“That’s right,” Hazel said. She took her cider and sipped it.
“And who’s this ghost?” Mrs. Buttersbee asked.
“Samuel,” he replied.
“Not Samuel Switzer?” she asked.
“Samuel Butler,” he corrected. He took the cup of cider, but he hadn’t cut himself a mouth hole, so he couldn’t actually drink it.
“Well, now, isn’t that a hoot,” she said. “All right, you two, come stand here and I’ll take your picture.”
They stood side by side while she struggled to get her camera out of its leather case. She had to keep adjusting the lens with her trembling hands. No wonder the other kids avoided this place. No amount of candy was worth all this.
Behind Mrs. Buttersbee was a cuckoo clock shaped like a Bavarian cottage. Just as Mrs. Buttersbee finally got her camera set, the hour changed and seven windows on the house opened. Out of each window emerged a gnome dressed in lederhosen and contorted into a dance pose. They spun on spindles for a minute, then stopped and counted off: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Then each gnome went back into the cottage with a soft slamming of the window.
Seven o’clock! Her parents would be expecting her home soon, and they still had the other side of the street to do.
“Oh, dear!” Mrs. Buttersbee said, lowering her camera. “That clock was my husband’s and it startles me every time.” She lifted the camera. “Let’s try this again.”
Hazel tried to strike her most Amelia Earhart–like pose. “Okay,” Mrs. Buttersbee said. “One, two, three.” It was another couple of seconds before her finger actually pressed the button. The flash went off and Hazel saw the light for minutes after as purple dots.
“We ought to go,” she said.
“So soon? It’s been a quiet night.”
“We’ve got to get back home. It’s getting late.”
Mrs. Buttersbee nodded. “Well, then, I suppose you two ought to take the bulk of this.” Her candy bowl was still nearly full, and she shoveled heap upon heap into each of their bags. Lemon drops, Turkish taffy, and Mary Janes. Hazel’s eyes grew wide at the thought of it all. There were some anise bears, too, but Hazel figured she could trade those with Samuel for some of his root beer barrels, because he probably didn’t know any better.
“Thank you!” she said, and Samuel echoed it.
Mrs. Buttersbee held the door open, and as they made their way down the walk, she called, “Good night, Caspar! Good night, Amelia!” Hazel couldn’t help but smile. Maybe the only person who got her was a lonely old lady, but at least somebody did.
Hazel glanced longingly at the jack-o’-lanterns on the other side of the street, but she didn’t want to push it with her parents. “Ready to go home?”
Samuel glanced down at his bag full of loot. Neither had ever seen so much candy. “I suppose we must,” he agreed.
To get back to Hazel’s house they wound around the graveyard.
“What’s that?” Samuel asked.
She followed his finger and saw in the center of the cemetery a light glimmering like a flame.
25
Spirits from Beyond
“I knew it!” Hazel said. “It’s a drop-off. We’ve got them now!” She started marching forward.
Samuel grabbed her by the arm. “Hazel, wait! They have candles.”
“So?” she asked, but she stopped walking.
“If it really was a drop-off, they’d use flashlights, or no lights at all.”
Hazel contemplated this. As much as it disappointed her to believe it, he was probably right. Then a new idea came to her, quick as crickets. “The Comrade is performing satanic rituals in our graveyard.”
“Now you think that Mr. Jones is a devil worshipper?”
“All Commies worship the devil,” Hazel replied.
“Try not to jump to conclusions.”
Hazel ignored him. She was like Trixie Belden: sure, she jumped to a lot of conclusions, but nine times out of ten she was right. “If he burns even a blade of grass my parents are going to flip their lids!” She squinted, trying to get a better view. She was ready to set off and to catch The Comrade in the act, but then she hesitated. If he was lighting candles and doing rituals in the graveyard, then that was illegal. But it wouldn’t prove that he was a spy. It would be like when Eliot Ness got Al Capone for tax evasion. “Let’s take this slow,” she said. “Let’s just go get a closer look.”
