I should have known. Nancy loves to be the center of attention. She plans to be an actress when she grows up.
“Let’s see,” said Nancy slowly. “Okay. Once — you know my charm bracelet? The one with the horse and all the other animals on it?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, once I lost the bracelet. And you know what? A leprechaun had stolen it…. Honest,” she added when she saw my face.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Because I found it in my underwear drawer, and I never keep it there.”
“Hmmm,” I said.
“Not scary enough?” asked Nancy.
“I don’t think so,” I replied. “Tell me another.”
Nancy told two more stories. They were not scary.
“Tell me a Ben Brewer story,” said Nancy at last.
“Okay.” I told Nancy just what I had told Hannie on Saturday. I told her all the Ben Brewer stories in one. I said how Ben was haunted by a ghost in his old age, and how he haunts the big house now. Especially the attic and his room on the third floor.
“But who was haunting Ben?” Nancy wanted to know.
“I’m not sure.”
“And why was a ghost haunting Ben? There must have been a reason.”
“Yeah…. And another thing,” I went on. “Why did Ben become a ghost? Boy, I better work on this story.”
“Why?” asked Nancy.
“Because I’ve got to tell the scariest story of all. I have to show Pamela Harding that I know a story and it’s a good one.”
“Pamela,” said Nancy, “is not the only other person who will be listening to your ghost story. And anyway, this is not a contest.”
“I know, I know,” I replied. “But I still want a good story. The best story. I’m sorry, but I do. And right now, this story is not finished. We have too many questions about it. I will have to find out what happened to Ben Brewer and why he was haunted.”
“Oh, just make something up,” said Nancy.
“No, I think a true ghost story will be scarier. Don’t you?”
“Yes,” Nancy replied, and shivered. She paused. “A true ghost story …”
“Ooh,” was all I said. I felt a little scared.
Help From Kristy
After awhile, Nancy said she had to go home. We took Emily Junior out of the playground and put her back in her cage. Then Nancy left.
I found Mommy and Andrew in the kitchen. Mommy was making dinner and Andrew was helping. He was stirring something in a bowl at the table. He was standing on a chair, wearing an apron. The apron reached down to his feet.
I giggled. He looked funny.
Then I said, “Mommy?”
“Yes?” Mommy turned away from the stove to look at me.
“Remember when you and Daddy were still married?”
“Yes.” Mommy looked a little nervous. Sometimes I ask her to marry Daddy again. She does not like to talk about that.
“And you and Daddy and Andrew and I lived in the big house?”
“Yes,” said Mommy again.
“Well, when you lived in the big house, did you ever see Ben Brewer’s ghost?”
“Karen —” Mommy began.
And then Andrew started to looked nervous. He stopped his stirring.
“Or do you know anything about Ben Brewer?” I went on.
“He was just a lonely old man,” Mommy told me.
“No. That’s not true,” I replied. “I mean, maybe he was lonely, but he was haunted by a ghost, too.”
“The one that could come down his chimney?” said Andrew. His eyes had grown huge.
“Yes,” I said.
“Karen, those are just stories,” Mommy told me.
“How did they start?” I asked. “Huh? How did they start?” I sat at the kitchen table, crossed my arms, and looked at Mommy.
“The way most silly stories start,” she answered. She sat down at the table, too, and pulled Andrew onto her lap. “People think someone is a little odd, so they make up stories about why he’s odd. Your great-grandfather was a recluse. Do you know what that means?”
“That he wrecked things?” suggested Andrew.
“No, silly,” I said. “I know what a recluse is. It’s a person who stays inside all the time and won’t come out.”
“Right,” said Mommy. “And that’s all that was wrong with Ben Brewer. Except for the fried dandelions. I think that’s true, too. And that’s as strange as being a recluse. So people made up stories about your poor great-grandfather.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Mommy.
“Then why won’t Boo-Boo go near the third floor at the big house?” I asked her. I felt pleased with myself.
“Because he’s lazy,” said Mommy. She put Andrew back on his chair and returned to her cooking.
