by Suzanne Weyn
It was the last thing Emma saw before she fainted.
“Your parents will be coming to get you in a little while,” Mrs. Clatter said to Emma. They were sitting in the main office of the Five Arrows facility, which really was a lovely place. Birds chirped outside the open windows, the sun shone down on a small pond on the grounds, surrounded by pine-needle paths and tall trees. Emma felt more peaceful than she could ever remember. “Is there anything else you’d like to talk about before you leave?”
Emma had been at Five Arrows for a week, and it really hadn’t been so bad. She’d had a terrible cold from being passed out in the rain for hours before her parents had found her outside the Haunted Museum, slumped against the side door. They’d taken her to Five Arrows right away.
After two days, her hearing had returned. After that, she’d talked to counselors about why it meant so much to her to be the best dancer. They thought she’d imagined everything that had happened with the music box, even though Emma knew it had been real. No matter what she said, they kept insisting it had been some kind of delusion.
“Emma, do you understand what the counselors have been telling you?” Mrs. Clatter asked. “You seem to have returned to yourself, and we’re happy you feel well enough to return home, but is there anything else you’d like to say or ask me?”
Emma took a deep breath to summon up her nerve. “Mrs. Clatter, why were you so mean to us when we were in the third grade?” she dared to ask. She just had to know. “I hated coming to your class so much it made me sick. I had nightmares that you were coming to get me. It was so bad that a doctor gave me pills to help me calm down. And I don’t understand it.” She felt that she could talk to Mrs. Clatter now. In the time she’d been at Five Arrows, she saw that the woman who had once been her worst nightmare had really changed.
“I’m sorry, Emma,” Mrs. Clatter said. “Very sorry. That was an extremely difficult time for me. You see, I was never cut out to be a teacher. I’d wanted to change things for so long — and I took something from the Haunted Museum that I thought could help. It … didn’t.”
Emma stood. “Then you do believe me!”
“I do,” Mrs. Clatter whispered.
Emma hugged Mrs. Clatter. It was great to know that someone believed her. Mrs. Clatter knew what objects from the Haunted Museum could do, too.
“Good luck, Emma,” Mrs. Clatter said when Mr. and Mrs. Bryant arrived to pick her up. “Keep dancing, but only so long as you’re enjoying it.”
“I will,” Emma said. “I’m in the troupe in Swan Lake at my dance school. It’s not the lead, but I know it’ll be fun.” Madame Andrews had sent her an e-mail saying she was holding the spot open for Emma whenever she was ready to return to class.
“Let me know when the performance is. I’d like to come see it,” Mrs. Clatter said.
As Emma walked out of Five Arrows with her parents, her cell phone buzzed and she saw that it was Keera. “Hi!”
“You won’t believe where I am,” Keera said over the phone. “Lauren is having her birthday party at the Haunted Museum. I’m calling you from the Haunted Music Boxes exhibit.”
Emma went to speak but found that her mouth was too dry. She didn’t want to ever think about that music box again.
“Remember that music box you were so scared of? It’s sitting right where it was. I’m sure it’s the same one,” Keera went on.
There was no way Emma could have heard the tune under Keera’s voice — but there it was, so faint that she wondered if she was imagining it.
Da-da-da-da DUM Dee-dum dee-dum Da-da-da-da DUM Dee-dum dee-dum
Licking her lips, Emma found her voice. “Listen to me, Keera,” she said. “Whatever you do — DON’T TOUCH IT!”
A SIX-BURNER STOVE!” Mom’s still wigging out on kitchen appliances. “A side-by-side freezer/fridge, and enough granite-slab counter space to do surgery.”
Wow, you could get your appendix out while you wait for a baked potato. Personally, I don’t care about kitchens. I’m moving right into the upstairs bathroom, since my own room is all red flocked wallpaper and a spindly, narrow bed with sagging springs that squeal every time you move an inch. Was this Emily Smythe’s bedroom?
It must have been Emily’s family who had the good sense to update the prehistoric bathrooms and kitchen in this creepy old house. Gram would have said they’re to die for. Every muscle in my whole body is achy from pushing furniture around and hauling boxes up the stairs, not to mention hefting that kidney pie, so I lock myself and Chester in the bathroom and fill up the huge triangular tub with hot water and about a quart of bubble bath. It nearly overflows when I sink into the water up to my shoulders and just let my hands and feet float like they’re weightless ghosts riding the bubbles and gentle waves. I can just feel stings of anger seeping out of me into the warm water.
Chester’s chomping to jump into the tub with me, but then it would overflow, and chocolate-brown dog hair would clog the fancy new plumbing, so I tell him, “Hang on, pup. I’ll take you out for a run later, okay?”
He whips his tail around, then coils onto the bath mat and snoozes patiently.
Not Brian. He’s banging on the bathroom door. “I gotta go. It’s an emergency!”
What a colossal pest. “There’s a bathroom downstairs, Brian. It’s the little room with the weird wallpaper that looks like old Sunday funnies. Oh, and it has a toilet. You can’t miss it.” Finally I hear his footsteps stomping down the creaky stairs, but in two minutes he’s back pounding on the door.
