Mallory and the Mystery Diary

  For Mary Dietrich

  and

  Virginia Kilbourne,

  who taught me to respect children

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Letter from Ann M. Martin

  About the Author

  Scrapbook

  Also Available

  Copyright

  I closed my journal with a snap. I have been keeping a journal for some time now. The difference between a journal and a diary, as far as I can tell, is that a diary is a recording of daily events and you’re supposed to write in it every day. For me, a diary entry would probably go like this (on a weekday):

  Pretty dull, huh? But a journal entry would be much more deep and sensitive and interesting. Also, I don’t write in my journal every day, just whenever I feel like it. And my journal is a plain old composition book. You know, one of the ones with a mottled black-and-white cover. It’s not set up with four lines for March 2nd, four lines for March 3rd, four lines for March 4th, etc. It’s blank. So I can write as much or as little whenever I want. And I only write when I feel an urgency, which is often — whenever I’m angry or confused or think I haven’t been treated fairly. Also when good things happen.

  Yesterday I didn’t write in my journal at all. Today, which is Sunday, I was feeling sort of pensive, so I wrote:

  I hid my journal under my mattress. As far as I know, Vanessa hasn’t found it there. It wouldn’t be like her to go looking for it, though. Vanessa is a poet, and understands the need to keep your writing private.

  Who’s Vanessa? She’s my sister. I have seven younger brothers and sisters in all. After me (I’m Mallory Pike) come the triplets — Byron, Adam, and Jordan. They’re ten. Then there’s Vanessa, who’s nine; Nicky, who’s eight; Margo, who’s seven; and Claire, the baby of the family. Claire is five and very silly. She calls everybody a silly-billy-goo-goo. For instance, my Claire-name is Mallory-silly-billy-goo-goo.

  Just as I was hiding my journal, I heard Mom call from downstairs, “Mal? Can you come here for a sec?”

  “Sure,” I replied. I patted the bed to be sure the mattress didn’t look lumpy, and then dashed downstairs.

  Mom was in the kitchen. She was wearing oven mitts and setting a casserole on a cooling rack.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “It’s a welcome-back present for Stacey and Mrs. McGill. I know they moved in a week ago, but I figure a casserole is always appreciated. They’ve been unpacking for a week, Mrs. McGill has been looking for a job, and Stacey’s been busy with school and the Baby-sitters Club. I know they haven’t had much time for cooking. If they don’t want to eat this now, they can freeze it and have it some other night.”

  “Gosh, that’s awfully nice of you, Mom,” I said. “I know the McGills will appreciate it.”

  “Do you mind taking it over?” she asked me.

  “Of course not. I’d love to see Stacey.”

  “Great. Just give it about fifteen minutes to cool off a little.”

  “Okay,” I replied.

  You may be wondering who Stacey and her mom are — and also what the Baby-sitters Club (the BSC) is. Well, while Mom’s casserole cools, I’ll tell you about the McGills and my BSC friends.

  First of all, the BSC is a club that I belong to. It’s really more of a business, and the other people in it are my friends Jessi Ramsey, Stacey McGill, Kristy Thomas, Dawn Schafer, Mary Anne Spier, and Claudia Kishi. What our club does is baby-sit for families here in Stoneybrook, Connecticut. It is super-fun, and I feel very cool to be allowed in it.

  You see, the club was started by Kristy, Claudia, Stacey, and Mary Anne, who are all thirteen years old now and in eighth grade. Jessi and I are the only eleven-year-old sixth-graders. I am so glad the club is back together again. For quite awhile, we had to make do without Stacey. In fact, Kristy (she’s the club president) asked Jessi and me to join when Stacey’s family moved from Stoneybrook back to New York City, which was where they’d come from in the first place. (They’d moved both times because Mr. McGill’s company kept transferring him.) Then, after they moved back to New York, Mr. and Mrs. McGill decided to get divorced. They’d been having problems for awhile. So Mr. McGill stayed in New York with his job, and Mrs. McGill and Stacey returned to Stoneybrook. Unfortunately, they couldn’t move into their old house. Guess why? Jessi Ramsey’s family had moved into it! But Stacey and her mom found a nice old house that they like — and it’s right behind ours. If there weren’t so many trees in the way, I’d be able to look out our back windows and into Stacey’s back windows. Maybe that will happen when the trees are bare. At any rate, it’s nice to be able to walk out our back door, through our backyard, and right into Stacey’s backyard.

