The Boys Return

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

  Caroline felt where Eddie was pointing. There was a definite ridge beneath the wallpaper. As Caroline followed it with her fingers, she found she was tracing a square.

  “Just like Tony said!” Beth told them. “It's right by the light switch. He said they removed a panel from the wall, and that's where he found the page from the diary, right behind it.”

  Eddie almost looked convinced. “Well, I suppose it could have happened. It doesn't mean the house is haunted, though, just because Tony found a page out of a diary.”

  “But what about the tapping sounds, Eddie? And always on March twenty-second?” Caroline said. Suddenly she grabbed Beth's arm on one side of her and Eddie's on the other. “Sleep with me on Tuesday!” she begged.

  “All right,” Eddie agreed. “And if we hear tapping…”At this point Eddie tapped three times on the wall. “… and footsteps…”Eddie stomped her feet three times.

  “… and a voice saying, ‘I'll take you home again, Kathleen…,'” said Beth in her spookiest voice.

  “…we'll say, ‘Kathleen's not here, but you can have Caroline!' ” finished Eddie. And all three burst out laughing.

  The boys didn't show up at the baseball diamond at all on Monday, and on Tuesday it began to rain, so the girls didn't go either.

  “I wonder what the guys are doing?” Eddie mused, looking bored as she sat by the window.

  “I never thought I'd hear that coming from you, Eddie!” Beth told her. “The great Edith Ann, missing the Hatfords?”

  The thing of it was, Caroline realized, the more the boys ignored them—politely, of course—the more her sisters wanted to see them.

  “I didn't say I missed them. Especially not the Hatfords. I just wondered what they could be doing with the Bensons that's so much fun,” Eddie said.

  “Probably sitting inside watching TV,” said Caroline.

  After dinner Beth suggested they go downtown and hang around Oldakers' Bookstore. Everyone liked to go there—sit and read and maybe buy a pop from the little café on one side of the store. If the boys weren't there, they surely would be at the drugstore.

  “Stay together, now!” Mrs. Malloy called out as the girls left the house. “I'd feel better if you'd put Caroline between you, and I want you home before eight. In fact, I'd feel a whole lot better if the Hatfords and Bensons were with you. The more kids in a crowd, the better, till that cougar is caught.”

  “Don't worry,” said Eddie. “I've got my hiking boots on. A cougar tries to get Caroline, I'll kick him in the teeth.”

  They went down the road to the bridge and sure enough, when they were a block away from the bookstore, they saw the nine boys trooping inside.

  “Let's act surprised to see them,” Beth cautioned. “We certainly don't want them to think we came looking for them.”

  “We especially don't want them to think we like them!” said Eddie.

  “But we are looking for them, and you do like them!” Caroline protested. “Why can't we just act real for a change?”

  “Because that's part of the fun, and because we'd never hear the end of it,” said Eddie.

  The girls walked casually into the bookstore, looking up, looking down, and looking sideways—anywhere but straight ahead where the Hatfords and Bensons were gathered around the paperback rack, looking for new books by Jerry Spinelli.

  Caroline played her part so well—she pretended to be absorbed in the picture books along one wall—that she stumbled over Wally's feet and went sprawling.

  “Are you hurt?” called Mike Oldaker, coming around from behind the counter to help her to her feet.

  But Caroline was only conscious of the fact that Danny Benson was helping her up. And right at that moment, Danny Benson seemed to be the most handsome, polite, strong, attractive, wonderful boy in the whole world.

  “I'm perfectly fine,” she said once she was standing again.

  “Well, well, we didn't know you were here!” Eddie said to Steve Benson. “The decorators!”

  “Us?” laughed Steve. “Your rooms, you mean? You're the ones who started it!”

  But Beth only had eyes for Tony, and was smiling at him with so silly a grin that Eddie had to poke her several times to make her stop staring.

  They went to the back of the store—the “tent,” they called it, because Mike Oldaker had put up a canopy and there were places to sit and read beneath it.

  But Caroline didn't want to read. “We found it!” she told them.

  “Found what?” asked Jake.

