Bending down, Miss Wolfson told Benny, “Bring some toys. I’m sure the ghost would especially like to have a few stuffed animals and some board games.”
Marcus Michelson’s face became very red. “It’s time for people to know the truth.” He stomped his foot, then put the hood of his black coat over his head and shouted at Mrs. Wolfson, “For all the trouble that ghost has caused, those gifts should be mine!” With that, Marcus stormed out of the cemetery.
He left just in time because a few minutes later Mrs. Radcliffe appeared. She was carrying a broom and swinging it like a weapon. “Get out,” she shrieked, sweeping at people’s feet. “Out of my cemetery. Stay off the grass. Don’t trample the flowers.” People moved aside, but no one left. Finally in frustration, Mrs. Radcliffe muttered, “The LaFonte ghost isn’t scary enough to keep people away. This cemetery needs a zombie!” With an angry huff, she stomped back to her office.
Chapter 7
Movie Magic
“Is there a zombie in Greenfield?” Benny asked at breakfast the next morning. “Mrs. Radcliffe said the cemetery needed a zombie.” The children were sitting at the dining room table, which was laid out with bowls and spoons.
Violet came in from the kitchen carrying a box of cereal and a carton of milk. “Mrs. Radcliffe is just trying to frighten people away from the cemetery,” Violet told Benny. “Ghosts maybe. Zombies…no way.”
“A zombie would be scarier than a ghost,” Benny said while pouring a bowl of crunchy flakes. “But know what would be even scarier?”
“What?” Jessie asked.
“Grrr,” Benny snarled, showing his teeth. “A werewolf.”
Jessie laughed. “Or a vampire.” She covered her neck with two hands. “That would scare me.”
“Mrs. Radcliffe scares me,” Henry said with a wink. “I think she can chase people away from the cemetery all on her own!”
Everyone agreed.
“Good morning,” Grandfather greeted the children as he brought his coffee cup and joined them at the table. “How’s the ghost hunt going?”
“After last night, our suspects are all now more suspicious,” Henry replied.
“It’s day three,” Jessie said. “The last day for people to bring gifts to the mausoleum.”
“Or get bad luck.” Benny trembled. “A whole year of bad luck.”
Violet said to Grandfather, “If we don’t find a person acting like the ghost today, we might have to admit that the ghost is real.”
“Or wait till next year to search around again,” Henry said, shaking his head.
“So what’s your plan for today?” Grandfather Alden asked as they finished their cereal. “Are you going back to the cemetery?”
“Maybe we should hide again and see if we can catch the person gathering the gifts,” Henry suggested.
Jessie opened her notebook. “Remember when Henry found out about the old LaFonte house on the hill? I think we should go there,” she said. “Maybe we can find a clue in the house.”
Benny took his empty bowl and got up to go into the kitchen. “I’m going to need a lot of snacks if we’re visiting a spooky haunted house.” He patted his empty pockets. “Lots and lots of snacks.”
“That reminds me,” Jessie said, getting up from the table, “Watch is probably hungry too.” She called to the dog. “Watch! Come here, Watch!”
Usually Watch came running at the sound of Jessie’s voice. But not today.
“Watch!” she called again.
“Where’s that dog?” Henry asked, going to search the bedrooms. “I bet he’s sleeping, or—”
Just then Benny came running in from the kitchen. “Watch is gone!”
“What do you mean?” Violet asked, hurrying to Benny’s side. She looked worried.
“When I came downstairs this morning, Watch wanted to go outside. So I tied his leash to the patio table. Now Watch is gone.” Benny’s eyes were wide. “I knew it! We should have brought a gift to the mass-o-lume.”
“Mausoleum,” Jessie corrected as she came back into the dining room. “There’s no ghost.”
“Then how do you explain this?” Benny held up Watch’s leash. “Watch escaped. We have bad luck! We have bad, bad luck!”
Benny ran from the room and came back a second later, still in his pajamas and his morning hair sticking up to the sky. He was holding a big bag of toys. “Gifts for the ghost. We have to deliver them right now so Watch will come back. Hurry, Jessie. Hustle, Henry. Come on, Violet.” He slipped on his tennis shoes. “Let’s go to the…” he said it slowly to be sure he said it right, “…mausoleum.”
* * *
Watch wasn’t at the cemetery. But plenty of people were there, and the area around the LaFonte mausoleum was piled high with gifts.
Benny walked carefully through the crowd until he reached one of the columns. He set down his bag of toys and began to put them on the ground one at a time near the mausoleum steps.
“Wait!” Vita rushed to him. “Can you take them back and do it again? I want to record you for my movie.”
Benny waited for his siblings to catch up. He asked Henry, “Is it bad luck to take them back? We’ve had enough bad luck already.”
“I think it’s all right,” Henry assured Benny. “You really don’t have to give gifts at all.”
“Yes, we do! We have to save our dog!” Glancing down at his pajama bottoms, Benny told Vita, “We’re kind of in a hurry to get these presents to the ghost.” He asked, “Have you seen Watch? He’s missing.”