  On the day that Mom fixed the casserole, the McGills had been back for a week and a day. That meant that Stacey had been to three BSC meetings since her return — and, boy, were the rest of us glad to have her back.

  I guess I should tell you a little about the girls in the BSC, since the club is basically the most important thing in my life. First, there’s Kristy Thomas. I’m starting with her because she’s the president of the club. She dreamed it up and got it going. Kristy is part of an interesting family. She has two older brothers, Sam and Charlie, who are in high school, and one much younger brother, David Michael. He’s seven. Kristy’s parents are divorced. They got divorced a long time ago and Kristy never sees her father. However, last summer her mother married this millionaire, Watson Brewer, who whisked the Thomases across town to his mansion. (Kristy used to live on Bradford Court, next to her best friend, Mary Anne Spier, and across the street from Claudia Kishi. But not anymore.) Watson has two little kids, Karen and Andrew, who are six and four. They’re from his first marriage and live at the Brewer mansion every other weekend. (The rest of the time they live with their mother.) Kristy adores them. It’s a full household — and even fuller since Nannie, Kristy’s grandmother, moved in to help run the house after the Brewers adopted Emily Michelle, a two-year-old Vietnamese girl.

  Kristy is brown-haired, brown-eyed, the shortest kid in her class, and doesn’t care a bit about clothes. She always wears jeans, running shoes, a turtleneck, and a sweater (well, not in the middle of summer, of course). She has a big mouth, which sometimes gets her in trouble, she can be bossy, and she’s a tomboy. She loves sports. She’s also great with children, and coaches a softball team for little kids called Kristy’s Krushers. I used to be intimidated by Kristy, but now I like her.

  The vice-president of the BSC is Claudia Kishi. Claud is one terrific person. She’s a really talented artist and she knows how to paint, sculpt, make jewelry, sketch, draw, and do other things. She’s a total junk-food nut and keeps candy and stuff hidden all over her room. (She has to hide it since her parents do not approve of this habit.) Claud is also one of the coolest dressers I know. She would never, ever get arrested by the Fashion Police. She wears long, baggy sweaters, tight leggings, dresses with flared skirts, little ballet slippers, and wild jewelry. She makes a lot of the jewelry herself. To top things off, she is gorgeous. She’s Japanese-American, and has LONG, silky, jet-black hair; a creamy, perfect complexion; and dark, almond-shaped eyes.

  The one unfortunate thing abo
ut Claud is that even though she’s smart, she’s a terrible student. Her older sister, Janine, on the other hand, is an actual genius. Claud reads Nancy Drew books; Janine studies stuff like biogenetics and physics. Claudia and Janine live with their parents. Until recently, Claud’s beloved grandmother, Mimi, lived with them, too, but Mimi died not long ago. That’s been tough on Claudia.

  Stacey McGill is the BSC’s treasurer. I know her parents’ divorce has been hard on her, but she does a pretty good job of covering up her feelings, I guess, because so far she has seemed like the old Stace to me. Stacey and Claudia are best friends, and no wonder. They share the same wild taste in clothes and are pretty sophisticated for thirteen, although neither of them has a steady boyfriend. Stacey has blue eyes and short, fluffy, blonde hair, which is often permed. She’s a pretty good student, especially in math, which is why she’s our treasurer, but she has one big problem (I mean, apart from the divorce). Stacey has diabetes. Actually, she’s fine as long as she sticks to her diet and gives herself daily insulin shots. But who wants to keep track of calories all day, avoid sugar and sweets, and give herself injections? Not me. Stacey is philosophical, though. She says she’d rather do those things than get sick.