  “The panel you were talking about, Tony!” Beth said hurriedly.

  “I felt along the wall until I found a ridge under the wallpaper, and just like you said, there was the shape of a panel—about two feet square—under the light switch,” Eddie told them.

  “That's where it was,” said Tony. “I was there when the electrician took it out. He propped it against the wall and went back outside to get more tools. I was just poking my head inside the wall, seeing what I could see—spiders and sawdust and stuff—and when I looked down, I saw that piece of paper. I haven't told anyone else except us.”

  “Wow!” said Peter and Doug together.

  Caroline laughed excitedly. “Well, just in case there is a ghost, just in case Annabelle does come looking for the sister who didn't save her, Eddie and Beth are going to sleep in my room with me tonight.”

  “Good idea,” said Steve. “But I still think Tony may have been imagining things.”

  “We'll see,” said Beth. “We'll just see!”

  Caroline could hardly wait until bedtime, with Eddie on one side of her and Beth on the other, listening for Annabelle's footsteps in the night. Maybe she could use this for her school assignment. But better yet, if she ever became a good actress—if she ever saw CAROLINE LENORE MALLOY in lights on Broadway, and had to play the part of a woman terrified half out of her mind by a ghost—then this would be a wonderful experience for her. She would at last know what real live terror felt like.

  “We're going to sleep with Caroline,” Beth told their mother at ten that evening.

  “In that small bed? It's not even big enough for two, much less three!” said Mrs. Malloy.

  “We just want to see if we can do it,” Beth said. “We may go camping this summer, and we want to see if we could all fit in one small pup tent.”

  “A tent, yes. At least you can't fall out of a tent,” said their mother. “But it's spring vacation. Do whatever you like.”

  The girls made cinnamon toast and cocoa and carried it up to Caroline's bedroom. They sat on the bed, having their snack and looking through old comic books, then took turns painting each other's finger-nails and toenails. After that they recited all the poems they knew, and finally ended up singing songs in three-part harmony.

  “Just like Annabelle and her sister used to do. They tapped out the rhythm on their walls,” said Eddie.

  “Let's do it!” said Caroline.

  “No!” said Beth. “We'd bring the ghost here in a minute!”

  At last they lay down. They could hardly stop laughing because either Beth or Eddie always seemed to be falling off the edge of the bed. But finally they braced themselves against Caroline. First Beth dropped off to sleep, then Eddie, leaving Caroline squeezed like a sardine in the middle.

  The night ticked on. The room was very dark. It was still raining lightly outside. From far off, Caroline could hear the night sounds—a dog barking, a car going along the road—but mostly it was still. Dark and still, with only the sound of rain.

  Her legs began to grow heavy, then her arms, and she started to feel as though she were floating. She didn't know what time it was, but she guessed about eleven. Maybe even midnight.

  Her eyes closed against the dark and she felt warm and snug and protected with her sisters on either side of her.

  Suddenly… Tap, tappity, tap, tap.

  Caroline's eyes opened, but she saw only blackness. Had she heard something or only imagined it?

  Tap, tap… t
appity-tap…tap, tap, tap.

  Her heart beat so hard it hurt.

  “B-B-Beth!” she whispered, but almost no sound came out.

  Try to remember how it feels to be so scared! she told herself, but it didn't work.

  “Eddie!” she cried, giving her sister a nudge. “Listen!”

  “Huh?” mumbled Eddie in a husky voice, and Caroline felt her rise up on one elbow.

  “Hear it?” Caroline whispered.

  Nothing. Not a sound.

  Then, tap, tappity, tappity, tap-tap-tap.

  “Beth!” Eddie said.

  “I heard it too!” whispered Beth.

  “Oh, my gosh! It's—it's coming for me!” cried Caroline, and she dived down under the covers.

  Seven

  In the Moonlight

  “You're not going anywhere without us!”

  Wally stood in the doorway of his brothers' room and faced the four older boys—Jake and Josh, Steve and Tony. Behind him, Danny and Bill Benson were nodding their agreement.

  “We can't all go over there!” Jake insisted. “There's no point in it! Tony's the only one who's going to crawl in the window.”

