“Becca and Charlotte,” said Jessi. “Don’t you think?” She looked around at the rest of us.
“I don’t know what to think,” said Claudia. “But, no matter what, we’d better work fast. Let’s get some shovels and start digging!”
Half an hour later, we were scattered around the grounds of the arboretum. Claudia, Stacey, and I were digging (or trying to dig; the ground was still hard) in the rose garden.
Jessi and Mary Anne were checking out the area near the statue Jessi had wondered about, and Mal and Dawn were excavating underneath the birdhouse, just in case Mal’s idea about lovebirds might be right. We hadn’t even begun to clean up the mess from the day before, so the arboretum was looking as if an army had marched through it. We weren’t thinking about that, though. We were too busy looking for the missing fortune. We were so busy, in fact, that we didn’t even hear the sound of a car pulling into the driveway of the arboretum.
That was why it was a total surprise to look up from our treasure-hunting and see Mrs. Goldsmith staring at us — with Mrs. VanderBellen, decked out in a fancy red coat and high heels, standing beside her.
Neither of them looked very happy.
“Yes, I understand,” I said into the phone, nodding as I spoke as if the person on the other end could see me. “Uh-huh. Right. Sure. Okay.” I paused. “Can I just say one more time how sorry — oh. Right. Okay, then. Good-bye.” I hung up and looked around the room. Six glum faces looked back at me. I hated having to tell them what that phone call had been about.
It was Wednesday afternoon, and we were in the middle of a BSC meeting. It had been a very subdued meeting, especially compared to the ones we’d been having lately. Nobody seemed to feel like talking about the mystery or about anything else. We felt horrible about what a mess we’d made of things at the arboretum. As Jessi pointed out, we had done the opposite of what we had set out to do there. Instead of sprucing up the place to make it look attractive, we had made it look worse than ever.
“That was Mrs. Goldsmith, wasn’t it?” Jessi asked.
I had been stalling, hoping I wouldn’t have to tell everyone the bad news. But I couldn’t stall anymore. “Yes,” I said.
“And?” asked Stacey. “What happened after we left yesterday?”
The day before, when Mrs. Goldsmith and Mrs. VanderBellen had surprised us, we had tried to apologize for the mess. But Mrs. Goldsmith had just shaken her head and asked us to leave. We took off as quickly as we could.
“Mrs. Goldsmith said that after we left, Mrs. VanderBellen took a quick look around, decided she wasn’t interested in buying the arboretum after all, and said good-bye.” I said that as fast as I could and then looked down at my hands. I didn’t want to see my friends’ faces. I knew they’d look as horrified and guilty as mine.
“Oh, no.” I heard Mary Anne gasp. “How awful.”
“I feel terrible,” Claudia said. “How could we have gotten so carried away?” I looked up in time to see her stick her hand into a bag of M&M’s and pull out a handful. She stared down at them, and shook her head. “I don’t think even chocolate is going to make me feel better,” she said mournfully. She dumped the handful back into the bag.
“After all that time we spent worrying about somebody else sabotaging our work,” said Jessi, who was sitting on the floor, cradling her chin in her hands, “we sabotaged ourselves. How am I ever going to make it up to Mrs. Goldsmith?”
“If we’d found the fortune,” said Mal, “we could give her the money. But we didn’t find a thing.” She patted Jessi on the back. “Still, Mrs. Goldsmith will forgive us,” she added. “Someday. Maybe.”
“I can’t believe we’ll never find out where the fortune was,” said Dawn. “Now it’ll probably stay hidden for another hundred years.”
“Maybe Christina would have wanted it that way,” said Stacey. “After all, she left it for Henry, not for a bunch of baby-sitters.” She shook back her hair and frowned.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I mean, I felt guilty about what had happened, too, but I wasn’t about to let it stop me from solving the mystery of Christina’s fortune. “Hold on a second!” I said. “Do you all hear yourselves?” I got up and started to pace around the room. “Don’t tell me you’re ready to give up.”
“What else can we do?” asked Jessi. “Dig up the rest of the arboretum? I doubt Mrs. Goldsmith would appreciate that.”