  Stacey is an only child, and I guess from now on she’ll be spending vacations and certain weekends with her father in New York. Her parents have said she can live with whichever one of them she wants, whenever she wants, just as long as the back-and-forth doesn’t interfere with her schoolwork.

  Our club secretary is Mary Anne Spier. Mary Anne and Kristy grew up together and are best friends (although Mary Anne has another best friend — Dawn Schafer). Mary Anne is like Kristy in that she is short and also has brown hair and brown eyes, and neither of them is as sophisticated as Stacey or Claudia. But there are major differences between Kristy and Mary Anne. For starters, Mary Anne’s family is as simple as Kristy’s is complicated. Mary Anne lives with just her dad and her kitten, Tigger. Her mom died so long ago that Mary Anne barely remembers her. When Mr. Spier found himself raising a daughter alone, he decided that the best way to do that would be very strictly. He invented a million rules for Mary Anne about what she could wear, what she could do, and where she could go. Now that Mary Anne’s growing up, though, he’s relaxed his rules — and two things happened right away. One, Mary Anne began choosing her own clothes, and they are much trendier. Two, she became the first one of us to have a steady boyfriend. His name is Logan Bruno and he’s really nice. I think Mary Anne was meant to have a boyfriend. She’s extremely romantic, very sensitive (actually, she cries a lot), a good listener, and patient and quiet. How she and loudmouth Kristy have remained friends for so long is beyond me. Anyway, Mary Anne is a wonderful person.

  Dawn Schafer is the club’s alternate officer. (I’ll explain what that means later.) Dawn has had a difficult year or so. Like Stacey, her parents got divorced. But her mom moved Dawn and her brother, Jeff, all the way from California to Connecticut. That’s because Mrs. Schafer grew up here and her parents still live in Stoneybrook. Dawn likes Connecticut okay, and she likes being near her grandparents, but she’s a California girl at heart and misses it badly. Her brother missed it so much that he finally moved back there to live with his father, so now Dawn’s family is cracked in two. But Dawn copes well.

  Dawn is an individual. She’s never rude, but she always does what she pleases. She stands up for what she believes in, dresses the way she likes (we call her style California casual), and eats health food while the rest of us pig out on junk food and red meat.

  Dawn has the L-O-N-G-E-S-T, blondest hair I’ve ever seen (it’s almost white), and sparkly bright blue eyes. Here’s an interesting fact about her. She lives in a very old farmhouse with a secret passage, and that passage just might be haunted by the ghost of a long-ago crazy man named Jared Mullray. This is okay with Dawn since she loves ghost stories, true or made up.

  Well, the only two club members left are Jessi and me. We’re junior officers, and are very much alike except for two things. I come from a huge family and Jessi comes from a normal-sized one. And I’m white and Jessi is black. These differences haven’t affected us much, though. We are the best of friends. We’re both eleven and the oldest in our families, we both feel that our parents treat us like babies, we both love to baby-sit (of course), and we both like to read, especially horse stories by Marguerite Henry. Beyond that, our interests are different. I like to write and draw, and I’m thinking of becoming an author and illustrator of children’s books. Jessi, though, is an amazing ballet dancer. She’s taken lessons for years, and attends a fancy ballet school in Stamford, Connecticut, which isn’t too far away. She has danced on stage before big audiences. She dances on toe, or as Jessi says, en pointe.

  In Jessi’s family are her parents, her shy eight-year-old sister, Becca, and her baby brother, Squirt. Squirt’s real name is John Philip Ramsey, Jr., but when he was born, he was so tiny that the nurses in the hospital nicknamed him Squirt. I wish I could say that the Ramseys had an easy time moving to Stoneybrook earlier this year, but they didn’t. They’re one of the few black families in town — and Jessi is the only black student in the whole sixth grade. I’m ashamed to say that some people were not very nice to them at first, but things have gotten better for the Ramseys.

  “Mallory!” my mother called then. “I think you can take the casserole over to Stacey’s now.”

  “Okay,” I replied.

  It was time to quit my daydreaming and get moving.

  Mom’s casserole wasn’t boiling anymore, but it was still pretty hot, so I had to carry it over to the McGills’ with oven mitts.