“Come on, Shelby. Mom says to take boxes up to the attic.”
“Go ahead,” I say lazily.
“Hunh-uh, not alone!”
“Okaaaay. Give me ten minutes, and we’ll do the attic thing.” Chester raises one ear in agreement that we’ll just keep the pest waiting a lot longer.
I’ve never lived in a house with an attic, and this one is the kind you have to move a rickety ladder up to, then slide the ceiling trapdoor aside and hoist yourself up onto the attic floor. Now I wish I hadn’t. It’s dark and smells like soured milk up here. I try to scramble to my feet till my head hits the ceiling. You’d have to be about the size of a shrunken Pygmy to stand up. That pink insulation fluff stuff sticks out between the wall slats. There’s a small round window like the porthole on a ship, which gives a circle of light to the big, dark space that spans the whole length of the second floor of the house. Somehow that little bit of sunshine makes everything seem spookier, lighting up dust motes that swirl, though there’s not a breath of a breeze. I think the air up here’s stood still for about a hundred years.
Brian hands a bunch of flattened cartons up to me, and I slide them across the bare plank floor. The attic seems to be totally empty, but then one of the cartons sails across the floor and thuds into something with a peaked roof jutting up in the shadow. A dollhouse.
“Come up here, Brian.” He scuttles up behind me, and we crawl over and push the little house across the floor toward the porthole, for a better look.
I ask, “Does this look familiar to you?”
“Kind of.”
“Look here. Two windows with pale green lace curtains on each side of the front door. Four steps up, then a flat landing, then six more steps to the blue door. It’s just like our house, even down to the goat-shaped knocker on the blue door.”
“Same furniture inside, too. Cool.”
Now I see the three green velvet couches circling the beveled glass-top table in the front parlor. Somebody built this dollhouse as an exact copy of the big house. Probably Mr. Thornewood built it for Sadie, the Tasmanian she-devil Mariah told me about.
The little house looks so lonely and abandoned. I wonder why Emily, or any of the other tenants, didn’t take it with them when they moved.
Brian asks, “Where are the people?”
Good question. There’s a mess on the floor, and the sink’s full of those teeny dishes and pots and pans. It looks like everybody took off in a hurry. My eyes roam ar
ound the two stories of the house. “At least they didn’t forget to take the baby, see? The crib’s empty.”
Brian chuckles. “Old-time toilet with the thing you pull instead of flush!”
“Not like our bathrooms, thank goodness. This dollhouse was probably built way back in the last century, and no one bothered to remodel it.”
“Bathtub has claws, see?” Brian reaches in and pulls out the old-fashioned oval tub, then shoves it back in the dollhouse with a gasp.
“What? WHAT?” I yell.
He points to the bathtub. A tiny doll is floating facedown in a small puddle of water. Brian whispers, “They didn’t take the baby.”
“Let’s get out of here.” We both slide across the floor and scamper down the ladder super quick, then glide down the smooth banister to the ground floor, landing on a Persian rug that covers the hardwood. Chester’s waiting for us. “Outside, both of you,” I command. “It was stifling up there; we need fresh air.” Brian tears out the front door, Chester right behind him, and I walk slowly, wondering if Sadie loved her dollhouse. I’m also wondering what kind of a kid would drown a baby in the bathtub. Crazy Emily?
Outside, I look up at dark thunder clouds rolling in. “We won’t have much time out here before the rain starts. So enjoy it while it lasts.”
The yard seems to be acres wide, but not much deeper than the house, and most of it is overgrown with weeds and tall grass. The only thing that saves it from being flat, ugly land are the twin mountains, the Spanish Peaks, dotting the horizon off in the distance. I’ll bet they look really pretty dusted with snow. Something to look forward to, since we seem to be trapped here forever.
We pass a small fishing hole on the north side where no fish could survive in the mustard-yellow algae, and I think about fishing with Dad at Horsetooth Reservoir. Don’t go there, I remind myself. You’re here, now … where lots of weeping willow branches sag from the trees and brush the ground. The air is usually hot and still in late August, but those storm clouds are rolling in. There’s a grassy clearing between two trees where someone seems to have chopped off the low-hanging branches. It looks strange in the middle of all that growth of weeds and grass and weeping willows. Chester sniffs the ground and whimpers. Maybe there’s a juicy bone buried under there that he hasn’t got the heart to go for right now, which is shocking, because Chester’s a great digger. So Brian and I move in closer to see what’s stopped him. Chills ripple up and down my spine.
It’s a graveyard, a miniature cemetery with five tiny wooden markers close together in a horseshoe shape, and one larger one set way apart, as if someone didn’t want that body buried with the rest.
SUZANNE WEYN lives in the heart of horse country, in a valley in New York State. She’s the author of The Haunted Museum series, as well as the books Reincarnation and Distant Waves for older readers, and the Breyer Stablemates books Diamond and Snowflake for younger readers.
Copyright © 2014 by Suzanne Weyn. All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. SCHOLASTIC and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
First printing, February 2014
COVER ART BY MIKE HEATH | MAGNUS CREATIVE
e-ISBN 978-0-545-58846-1
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