“We’ll work on it later,” said Regina. “First we need to tell some good ghost stories. Where’s the best place for that?”
“We could stay here,” Stevie suggested, comforted by the idea that as long as they were in the basement, they were only a few short steps from escape.
“Too dirty,” said Peter.
“Too ugly,” said Ann.
“Okay, where?” Regina asked again.
“I like the parlor floor,” Peter said. “I like the tall ceilings and the big marble fireplace. Maybe we could even light a fire in it.”
“I’m sure it’s been closed off for years,” Regina said.
“Well, then maybe we could put some candles in it and pretend we’ve got a fire. You brought candles, didn’t you?”
“Of course I did,” Regina said. “And Stevie packed some marshmallows that we can cook over them.”
“Cool!” said Gordon. “Just like camp!”
“All we need are graham crackers and chocolate bars,” Peter said.
“I brought raisins,” said Ann.
“Where’s Liza?” Peter asked.
“Beats me,” said Regina.
“She was kind of freaked this afternoon,” Ann told the group. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she doesn’t come tonight. She said something about having to go somewhere with her mother, but I don’t know if that’s true.”
“That’s okay,” said Regina. “It’s no fun if someone’s really scared. She’ll be back with us another time.”
Two thoughts entered Stevie’s head. The first was that it was nice of Regina to respect the fact that Liza was nervous, and that she didn’t seem to think less of her for it. The second was that she wished she’d told Regina how freaked she was so that she could have stayed home! Well, it was too late for that now.
“Do you know really scary stories?” Gordon asked Stevie.
“The scariest,” Regina answered for her. “Even her mother says so.”
“Let’s go, then,” Peter said, heading for the stairs.
The house looked very different at night. There was no light at all coming through the cracks in the boards over the windows. As the flashlight beams crisscrossed on the stairs and in the hallway, Stevie found herself staring at the dancing shadows they cast on the walls and floors. It was pure inspiration for a ghost story expert like Stevie Lake. She was getting ready to scare the daylights out of all of them. And they’d love every minute of it. Things were looking up. A little.
It took a few minutes to set up their story circle. They pulled boxes back around the fireplace, set some candles in it, then set even more in a semicircle around the hearth. Stevie took the seat of honor, facing the fireplace.
A great deal of food was produced. Regina set out some of their goodies, including the marshmallows, but she kept the cheese crackers and chocolate milk until later.
Ann passed around her big bag of raisins, which everybody enjoyed. Gordon offered them all a drink of his blue fruit punch. They all said no thank you to that, favoring instead Peter’s apple juice.
“Ah, thirteen candles!” Stevie began. “A perfect number for a night like tonight, for it was exactly the number of candles that Lady Griselda lit on her husband’s bier the night her head fell off.”
She paused for dramatic effect. In the moment of silence, she heard two truck doors slam right in front of the house.
“Did you bring the key?” a too-familiar voice demanded from the street, just on the other side of the boarded-up windows. It was the same man who had been there in the afternoon: Frank.
“What kind of idiot do you think I am?” said the other man.
“You don’t want me to answer that, Maurice,” Frank said.
He clearly hadn’t said it to be funny. These guys were mean and they weren’t going to be pleased to find the kids back again.
“Hide!” Regina said.
Good idea, but where? thought Stevie. As fast as they could, the group blew out all the candles. They couldn’t go up higher in the house because the staircase to the next floor didn’t have any stairs on it. It would be treacherous in broad daylight and deadly in the dark.
The group clustered behind a stack of wooden planks and did everything they could to stop breathing, or at least to stop sounding as if they were breathing. Stevie wondered if the pounding in her chest could be heard downstairs. She suspected that it could.
Next to her, Stevie could feel that Gordon’s knees were shaking and he was shivering. Once again she saw Peter take the little boy’s shoulders and hold them for comfort. She was just beginning to wonder where her own comfort was going to come from when she felt Regina grab her around the waist. It didn’t exactly make her feel better, but it let her know that Regina did, in fact, have some nerves after all. There was some comfort in that. She put her own arm around Ann’s shoulders.