“No,” I said. “It’s because he knows about the ghost of old Ben. Animals can sense those things. Boo-Boo is afraid.”
“He’s a ’fraidy-cat,” said Andrew, giggling.
I made a face. “You guys aren’t taking this seriously. I am going to call Kristy,” I said. “She will help me find out the true ghost story…. Can I call Kristy?” I asked Mommy.
“Sure,” she answered.
I knew that Mommy didn’t think Kristy and I would find out anything about Ben Brewer. But I knew better.
I called the big house. Kristy answered the phone! That was a good sign. I told her what I wanted to do.
“Will you help me?” I asked her.
“Of course,” she replied. “Come over tomorrow after school. We will do some detective work.”
The Mystery Grows
The next afternoon, my big stepbrother Charlie came to the little house to pick me up. He has his own car and he is very proud of it. Then Charlie drove me back to the big house. Kristy met me at the front door.
“Hi!” I cried. “Thank you, Charlie! Okay, Kristy. Let’s get to work.”
Kristy has as much energy as I do. “Ready when you are,” she replied.
The only thing I could think to do was to look at some old books in the library. Not in the public library. In the room Daddy and Elizabeth call the library, where they keep their books. Daddy collects old-fashioned ones. They are so old that their pages are yellow and they smell funny.
“Let’s start in the library,” I said.
“Okay,” agreed Kristy.
We went straight to the oldest of the old books. Some of the books were about Stoneybrook a long time ago. We looked at those first.
“Guess what!” I exclaimed. “They used to spell the name of our town wrong. They spelled it like this: S-t-o-n-e-y-b-r-o-o-k-e. They put an extra ‘e’ on the end.”
“I don’t think it was wrong,” said Kristy. “That was just the way the name was spelled a long time ago.”
“Oh,” I said.
Kristy and I looked at the history books. They were hard to read and we could not find anything about my great-grandfather.
Then suddenly Kristy cried, “Hey, look! A genealogy!”
“A what?” I said.
“A genealogy. That’s a book that tells about the people in a family. And here is the Brewer genealogy. Old Ben must be in here.”
Guess what. He was! We found him toward the back of the book. But we didn’t find much information.
“All it says,” Kristy told me, “is the date Ben was born; the names of his parents; the date he got married; the name of his wife; when they had Jeremy, their son — he would be your grandfather — and the dates when Ben and his wife died.”
“That isn’t very helpful, is it?” I said.
“No,” replied Kristy. She looked disappointed.
“You know what?” I said shakily. “I don’t think we’re going to find anything here. We are going to have to go into Ben’s bedroom.”
In Ben Brewer’s Room
“Into Ben Brewer’s bedroom?” cried Kristy. “Oh, Karen …”
“We went in t
he attic once,” I reminded her. “We thought the attic was haunted, but nothing happened. Except that David Michael played a trick on us.”
“Yeah,” said Kristy, smiling. “He hid, and we thought he had disappeared. But nothing bad happened. Still, Ben’s bedroom …”
We had to go, though. We could not think of any other way to find out more about Ben. Well, I guess we could have called Daddy at his office, but I did not think he would like that.
Kristy and I held hands. Bravely we walked to the second floor. Bravely we walked to the third floor. Bravely we walked down the hallway to Ben Brewer’s bedroom. We stood in front of the closed door. We did not feel so brave anymore.
“I wish the door was open,” said Kristy. “Then we could see inside.”
“Maybe it’s locked!” I said hopefully.
“Maybe,” replied Kristy.
I turned the handle. The door opened easily. “Here goes,” I said.
Very, very slowly Kristy and I walked inside the room.
“Pew! Gigundo pew!” I said. “This place smells.”
“It’s just musty,” said Kristy. “It has been shut up for a long time. It’s dusty and the air is stale.”
We tiptoed around the room. Some of the furniture was covered with sheets. What was not covered looked so, so old. And messy.
“Ben Brewer wasn’t very neat, was he?” I said.
