wild.
“Okay, okay.” Stacey cleared her throat and read out loud. “It says, ‘Dearest L. S., They’re playing our song. Think of me whenever you look up at the night sky. I’ll be on the other side of the world, thinking of you. And, before long, I’ll be back and we can look at the stars together, forever.’ ” Stacey paused. “It’s signed H. I. W.”
We were silent for a second. Then I gave a huge sniff. I couldn’t help it. The note was so romantic. And I couldn’t help thinking that it must be from my sailor boy to a girl he loved. Did he ever come back? (I assumed he’d given her the music box before he left to join the navy.) Did they live happily ever after? I would never know.
Stacey patted my hand. “It’s okay, Mary Anne,” she said with a gentle smile. Like all my friends, she knows how emotional I am and how easily I cry. But she couldn’t have known how connected I felt to that boy in the picture.
Mal, meanwhile, had whipped out the mystery notebook again. “L. S., right?” she asked Stacey. “And H. I. W.?” She jotted down the initials on a fresh page. “Now, how are we going to figure out what those initials stand for?”
“Laura Stern,” said Kristy, “and Henry Isaiah Williams.”
“Whoa!” said Abby. “That was quick. How did you know?”
Kristy shrugged. “I don’t know. I made those names up. There must be plenty of people with those initials. But how do we know the box is even connected to our mystery?”
We were silent for a moment. “Also,” said Mal, “how do we know the letters are initials? They might stand for something else, you know?”
“Maybe this box is what everyone is looking for,” said Stacey. “Maybe it’s really valuable or something.”
As you can tell, it doesn’t take long for the BSC members to switch into detective mode. Present us with a mystery and we plunge right in. Part of me, though, didn’t want this mystery to be BSC property. I felt possessive about my sailor boy, and I wanted very much to be the one to find out who he was. So I have to admit I was glad when Claudia’s digital clock flipped over to six and our meeting officially ended. Everyone had to head home for dinner, and there’d be no more talk that night about L. S. and H. I. W. and who they might be.
“Two mysteries!” Kristy said as we were leaving the Kishis’ house. “We’ll have to work twice as hard to solve them both.” She was practically rubbing her hands in anticipation.
I thought of the music box nestled carefully inside my backpack. If I had my way, I’d be the one to solve its mystery.
Back at home, the first thing I did was take the music box upstairs and place it carefully on my dresser. I opened it and listened to the song one more time while I looked at the picture and the letter. Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are. Finding the secret compartment seemed like a big step along my way to unraveling the mystery. But what was the next step? Figuring that out would take some thought.
I closed the box and headed downstairs. I was suddenly very hungry, and I was hoping Sharon had made something good for dinner. But when I walked into the kitchen, I found out that dinner was the farthest thing from her mind. She was sitting at the kitchen table, looking dazed. The table was overflowing with piles of letters and photos and papers.
“
Wow,” I said. “What’s all this?”
“Granny and Pop-Pop’s papers,” said Sharon wearily. “I’ve been sorting them.”
“I didn’t realize there’d be so much stuff,” I said. “I thought it was just letters.”
“This isn’t even all of it,” Sharon answered, gesturing to the floor next to the table, where three cardboard boxes waited to be opened. “It’s a lot more than letters. There’s two lifetimes worth of memories here,” she said with a little smile. “I guess I can’t expect to organize it in one afternoon.”
I pulled up a chair and sat down. “Have you found anything interesting?” I asked.
“Oh, tons,” said Sharon. “I mean, there’s a lot of boring junk, like bank statements and electric bills. But I’ve also found things like Granny’s third-grade class picture, and Pop-Pop’s prize-winning essay on what it means to be an American. He wrote that when he was eleven.” Sharon sounded less tired now, and her eyes were sparkling as she talked.
“Cool,” I said. “I bet he’ll be glad to see that again. It’s probably been buried in that drawer for years.”
