The afternoon got off to a good start. For once, the triplets allowed Nicky to play with them. The four boys tore around on their driveway, shooting baskets. They’d split into teams — the triplets against Nicky — but Nicky seemed satisfied.
“What should we make for lunch?” I asked Mallory.
It was late for lunch, but Mrs. Pike had had a hectic morning and hadn’t gotten around to feeding the kids lunch. She was going to feed the girls at the mall. (That probably happens a lot when you have eight children.)
“Let’s do a smorgasbord,” said Mallory.
“How?” I asked.
“It’s simple. We take every thing out of the refrigerator, put it on the table, and let the boys fix whatever they want.”
I laughed. “It sounds messy.”
“It is,” agreed Mallory, “but it’s fun. And Mom likes us to use up leftovers.”
I looked inside the refrigerator. Then I looked back at Mallory. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
We only needed about two minutes to pull every thing out of the refrigerator and arrange it on the kitchen table. Then we set out plates, cups, napkins, and forks, and called the boys inside.
“All right!” cried Jordan when he got a look at the kitchen.
“Yeah!” exclaimed Nicky. “All right! We’re having a schmurgerbeard!”
“That’s smorgasbord, stupid,” said one of the triplets.
“Don’t call Nicky stupid,” I said.
Nobody even heard me.
Adam was glopping mayonnaise onto a piece of bread.
Byron was digging into the peanut butter with one hand, and eating a dill pickle with the other.
And Jordan was standing at the stove, turning the flame up under a frying pan.
“Jordan! What are you doing?” I cried.
“Making fried baloney.”
“Well, let me do that.”
I was beginning to think that the schmurgerbeard hadn’t been such a good idea. “Does anyone else want fried baloney?” I asked.
“I want fried peanut butter and jelly,” replied Byron.
“I want a fried egg,” replied Adam.
“I want fried barf,” replied Nicky.
“Ha, ha. So funny I forgot to laugh,” said Jordan.
The triplets looked at each other, smirking.
“Hey, Nicky,” said Adam, “say Mark Twain’s initials and point to your head.”
“Oh, simple,” said Nicky. He pointed to his left ear. “M.T.”
The triplets doubled over with laughter.
“M.T. Empty!” hooted Adam. “Get it? You’ve got nothing in your head, Nicky. Not one little brain. It’s empty!”
“Ha, ha. So funny I forgot to laugh,” said Nicky.
I thought his comeback was pretty good, considering, but the triplets barely heard him.
“Come on now,” I said. “Who wants fried what?”
After much debate, I made fried baloney for Jordan and Adam, and a fried peanut butter and jelly sandwich for Byron. Nicky said he wasn’t hungry, but finally fixed himself a potato chip and banana sandwich. I started to say something to him about that, and then remembered that the Pike kids are allowed to eat whatever they want (within reason). Mallory made tuna-fish sandwiches for the two of us.
We carried our lunches to the table on the sun porch. Everything was peaceful until the very end of the meal. Nicky, who had been silent since the Mark Twain incident, stood up and stacked his glass on his plate.
“Here, Nicky. You want the rest of this cupcake?” asked Adam, holding out half of a gooey chocolate concoction. He must have been having an attack of conscience.
“Sure,” said Nicky, flattered. He set his plate down.
As he did so, Adam reached behind him and pulled his chair out from under him.
Nicky sat down hard on the floor.
“Adam!” I shouted. The triplets knew I was angry, but they couldn’t help laughing silently, their faces turning red and their eyes filling with tears of laughter.
Nicky sat on the floor for a moment, looking surprised. Then he scrambled to his feet and ran off the porch. A second later, the front door slammed.
I counted to ten before I opened my mouth. Then I said very quietly, “You three are in major trouble.”
The laughter stopped.
“You’ve been rotten to Nicky today. Really rotten. I’m going to have to tell your mother about this.”
“Aw —” began Jordan.