  Claire held our back door open for me.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You’re welcome, Mallory-silly-billy-goo-goo…. Can I come with you?”

  I thought about that. Claire loves Stacey, and I would need someone to ring the McGills’ bell for me. On the other hand, if I stayed at the McGills’, I didn’t really want Claire hanging around.

  At last I said tactfully, “I think the McGills are still unpacking, Claire. Their house is probably a mess. You know, boxes everywhere. I bet Stacey would rather have you see her house when it’s all fixed up.”

  Claire accepted that. “Okay,” she said. “Tell Stacey I love her. Tell her she’s still a silly-billy-goo-goo.”

  I grinned. “All right. See you later, alligator.”

  “After awhile, crocodile.”

  Sometimes, like now, Claire can be absolutely wonderful. At other times she can be a pain … in … the … NECK!

  I walked carefully through our backyard, through Stacey’s backyard, and around to the front of her house. I climbed her porch steps and stood at the door. Now — how was I supposed to ring the bell? The casserole weighed a ton and I needed both hands to carry it. I tried resting it on my leg long enough to let go with one hand, but — “OW!” The casserole wasn’t nearly cooled off. I was about to set it on the porch floor when I heard someone call, “Hello?”

  “Hi … Stace? It’s me, Mallory.”

  The front door opened. “I thought I heard someone out here,” she said, grinning. “Come on in.”

  “Thanks.” I stepped inside. “This is for you and your mom. My mother made it. It’s a tuna casserole. And it’s burning hot and incredibly heavy.”

  Stacey hurried me into the kitchen, where I set the casserole on the stove.

  “Gosh, that was nice of your mother,” said Stacey. “We’ve been eating take-out food all week, except for Thursday night when the Kishis invited us over for dinner…. Mom?” she called. “Hey, Mom!”

  Mrs. McGill appeared from somewhere, looking dusty.

  “Hi, Mal,” she greeted me.

  “Hi,” I replied.

  “Mom, look what Mrs. Pike sent over. A tuna casserole.”

  “Oh, how nice!” Stacey’s mother lifted the lid off the dish and breathed in deeply. “Oh, that smells wonderful!” she exclaimed. “I’ll call your mother to thank h
er as soon as I have a spare moment.”

  “You want to stay for awhile?” Stacey asked me. “Claud’s here. She’s helping Mom and me. Believe it or not, we’re pretty much unpacked. But there are cartons and crumpled-up newspapers and those little Styrofoam things everywhere. So now we’re trying to clean up. Claud’s in the living room. Come take a look around.”

  It was funny. I’d always lived behind the house Stacey had moved into, but I’d never been inside it. So I was pretty eager to look around, especially since it was such an old house.

  Stacey took me on a tour. “This is the dining room. And this is the back hall. See? Those steps go upstairs, and there’s another set of stairs at the front of the house.”

  “Cool!” I said.

  Stacey led me all around the first floor and I looked at the low doorways, the funny wavy panes of glass in the windows, and the floors that tilted a little.

  We met up with Claud and Mrs. McGill in the living room. Claudia was stuffing newspaper and Styrofoam bits into big garbage bags.

  “I think we should save the boxes, though,” Mrs. McGill said.

  “Are you kidding?” said Stacey. “You better save them — after all the trouble I went through collecting those things in New York!” She turned to me. “I had to go begging at the grocery store nearly every day while we were packing. I thought the manager was going to kill me. There’s no way I’m throwing them out.”

  “Why don’t you take them up to the attic?” suggested Mrs. McGill. “We can always use boxes.”

  “The attic?” repeated Stacey. “I don’t even know where it is. It’s not one of those ladders you have to pull down from the ceiling, is it?”

  “No. It’s that doorway next to your bathroom, upstairs.”

  “You’re kidding. I thought that was a linen closet. I didn’t even bother to look inside!”

  “That’s because you hate changing your sheets,” said Mrs. McGill, and we laughed.

  Claud, Stacey, and I each nested some boxes together. We climbed to the second floor with them. Then Stacey opened the door to the “linen closet.”