The Pearl Earring

  For lovers of spooky stories everywhere.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

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  About the Author

  Also Available

  Copyright

  WELCOME. You have arrived at the Haunted Museum. It’s a place where dreams are made — bad dreams! Ghostly phantasms float. When you least expect it, a hand grabs your throat. A jar falls and unleashes an ancient curse.

  I opened the Haunted Museum many, many years ago. And I’ve been adding to its special displays for longer than I can recall.

  Some say the museum has become a worldwide chain — just an entertaining fraud for the amusement of tourists.

  Others see something more mysterious, more sinister within its walls.

  Either way, no one escapes unaffected by what they find within the museum. The items that touch your hands will come back to touch your life in a most terrifying manner.

  Take, for instance, the case of Lily Powers, who has dreams of becoming a model. When she’s asked to pose by an artist whose portraits hang on the Haunted Museum walls, she jumps at the chance. But she soon learns that there’s something more to these paintings than meets the eye — something horrifying.

  Happy Haunting,

  Belladonna Bloodstone

  Founder and Head Curator

  THE HAUNTED MUSEUM

  BYE, MOM!” Lily Powers waved from the curb as her mother disappeared into a yellow cab. Mrs. Powers was on her way to the airport. That day she would fly to a college in Ohio where she had been hired to teach a summer class in art history.

  Lily had been dreading another boring summer on another boring college campus, so she was thrilled to find herself in New York City instead. She turned to her aunt Amy who stood beside her. “I can’t believe Mom will be gone for a whole month.”

  “It’s just you and me now, kiddo,” Lily’s aunt Amy said with a smile. “Think you can stand being with me for all that time?”

  Lily was sure she could. In fact, she was looking forward to it. Amy was more like a cool best friend than a parent. At twenty-three, wearing skinny jeans, a tank top adorned with the logo of her favorite rock band, lots of plastic bracelets, and short, spiky, bright red hair, Amy was Lily’s idea of the ultimate young city dweller. “I can’t believe your mom trusted me to take care of you,” Amy added.

  “Me neither,” Lily said.

  Amy scowled at her. “Hey! I resent that. I’m an adult, you know. Gainfully employed, even.”

  Lily laughed. “I didn’t mean anything bad by it. It’s just that Mom is so fussy about things and you’re … kind of not.”

  “I know,” Amy agreed. “We’ll have a good time. We can bike around Central Park, and there’s a cool Jasper Johns exhibit at MoMA.”

  “MoMA?” Lily asked.

  “Museum of Modern Art,” Amy explained. “It’s in midtown, but we can take the subway. While we’re up there, we’ll snag tickets at the Radio City box office. Mumford and Sons are playing there next month.”

  “I love them,” Lily said excitedly. “My friends and I just found some good concert videos on YouTube I could show you.”

  “I can’t really access the Internet right now,” Amy said.

  “I can help you with that. I’m pretty good with computer stuff. Does the router need to be reset?”

  “There’s nothing you could really do to fix this problem.”

  What could the problem be? “You do have Internet, don’t you?” Lily asked.

  “Sort of. I mean, I used to have Internet but I didn’t pay last month’s bill so the cable company shut it off.”

  No Internet?! “When will it be turned back on?”

  “When I pay the bill.”

  “Are you paying it soon?” Lily asked.

  “It depends what you mean by soon,” Amy replied in an apologetic tone.

  Lily tried to hide her disappointment. But hopefully they wouldn’t be spending a month at Amy’s apartment without Internet.

  “My roommate, Sylvia, is gone for the summer,” Amy added. “She got this great job teaching English in India, but I can’t ask her to split the bills like we usually do, since she’s away. I probably won’t be able to pay the bill until she gets back in September.”

  Lily didn’t want to make her aunt feel bad, though. “It’ll be all right,” she said cheerfully. “If I need to go online I’ll go to a diner or a library where they have an Internet connection,” Lily suggested.

  Amy grimaced and looked even more apologetic. “I feel bad about this but you’ll have to stay in the apartment while I’m at work.” Amy worked in the art department of a fashion magazine called Swirl, designing the look of the photos and the layout of text on the pages. “Maybe you could come into my office and do some filing for a few days.”

  “Filing?!” Lily said with a groan. That was her big treat?

  Amy sighed. “Sorry, kiddo. The only way I can bring you to work is if you file or run errands or something. I can’t let you go wandering around the city on your own. It wouldn’t be responsible, and I don’t want to let your mother down.”

  “I’m not a baby!” Lily complained. She’d pictured a week of exploring the city: going to shops, museums, shows. Hanging out within a two-block radius of Amy’s apartment wasn’t even close to the way she’d envisioned her summer. “How am I going to stay inside for three weeks?!” she cried.

  “Well, there’s plenty to do near my building, and I’ll be home by five-fifteen.”

  “That’s eight hours!”

  “Let me think about it,” Amy said with a sigh. “Maybe we can find something for you to do in the day.”

  “I hope so,” Lily said.

  “Anyway, the good thing about Sylvia being gone is that we’ll have more room,” Amy said, brightening. “Sylvia usually sleeps on the pull-out couch in the living room, so you can have that all to yourself instead of sharing the bed with me.”