Hazel walked down the sidewalk toward a small side gate. She peered out into the graveyard. Normally her father patrolled Memory’s Garden on Halloween, but she couldn’t see the light from his flashlight. Oh, no! she thought. What if The Comrade has him and is torturing him for information? They had to move quickly. “Let’s go,” she said.
Samuel hung behind, his sheet waving in the breeze like a flag dangling from a flagpole. “You know, maybe we should get your parents. It could be some greasers drinking beers.”
Hazel stopped and looked back at him. “We won’t let him see us. Come on. Give me your flashlight.”
“What? No. It could be a weapon if I need to defend myself.” He tucked the flashlight under his sheet.
“Now who’s jumping to conclusions? Just turn it off so we can creep closer without him seeing us. There’s plenty of light from the moon.”
They both clicked off their flashlights and began walking across the grass. Samuel tripped over a headstone and cried out. Hazel slapped her hand over his mouth. “Shh!”
“Your hand is clammy,” he told her.
“Well, it’s a little chilly.”
“You’re nervous.”
“I’m not even going to dignify that with a response.” But Hazel could not deny the way her heart beat like the little drum that Arthur Gayle got to play in music class. It was not nerves, she told herself; she wasn’t scared. It was anticipation at finally catching The Comrade doing something, and that was enough for Hazel.
When they got closer, Hazel instructed Samuel to crawl and they scooted their bodies along the ground like soldiers on the Korean battlefield. Hazel’s brown outfit blended right in, but Samuel’s white sheet seemed to pull the moonlight to them like a spotlight, and she almost wished she could leave him behind.
They began to hear voices, low and humming. “That’s a lot of people,” Samuel whispered.
“Maybe it’s not a ritual,” she said, her heart beating faster. “Maybe it’s a spy meeting after all, and they disguised it as a ritual.”
“That seems like a bad disguise.”
“He’s probably grown so confident here he doesn’t think that anyone can catch him. But we’ll show him, won’t we?”
“We should go get help,” Samuel said. His voice trembled a little bit. Maybe she shouldn’t put him in this situation, especially if he was as fragile as everyone said. She looked up ahead at the flickering light. Still, Samuel was someone who wanted to know the truth of things, and they were close to the truth of Mr. Jones.
“We’re just going to look,” she told him. “We won’t confront him.”
They crept along, trying to avoid sticks and other potential noisemakers. The smell of the candle smoke drifted over to them. A few more steps and they could make out four people crouched around a candle.
“They look pretty small,” Samuel said.
One of the bodies swung a lantern around and Hazel and Samuel were bathed in light. They both jumped up, screaming. They screamed so loud and so high that Hazel wasn’t sure what sound was her and what sound was him.
The lantern fell to the ground, and Hazel dashed over to pick it up. She shined it on the figures running away, the handle still warm in her hand. She would have recognized them anywhere: two sets of bunny ears with one ear pointing up and the other down. One sprinted, while the other waddle-ran like a duck trying to take flight. A witch’s hat and Raggedy Ann hair followed after them. “Maryann Wood, I know that’s you! And Connie Short, too!” The girls didn’t stop and didn’t look back.
Hazel an
d Samuel kept going to where the girls had been. There was a circle of rocks with wax of different colors drizzled over them. The candle in the center had been knocked over and a thin line of smoke trailed up from it. One large rock had a star drawn on it.
“What is all this?” Samuel asked.
“Séance,” Hazel replied. “Stupid girls.” She kicked at the rock, then bent over to pick up the candle. It was warm and soft in her hand and she squeezed it hard. “I wonder what they were trying to find out?” And then she grinned: another riddle to solve. First The Comrade, then Samuel’s story, and now Maryann and Connie’s séance. It was like all these mysteries kept falling into her lap, one after another. That, she decided, had to be the sign of a true detective.
