“This is Martha’s business card,” she said. “I saw it in her bag when I got her water bottle. And…I think it’s a clue!”
“What do you mean?” Henry asked.
“Well,” Jessie replied, “the card says that Martha sells antique furniture! She has her own business.”
“That would explain why she was looking at the desks so closely,” Henry said. He remembered the first time they had met Martha.
“Wow,” Violet said. “This school is filled with old furniture.”
“Yes,” Jessie continued. “I think Martha has been more interested in the furniture than in the restoration project. She must be looking for antiques to sell.”
“Maybe she was the one who moved those desks into the basement,” Henry said.
“And if she moved the furniture, then the Hawthorne School ghost didn’t do it!” Bennie added.
“Exactly!” Jessie agreed.
Violet frowned. “That all makes sense,” she said. “But why didn’t Martha just tell us she was looking for antiques? Why all the sneaking around?”
Jessie crossed her arms and sighed. “That’s a good question.”
“And another thing,” Violet added. “How did Martha know Watch’s name?”
CHAPTER 6
Unusual Business
That evening, Grandfather made his famous spaghetti. He had spent an hour standing over the bubbling pot of sauce before he left it to simmer on the stove. Each time one of the children entered the kitchen to offer their help, he shooed them away. “It’s a secret recipe!” he would say.
After dinner they made tapioca pudding for dessert. Benny had given Mrs. McGregor the idea after the Aldens returned from Hawthorne School. Benny told her all about the old menu. When he mentioned tapioca pudding, Mrs. McGregor took out a cookbook and showed him a picture of what looked like vanilla pudding filled with tiny, round blobs. Benny thought the pudding looked really funny, but he wanted to try it.
Now Mrs. McGregor set out the ingredients so the children could help make it. She showed them the package of tapioca, which looked like little white beads.
“Tapioca comes from the root of a South American plant called cassava,” she explained.
“I think I’ve had tapioca before,” Jessie said. “I had some bubble tea at the mall once, and there were little round pieces in it! They were soft, like jelly. It was weird but good!”
“Wow!” Benny said. Mrs. McGregor let him pour the beads into a measuring cup while she heated the milk for the pudding in a saucepan. Jessie cracked two eggs into a bowl and whisked them together.
“Violet,” Mrs. McGregor said, “will you get the sugar, vanilla, and salt?”
After a few minutes, Mrs. McGregor added the rest of the ingredients to the milk. Each of the Aldens took turns slowly stirring the mixture.
“Is it done?” Benny asked. He looked at the creamy pudding. It was now thick and filled with little translucent globes of tapioca.
“I think so,” Mrs. McGregor told him. She poured the pudding into a bowl and covered it with wax paper. Benny opened the refrigerator door, and Mrs. McGregor set the sweet pudding inside.
While they waited for the pudding to cool, Mrs. McGregor finished cleaning the kitchen and Grandfather went to read in the next room. Benny, Jessie, and Violet gathered around Henry while he showed them what he’d found online.
“I wanted to know more about Martha’s antique business,” he said. “So I went to the website listed on her business card.”
Benny pointed to a photo on the screen. “Those look like desks from Hawthorne School.”
“They sure do,” Henry said. “‘Original antiques from a historic Silver City building,’” he read aloud. “‘Will be in stock soon. No other dealer in town has these unique desks!’”
“Hmm,” Violet said. “‘No other dealer in town.’ Do you think Martha has been making the school seem haunted so that nobody else would find out about those old desks?”
“It’s a good theory,” Jessie agreed. “She didn’t want anyone to know she was interested in the desks. And she definitely didn’t want other antique dealers to know about the school.”
“That must be why she didn’t want anyone to call the newspaper when we found the lesson on the old chalkboard,” Henry added. “I’m sure she doesn’t want the others to know about the furniture in the school.”
Jessie grabbed her notebook off the kitchen counter and made some notes. “Martha is definitely a suspect,” she said. “But then…she seemed really upset when she saw the message on the chalkboard in Room 214 today. I don’t think she wrote that warning.”
“Then who wrote it?” Benny asked.
Violet shrugged. “Maybe there’s another suspect.”
“What about Ansel?” Henry said. “He keeps showing up with his camera right after each strange thing that happens at the school.”
“Also, remember when he said that he wanted the school to stay exactly the way it is?” Jessie asked.
“Maybe he’s trying to stop the renovation,” Violet said. “But why?”
They were all silent for a moment as they thought. But nobody had any answers.
Henry closed the laptop and folded his hands in his lap. He leaned back in his chair.
“I think it’s time to search for more clues,” he said. “We should begin first thing Saturday morning.”
Benny nodded. “But there’s just one thing,” he said.
“What is it?” Jessie asked.
“Can we have some tapioca pudding first?” Benny asked.
The Aldens were ready to leave the house two hours earlier than usual on Saturday morning. They’d asked Grandfather to take them to the Greenfield Public Library. The air was still crisp and cool when they got into the minivan.
“Hopefully we can get some answers today,” Jessie said, as she tucked her notebook into her backpack.