  A bus went by as they walked, and on its side was a larger-than-life ad for a TV reality show titled Model Mania. “I love that show,” Lily remarked to her aunt, happy to change the subject.

  “That’s the show where girls compete for a modeling contract, isn’t it?” Amy asked.

  Lily nodded. “You have to be at least seventeen to be on it, though. I’d love to be a model! I hope it’s still around when I’m old enough.”

  “That’s five years from now,” Amy pointed out.

  “Four and a half,” Lily corrected her. “Lots of shows stay on that long.”

  Amy looked Lily over and nodded. “You definitely should model.” She spun Lily around so they could both see their images reflected in the store front glass of the dress shop they stood in front of. The curls of Lily’s brown hair bounced down her back, and she was almost as tall as her aunt, even though they were almost a decade apart. In the glass, the light of her large brown eyes sparkled back at her.

  People were always telling Lily she was pretty. It was flattering to hear, of course, but mostly she didn’t give it much importance. But since she’d started watching Model Mania, the life of a model had begun to seem exciting to her.

  “What do you feel like doing right now?” Amy asked Lily.
“It’s Saturday and I cleared my schedule so we can do anything you want.”

  “I don’t know,” Lily told Amy. “What is there to do around here?”

  “Hmm,” Amy said, as her forehead crinkled in thought. “We could shop for cool funky jewelry in the East Village, or we could check out Chinatown. If you’re up for a hike, it’s fun to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and back. You get a cool view of the East River and you can see the Statue of Liberty out in the harbor.”

  “That all sounds fun,” Lily said. “But it’s so hot out today and that sounds like a lot of walking. Is there anything to do nearby?”

  “There’s a Haunted Museum around the block.”

  Lily had heard of the Haunted Museum but had never been to one. “I’d love to see that.”

  “Are you sure it won’t give you nightmares?” Amy teased.

  Lily rolled her eyes. “I’m sure. Come on. Let’s go get haunted!”

  The first thing Lily noticed when she and Amy walked into the main room of the Haunted Museum was all of the DO NOT TOUCH signs posted among the various exhibits.

  “Like I would really want to touch any of this creepy stuff,” she said quietly to Amy.

  “Ah, come on,” Amy said. “This place is more cheesy than scary. It’s like a cross between the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, and Madame Tussauds wax museum.”

  Lily saw what Amy meant. Scattered around the room were exhibits that featured life-size replicas of sinister characters. There was a section called Famous Murderers of the Past that made Lily feel as if she were really in the company of Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden, and Deacon William Brodie, whom many claim was the inspiration for the character of the murderous Mr. Hyde in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. There was also a motion-activated talking skeleton dressed like the pirate Long John Silver.

  Moving deeper into the museum, Lily saw that different hallways branched off from the main room. Overhead signs identified them. A collection of haunted music boxes, haunted remains from the sunken Titanic, and terrifying artifacts of ancient Egypt were among the exhibits. To her right, Lily noticed a hallway leading to an exhibit titled Sinister Portraits.

  Lily poked Amy and nodded toward Sinister Portraits. “That sounds cool,” she said. “Let’s go in there.”

  A guard dressed in black appeared from out of the shadows. “Don’t touch any of the art in there,” she snapped.

  Lily jumped back, startled by the guard. “No problem,” she told the woman. “I wouldn’t touch a thing in this place — not a single thing.”

  Amy might think the Haunted Museum was silly, but Lily was starting to feel seriously creeped out.

  AMY CHUCKLED softly when they passed a large gold-framed portrait of a man whose eyes moved on their own. “So corny,” she commented.

  “Yeah, kinda dumb,” Lily agreed halfheartedly, but she didn’t like the feeling of the painting’s eyes still on her as she hurried away from it.

  It didn’t help that the hall was colder than the main room had been, and darker, too. Little lights below the portraits shone upward, lighting the faces in a way Lily thought was frightening.

  Lily let Amy get ahead of her as she lingered over a pastel portrait of Madame Elisabeth, a sister of the French king Louis XVI. The placard next to the portrait said that Madame Elisabeth chose to be beheaded at the guillotine out of loyalty to her brother and his wife, Queen Marie-Antoinette. Madame Elisabeth was said to have haunted her executioner until he went mad and killed himself. Many claimed that only after the man died did her portrait acquire its smug grin.

  Lily shivered at the idea. Could it be true?

  She moved on to the next portrait painted by an artist named Dimitri Fouquet. It was of Marie Laveau, who some called the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, with a living rooster in one hand and a velvet bag in the other. On the table in front of her was a small voodoo doll with nails stuck into it.

  Lily felt as though Marie Laveau was gazing right into her heart, and it unsettled her. The next portrait showed Mary, Queen of Scots, being executed. She was blindfolded with arms outstretched beside the executioner, who wore a black leather mask and wielded an ax. The card near the painting claimed that after Mary was beheaded, her lips continued to open and close for fifteen minutes afterward. And when the executioner lifted her head by the hair to show it to the crowd, Mary’s head fell out of the wig she wore and rolled through the streets for hours.