26
Tree of Too Much Knowledge
When Hazel arrived at school on Monday, she marched right over to Maryann and Connie. After a dramatic pause to get their attention, she dropped the candle on Maryann’s desk. “Okay, ladies,” she said. “Spill.”
Maryann looked at Connie and rolled her eyes.
“What I’m saying is, I know you were at the graveyard Saturday night. What gives?” She tried to sound matter-of-fact, like they all knew what was going on and all that was left was for the culprit to confess.
“What gives?” Connie mimicked.
“What gives you the right to talk to us?” Maryann asked.
Hazel tapped her finger on the candle. This was not going the way she had planned. In her version the girls started weeping and then told her everything. Still, she kept her cool just like Nancy Drew would. “Hey now, you were the ones who were at the graveyard, even though it’s closed after dark. You can be arrested for trespassing. Plus you violated my restraining order. And I haven’t ratted you out to anyone, so I think you ought to tell me everything.”
“You never had a restraining order,” Maryann said. “I asked my mom.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Hazel said. She slid onto her desk facing the girls and channeled every detective in every book she had ever read. “Here’s how I see it. You came to the graveyard. You held your little séance. You got caught, and you ran. Maybe you were running because you were caught, or because you scared yourself with the whole stupid séance thing. Or maybe, you’re hiding a different secret entirely.”
Maryann and Connie exchanged smirks. “If we had a secret, we wouldn’t tell you.”
“All right, then,” Hazel said, leaning back. “You want to play hardball. I’ll just put the screws to you. I’ll tell my parents that it was you who moved the rocks and lit the candles. That it was you who drew the pentagram. They’ll call the police and you can take it up with them.”
Connie bit her lip, but Maryann remained strong. “What do you care what our secrets are?”
“I just want to know if it’s worth desecrating a grave for.”
“What does desecrating mean?” Connie asked.
“It means time in the slammer,” Hazel told her.
Connie looked at Maryann with wide eyes. Maryann, though, smirked her smirkiest smirk. “It doesn’t mean anything. She’s lying. She’s always talk-talk-talking without saying anything.”
“Have it your way,” Hazel said. “Keep the candle.”
She went back to the cubbies and willed herself not to look over her shoulder to see what her effect had been.
Connie stood at the pencil sharpener, spinning the handle round and round and round.
“You’re not going to have any pencil left,” Hazel said, holding her own dull pencil in her hand.
Connie jumped. Then she leaned in close. “Meet me at the apple tree by the library after school. I have information for you.”
“What kind of information?” Hazel asked.
“The information you want.”
“Interesting,” Hazel said.
“So you’ll meet me?”
“I’ll consider it.”
“Don’t tell your parents anything until you talk to me. I promise it will be good.” Connie took her pencil, blew the dust off the sharp tip, and headed back to her seat next to Maryann, who demanded what she was doing talking to Hazel.
Hazel rushed over to Samuel. “We have an insider contact,” she said.
“Something about Alice?” Samuel asked, looking down at his paper, where he was writing a list of ancient Greek heroes. He was getting much better at the subterfuge required for being a detective.
“No. The séance case.”
Samuel glanced up at her for a second, then back to his paper. “I wasn’t aware we had taken on a second case,” he said.
“Side job,” Hazel said, grinning. “You catch the jobs when you can, right?”
Samuel stopped writing and looked at her. “It’s not all a game, you know.”
“I know.” She shifted her gaze to his list: Achilles, Heracles, Odysseus.
“I mean, Alice was a real person. Mr. Jones is a real person.” His fingers gripped the pencil like a vise.
“I know,” she said again, then blew her hair out of her face.
“It just seems like you’re playing make-believe and—”
“I’m not playing make-believe,” she said. “This was my idea in the first place, you know. And something else happened in the cemetery. That’s where I live. It’s my job to find out what’s going on.”
“Okay. Forget I said anything.”
“I will,” she replied, and huffed away.