  “So, why are you guys all going?” Wally demanded. “Why doesn't Tony go over there by himself?”

  “Because somebody has to be the lookout, that's why,” said Josh.

  “Well, if you're all going, we're going,” Bill insisted.

  “There had better be lots of lookouts, one on each side of the house and a couple more to help Tony make his getaway,” Wally told them.

  “All right, all right, don't have a spaz,” said Steve. “But you've got to get out of the house without Mr. and Mrs. Hatford knowing about it.”

  “And don't let Peter and Doug in on it, either,” warned Jake.

  “We'll be careful,” said Wally. “What time are you going over?”

  Tony and Steve exchanged glances, then looked at Jake and Josh. “Oh, around one in the morning,” Tony said.

  “One in the morning!” said Danny. “I can't stay awake that long.”

  “It's okay. Just go to sleep, then. We'll tell you all about it tomorrow,” said Steve.

  Wally went back into his own room with Danny and Bill. “I don't think they're going to wait till one in the morning at all,” he said. “If they did, it wouldn't be March twenty-second anymore. They're going to sneak over earlier, but they don't want us along.”

  “Ha!” said Bill. “So what are we going to do?”

  “We're going to turn out our light and not make a sound. They'll think we've gone to bed, but the minute we hear them sneak downstairs, we're out of here!” said Wally.

  Why was he doing this? Wally wondered. He certainly couldn't use this for the school assignment. Nothing looked so inviting to him as his bed right now, and nothing good ever came of getting mixed up with the Malloys. He should know that by now. But there was something about having Bill and Danny in his room, something about the way the older boys treated them like babies, that made him talk tough.

  There was a light tap on the door, and Mrs. Hatford stuck her head inside. “Anything else you need, boys? Peter and Doug are having some popcorn and cocoa downstairs. Want to come down for a snack?”

  “I think we'll just bring some popcorn up here, Mom,” Wally told her. Even his mother was treating them like babies.

  “Okay. Help yourselves,” she said. The boys heard her tap on Jake and Josh's door too before she went downstairs, but all she asked them was whether they wanted a snack. She didn't offer them popcorn and cocoa. Naturally, they got to choose whatever they wanted!

  When Wally went down to the kitchen, Peter and Doug were sitting at the table, swinging their legs and taking turns reaching into the popcorn bowl, their mouths rimmed with marshmallow.

  “Hey, Wally!” said Peter. “Doug and me are gonna play Monopoly on my bed. You wanna play?”

  “I don't think so,” Wally told him. “I'm pretty tired. I think Bill and Danny and I will turn in early.”

  “Well, we're going to stay up till midnight!” crowed Doug.

  “Yeah. We may not go to sleep all night!” said Peter.

  “Good for you,” said Wally, and took a bowl of popcorn upstairs with a giant-size bottle of Mountain Dew.

  Peter and Doug held out until nine-thirty. Mrs. Benson called, and Doug talked to his mother for a while. Then the two boys took a bath together and had a water fight. After Mrs. Hatford came up to calm them down, they finally went to bed, and the upstairs grew very quiet.

  Wally, Danny, and Bill took turns listening at the crack in their door for any sign that the four older boys were leaving the house.

  “Dad and Mom go to bed around ten. The guys will wait till they're sure they're asleep, and then they'll leave, I'll bet,” said Wally.

  Ten-fifteen came, ten-thirty, ten-forty, and there was still no sign of activity from Josh and Jake's room, no light from under their door, no stirrings or rustlings.

  “When do you suppose they're going to go?” Bill asked.

  “Maybe they fell asleep,” said Danny.

  Wally went out into the hall. He tiptoed over to his brothers' room. Not a sound. Gently he tried the handle. The door was locked. But his feet were cold, and he realized suddenly that there was a draft coming from under the door.

  The window!

  He hurried back to his room. “They've already left!” he said. “They climbed out their window and slid down the tree.”

  Danny and Bill jumped up and pulled on their shoes.

  “We've got to be really, really quiet, though,” Wally warned. “And don't step on the next-to-last stair from the bottom. It squeaks.”