  Lily folded her arms as a sudden coldness swept over her. What must it be like to have your head cut off? Suddenly she didn’t like being alone in the dark hallway. She spied Amy looking at some framed paintings on the wall just ahead and hurried forward to join her.

  “Oh, there you are,” Amy said when Lily came to her side. “Look at these paintings. What do you think of them?”

  Five portraits of girls around Lily’s age hung in a perfectly spaced and balanced row. Each of the girls was lovely in her own way, though they seemed to represent different historical eras. Lily read the plaques at the bottom of each portrait.

  ROSALIE: CIRCA 1400

  ASHLYNNE: CIRCA 1600

  ANNE: 1792

  EMILY: 1816

  JULIA: 1920

  Lily turned toward Amy. “What makes these so sinister?”

  Amy shrugged but then looked at the card beside the portraits. “It says here that all these paintings were signed by the same artist: Dolores Agonie.”

  “But that’s obviously impossible,” Lily said. “They were all painted nearly a hundred years apart.”

  “That’s true,” Amy said. “Unless there was a portrait artist who lived to be almost four hundred, the portraits had to have been painted by different people.”

  “They would have to be,” Lily agreed.

  “And yet …,” Amy said, studying the portraits, “the straightforward, almost photographic realism of each painting is alike from portrait to portrait. The artists who did these must have carefully studied the style — the brush strokes, the use of light, the background — of the previous portrait in the series.”

  “That is strange,” Lily said as she followed alongside Amy, examining each painting.

  “It gets weirder,” Amy reported, still reading the card. “These paintings were all found locked away in a trunk covered in chains in an abandoned mansion in Newport, Rhode Island. A sign saying ‘Do Not Open for Any Reason’ was glued to the trunk.”

  But why would someone lock these lovely works of art away like that? There must be something really awful about them.

  A spell?

  A curse?

  Lily went from portrait to portrait, studying each girl. Rosalie was a green-eyed redhead in a red gown with a ruffled collar.

  Blond, blue-eyed Ashlynne wore a gown of green brocade. A tiny unicorn hung from a golden chain around her neck.

  Julia’s wavy curls were bobbed to her chin. Her fringed dress clearly evoked the days of the flapper in the 1920s.

  Lily stepped backward to view all the portraits together, and realized that all five girls wore the exact same glistening tear-like pearl-drop earrings!

  Lily stepped closer to the paintings to inspect them more carefully. She glanced to the right and then the left to see if any guard was nearby, ready to scold her for being too close but she didn’t see anyone.

  The earrings were somewhat buried in Rosalie’s high, thick collar, but they were easy to see under Ashlynne’s upswept blond hair. On Anne, the white shimmer of the pearl was harder to find, buried as it was in her light-colored hair.

  Lily touched one of the small hoops in her own ears. Mostly she liked hoops and colorful posts, the kinds of earrings she and her friends could find at the mall. How would it feel to wear a set of elegant, glimmering pearls like the ones in the portraits?

  Amy came alongside Lily. “What are you staring at?”

  “They’re all wearing the same earrings,” Lily explained. She reached up, pointing to the
pearls just below Julia’s hair. “See? Even this one. They’re buried under her hair but they’re right there on the bottom.” She brushed the earrings on the painting with her fingertip.

  Amy peered at the portraits, taking a closer look, then smiled at Lily. “You’re right! And I never would have spotted them on my own. What do you think it means?”

  Lily’s fingertip tingled where it had brushed the paint and canvas, and she felt a sudden chill run down her spine. “I don’t know — they’re pretty, though.”

  What kind of paint was that? Why did it cause that buzz in her hand?

  She rubbed her palms together briskly to shake off the weird feeling that had come into her right hand. “I’m starving — do you want to head back home?”

  LILY COULDN’T stop thinking about the portraits in the Haunted Museum as she and Amy walked home. Who was this Dolores Agonie? Could the artists all be descendants of the original artist — all with the same name?

  “Don’t look so serious,” Amy said. “I can see that those last five paintings really shook you. They’re a joke. A hoax. Did you notice that the signature on each painting was exactly alike? The same person probably painted them all last year.”

  Of course Amy was right. “I’m so easy to fool,” Lily said, blushing a little. “I always think this kind of stuff could be real.”

  Amy smiled as she fished in her canvas bag for the keys to her apartment building. “You’ve got a great imagination. That’s all.”

  “So you don’t think they found the portraits locked up in a trunk?” Lily asked.

  “No way!” Amy said as she pushed open the door. “I’m sure that was all made up. It’s not the Metropolitan Museum of Art! It’s the Haunted Museum!”

  They rode the elevator to the fifth floor and got out at the hall leading to Amy’s apartment.

  Almost as soon as they turned toward Amy’s place, Lily saw that there was a thin, rectangular package leaning against the door. “That’s odd,” Amy said. “Packages usually get left in the downstairs front hall under the mailboxes.”

  “Did you order something?” Lily asked.

  Amy shook her head and hurried toward her door. Picking up the package, she turned it in her hands, inspecting the brown paper in which it was wrapped. “This was hand-delivered,” she told Lily as she handed it over. “And it’s for you.”