“Nope!” I cried. “I don’t want to hear a word about it. Right now I’m going to look for your brother. Mallory will be in charge. I want to see the porch and the kitchen sparkling by the time I get back. And if you give Mallory any trouble, your mother will hear about that, too.”
I marched out of the Pikes’ house. The triplets had rarely seen me angry. That’s because I rarely get angry. Sometimes I pout or feel cross, but I don’t often scold. And I had never scolded the Pikes. I felt kind of bad about it, but the triplets had really been mean to Nicky. I hoped Mallory knew I wasn’t angry at her. Oh, well. I’d straighten every thing out when I got back.
As I ran down the street, my anger began to turn to excitement. I realized that I was finally going to have the chance to test my theory!
I didn’t bother to call for Nicky. I ran right to my own house, darted across the lawn, around to the back, and into the barn. I paused to let my eyes adjust to the dim light.
Just as I expected, the bale of hay that Mom had shoved over the trapdoor had been moved aside. In fact, the trapdoor itself was open. I drew in my breath and stepped boldly down the ladder.
“Nicky?” I called, but my voice was no higher than a whisper.
I jumped down the last two rungs.
“Nicky?”
That was when I realized I didn’t even have a flashlight. If Nicky wasn’t going to answer me, then I’d have to go after him. I ran into our kitchen, found a flashlight, and ran back out to the barn.
“Nicky!” I called again as I lowered myself through the trapdoor.
I thought I could hear heavy breathing, but when I shined the light around I saw nothing but darkness. An awful thought struck me then: What if I was wrong? What if it wasn’t Nicky in the passage? What if it was Jared?
The thought scared me so that I climbed all the way back up the ladder and sat down on the bale of hay.
I considered calling my mother.
I considered calling Mary Anne.
I considered calling the police.
But I didn’t call any of them. I wanted to solve the mystery. I turned over the evidence and the clues I had gathered:
I had found some very old things in the secret passage. They looked like they had been there for years. I had kept them.
I had seen some things in the passage that had later disappeared.
Some other things had appeared in the passage and stayed there (like the peanut shells and the bread crust).
I had heard tons of weird noises coming from the passage. I’d heard a lot of them during the day, but I’d heard some of them in the dead of night.
Nicky might be in the passage now … and he might not. I decided to take a chance.
I eased myself through the trapdoor again and jumped onto the dirt floor. Now there was something that had always bothered me. Why was the dirt floor so hard-packed? Simple, I answered myself. Because it had been walked on a lot, even before I found it. Someone had been using the passage frequently — and it wasn’t Jared, since ghosts don’t weigh anything.
I took a deep breath and marched forward.
“Nicky!” I called. “I’m coming after you right now.”
I heard footsteps then, far down the passage. With a pounding heart, I followed them.
The footsteps began to run, and I ran after them.
The footsteps thumped up the stairs. I thumped after them.
Then I turned the corner and shined the light ahead of me to the end of the passage.
Crouched in one
corner was a small figure.
“Nicky!” I exclaimed. “So it is you, after all.”
Nicky didn’t answer. I ran to him.
“Nicky?” I said again.
“Oh, Dawn!” he burst out. “Why’d you have to find me?”
“Is this your secret place? Is this where you go when you disappear?”
He nodded. “Well, not right here. Usually I stop when I get to the stairs. I mean, this is your house. I didn’t want to trespass or anything…. We are somewhere inside your house, aren’t we?”
“Yeah. You don’t know where the passage ends up?”
“Just in this dead end, I thought.”
“Nope. Not quite. I’ll show you.” I was pretty sure my wall was unlocked, so I released the catch.
Nicky watched wide-eyed as the wall in front of him began to move back. Through the opening, my bedspread appeared, then the dresser, the curtains, and the armchair. Nicky found himself practically in my room.
He stood up and peered inside, then looked back at me. “Whoa …”
“My bedroom,” I said. “Come on in.”
