“Here it is,” said Abby. “Mr. Seger. He’s a member of the Stoneybrook Business Bureau — that sounds pretty respectable — his wife is deceased, and he has one son who is in high school, going by his date of birth.”
“What’s his son’s name?” asked Claudia.
“Noah.” Abby looked from Claudia to Kristy. “Do you think he’s in high school here? Do you think your sister or your brothers would know him?”
Both Kristy and Claudia shrugged. Then Kristy asked, “Is that all?”
“That’s it.” I said. I was disappointed. The Who’s Who didn’t have very much what’s what, in my humble opinion.
“Yeah.” Abby sounded disappointed, too.
“Let’s photocopy it,” said Kristy. “There could be a clue there.”
Abby picked up the book. Pretending to stagger slightly under its weight, she turned toward the photocopy room. “Anybody have change?” she asked.
We pooled our change and Abby, still in her fake stagger mode, lurched away.
A few minutes later she came lurching back.
“Ha, ha …” Kristy began. Her voice trailed off.
Abby’s face was a ghastly greenish-white.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, jumping up from the table. Abby dropped the Who’s Who with a thump. She also dropped several photocopies of the page about Mr. Seger.
And one photocopy, very crooked but quite clear, of a photograph of Kristy, Mary Anne, Claudia, Stacey, and Dawn.
“Where did you find this?” demanded Kristy.
Abby sat down in the chair. Color was returning to her face. Her voice sounded normal, but abnormally serious, for her. “It was just sitting there, staring up at me from the recycle bin.”
“Right on top?” I asked.
“Well, not right on top.” Abby looked a little sheepish. “I was sort of going through it while the machine was making copies. You know, checking out what other people make copies of. Anyway, there it was, just underneath the first few pieces of paper. It was creepy. I mean, it freaked me out.”
“It’s the photo that was taken of us when we solved that pet-napping mystery, with Dawn,” said Kristy. “The one that was in the Stoneybrook News. Remember? Jessi and Mal were on the ends and got cropped out and were majorly annoyed.”
“That’s where the burglar found our names!” Claudia exclaimed. “He must have looked up ‘Kristy Thomas’ in the news index and found our picture in the paper. That’s why all the phone calls and weird stuff have been happening to just the four of us, unless Dawn, all the way out in California —”
“Mary Anne talked to Dawn on Sunday and told her what was going on,” said Kristy. “Dawn would have told Mary Anne then if she’d been getting weird phone calls or anything, and she didn’t.”
“Talk about major clues,” said Abby. “I mean, this proves that the burglars must be behind the vandalism, right? They saw your name, Kristy, and mine, and looked us both up in the newspaper index and since I’m not famous all over town — yet — they found you. Wow. I bet Jessi and Mal are going to be glad they got cropped out of the photo now!”
“It could be.” Kristy had picked up the photocopies of the information about Mr. Seger and handed them around to each of us before tucking the extra ones in her notebook.
“Someone could have looked up any one of the five names in the newspaper index,” I pointed out. “Not that I believe that. What I believe is that your burglar did get Kristy’s name from her tag.”
“That means he was here, in this library, not too long ago. Too bad we can’t find out who made copies,” Abby said regretfully. Then she brightened. “You think he’s still here?”
“No!” said Claudia so firmly we all jumped.
We looked quickly and nervously around. But nobody sinister was lurking nearby. Or if they were, they were cleverly disguised as a teenaged boy helping his kid sister with her homework, two older women thumbing through a towering stack of financial reports, and someone who looked like a college student staring glumly down at an open book without turning a page.
“Let’s check out Mr. Seger in the Stoneybrook News index,” suggested Kristy.
Claudia put the Who’s Who back on the shelf, and we went to the computers. We scrolled through the index twice, but Mr. Seger wasn’t as famous as the Baby-sitters Club. He’d never made the news, at least not according to the index.
“Or not under the name he’s using now,” said Abby darkly.
We looked at her. “Well, maybe it is a fake name,” she said. “You never know.”