“Not at all,” agreed Kristy.
There was stuff everywhere — old newspapers, candles, books, clothes, a clock on the mantelpiece over the fireplace.
“You know what I think?” I said. “I think this is exactly the way Ben’s room looked when he died. No one has touched it in years and years,” I added dramatically.
“Hey,” whispered Kristy. “There’s the fireplace the ghost came down.” (Kristy knew the stories as well as I did.)
Kristy and I peered into the fireplace. It looked like a regular old fireplace. The bricks were black from Ben’s fires, and it was filled with ashes. That was all.
Kristy and I did not feel so scared anymore. We let go of each other’s hands and we walked around the room by ourselves. We poked into things. We looked under sheets and on bookcases.
Kristy had just said, “Well, I guess there’s nothing here,” when I let out a scream.
“What? What’s the matter?” Kristy ran to my side.
“Look what I found,” I said.
It was a book. I had opened a drawer in a table by Ben’s bed. I had seen a tiny knob inside. When I touched it, another drawer — a secret one — had sprung out from the back. And in that drawer was a diary. I opened it. I saw the name Jeremy Brewer. I flipped through the book to see what I could learn, but Jeremy’s handwriting was hard to read, so I gave the book to Kristy to look at.
What I had found was the story of Ben Brewer. Or most of it.
“It’s here,” Kristy whispered. “Ben’s son Jeremy kept a diary, and the story is here.”
Just from reading a few pages, Kristy knew we had found a gigundo spooky story. And the spookiest thing about it was that it was true. It had to be. Diaries are always true … aren’t they?
I grabbed the book with one hand and Kristy with the other.
We ran all the way downstairs to Kristy’s bedroom.
Ben’s Birthday
“Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh,” I kept saying as Kristy and I looked through the diary. Sometimes I said, “Ooh, scary.”
This is the story we found, the story that Jeremy wrote down about his father, Old Ben Brewer.
Guess what? Ben’s birthday was on Halloween. Can you imagine? A Halloween birthday. I would not like that. First of all, you would probably only get to have one party, a Halloween birthday party, instead of a Halloween party and a birthday party. And second, who would want to be born on the scariest day of the year?
Then we found out that every ten years, at midnight on Halloween, Ben gives himself a birthday party.
“A haunted birthday,” I said to Kristy. My teeth began to chatter. That is how scared I was.
“Yeah,” said Kristy. She looked nervous. “Jeremy writes that the birthday parties started after his father died.”
“What happens at the haunted birthday parties?” I asked Kristy. I was letting her read most of the diary. Jeremy wrote in cursive, and I am not very good at reading cursive yet. It takes a long time.
“Let me see,” said Kristy. She flipped through the book. Then she looked again. “I can’t find anything,” she said at last. “I would probably have to read the whole diary. From beginning to end. That would take awhile.”
“I bet that at a haunted birthday party,” I said, “Ben invites his ghost friends over and they eat ghost cake. Maybe he invites Morbidda Destiny, too. I wonder if there are other ghosts in our house who come to the —”
“Yikes!” shrieked Kristy.
“What?” I asked.
“This Halloween, Ben is going to have one of his parties! It’s the tenth year. Oh, no. I don’t believe it!”
“Are you sure?” I asked Kristy.
“Positive.” She read to me from the book. She was right.
Suddenly it was my turn to shriek. (Again.) “I’m going to be here this Halloween!” I exclaimed. “I will be at the big house. Halloween is a big-house weekend for Andrew and me. I will be here for a haunted birthday party.” I was scared — but I was also excited. My story for the Halloween party was getting better and better, but there were still some things I did not know.
I did not know why Ben was haunted when he was alive. I did not know who had haunted him. I did not know why he became a ghost after he died. But if I could not find out those things, I could make them up. I did not want to, but I could.
Now I knew for sure that my story would be better than Pamela Harding’s.
“Do you want to take the diary home with you when your mother picks you up?” Kristy asked me a little later.
I looked at the diary. It was so spooky. I almost said, “No.” Then I changed my mind.