“No,” I said, “but she would appreciate having a share of that fortune.” I sat down in the director’s chair again and looked around at my friends’ skeptical faces. “I’m serious, you guys. I was thinking about it last night, and I really believe we have to keep trying.”
“Okay, fine,” said Dawn. “Maybe you’re right. But how? Obviously, the way we were going about it wasn’t right. You can’t just dig holes all over the place.”
“Plus, we need to work fast,” I said. “Remember, somebody else might be looking for that fortune, too. That’s why I brought this.” I rummaged around in my backpack and pulled out a heavy, leather-bound book. I held it up.
“What’s that?” asked Stacey. “A treasure hunter’s guide?”
“Very funny,” I said. “No, it’s The Stoneybrooke Town Record. The book where we first found a mention of Christina.”
“What good is that going to do us?” asked Claudia. “You already checked all the stuff about the Thomas family in there, didn’t you?”
I nodded. “Here’s what I was thinking,” I said. “Remember when we were trying to figure out what was important about February fourteenth? Well, the almanac section of this book can tell us all about February fourteenth, eighteen sixty-three. I grabbed it on my way over here, thinking maybe we’d find some clues if we looked through it.”
“Hmm,” said Claudia. Suddenly, I saw a certain gleam come back into her eyes — the gleam that means she’s on the case. I noticed the other members of the BSC perking up a little, too. “So, what does it say?” Claudia asked, reaching for a notebook and pen.
I opened the book and flipped through it, looking for the right page. “Here we go,” I said, after I’d run my finger down the entries for February 1863. “First of all, it says there was a cow auction at the Gleeson farm.”
“A cow auction. That’s meaningful,” Stacey muttered.
I shot her a Look.
“Forty-nine of the finest heifers were sold to bidders from three counties,” I read, just to torture Stacey. “Sounds like a lot of fun.”
“Right,” said Stacey, grinning a little in spite of herself. “If you happen to like cows.”
The atmosphere in Claudia’s room had started to lighten, and I was glad. I can’t stand to sit around feeling depressed or worried. Not if I can be doing something, instead. I smiled around at my friends. Then I looked back down at the book and read the next entry. “Hmm, that’s interesting,” I said.
“What?” asked Jessi eagerly. “What does it say?”
“It says that Mrs. Jacob Smythe, the baker’s wife, has left her home and taken up residence with her sister, Mrs. Matthew Poole.”
“What does that have to do with the missing fortune?” asked Mal.
“Nothing,” I admitted. “But it makes good gossip, doesn’t it? Don’t you wonder why she left him, and if she ever went back? Maybe she didn’t like his apple turnovers. Or maybe she did, but he never made them for her. Maybe he tempted her back by baking a whole tray —”
“Kristy,” Claudia said. “Enough about the baker. What else does it say in there?”
“Sorry,” I said, stifling a giggle. I looked back at the page. “It doesn’t say much else. Just that there was a full moon that night.”
“A full moon?” asked Mary Anne. “I wonder if that could mean anything.”
“Like what?” asked Stacey.
“I don’t know,” admitted Mary Anne, looking a little embarrassed. “Never mind. It was just a thought.”
“Let’s see,” said Claudia, checking the list she’d ma
de. “A cow auction. The baker’s wife leaves him. And a full moon. What could it add up to?”
“I wonder if the baker’s wife left him a note,” mused Stacey. “You know, to explain why she ran away?”
“Right,” said Jessi. “Like, ‘Dear Husband, I cannot possibly eat one more of your disgusting apple turnovers.’ ”
Everybody cracked up — except for me. I had missed the joke, because I was suddenly thinking, hard. “Claudia!” I said. “Where’s that copy of Christina’s letter? I think I just figured something out.”
Claudia stopped giggling immediately and jumped up to find the letter on her desk. She handed it to me, and I looked it over. “This is it!” I said. “I’m sure of it.”
“What?” asked Claudia, who was looking at the letter over my shoulder. “I don’t see anything new.”