It was time to go. We’d done all the investigating we could do for one day. We trudged out of the library silently. Abby even forgot to goof on Mrs. Kishi as we passed the front desk on the way to the door.
“Find everything you need?” asked Mrs. Kishi.
“Yes, thank you,” Kristy answered. “Plenty.”
“Yeah,” I added under my breath. “We found out how much we don’t know.”
Have you ever noticed how when you are with kids, people remember you as a unit, like “a bunch of kids” or “a girl with two little kids (or three or four)”?
Anyway, I was sitting for the Rodowskys on Tuesday afternoon — and I was staking out Mr. Seger’s house next door. The Rodowskys’ kitchen was on the side of the house that was next to Mr. Seger’s house, so naturally I’d decided we should do some kitchen-related activities.
All three Rodowsky boys were enthusiastic about this idea. It was only after I’d suggested it that I began to have second thoughts.
A kitchen is filled with potential for disasters. And Jackie Rodowsky, age seven, is known, among the members of the BSC, as the Walking Disaster.
Trouble follows him wherever he goes — except when he is walking into it head-on. Jackie is used to it. But it is extremely hard on other people if they are not used to it.
Since I have four brothers, three of whom are triplets, I am used to chaos and catastrophe. In fact, when I write the first volume of my autobiography, I am going to call it Chaos and Catastrophe. Or maybe that will be the title of the opening chapter….
That day we decided to make cookies. (But Shea, who is nine, and Jackie weren’t calling them cookies. They were calling them Edible Slammers, after their Pogs and Slammers games, and so was Archie, who is four and copies everything his two older brothers do, even when he isn’t sure why they are doing it.)
Of course I spent some time checking out the house next door from the kitchen window. The glass had been cleaned up. The window had been replaced. Not surprisingly, no tree branch was in sight.
In fact, the only tree of any size near the house wasn’t near enough for one of its branches to fall through that window, unless the tree was bent toward it at a forty-five degree angle.
Shea said, “Jackie, if you put chocolate chips up your nose …”
I spun around. “Don’t you dare!”
Jackie grinned at me. “I wasn’t really going to,” he said. “I just said it would make a really excellent gross joke.”
Great, I thought. Wait till Kristy hears about this. Something else to add to her gross food jokes at lunch. I’d heard plenty about her lunchroom jokes, enough to make me almost glad the sixth-graders have a different lunch period than the eighth-graders. I could hear Kristy now: “Hey, you guys, you know where they keep these chocolate chips?”
I saw that Archie was looking extremely interested in the idea and quickly moved the chocolate chips out of his reach to the middle of the table. I safety-pinned a large, clean, blue and white dishtowel to Archie’s shirt for an apron, and Shea and Jackie put on old aprons. Jackie chose a bright pink apron, which looked startling, to say the least, with his hair. Shea opted for a flaming red one that said “BARBECUE ON, DUDES.” His color combination was pretty eye-catching, too.
I settled on your basic navy blue apron — a nice, conservative choice that doesn’t show spots.
Tying on my apron, I took another quick glance out the window, noted th
at no one seemed to be home, then turned back to the cookies.
Although members of the BSC have, at times, made very exotic cookies, we stuck to basics that afternoon. We made Toll House cookies and plain oatmeal raisin cookies (excuse me, Slammers).
After we put them in the oven, I made a game out of cleaning up the kitchen. The only disaster was when Jackie knocked over a chair with his enthusiastic sweeping. This would not have been a disaster at all, except that the chair somehow hit the trashcan, which tipped over and spilled garbage across the kitchen floor, and hit Bo’s dog dishes, splattering dog food and water everywhere.
“Uh-oh,” said Jackie.
Archie laughed delightedly. “A mess!” he proclaimed.
Bo, who had heard the commotion and naturally came to investigate the sound of his food bowl rattling, joined in, barking and doing a happy dog dance in the mess.
We went into action automatically (the Rodowsky boys know everything there is to know about cleaning) and we soon had the mess cleaned up — somewhat, I suspect, to the disappointment of Archie and Bo.