Once they were in the library, Jessie pointed to the second-floor stairway that led to the Periodicals department.
“Let’s check out old newspaper articles,” she said. “Maybe we can find out more about the Hawthorne School ghost.”
The Aldens found a computer station that they could use to look up digital copies of every issue published by the Silver City and Greenfield newspapers. Henry typed HAWTHORNE SCHOOL into the search box, and a dozen articles appeared on the screen. Jessie read the first one aloud.
“‘Hawthorne School Bake Sale Next Friday,’” she said. “That was March 19, 1948.”
“Mmm, a bake sale sounds good,” Benny said.
Henry smiled and ruffled Benny’s hair. “It sure does,” Henry agreed.
“Here’s another story from the 1940s,” Jessie said, pointing to a headline that read “Hawthorne School Modernizes First-Floor Classrooms.” “That must have been when they covered up that old blackboard.”
Henry read the short article. “Interesting. But nothing about the Hawthorne School ghost.”
They read a few more articles, one headlined “Fund-Raiser for Hawthorne School PTA” and another about the winner of an essay contest. But there was nothing about a principal who had been fired, and nothing at all about a curse or a ghost.
Benny yawned.
“I’m starting to wonder how anyone got the idea that Hawthorne School was haunted,” Violet said. “Nothing interesting ever happened there!”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Jessie, pointing to a headline. “According to this story, a photography darkroom was added to one of the classrooms in 1952. That’s kind of cool.”
“But it doesn’t explain the ghost,” Henry reminded them. He scrolled down to look at more stories.
“This one is sort of sad,” he said. “It’s about a Hawthorne student named Hyacinth Weaver,” Henry said.
“Hyacinth,” Violet repeated. “Like the kind of flower?”
Henry nodded. “The article says her parents owned Weaver’s Flower Shop in Silver City. In spring 1955, Hyacinth had to get her tonsil
s taken out and missed the last week of school.” He pointed to a black-and-white photo. It showed a young girl standing outside her parents’ flower shop.
“That’s all?” Jessie said. “She missed the last week of school?”
“But that’s the best week of all!” Benny said.
Everyone laughed at that.
“There’s one more article here, from later that summer,” Jessie said. The headline read, “Hawthorne School’s Doors Close for Good!”
“It says that the school wouldn’t be reopening in the fall,” Henry said, after reading the article. “Hawthorne School didn’t have enough students anymore, so it was combined with Greenfield School. And since Greenfield had a bigger and newer school building, students had to go there instead of returning to Hawthorne.”
Jessie wrote the date the school closed in her notebook: June 10, 1955.
“Well, that’s it,” she said. “Let’s go meet Grandfather.”
Grandfather was on the first floor of the library, standing next to the information center with a hardcover book tucked under his arm.
“Ready?” he asked.
The children nodded and walked with him to the minivan.
As they headed to Hawthorne School, Henry turned to his siblings.
“Do you think we’ve reached a dead end?” he asked them.
“It does seem strange that we didn’t find any articles on the former principal,” Violet said. “But I guess that means that story isn’t true. And that there’s no ghost.”
“I thought we’d find something more interesting about the school,” Jessie said.
“We only know about the bake sale,” Benny added sadly. “And that was a long time ago.”
When they reached the school, the Aldens climbed out of the minivan. They waved to Grandfather as he drove away.
“Let’s check in with Bob,” Henry suggested. “See where he needs us to help out today.”
They looked up and down the hallways and in each classroom, but they couldn’t find Bob.
“There’s Ansel,” Benny said, pointing down the hallway. “Maybe he knows where Bob went.”
They watched as Ansel turned a corner and then was out of sight.
Violet gasped.
“What is it?” Jessie asked.
“I-I just remembered something from the articles at the library,” Violet said. “I think I know where Ansel is headed. And it might be a clue!”
“How?” Henry asked.
“Follow me!” Violet said. And with that, she took off running in the direction Ansel had gone.
CHAPTER 7
Behind the Curtain
Henry, Jessie, and Benny ran after Violet. They caught up with her outside Room 108.
“In here!” she said.
Everyone followed Violet into the room. It was empty.
“Nobody’s here,” Jessie said. She spun around a few times to make sure she wasn’t missing anything.
“Did Ansel vanish?” Benny asked as he peeked under a desk.
“Of course not,” Violet said. “I know where to find him.” She walked over to a long curtain hanging in the corner of the room. It was made of dark, heavy velvet fabric, which she pulled back. Behind it was a tall, black pillar.
“What’s that?” Benny asked, pointing at the pillar.
“It’s a door,” Violet said. “A special one.”
The black pillar didn’t look like a door at all. But Violet reached around it and found a small handle, which she pulled. The side of the pillar began to move, making a rolling noise.
“It is a door!” Jessie said with a gasp. “A curved, sliding door!”
The black door was a little bit like a revolving door in a store. They peered into what seemed to be a round closet.
“But what is it?” Henry asked.
“It’s the door to the photography darkroom!” Violet exclaimed. “The one that was built in 1952! We read about it at the library this morning.” Violet knew all about darkrooms. She had once taken a photography class and had used a door just like this one.