“That’s terrible!” Vita said. “How about this? After I record you putting out the gifts, I’ll help you find your dog. Filming will only take a couple minutes.”
Benny agreed and took back his presents, putting them into the bag.
Vita asked him to move into the crowd while she framed the shot. She wanted the old grove of trees behind him and the LaFonte house on the hill in the distance. Looking through her lens, Vita shouted, “Action!”
Benny wove his way through the people around the mausoleum toward the column again. He took the gifts out one by one and set them down. He had ten different wrapped packages. Then Benny turned to Vita’s camera and said, “We don’t want any bad luck. We just want our dog back.”
Vita put down the lens. “That was perfect,” she told Benny. “I’ll quickly review it to make sure I got everything and that it’s in focus. Then we can search for Watch.”
Benny said, “I’m worried about our dog. Thanks for helping us.”
“Thanks to you too,” Vita replied. She switched the camera into playback mode.
“Did you know about the ghost story before you decided to make the movie?” Jessie asked Vita.
“No,” Vita said. “I found out the same way you did. The lights went out at Randy’s Café and then the lily appeared. That was the beginning.” She looked at the small screen on her camera and rewound the part she’d filmed with Benny.
Violet took Jessie aside. “It doesn’t sound like Vita is a suspect anymore.”
“She didn’t make up the ghost for her movie,” Jessie agreed, taking out her notebook and crossing off Vita’s name. “It was a coincidence that she was at the café that night.”
Jessie closed the notebook and everyone huddled around Vita’s camera to see the bit with Benny.
There he was, standing in the crowd. Then she moved out to the trees.
“Wait till I add spooky music,” Vita said. “This is going to be awesome!”
From the trees, her lens panned up to the old house on the hill and then down to focus on Benny…
Suddenly, Vita gasped. She pressed the stop button on the camera and then pushed the footage back a few frames.
“What do you see?” Henry asked.
“Is it the ghost?” Benny shivered.
She zoomed in toward
the house. “Look at this.” Vita turned the tiny screen toward Henry and Jessie. Violet and Benny squeezed in to see. “There’s something moving. There—” Vita’s eyes went wide. “Near the front porch. By the steps.”
“That’s not a ghost!” Jessie gasped. She jumped up and started to run toward the house on the hill. “It’s Watch!”
Chapter 8
Haunted House
“Don’t worry.” Benny untied the cord that held Watch to the splintered wooden stake in front of the LaFonte house. “We gave the ghost presents. Lots of presents. No more bad luck for the Aldens!”
“Watch didn’t run away,” Henry said, hooking Watch’s leash to his collar. “Someone took him. On purpose.”
“I wonder why,” Jessie said, bending down to hug her dog. “Is someone trying to scare us away?”
Violet looked up at the old house and wrinkled her forehead. “Maybe whoever is pretending to be the ghost wanted us to come here.”
“I don’t think anyone wanted us to come here,” Benny said. “In fact, I think we should leave. Fast as we can.”
The LaFonte house was dark and dusty. When a gust of wind blew, the enormous house swayed. It was hard to imagine what it had been like when Jacqueline LaFonte lived there. It must have been beautiful, but now the windows were all broken. The fence had toppled down and was rotten. The garden was a field of weeds.
Jessie saw a rat scurry under the porch.
Violet glanced over her shoulder. “I want to go inside,” she said.
“Come on, Violet.” Vita was right behind her, camera held high. “We have a mystery to solve.” She added, “This is going to be the best movie ever.”
The children entered through a side door with broken hinges. The door led into a small kitchen area, where rusted appliances sat covered with silken spider webs and thick dust.
“I don’t like it in here,” Benny said, squeezing himself between Henry and Jessie. Benny took a granola bar out of his pocket but didn’t eat it. He held it in his hand to give him courage.
The living room was in better shape than the kitchen, but barely. Antique furniture had been covered with sheets. The chandeliers were black with tarnish. The ceiling beams appeared sturdy, but birds had nested in the wide cracks.
“Okay,” Violet said with a quick look around. “Nothing to see. No clues to who might be pretending to be a ghost.” She crossed her arms and hugged herself. “No gifts. Let’s go.”
Henry insisted they take a peek in the dining room and a small parlor across the hall before they could leave. “No one would be foolish enough to try those stairs.” He indicated that the only way to the second floor was a narrow stairway with wilted boards and a broken handrail.
“A dead end. This is disappointing,” Jessie said. “I hoped that the answer to who was playing the LaFonte ghost and what was happening to the gifts would be in this old house.”
Henry headed to the front door. “We can leave this way.” Reaching out, Henry said, “I’ll unlock—”
The knob rattled.
“It’s the ghost!” Benny exclaimed. “Yikes.”
“We’ve gotta run.” Violet was shaking.
When the knob rattled again, Henry jumped back, colliding with Violet and Jessie. Benny crashed into Vita, knocking the camera out of her hands. It skidded across the floor and hit a wall at the far end of the living room.
In the middle of the wall was a door that the children hadn’t noticed during their quick look around. The door was covered with the same peeling wallpaper as the rest of the room. Had it not been for a small latch and the gap near the floor, the door would have completely blended into the wall.