The stove timer went off and Jackie shouted, “The Slammers!” and lunged for the oven door.
I lunged for Jackie just as he pulled the oven door open. Steam billowed up and fogged my glasses.
“Hey!” I said and Jackie let the oven door slam shut.
A pot fell off the stove onto my toe. Fortunately, it was empty.
“Sorry,” said Jackie.
“It’s okay. No problem,” I said, taking off my glasses to wipe them and squint at him. “But why don’t you let Shea take the cookies out of the oven — with an oven mitt, Shea — and put them on top of the stove. When they’re cool, all three of you can help put them in the cookie jar.”
Archie picked up the pot and handed it to me.
“Thank you, Archie,” I said.
“Welcome,” he replied.
A movement caught my eye. I dashed to the kitchen window and squinted out. Then I realized I wasn’t wearing my glasses and put them on.
A short kid (at least, he looked short to me) with brown hair and a baseball cap, and a gray pack slung over one shoulder, was standing at the side door of the Segers’ house. He was wearing black sneakers, faded jeans, and an old leather bomber jacket.
I caught my breath. A burglar?
Then, when the kid took a key out of his pocket and opened the door, I realized that he must live there. Did Mr. Seger have a son? I wondered.
“Excuse me,” I said to the Rodowsky boys. I dashed to my backpack, whipped out my mystery notebook, and wrote a description of the kid on the blank page under “Stakeout: Seger Burglary.” I also wrote in the time he’d arrived home, and what I had noticed about the house (no glass, no tree within glass-breaking distance).
As far as I could tell, the kid stayed in for the rest of the afternoon. Mr. Seger hadn’t come home when I left the Rodowskys.
And the only other disaster was when Jackie slammed the door on his finger and it fell in crumbs to the floor. As you might have guessed, “it” wasn’t his finger, it was the cookie he was holding.
So it didn’t scare me too much.
Jackie just laughed. “Cool,” he said. “Slammers.”
* * *
As I walked my bicycle to the sidewalk on the other side of the street, someone came jogging toward me. It was Abby.
“Hi,” I said, surprised.
“Hi. I’m here to relieve you,” she said.
“Relieve me?”
“On the stakeout,” she explained.
“Oh.” I looked around. “Don’t you have to get home for dinner?”
Abby shrugged. “I’m on my way home from Claudia’s.” Abby filled me in on what had happened. “Anna knows where I am,” she concluded. “So it’s okay. Besides, I’m not going to stay out here freezing for that long. I’m just going to jog around the block for a while, so I don’t look suspicious.”
Before Abby could put her plan into effect, however, a car pulled into Mr. Seger’s driveway.
Abby whipped out a tiny notebook and wrote something down.
“What’re you doing?” I whispered (although there was no chance whoever it was could hear me all the way across the street).
“License plate,” she whispered back, “and car description. And description of the guy.”
“Is he Mr. Seger?”
“Maybe,” she said.
We both watched as a short man got out of the car. He was wearing a brown suit and his brown hair was combed to one side the way men sometimes comb their hair to hide bald spots. He seemed pretty ordinary.
“Look,” I said. “He has two stickers on the back of his car.”
“Can you see what they say?”
I shook my head. It was getting dark.
Mr. Seger let himself in the side door of the house, confirming his identity. The light in the kitchen of his house (at least, I assumed it was the kitchen) went on.
Abby jogged forward.
“Where are you going?” I asked in alarm.
She didn’t answer. A moment later I saw her crouch by the back bumper of the car and write furiously in her notebook.
Then she jogged back to me. “Stoneybrook Business Bureau stickers,” she reported. “The blue hexagon is last year’s and the orange one is for this year…. Well, I better keep moving. Don’t want to look suspicious. See ya later, Mal.”
Abby jogged away.
I climbed on my bicycle in a daze and pedaled home.
When I got home, my parents were talking about insulation. I felt that this was becoming an unhealthy obsession with them. But I didn’t mention it, although my mother did say, as I walked by the door of the den, “Mallory? Was that jacket warm enough for the weather today?”