“Come on! Bring that stuff down here!” Frank bellowed.
Maurice hauled something into the house and, mercifully, downstairs instead of up.
“Hey, the light’s on!” Maurice said.
The kids looked around at one another. Had they really left it on?
“I left it on,” Peter whispered. “So we could find our way out.”
Stevie could have sworn her knees were knocking. It turned out to be Gordon’s knee knocking against hers.
“Yeah, well, you must have left it on last time!” said Frank. “Remember who’s paying the electricity bill!”
“Sure, for this twenty-five-watt bulb. Big deal,” said Maurice.
He made two more trips down to the basement while Frank grumbled about how slow he was.
“Okay, that’s it,” said Maurice.
“Did you lock it up good?”
“I locked it up good,” Maurice answered. “And I turned off the light to save you some precious money, like you need any help in that department.”
“Let’s stop the chitchat and get out of here,” Frank said.
The door slammed. There was the now familiar sound of the key in the lock and then in the padlock. Footsteps down the stairs. Truck doors opening. Truck doors slamming. The engine turning over. The sound of the truck fading into the distance.
“Ah-chooooooo!” It was Ann.
It was such a totally weird sound after their silent terror that all the kids started laughing, except Gordon. He cried. And then he laughed. Again, Peter hugged him. So did Stevie and Regina, and finally Ann, once she’d sneezed twice more.
“That’s it!” said Regina.
Stevie’s thought exactly. She was more than ready to go home.
“We’ve just got to find out what’s in that closet!” Regina said, continuing her thought. That wasn’t what Stevie’d had in mind at all.
“I mean, what could be so important that it has to be delivered practically in the middle of the night and then locked up with three padlocks?”
It was a good question, but it wasn’t one Stevie was absolutely sure she wanted to answer.
“Listen, could we maybe—” she began.
“I brought the stethoscope,” said Peter, pulling it out of his pocket. “I don’t know how to tell when a lock is unlocking, though.”
“They do it on TV all the time,” said Regina. “It can’t be all that hard.”
Stevie was inclined to remind Regina that TV was fiction and this was real life, but she had the feeling Regina wasn’t in a reality mode. She was in a curiosity mode, and the only way to get out of curiosity mode was to satisfy the curiosity.
Stevie switched on the flashlight and led the kids back down to the basement. At least there they would be close to the exit, to safety.
It didn’t work. Or at least they didn’t know how to make it work. Regina made Peter hold the stethoscope over the back of the padlock while she listened and turned the dial. Stevie held the flashlight. She didn’t want to risk turning on the overhead light again.
“Left first, right?” asked Regina.
“No, right then left,” sa
id Peter.
She twirled it to the right. She shook her head. She twirled it slowly. Nothing. She tried left.
“What’s that?” Ann asked.
“Nothing,” said Regina.
“No, I heard something,” said Ann.
“There’s no sound here,” said Regina. “I can’t hear a darn thing!”
“I thought I did, too,” said Peter.
“Be quiet!” said Regina, concentrating on the padlock.
Everybody was quiet. And then everybody heard another sound. It didn’t come from the padlock. It came from outside.
“DO YOU HEAR that?” Lisa asked.
“What?” Carole asked.
“That’s it,” said Lisa.
“I don’t hear anything.”
“Isn’t it wonderful?” asked Lisa, sighing.
Carole smiled. “Yes, it’s wonderful,” she said finally. There were no noises at all coming through the baby monitor except the gentle, even sounds of a child breathing.
Lisa was stretched out on Max and Deborah’s sofa. Carole sat nearby, draped sideways across an oversized, overstuffed chair. Carole’s attention was focused on the book she held, which was about the benefits of longeing horses. Lisa was reading The Black Stallion for the fourteenth time. The girls felt completely content and relaxed—now that Maxi was asleep.