  Silently the boys crept out into the hall and down the stairs, careful to avoid the squeaky step. They pulled on their jackets and passed the big clock in the hall, which said 10:44, softly opened the front door, and closed it behind them.

  The air was heavy and damp. Occasionally the moon peeped out from behind stormy, swirling clouds, then hid its face again. The boys made their way off the porch and down the sidewalk, where they crossed the road and went down the bank to the swinging bridge.

  The boards bounced and the bridge swayed beneath their feet. As they climbed the hill on the other side to the house where the Malloys were staying, they could see no glow in the windows, no light on the porch.

  Wally led his friends around the clump of lilac bushes at the edge of the yard, and suddenly, whump. He collided with a warm, sturdy body—a body in a nylon jacket smelling of popcorn.

  “Hey!” said Wally.

  “Hey!” said the jacket.

  “Josh?” asked Wally.

  “Wally?” asked the jacket.

  The boys confronted each other. “I thought you were going to let us know when you came over here,” Wally said.

  “There was too much noise going on. It took Peter and Doug forever to go to sleep, and we figured if we came through the hallway, someone would see us. So we went out the window,” Josh told him.

  “Yeah, I'll bet you weren't going to tell us at all!” Bill said.

  “Shhh. I'm the lookout here. I have to keep my eyes on Mr. and Mrs. Malloy's bedroom and tell Steve if their light comes on,” Josh said.

  “Well, we can help!” said Danny.

  “Okay, just spread out around the house and watch for a light,” Josh said. “Tony's crawling in the basement window right now, and he's going to start tapping. The minute you see a light go on anywhere in the house, give a whistle. Steve will tell Tony, Tony will crawl back out, and we'll all run like heck.”

  Bill and Danny moved on to the far side of the house, but Wally went around to where Steve and Jake were crouched by the open window, ready to pull Tony to safety at the right moment.

  Wally crouched down by the window too.

  “What are you doing here?” Jake asked irritably.

  “Same as you,” Wally said. From inside the basement he could hear a faint sound. Tap… tappity… tap-tap.


  Steve and Jake grinned at each other.

  Tap, tap… tappity-tap…tap, tap, tap.

  Steve couldn't contain a chuckle.

  “Do you see any lights coming on?” Jake whispered to Wally.

  Wally backed away from the house and scanned the windows. “Nope,” he said.

  “Tap louder, Tony,” Steve whispered, sticking his head in the window. “Maybe no one can hear it.”

  TAP…TAPPITY, TAPPITY, TAP, TAP, TAP, went the rapping on the water pipes, louder still.

  “Hey, cut it out, Wally,” muttered Jake.

  “What?” said Wally.

  “Leave me alone,” said Jake. “Quit bumping against me.”

  “I'm not doing anything. I'm clear out here,” said Wally. He strained to see Jake in the darkness, and then they saw it. They all saw it: the cougar, sniffing around next to Jake.

  “C-c-cougar!” gasped Jake, throwing up his hands and springing backward. The animal turned and sprinted across the yard, disappearing into the trees.

  “Cougar!” Steve croaked through the basement window.

  A moment later Tony came crawling out, Steve and Jake half dragging him the rest of the way, but he remembered to pull the window closed behind him. Then the boys were racing pell-mell down the hill to the footbridge, Bill and Danny and Wally at their heels, Josh bringing up the rear. They didn't stop till they reached the other side of the river.

  “What happened? Did they see you?” Josh asked, breathless.

  “No! It was the cougar! Right beside me!” Jake gasped. “I think it touched my neck with its nose!”

  “Oh, you're imagining things,” said Josh.

  “No! I saw it too!” said Steve.

  “So did I!” said Wally.

  “Man oh man oh man!” said Jake. “I've never been that close to a wild animal in my life! Do you think it was about to attack me?”

  “Probably wanted to sniff you out first, see if you'd taste any good,” said Steve, trying to make a joke. But no one laughed.

  Tony was upset that his little trick on the Malloys seemed to have been preempted by the cougar. “What about the girls?” he asked. “Did a light come on in Caroline's bedroom?”