“So how do we get into the darkroom?” Jessie asked. This big, round black thing didn’t look anything like a door. No wonder nobody noticed it, she thought.
“I’ll show you,” Violet replied. She stepped into the little round closet and motioned for the others to join her. “Now turn around and face the back,” she said. As they did, she slid the curving door. The side of the closet that had been open to Room 108 now slid closed, and for a moment it was completely dark.
“Hang on,” said Violet. She kept sliding the door until another room opened up—one on the other side. This room was lit by a glowing red light.
“I get it,” Henry whispered. “The special round door lets you get to this red room without ever letting in the light from Room 108.”
“Yes,” Violet said. “Because the light would ruin the photographs.”
“She’s right!” said Ansel, his voice coming from the red-lit room. He was standing at a table and swishing a photograph around in a pan filled with liquid.
“Welcome to the darkroom,” he said. “I’ve just printed a new photo. You can watch it develop.”
The children went over to the table as Ansel picked up a pair of tongs. He used them to hold down photograph paper in a pan of processing solution. After a few moments in the solution, the blank paper changed to show a black-and-white image of Hawthorne School. The photograph was beautiful. Then Ansel dipped his tongs into the pan and pulled out the photograph. He moved it into another pan of liquid, then rinsed it in a third pan and clipped it to a line to dry.
Several other photographs hung alongside it. Each one was a different shot of the school. One was a close-up of an intricate woodcarving that Violet recognized from the banister in the front hallway. Another showed the overgrown yard behind the school. The bare trees looked like skeletons. Ansel’s photos were all in just black and white, and they looked dark and mysterious.
“I had always heard about the darkroom,” Ansel said. “So I looked for it the first time I came here with my dad.”
“The night that we met you,” Violet said.
Ansel nodded. “The equipment is in pretty good shape,” he continued. “I’ve been printing my own photos here since the renovation started.”
Jessie noticed the darkroom was neat and tidy. Ansel had taken special care to keep everything orderly.
“I’d always used a digital camera,” Ansel explained. He pointed to a few different types of cameras on a shelf. “But then I started to experiment with traditional photography. This darkroom gave me the perfect opportunity to develop my own pictures.”
“When we first met, you said you wanted to keep Hawthorne School the way it is,” Jessie said.
Ansel furrowed his brow for a moment and swished another photograph around in the liquid. “I did say that, didn’t I?”
“That’s right,” Henry said. “So you don’t want Hawthorne School to be renovated into an art center?”
“That’s not what I meant,” Ansel replied. “I’m excited about having an art center. But I love how old and spooky the school is, and I was worried that the renovation would change that. I shouldn’t have worried though…It’s still as spooky as ever around here!”
The Aldens laughed along with him.
“And now,” Ansel continued, “I have all of these photographs to show the school at its spookiest. I want to create a gallery to showcase them during the grand opening. It’s important for people in Silver City to remember the history of old buildings like this one.”
“That’s a great idea,” Henry said.
“Do you want to see some of the photos I’ve taken around the school?” Ansel asked.
The Aldens nodded enthusiastically. Ansel opened a drawer and pulled out a case. Inside was a binder full of black-and-white photos slid into clear plastic sleeves. The Aldens admired the photos. Ansel had captured the school’s ghostly setting, but the images were also creative and beau
tiful.
“This one is very interesting,” Violet said. She lifted the page to inspect the image.
“I like the way the locker doors are casting shadows in the hallway,” Ansel replied.
In the photograph, all of the old locker doors were open. Violet noticed the lock dials were built into the doors. Their unique shape, combined with the lighting, made interesting shadows.
“Thanks for showing us your photos,” Henry said. “And good luck getting everything done in time for the grand opening.”
“Let us know if you need any help,” Jessie added.
Ansel smiled. “I will.”
Violet led everyone back through the small round closet and into Room 108. They sat down while Jessie took out her notebook.
“Now we know that Ansel isn’t a suspect,” Jessie said. She drew a line through Ansel’s name in her notebook.
“And we know that a ghost didn’t lock the door,” Jessie said.
“Yes,” Violet agreed. “When the volunteer was sweeping in here, she must not have known the darkroom door was there.”
“Because it doesn’t even look like a door!” Benny said.
“Right,” said Violet. “She left the room for a few minutes. When she returned, Ansel must have locked the door!”
“And he left later that night,” Jessie added. “So the door was unlocked the next morning.”
“So it wasn’t a ghost!” Benny exclaimed. “It was just Ansel.”
The Alden children looked at one another.
“This explains what happened in Room 108,” Violet said. “But who is behind the warning on the chalkboard in Room 214?”
CHAPTER 8
An Unexpected Discovery
“Benny,” Henry said, sweeping up a pile of dust, “will you hand me the dustpan?”
The Aldens were in the old auditorium, where their job was to sweep the floor. It needed to be clean for a fresh coat of paint. The art committee had asked local artists to design an emblem that would be painted on the floor. Bob had shown them a drawing of the design, which featured a beautiful H, A, and C for Hawthorne Art Center.