“I think they’re both happy I’ve taken this project on,” said Sharon. “They seemed very enthusiastic when I asked for permission to sort their papers. I hope they’ll like the scrapbook. I’m just going to choose a few special things for that.” She picked up a letter from the top of the closest pile. “This, for example. It’s a letter Pop-Pop wrote to Granny while he was in basic training in the army.” She put that down and picked up a picture. “And this has to go in, too. Can you believe how pretty Granny was as a little girl?”
“I love those ringlets,” I said. “This is great. But it looks like a huge job. Do you really think you can finish by the time their cruise is over?”
Sharon sighed. “I hope so. Are you still willing to help?”
“Definitely. Just tell me what you want me to do.”
“I thought you might be interested in these,” she said, picking up a thick stack of envelopes tied with a piece of string. “They’re letters Granny wrote to her cousin June, back when they were both just about your age.”
“Neat,” I said. “I’d love to read them. But if Granny wrote them, how did they end up back at her house?”
“June died a few years ago,” said Sharon. “I guess her family sent these along when they were cleaning out her house.”
I looked at the stack of letters and felt a shiver of excitement. It would be like a living history lesson to read through them. I’d learn what it was like to be a young girl growing up in Stoneybrook over fifty years ago!
Sharon and I talked for a while longer, until we realized we’d better clear off the table and fix something for dinner. By the time my dad came home, we’d pulled together a quick meal. After supper, Dawn called. She and I must have talked for nearly an hour, since I had to fill her in on everything that was happening: the flood, the mystery at Granny and Pop-Pop’s, and, most especially, the news about the music box. I even came close to telling her about the dreams I’d been having and why the boy in the picture looked so familiar to me, but I stopped short. I just wasn’t ready to share that with anyone. Dawn was fascinated by the mysteries and disappointed to have left Stoneybrook before they came to light.
By the time we finished talking, it was late. I was suddenly very, very tired. It had been a long day. I took one of Granny’s letters to bed with me, but I was barely able to glance at it before my eyes fell shut.
Still, what I read gave me a little chill. In handwriting that was somehow familiar, even though it didn’t look like Granny’s current style, the young Granny was promising to fill June in on “all the goings-on next door.” As I drifted off to sleep, I couldn’t help wondering if “next door” could possibly refer to the house that now belongs to Granny and Pop-Pop. If so, maybe the letters sitting so neatly in a stack on my desk would hold some clue to one — or both! — of the mysteries I was hoping to solve.
Stacey and Claudia arrived at the Barrett-DeWitt house on Friday morning prepared for two things: construction and detection. They knew all about the playhouse the kids were building. Stacey and Claud were excited about helping out. They’d each brought a hammer so they could “bang nails,” as Claud put it. Claudia had also brought a monkey wrench, two screwdrivers, and her eyelash curler. The wrench and screwdrivers had come from her dad’s toolbox; the eyelash curler was Claudia’s. “You never know what tools you might need,” she explained.
Stacey and Claudia had dressed for the occasion, as only the two of them can. Stacey was wearing a pair of pink denim overall shorts with a white baby T underneath. Purple Doc Martens and a white baseball cap — with her ponytail pulled through the back — completed the look.
Claudia had on her favorite painter’s pants. They used to be white, but she’s worn them during so many art projects that they are now splattered with paint in every color of the rainbow. To complement the pants, Claudia wore a tie-dyed shirt she made herself that features a huge yellow peace sign surrounded by starbursts of orange, red, and purple. She also had on her red high-top sneakers, and she had braided her hair in two pigtails, tied with purple ribbons, to keep it tidy and out of the way.
As far as preparations for spying went, they were simple. Stacey had brought along the mystery notebook, and she and Claudia had talked over their plans. They’d decided, after hearing what Kristy and I had said at Wednesday’s BSC meeting, that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to keep a close eye on Eddie and Jim and their crews. After all, they’d reasoned, maybe Eddie and Jim acted suspiciously all the time. Maybe they were just nosy guys who liked to poke around in their clients’ houses. Maybe their odd behavior at Granny and Pop-Pop’s house didn’t mean anything at all.