Their offer to help look after Maxi hadn’t originally included evening baby-sitting, but both Deborah and Max had been working so hard that the girls thought they needed a night out together without Maxi in tow, so they’d told the tired parents to go have some fun. Besides, it gave them a chance to pick really good books from Max’s library.
Lisa set her book down. “You know, I think I feel a little sorry for Stevie.”
“Because she hasn’t had a chance to run after Maxi for three whole days?” Carole asked.
“No, because she’s probably being dragged around to a whole bunch of boring museums, and there are so few horses anywhere in the city.”
“You know that if there are horses, Stevie will find them,” said Carole.
“Well, sure, it’s sort of a Saddle Club thing, isn’t it? We’re horse magnets. But it’s not always easy and we don’t know whether the girl she’s staying with rides. I mean, Stevie must be bored out of her mind, don’t you think?”
“It seems to me that Stevie has a talent for making things happen. My sixth sense tells me she’s not bored at all.”
“You’re probably right,” Lisa conceded. “And she’s probably teaching that girl—what’s her name, Regina?—a thing or two about getting into trouble!”
“HELLO?” A VOICE whispered through the darkness.
Nobody said anything.
“You guys!” the voice said. “I’m sure I heard you. Are you there?”
It was Liza! It wasn’t police, robbers, muggers, murderers, or worse. It was Liza. Stevie let out a huge sigh of relief.
“Get in here!” Regina said sharply. “Don’t let anybody see you.”
“Nobody can see anything down here,” Liza said, climbing through the window and down the tower of boxes. “It’s completely dark. Did they turn off the electricity?”
“What are you doing here?” Stevie asked. The one thing that had made sense to her all evening was that Liza had had the presence of mind to stay home. She couldn’t imagine what had made her decide to come.
“I told Ann I’d be here, but I had to go someplace with my mother. Didn’t she tell you?”
“Uh, sort of,” Regina said. That seemed to Stevie as good an answer as any.
“So, ghost stories? Are we going to tell them or what?” Liza asked.
Regina shrugged. She handed the stethoscope back to Peter. “This doesn’t work at all,” she said. “We’re never going to find out what’s in here, so we might as well go back upstairs.”
The whole crew trooped back up the basement stairs and then up again to the parlor floor. Peter and Ann relit the candles and the group settled themselves back on the boxes they’d put around the fireplace.
“Now, where were we?” Regina asked. “I remember.
It was something about thirteen candles.…” She looked at Stevie expectantly.
Stevie remembered, too. She knew the story perfectly well. She’d told it many times. It was a campfire favorite of The Saddle Club. Even her boyfriend, Phil, and his friend A.J. shivered when she told it. It was a very scary story. Somehow, though, tonight it didn’t seem very scary. It wasn’t anywhere near as frightening as having Frank and Maurice arrive in the middle of their game. It wasn’t even as scary as having Liza show up at the basement window when they’d thought they were alone. Stevie was beginning to consider the possibility of giving up telling ghost stories altogether. She thought she’d had enough of a scare for one night.
“Come on, Stevie, tell it!” Regina urged her.
“I think I’ve forgotten what I was going to say. Why doesn’t someone else tell a story?” she suggested.
Gordon tried. He told one about a monster that hid in the woods. Stevie had heard lots of variations of it. The only way it worked was if the storyteller set up the fact that when the monster is on the loose, a bell rings or a siren sounds. Gordon didn’t realize that, and it wasn’t scary at all the way he told it. Stevie thought that maybe his heart wasn’t in it. Maybe, like Stevie, he wasn’t interested in being scared anymore. Maybe, being younger than the rest of them, he was already too scared to think very clearly—although Stevie thought maybe they were all feeling that way, no matter how old they were.
Peter looked at his watch. “Isn’t it time to go home?” he asked. Those were the words Stevie had been waiting to hear ever since they’d gotten there!