Nicky followed me inside. I showed him how the wall closed up.
“You can’t even see a crack!” he exclaimed.
“I know,” I said. “I looked for a secret passage in the house forever, and I never found this.”
“I found the other end really easily,” said Nicky in a small voice.
Nicky looked completely out of place in my bedroom. He was dirty and dusty (so was I, for that matter, but only slightly), he had chocolate cake mashed on one arm, and his cheeks were streaked with tears. Messy as he was, he was sitting on my clean white bedspread. I didn’t care, though.
“You want to tell me about it, Nicky?” He shrugged.
“How’d you find the other end?”
Nicky sighed. “One day Adam kept teasing me about this book I was reading. So I took the book —”
“Was it Great Dog Tales?” I interrupted.
“How did you know?”
“I saw it in the passage once. You must have left it there.”
“Oh. Well, anyway, I took the book and I ran away. I didn’t break the two-block rule, Dawn. I swear I didn’t. The back of your barn is exactly two blocks from the front of our house. I didn’t know if any of you guys were home, but I didn’t think you used the barn, so I snuck inside. It’s so quiet in there.”
“I know.”
“And I was looking for a place to read when I found the trapdoor instead. I opened it up and climbed down the ladder. And that’s how I found the passage.”
“And you started coming back?” I prompted him.
“Yeah. I kept a flashlight buried under some hay near the trapdoor, and I could go in the passage and think of mean things to say to the triplets or read or look at my coin collection.”
“Your coin collection? Oh, boy. I have about a million questions to ask you.”
“You do?” Nicky looked puzzled.
“Yeah. See, I thought the secret passage had a ghost.”
“A ghost?” Nicky shrieked. “I’ve been going some place where there’s a ghost?”
“No, silly,” I said. “You were the ghost.”
“Oh.”
“I mean, I think you were. Do you have an Indian-head nickel in your coin collection?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you lose it?”
“Yup. But I found it again.”
“I found it, too.” I told him about the stormy night and the Trip-Man.
Nicky laughed.
“Did you ever bring snacks over here?” I asked.
“Lots of times,” he replied. “Once, I even brought an ice-cream cone. The Frosty Treats truck drove by just as I got to the barn. So I bought a cone. It was called a Fancy Old-Fashioned Ice-Cream Parlour Cone and it cost a whole dollar.”
“I found the end of the cone,” I told him. “And some other things.”
“Sorry,” said Nicky. “I guess I didn’t clean up too good.”
“Too well,” I corrected him, “and you cleaned up just fine. I only found a couple of things. I thought the ghost had a sweet tooth.”
Nicky giggled. “I was here just this morning eating peanuts. That’s why I wasn’t hungry for lunch,” he confessed. “You know,” he went on, “now that I know you used the passage, you answered a question for me.”
“What’s that?”
“I used to see these old things in the passage.”
“A key, a buckle, and a button,” I said.
“Yes. Did you take them? I couldn’t figure out what happened to them.”
“I took them,” I said. “They’re in my drawer. Where’d you get that other key, though?”
“What other key?”
“The really old one. The one at the bottom of the steps.”
“I’ve never seen another key,” replied Nicky. “So it can’t be mine.”
“Are you sure? I know it wasn’t there a few days ago.”
“It isn’t mine. Honest.”
“I believe you,” I said, my skin crawling. If the key wasn’t mine and it wasn’t Nicky’s, whose was it? Jared’s?
“What’s the matter, Dawn?” asked Nicky.
I shivered. “Nothing … I’m sorry I ruined your secret hiding place.”
“That’s okay,” replied Nicky, but he didn’t sound as if it were okay at all.
“I don’t mind that you were coming to our passageway, Nicky,” I told him. “I really don’t. But you do know that it wasn’t quite right, don’t you?”
Nicky looked worried. “What?”
“Well,” I said, “technically, I guess you were trespassing, but that’s not what I mean. What I mean is that, for one thing, you scared me. You made noises when you were in the passage. That was another reason I thought we had a ghost.”