In any case, Claudia and Stacey agreed that it was important to watch both men and their crews carefully.
Of course, that didn’t turn out to be so easy. Why? Because they also had the Barretts and the DeWitts to watch.
Fortunately, some of the younger kids had become bored with measuring and hammering. Lindsay had organized them into a “decorating committee,” and they were very busy drawing pictures and making cardboard frames for them so that the playhouse would have “art.” They were also making curtains as well as placemats, tablecloths, and anything else they could think of in the way of home furnishings.
Mrs. DeWitt was home and willing to keep an eye on the younger kids. They were in the playroom, where she could check up on them every so often. That left Claudia and Stacey free to supervise the older kids as they worked on the playhouse.
“You go out and check on the playhouse,” Stacey whispered to Claudia, soon after they’d arrived. “I’ll pretend I have to use the bathroom first. That way I can see what Eddie and Jim and everyone are up to.”
While Claudia went out to the shed in the backyard, where the playhouse was being assembled, Stacey headed upstairs. She tiptoed past the bathroom and peered through the doorway that led into the new addition. There was no sign of Jim or Eddie or any of their helpers. Stacey raised an eyebrow. Where were they all? Out snooping?
Then she heard the murmur of voices coming from one of the rooms near the back of the addition. As silently as possible, she moved down the hall toward the sound. The voices grew louder. Stacey peeked around the corner carefully.
But not carefully enough.
“Hey, good morning,” said Eddie cheerfully. He and Jake and Lori, along with Jim and Dooley, were sitting in a circle on the floor in the middle of a nearly finished room. An open box of doughnuts sat in the middle of the circle, and Eddie and the other workers were sipping from large containers of coffee. “You must be looking for that wild bunch of maniacs known as the children of the house.” He grinned at her and held up a chocolate-covered doughnut. “You’re just in time for coffee break. Care for a cruller?”
Stacey blushed. How could she admit, even to herself, that she’d been planning to spy on this perfectly nice man? “Thanks, but I just had breakfas
t,” she said. “I’m Stacey, and you’re right, I’m here to baby-sit. Do you know where the kids are?” she asked, even though she knew the kids were out in the shed.
“They’re busy building. Those kids sure have a knack for construction,” he added, smiling and shaking his head. “Didn’t take much to fire them up about building their own playhouse. They’re out there hammering away every day, rain or shine.” He stood up and brushed off his pants. Then he led Stacey to a window in the back of the room. “They’re out in that shed,” he said, pointing.
“Oh, great. Thanks.” Stacey headed out of the room, feeling mortified. Eddie was so nice. How could he be up to anything wrong?
“That’s just it,” Claudia whispered when Stacey had joined her in the shed and filled her in on what Eddie and the other workers were doing. “Of course he would act like a nice guy. I’ll go check them out a little later. Meanwhile,” she added, raising her voice slightly, “look at what these kids have done!”
Stacey stepped back to take it all in. The playhouse was a small building that looked very much like a miniature version of the Barrett-DeWitt house. It had four windows, including two tiny ones on either side of the door. There was a peaked roof, covered in gray shingles like the ones on the real house. Stacey thought it looked great, even though some of the shingles were crooked, the door was so low that only Suzi could go through it without ducking, and the whole house seemed to lean a bit to the right. “Very impressive,” she said. “You guys have really worked hard. I love the little windows.”
“I did those!” cried Buddy. “See how I nailed them in really good?”
“Really well,” Stacey said, correcting him absently as she checked out Buddy’s work. Sure enough, he’d nailed the windows in well. So well that they’d probably never budge, even in a hurricane. Even in a tornado, thought Stacey, smiling to herself as she looked at the dozens of nails clustered around each window frame. “Great job,” she told Buddy. “And who put the roof on?”
“We did,” said Buddy. “Lindsay held the shingles and I hammered. Eddie showed us how.”
Mary Anne and the Music Page 5