“Yeah,” said Gordon. “Come on.”
He stood up. He was tired, and when people get tired, they sometimes get clumsy, especially when they are little kids, which is exactly what Gordon was. He kicked the candle in front of him. He obviously didn’t mean to do it. Nobody ever thought it was intentional and nobody ever thought Gordon had any idea what would happen as a consequence.
The floor was covered with dust and sawdust and construction debris. The candle flame caught onto a curl of dry wood that had settled next to a small paper bag that was next to a small pile of sawdust. Only it all happened in a second. Maybe less than that.
Suddenly a whole section of the floor was on fire.
“Step on it!” Stevie called out. She and her friends began stomping on the flames as fast and as hard as they could, chasing them wherever they caught.
The flames raced like water running downhill, in three directions at once, toward the windows, the fireplace, and then the stairs to the ground floor—the kids’ only means of escape. The fire fueled itself on litter scattered all over the floor that the kids had barely noticed until it exploded into flames.
“We’ve got to get this out!” yelled Stevie.
“There it goes over there!” said Peter, racing after the line of fire that was stretching toward the stack of boxes. They had no idea what was in those boxes. A construction site could contain sand and gravel that couldn’t burn or paint thinner that could explode.
Regina pulled off her jacket and began using it to swat at the flames. Ann did the same. It helped until the flames headed for the back room, where there were stacks of lumber, apparently to be used for the new stairs up to the third floor from the parlor. Everybody knew that wood burns well. Especially wood that’s just been varnished!
STEVIE SLAPPED AT the last lick of flame while Peter stepped on the final embers.
“And we thought the worst thing that could happen was if those guys came back!” Stevie joked.
The rest of the group laughed but not very hard. There was nothing funny about fire, and they’d just had a very close call.
“I never saw anything catch fire so fast!” said Liza.
“It was like an explosion,” Peter said.
“It’s because the place is so dirty,” Regina told them. �
��The only way it gets worse is if there’s dust in the air that catches on fire.”
“That happens in stables sometimes,” said Stevie. “The air can be filled with dust from the hay, straw, and feed grains, so the old wood that most stables are made of isn’t the only danger: The air itself becomes an explosive.”
“Fortunately this place wasn’t that messy,” said Ann.
“No, but I’ve just decided that when I get back to Virginia, I’m going to reconsider cleaning up my room!” said Stevie.
“And speaking of getting home …,”said Peter, taking Gordon’s hand.
“Yes, go,” said Regina. “The fire seems to be completely out, but”—she glanced at her watch—“Stevie and I have another fifteen minutes until our curfew. I think someone should stick around to be absolutely sure. Fire can kind of hide for a while.”
“I think that’s a good idea, and we’ll go on one condition,” said Peter.
“Yes?” Stevie asked, wondering why anybody would put any conditions on that at all.
“If it breaks out again, you guys run out of here as fast as you can and call the fire department. There’s no way two of you alone could put out another fire like the one we just saw.”
“Deal,” said Stevie before Regina could have another bright idea.
A few seconds later Stevie and Regina were alone in the house. The two of them examined the remains of the fire in the parlor. Oddly, because what had burned were scraps and dust, Stevie couldn’t find any damage to the building. There were just loads of cinders and charred trash scattered across the floor.
“Boy, were we lucky,” said Regina.
Stevie didn’t think lucky was the right word. Stupid came closer. But then again, she knew they had been lucky. The fire could have been much worse.
“I don’t see anything here that looks like it’s still dangerous,” said Regina. “Even when I touch the stuff, it feels cold by now. That means we can go, I guess.”
“I guess,” said Stevie. Those were the nicest words she’d heard in a long time! They picked up the remainders of everything the kids had brought with them. Stevie put six candles and lots of snack food, including the big bag of raisins, into Regina’s backpack. She took a last look. It was messy, but she was pretty certain the fire was out and they could go.
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