“I didn’t mean to make any noise.”
“I know you didn’t. By the way, did you ever hide in the passage at night?”
“At night?” exclaimed Nicky. “No way.”
“I didn’t think so.” I tried not to start shivering again. Who had been moaning and creaking around the passage during the nighttime thunderstorms?
“I’m sorry I scared you,” said Nicky.
“It’s okay. Really. Let’s go back to your house. Your mom’s going to be home soon.”
“All right.” Nicky looked as if I were going to lead him into a pit of vipers.
We left my house and headed back to the Pikes’. “Another thing,” I added as we walked along. “I don’t know how safe the passage is. Those stairs are old. So’s the trapdoor.” Nicky nodded glumly.
“Last thing,” I said. “When your mother made up the two-block rule for you, I don’t think she meant for you to go someplace where no one could find you. That’s just not a good idea. Okay?”
“Okay.”
I took Nicky’s hand. “Hey,” I said. “Look at that. Your mom beat us home. Let’s go tell her about your adventure.”
Mrs. Pike had been surprised, to say the least, when she had come back and found that I wasn’t there, but I explained the whole story to her, including the triplets’ pranks. Mallory, luckily, had done just fine with her brothers. While I was chasing after Nicky, she had gotten them to clean up lunch and then had settled them into a game of Monopoly. They were extremely quiet and well-behaved when I returned. I was really impressed with Mallory.
Mrs. Pike and Nicky and I had a talk before I went home.
“I need a hideout,” Nicky said, sounding the way people do when they talk about very important things, like food or money.
“I understand that, sweetie,” said Mrs. Pike.
“Well,” I spoke up, “I’ll have to check with my mom, but it’s all right with me if Nicky comes back to our passage.”
“It’s all right with me, too,” said Mrs. Pike after a moment, “as long as you tell an adult where you’re going first, Nicky. And maybe someone should check the condition of the passa
ge.”
“Yippee!” cried Nicky. “I just hope the triplets don’t start going there.”
“Believe me, they won’t,” said his mother.
“How do you know?” asked Nicky.
“Because I’m about to have a little talk with them.”
Nicky turned to me, all smiles. “You,” he said, “are my favorite baby-sitter in the whole wide world.”
“So what movie do you guys want to watch?” I asked.
“Ghostbusters,” said Kristy.
“Star Wars,” said Claudia.
“Mary Poppins,” said Stacey.
“Sixteen Candles,” said Mary Anne.
“And I want to watch The Parent Trap,” I said, looking woefully at the VCR.
It was Saturday night. The members of the Baby-sitters Club were crowded into my living room. We were having a slumber party. Upstairs, sleeping bags were spread over every inch of the floor of my bedroom. The bathroom was a disaster area. It looked like a makeup tornado had ripped through it. (But our faces looked great. Stacey and Claudia had practiced on all of us.) We had finished supper, and now we were settling in for a long night in front of the VCR.
“Maybe we could watch all of them,” suggested Claudia.
“Well,” I said, “let’s see. If each one is about two hours long —”
“Mary Poppins is longer, I think,” said Stacey.
“But Sixteen Candles is shorter,” Mary Anne pointed out.
“An average,” I said. “Just an average. What I was going to say is that that comes to about ten hours of movies. It’s nine o’clock now. That would take us right up to seven in the morning.”
We laughed.
“Let’s pick two,” I said. “We’ll vote on them.”
Everyone voted for the movie she had suggested plus one other. We ended up with a five-way tie. In the end, Kristy drew two of the movies out of a hat. (After all, she’s the club president.) The winners were Sixteen Candles and Ghostbusters.
“Mary Anne was jubilant. She’d brought two copies of Sixteen magazine with her, and there was an article about Cam Geary, the love of her life, in it. Cam Geary and Sixteen Candles created a really prime evening for Mary Anne.