She went back to her seat and took out her own workbook, but all she could think about was how much Samuel’s words had stung her. They weren’t true, of course. She wasn’t playing any games. But she didn’t like that he would think she was, even for a minute.
The apple tree by the library was overgrown and untamed. No one plucked its apples, which were more bitter than sweet. Her dad said it was the Tree of Too Much Knowledge, and her mom would laugh and say “No such thing.”
As Hazel stood under it, kicking at rotted chunks, she thought about what Samuel had said. She had been thinking about it all day. It churned in her brain and her stomach and made her so upset that in gym class she had thrown the ball hard enough that Mrs. Warsaw told her she ought to consider taking up softball.
Samuel was angry at her, she knew. Maybe it was because he was afraid she’d become friends with Connie instead of him. Hardly. Hazel knew that in books it always turned out that the mean girls were actually nice, they were just afraid, or had mean parents, or were trying to fit in, but once you got to know them, they were fine. Hazel knew that those stories were lies. Some people were just mean, and Connie was one of them.
In fact, Hazel was growing certain that Connie had ditched her, that this was all part of some scheme Maryann and Connie had cooked up to embarrass her. Maybe they even knew that she was grounded and could get in trouble for coming home late. She was picturing the two girls snickering together when she heard someone whisper “Meet me in the listening booth.”
She stood up and looked over her shoulder, but no one was there. On her way into the library, she stepped on one of the apples. She felt it squish under her saddle shoe. She tried to wipe it off, but some was still stuck in the treads and around the toe. She frowned, but she had an appointment to keep, so she went into the library, nodded to Miss Angus, and made her way to the listening booth and sat in the chair. She was still not convinced that this wasn’t some sort of a trick, but then Connie, wearing sunglasses that did nothing to disguise her, waddled into the booth.
“What’s that smell?” she asked.
Hazel glanced down at her shoe. “Secret. None of your business,” she replied.
Connie shrugged as if she didn’t care. “This goes no farther than this room.”
“I may need to tell my associate,” Hazel replied. She took out her notebook and flipped it open to a new page.
“Samuel?”
Hazel nodded.
“Oh, all right. It’s not like he has any other friends that he could tell.” She lifted up her sunglasses. “Mar
yann will kill me if she knows I told you, but I’m not willing to go to jail for desi—what was that word you said?”
“Desecrating a grave,” Hazel said. She grabbed one of the little yellow library pencils from the table, licked the tip, and was ready to write.
“You’re taking notes?”
“A detective always takes notes,” Hazel said.
Connie rolled her eyes, and then smiled to try to cover it up. Hazel, of course, was not fooled.
“Right,” Connie said. “We were doing a séance. We read about how to do it in a book.”
“You can do it in your house,” Hazel said. “I mean, not that they’re real, but that’s where people normally do them. In the parlor.”
“We don’t have a parlor,” Connie said.
No one did, as far as Hazel knew. No one except Samuel’s grandmother.
“Anyway, we didn’t want our parents to know what we were up to. Plus the book said to try to get close to the spirit world, and that was as close as we could think of.”
“It’s not their spirits in the ground. It’s just their bodies.”
“Well, that’s what we were doing there. And I’m sorry if we made a mess, but we had planned on picking it up. It’s just that you and Samuel surprised us. So, that’s it. That’s what happened.”
“That’s not it.”
Connie chewed on the edge of her thumb. “You mean you’re still going to tell your parents?”
“No, I mean I want to know what you were doing a séance about. Who were you trying to contact?”
Connie put her sunglasses back down over her eyes. “You have to swear not to tell.”
“Of course.”
“Pinkie swear.” Connie held out her pinkie, and Hazel hooked hers into it. She and Becky used to pinkie swear about things—never wearing makeup except in dramatic productions, always being best friends—and it was strange to feel someone else’s pinkie hooked into hers.
Connie grimaced, but then confessed, her words running together in a rushed stream. “Okay, so, Maryann wanted to find out if Timmy likes her.”
The Spy Catchers of Maple Hill Page 15