“It’s not something new,” I said. “It’s just that I’m thinking about it in a new way. See this perfect circle around the date?” I pointed at the paper. “What if that symbolizes a full moon?”
“Whoa!” said Jessi, jumping up to take a look at the letter. Everybody else clustered around, too.
“I think you’re onto something, Kristy,” said Stacey.
“Mary Anne’s the one who really thought of it,” I said. “She figured out that there was something important about the full moon. And I think there is. Don’t you?” I looked around at my friends.
“Definitely,” said Claudia. “But what?”
“What if,” said Mal, speaking slowly at first and then gathering steam, “there was going to be a full moon on the night of February fourteenth, the night Christina told Henry to go to their special place? And what if, somehow, the full moon would lead him to the fortune?”
“That’s it!” said Dawn. “That has to be it.”
“But how would the moon do that?” asked Stacey.
“There’s only one way to find out,” said Claudia, who was leaning over her desk, checking her calendar. “February’s full moon is — let’s see — two days from now! That’s Friday night. All we have to do is stake out the arboretum that night, and I bet anything we’ll see what Henry was supposed to have seen.”
“Do you really think it’ll be that easy?” asked Mal.
“We don’t have a thing to lose by trying,” I said. “All we have to do is figure out how to sneak out of our houses and into the arboretum on Friday night.”
As it turned out, it wasn’t easy to figure those things out. We spent most of the next two days talking about it: by phone in the evenings, and at school in the cafeteria.
“Okay,” I told my friends, at lunch on Friday. “I think we’re all set. You guys are coming to my house for a slumber party, as far as your parents know. Watson and my mom are going out, and Nannie will be busy looking after the little kids. We have permission to go to the movies, anyway. Charlie said he’d drive us wherever we want, and come back in two hours.”
“What if it takes longer than that?” asked Claudia.
“He’ll wait if he has to,” I said. “Now, we should really prepare for a nighttime stakeout. Like, we should all wear —”
Just then, I noticed — guess who? — Cokie Mason hovering nearby, looking almost as if she wanted to join our conversation. “What’s up, Cokie?” I asked impatiently.
“Nothing,” she said. “Can’t a person stand wherever they want anymore? It’s a free country, you know.”
I rolled my eyes and decided to ignore her. “As I was saying,” I went on, “I think we should dress in dark colors, so we can’t be seen so easily.”
“Great idea,” said Claudia. “Also, we’ll need provisions if we’re going to be standing out in the cold. I’ll take care of that.”
“And we should bring flashlights,” put in Mary Anne.
I noticed that Cokie was still hanging around, looking nosy. But I didn’t let it bother me. We had a lot of planning to do, and it was her problem if she had nothing better to do than listen to us. Still, it made me a little uneasy to know she was eavesdropping. It would be just like Cokie to mess up our plans. And if we wanted to find that fortune, we couldn’t afford to make any mistakes. After all, the full moon only lasts one night.
“Flashlights?”
“Check.”
“Notebooks?”
“Check.”
“Provisions?”
“Check and double check. I brought Fig Newtons, Apple Newtons, Cherry Newtons, and, just for a change, Chips Ahoy. Plus, some great sourdough pretzels for Stacey and Dawn.”
That was Claudia, answering my last question as I ran down the checklist I’d made for our stakeout at the arboretum. Going over it at that moment didn’t really make too much sense. If somebody hadn’t answered “check” to one of the items, it was too late to do anything about it. Anyway, we’d already gone over the checklist before, back at my house.
Charlie had dropped us off just five minutes earlier, and we were standing in front of the big, wrought-iron gate that led to the house and grounds.
The gate to Squirelot.
As I was saying, there wasn’t much point in my going over the checklist, but I was doing it anyway, hoping it would help to calm my nerves. I could tell some of my friends were feeling a little tense, too.
Mary Anne kept glancing around as if she expected the police to show up any second and arrest us all. Jessi and Mal stood close together, as if they’d be safer if they presented a united front. Dawn was playing nervously with her hair, which she was wearing in a long braid.