See what I mean?
* * *
“The Stoneybrook Business Bureau,” said Kristy. “All roads seem to point to it.”
It was the next afternoon. We’d convened a special meeting of the BSC on the steps of the school to “review the case” as Kristy put it. Among us, we’d managed to keep Mr. Seger’s house pretty well staked out, except during the night. Kristy and Abby had gone out for an early morning jog that just happened to take them by Mr. Seger’s house. (“We split up at the corner and took turns circling the block,” Abby explained.) When they’d had to go home to get ready for school, Stacey had taken over the watch, standing at the bus stop at the end of the road and sauntering casually along the street.
There had been additional sightings of Noah and of Mr. Seger: Noah climbing into the car with Mr. Seger that morning before school, Noah looking glum and Mr. Seger looking tense. Noah had returned shortly after that and gone in the house. He hadn’t emerged by the time Stacey had to leave for school.
Nobody had seen the Ford Escort.
Stacey, meanwhile, told us she’d give us a “full report” at the BSC meeting, then headed out to baby-sit the Rodowskys again. Claudia, who was heading home to start work on a report, walked with her. Abby had soccer practice, so that left Mary Anne, Jessi, Kristy, and me.
We headed for the Stoneybrook Business Bureau. It turned out to be an old house in the middle of Stoneybrook that had been turned into an office building, along with most of the other houses on the street. We passed a dentist, a lawyer, a secondhand clothing store, and a used bookstore, before we reached the house we were looking for, a white building with red trim.
We opened the door and went in. Just to the right of the front hall was a room where a secretary sat behind a desk. He nodded at us.
Kristy said, “Hello,” and walked in.
“Hello,” said the secretary, smiling. “What can I do for you?”
“Well, we’re doing a report for school,” said Kristy. “Or at least, I am. About small businesses in Stoneybrook. And I, ah, wanted to interview some of the members of the bureau.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” said the secretary. “Let me get you our membership list.”
“You have a li
st?” I asked, surprised. “I mean, one that we can look at?”
“Better than that, I’ll make you a copy,” said the secretary. He took a file out of one of his lower desk drawers. “If you’ll excuse me for a moment, I’ll be right back with this.”
“Wow,” Jessi said softly after he’d left. “That was easy.”
The secretary returned and handed Kristy four sheets of paper stapled together. “Here’s the list of our member businesses.”
“Thanks,” said Kristy, folding it carefully and putting it in her pack.
“Let us know if we can be of any further help,” said the secretary. “And good luck with that report.”
“Thanks,” Kristy replied. We turned and walked casually toward the door. We had almost reached it when the secretary cried, “Stop!”
I froze.
Kristy turned.
The secretary hurried toward her with another set of sheets. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I gave you last year’s list. Here’s one that is more up-to-date. I have extra copies of this one on hand.”
“Oh,” said Kristy. “Do you mind if I keep both lists?”
“Be my guest,” said the secretary. The phone began to ring and he hurried back to his desk.
* * *
Later, at the BSC meeting, Stacey reported that Mr. Seger had come home early that afternoon, while she was sitting for the Rodowskys, then left. Noah, who obviously had left the house after Stacey had gone to school, had come home and gone inside, slamming the door. Mr. Seger had then returned and gone inside. The two had emerged a short time later. They’d left, in Mr. Seger’s car, and hadn’t returned by the time the Rodowskys had come home.
“You know, for only two people, they come and go almost as much as my whole family,” I commented.
Kristy studied the list, then handed it around. “Mr. Seger’s there on both lists, a member in good standing,” she said. “But it doesn’t say what he does. It just says, ‘Seger Associates.’ ”
“Whatever he does, he keeps his own hours. And if the business is named after him, he must be the boss,” said Stacey.
“Maybe he’s an embezzler!” Claudia exclaimed. “Maybe he has stacks and stacks of embezzled money around his house and that’s why he didn’t want the police to come in. And maybe that’s why he can’t report it stolen — because he stole it first!”