“Yes,” I said. “Maybe if I try very hard, I can read Jeremy Brewer’s cursive writing. And if I read the diary carefully, I might find the answers to some of my questions. We did not read the diary very carefully today.”
“No,” agreed Kristy. “We didn’t.”
She handed me the diary. She looked relieved.
Honk, honk! Mommy was here. It was time to go back to the little house.
“Haunted Birthday to You”
I thanked Kristy. I called good-bye to Nannie and Charlie and Emily and David Michael. Then I ran outside.
I climbed into Mommy’s car and buckled my seat belt. The diary was in my hand. And in that diary was the best story ever.
“What’s that?” asked Andrew. He peered over the front seat.
“Oh, just an old diary,” I said.
“Whose old diary?” asked Mommy.
“What’s a diary?” asked Andrew.
“It’s Jeremy Brewer’s diary,” I told Mommy. “Ben’s son. And,” I added, turning to Andrew, “a diary is a book that you write in. You tell about things that happen to you, or things that happen with your family and friends. It is a very private thing.”
“Then how come you have someone else’s diary?” Andrew wanted to know.
“Because the guy is dead now. He won’t care if I read his diary.”
“Karen,” said Mommy, “ ‘the guy’ is your grandfather. Be nice about him. And how did you get his diary?”
“We found it in Ben Brewer’s room. It was in a secret drawer in the table next to his bed. Kristy and I were so sc — I mean, so brave. We marched right into that room and we searched it until we found this diary. Jeremy must have wanted to tell the story of his father. I guess that’s why he put the diary in his father’s room. Anyway, did you know that Ben’s birthday was on Halloween? And after he died he started giving himself haunted birthday parties.”
“Oh, Karen,” said Mommy.
“It’s true. That’s
what Jeremy wrote.”
“Really?” said Andrew. His bottom lip trembled.
“Really,” I told him. “He gives one every ten years. And guess what. This Halloween he’ll be giving a haunted party and we will be at the big house for it. It will happen at midnight.”
Andrew began to cry. “No!” he wailed. “Then I’m not going to Daddy’s for Halloween. I don’t want the ghosts to get me.”
“Andrew,” said Mommy, “there are no ghosts. Besides, you will be asleep at midnight, so you don’t need to worry. And Karen, you are scaring your brother. Please stop it right now.”
“Okay,” I replied. But I sat back in my seat and said softly, “Yup. Every ten years. A haunted party. A haunted birthday party. At midnight.”
Mommy stopped the car. She turned around in her seat. “Karen, that is enough. I just told you that you are scaring Andrew. I don’t want to hear another word out of you until we get home. And then I want you to go to your room for fifteen minutes and think about what you’ve done.”
I began to cry. In the front seat, Andrew was crying, too. We cried all the way home. Mommy did not say anything.
At home, I spent fifteen minutes in my room playing with Emily Junior. I tried to think about what I’d done. But all I could think about was Ben.
When the fifteen minutes were over, Mommy said I could come out. She said it was dinnertime. I ate my whole dinner without saying anything about Ben or Jeremy or the diary.
Mommy gave me a hug and a kiss. I was glad she was not mad at me anymore. But I was mad at Andrew. He had gotten me in trouble because he is a crybaby. So when we were alone I sang to him, “Haunted birthday to you, haunted birthday to you. Ben Brewer will get you. Haunted birthday to you.”
Do you know what? Andrew stuck his tongue out at me.
The Wizard of Oz
On a Friday afternoon when there was still a week and a day left before Halloween, Ms. Colman let us make decorations for our classroom. We sat wherever we wanted and we made paper pumpkins and witches and skeletons and black cats and ghosts.
Ricky and I took our chairs to the back of the room and sat with Hannie and Nancy. Ricky was making a skeleton. He worked very hard on it. He cut out the arms and legs separately so that they could move. Hannie was making a grinning pumpkin. She called it a jack-o’-lantern. Nancy was making a black cat. And I was making — what else? — a ghost.