Only Claudia and Stacey seemed at ease. They were chatting about how much fun they’d had putting together stakeout outfits that were “dark, layered for warmth, yet totally hip,” as Claud said. She was wearing black jeans, short black cowboy boots, and a black suede jacket with fringe along the back and arms and silver buttons that looked like those old Indian-head nickels. Stacey was wearing black leggings, black high-top sneakers, and a long, bulky, dark green sweater. She had hidden her blonde hair beneath a dark green wool baseball cap.
“Love the jacket,” Stacey said, fingering the fringe on Claudia’s jacket.
“Your hat looks adorable,” said Claudia.
“All right, all right,” I said. “This is a stakeout, not a fashion show. You both look great. Now, can we get to work?” I checked my watch. “We have less than two hours until Charlie comes back for us.” I turned to Jessi. “Why don’t you lead the way?” I said. “You know this place like the back of your hand.”
Jessi took a deep breath. “Okay,” she said. “I guess there’s really nothing to be afraid of. Mrs. Goldsmith leaves at six, and nobody else is here at night. There’s no chance we’ll get caught.” She led us through the iron gate (it wasn’t locked) and up the driveway. “I think we might as well start with the rose garden,” she said, “since we think roses might have something to do with where the fortune is hidden.”
Silently, we followed Jessi, heading for the rose garden. Silently, that is, except for a short outburst from Dawn, when she stubbed her toe on a flowerpot. “Ouch!” she yelled. The rest of us turned around and shushed her. “I can’t help it,” she said, limping a little. “That hurt!”
“Okay, we’re here,” whispered Jessi, turning off her flashlight. “Watch out for the rose bushes. They’re prickly. Plus, I don’t think Mrs. Goldsmith would appreciate it if we trampled them.”
We gathered close together and snapped off our flashlights. “Whoa,” whispered Mal. “It sure is dark all of a sudden.”
“Where’s the moon?” asked Stacey. “I thought the point was that there was supposed to be a full moon.”
“It’s not up yet,” I whispered. “But I bet it will be soon. Christina’s letter said ten o’clock, remember? We just have to wait.” It was dark, but not pitch-dark. I could still make out my friends’ faces, which made me feel less afraid.
Suddenly, I heard a rustling noise, and then a sound like a twig snapping. Both came from the area behind us, near the fountain. “What??
?s that?” I hissed.
“I — I don’t know,” whispered Dawn. “But to tell you the truth, I’ve had this strange feeling ever since we got to the rose garden.”
“Like somebody’s following us?” Jessi asked quietly. “I know. I’ve had it, too.”
“Oh, man!” said Mal. “Who do you think it is?” She sounded scared.
My heart was beating pretty fast, too. But I tried to hide my fear. I didn’t want everyone to panic.
“Maybe it’s our friends, DT Developers,” said Jessi.
I remembered the business card I’d found. “DT Developers?” I said. I’d forgotten that was their name. “I just realized something! Remember Mildred Abbott told me about her cousin who was a contractor? Devon Thomas the fourth? His initials would be DT!”
“So you’re saying he could be after the estate?” asked Claudia. “That’s perfect. It fits. He could be doing the sabotage — and he might be looking for the fortune, too!”
“Shh!” hissed Stacey. “I just heard another noise.” We’d been whispering, but now we quieted down completely.
“I don’t hear anything,” Mary Anne said after a minute. Just then, somebody sneezed. “Bless you,” Mary Anne replied automatically. Then I felt her grab my sleeve. “Kristy! That sneeze. It came from over by the fountain!”
Then there was another sneeze, and another. Mary Anne was right. The sound was coming from the area near the fountain. And the funny thing about those sneezes was that they didn’t sound like the kind of sneezes a big, burly developer would make. They sounded more like my sneezes. I decided to take a big chance. “Who’s there?” I called in my gruffest voice. “You’re surrounded. Give yourself up now, and we won’t hurt you.”
“Kristy, are you nuts?” hissed Claudia.
“Nope,” I said with a grin. “I just had a pretty good hunch about who might be following us. And I was right. Check it out!” I pointed toward the fountain, and there, coming toward us out of the darkness, was Cokie Mason.
“Cokie!” everybody said at once.