“Whoa,” Vita said, scooping up her camera. “What’s this?” She reached out to tug the latch.
“Let’s go back out through the kitchen,” Violet said, hurrying in that direction. “I don’t want to know what’s in there.”
“Just a quick look.” Henry stepped next to Vita at the door. “It’ll just take a second.”
Violet cautiously stepped back into the room. “No such thing as ghosts,” she told herself.
The door creaked as the hinges gave way and the door opened to reveal a closet.
Crash!
A vase fell off a tilted shelf and shattered on the living room floor.
Just then, the front door of the house opened with a bang. A figure wearing a black jacket, face obscured with a hood, stomped into the room.
It was too late to run. Vita slowly turned around and raised her camera lens to her eye. “If I’m going to face a ghost, I should film it,” she said, breathing deeply. “A good director would never run away.”
Henry, Violet, Jessie, and Benny stared at the figure. Watch growled.
Marcus Michelson pushed back his hood, revealing his face. “What are you doing here?” he demanded to know.
“I—” Vita was so nervous that she had a hard time forming words.
“We came to get our dog,” Benny boldly told Marcus. “He was dog-napped.”
“What are you doing here?” Henry asked.
“This is my family’s house.” Marcus dangled the door key. “And you are trespassing. I should call the police—” He stared at the Aldens and then at Vita. Behind her, the closet door was wide open and the broken vase lay on the floor.
Marcus walked forward with large steps. “Look. There are my candlesticks!” He gasped. Marcus took a flashlight out of his coat pocket and shone the beam inside the closet. The light glittered on his gift to the ghost.
The closet was deep. Henry and the others leaned forward to get a good look inside. Shelves ran floor to ceiling and they were packed full. Boxes sat on top of other boxes, piled high. Everything the children had seen left at the LaFonte mausoleum was in this closet. And there was plenty of room for today’s final offerings.
“That’s where my presents will go.” Benny pointed to a big empty shelf near the back.
Henry turned toward Marcus. “You have a black coat like the one we saw in the cemetery. You were inside the café when the lily showed up. We saw you at the mausoleum. And we found the gifts in your family house.” He scratched his forehead and ran a hand through his hair. “Everything seems to tell us that you are the thief. But I don’t understand. Why would you steal your own candlesticks?”
“I promise you I didn’t take my own candles,” Marcus insisted. He looked over Henry’s shoulder. “I’ve been to this old house a few times since I moved to town but never noticed that closet.”
“It was hidden,” Vita said. She shut the door to show him how the wallpaper perfectly matched up, making the door disappear into the wall.
“If you aren’t the one pretending to be the ghost,” Jessie said, opening her notebook and looking at Marcus’s name on the suspect’s page. “Who do you think it is?”
Vita was busy filming everything. She turned her camera to face the suspect. “What do you have to say, Mr. Michelson?”
“I don’t—”
“Wait a second.” Benny peered into Marcus’s face. “Did you steal our dog?”
“I’m not the LaFonte ghost,” Marcus said honestly. “But yes, I did take your dog.”
Chapter 9
Who Is Greenfield’s Ghost?
“You took our dog!” Benny stomped his feet. “That wasn’t nice.”
“I gave him water and food,” Marcus assured Benny. “I did it because I wanted to get you out of the way.” The college student looked from Benny to Jessie, to Violet and Henry. “I’m trying to find out who is pretending to be the ghost, and you children are always around, asking questions. You’re ruining my investigation.”
“We’re searching for the same thing,” Henry explained. “We could help each other.”
“No,” Marcus said. “I don’t want help. I need to solve this mystery by myself.??
?
“But we—” Henry began then changed his mind about what he was going to say. He looked to his siblings. “I just realized something important. Marcus is Madame LaFonte’s grandson,” Henry said.
“He is?” Violet asked. “How’d you know?”
“This is his family’s house. He has the key,” Henry explained. He asked Marcus, “You put out the candlesticks at the mausoleum so that you could see who took them, right?”
“Yes,” Marcus said.
Jessie understood what had happened. She said, “When Mrs. Radcliffe said she chased someone else out of the cemetery that first night, it was Marcus. He was hiding to watch the candlesticks. Then, just like us, when he looked back from outside the cemetery—they were already gone.”
“I missed seeing the thief and it’s your fault. If I’d been the only one in the cemetery, Mrs. Radcliffe wouldn’t have been so upset!” Marcus said, “I have to find out who ruined my family name. I want to prove there is no bad luck. And I have to do it on my own.”
“But we’re good helpers—” Violet began.
“No!” Marcus growled at her. “I’m close to finding the truth. If you kids mess this up, I’ll have to wait another year until Jacqueline LaFonte’s next anniversary. I need to find out who started the rumor so that my parents and cousins can move back to town. I want to rebuild this house, open a business again, and start a fresh life here.” He turned to Henry. “Please stop getting in my way. Let me find the thief.”
“How do you know your grandmother is not really a ghost?” Benny asked.
“Grandmother LaFonte would never have stolen gifts. She was a kind and charitable person,” Marcus said. “Did you know she gave money to the children’s hospital?