Sleepover Stakeout (9780545443111) (3 page)

The
tall, dark figure emerged from the shadows and let out a mocking laugh.

A laugh that I recognized.

“Hunter?” I asked shakily.

He clicked on a flashlight and held it under his chin, illuminating his face. Yep. It was Hunter Fisk, seventh-grade mean kid. My fear morphed into annoyance. But at least he wasn't a man-eating animal or an alien or anything else Darcy had brought up.

I hadn't even realized I'd been digging my fingernails into Darcy's skin until she said, “How about you take your talons out of my arm before I start bleeding?”

“Oh, sorry.” I let go and brought my hands down to my sides.

She whispered, “It's okay. I was kind of scared, too.” She added with a wink, “But I'll never admit it.”

Then she turned to Hunter, and her voice went from soft to hard. “What are you doing out here?”

He took the flashlight from his face and shined it into our eyes. “I should be asking you that. This is
my
house.”

I knew that Hunter lived on Maya's street. He'd been teasing her on the way home from school a while back, and Zane had started walking her home to protect her. Which meant that Zane also lived in one of these houses, but I tried to focus on the subject at hand.

“We heard something and we were just checking it out,” I said. “We're on our way back in now.”

I started to move, but Hunter said, “Wait.” He seemed suddenly intrigued. “What did you hear?”

I paused a moment for Maya to explain, but when she didn't, I said, “It was a mysterious voice. Asking for help.”

“Male or female?” he asked.

“We couldn't tell,” Darcy said. “Too much static.”

Hunter moved closer. At least we could all see one another better with his flashlight bouncing around. “One voice or lots of voices?”

“We don't know,” Darcy replied again. “There was interference. It was muffled.”

Hunter stared at us suspiciously. I silently scoffed. Like we were the untrustworthy troublemakers in this circle? Puh-leeze.

“So you really heard this voice all the way inside Maya's house?” he asked.

We all shared a look. Silently trying to decide whether we should tell him the truth.

Maya gave in. “We heard it over the baby monitor. Sometimes those things can pick up other electronic devices, so we came out to see if any of the neighbors were watching TV.”

Hunter furrowed his eyebrows. “Well, I was playing video games, but there was no talking. Just shooting aliens.”

Something about that didn't make sense. I crossed my arms and narrowed my eyes at him. “Then what are you doing out here?”

“My TV faces that window.” He pointed and we all looked up at the now dark window that faced the backyard and the woods. “I thought I saw something out there in the dark. So I shut the game off and went up real close to the window to see if it would happen again, but then I heard voices. That's when I came out and found you guys creeping around outside.”

“So the voices were probably us,” Darcy said. “But what did you see before that?”

He looked down and shuffled his feet back and forth, as if he was embarrassed to say it.

“Come on, Hunter,” I said. “We told you what we heard. Tell us what you saw.”

“It just … it doesn't make much sense. It was probably nothing.”

“Spill!” Darcy yelled.

He groaned. “Fine. I saw a small light. Moving around outside. It was real quick and just sort of shot by in the dark.”

Maybe Darcy's alien theory wasn't too far off.

“But it was nothing,” he said quickly. “It was probably from staring at the video game too long. My mom's always on me about that. She's probably right.”

“That doesn't explain the voice we heard,” Maya said.

Hunter cocked his head to the side as if a thought had just occurred to him. “Could the voice have been an old lady?”

I shrugged. “Anything's possible. Like we said, it wasn't clear.”

“I bet I know who it is, then.” Hunter put the flashlight under his chin again. His whole face lit up orange and distorted. He made his voice go deep and creepy as he said each word slowly, “It … was … the … Old Witch.”

I took in a sharp breath. “Who?”

Maya gasped, “What?”

“You don't know about her? You should. She lives right across the street from you,” Hunter told Maya smugly. “Someone in the neighborhood should have warned you when you moved in.”

“A person lives in that run-down old house?” Maya asked, surprised. “I've never seen anyone.”

“She hardly ever comes out,” Hunter said, adding a dash of menace to his voice. “Only once every few years, when it's time for her to lure an innocent child into her house … for sacrifice.”

Darcy groaned. “You're full of it, Hunter.”

“No, he's kind of right,” another voice said.

Startled, I jumped and turned around. A shadow was walking toward us, from the house next to Hunter's, two doors down from Maya. Hunter shined the flashlight at the figure, and my throat went dry.

Zane Munro.

I slowly blinked a few times as he joined our group.

Zane was here. Standing right next to me. And I was wearing cloud pants. I closed my eyes and prayed for Darcy's aliens to beam me up. I opened my eyes again. No luck. Still here in my dorky pajamas.

“What do you mean ‘kind of right'?” Darcy asked.

Zane stuffed his hands in the pockets of his athletic pants. “There is a woman who lives across the street and hardly ever comes out. And she is very strange. But I don't believe those stories about her.”

Hunter said, “Well, then how did she get the name the Old Witch?”

Zane shrugged. “Probably from kids referring to her as ‘that old witch.' You know how these stories get started.”

Hunter shook his head. “It's more than that. She lives alone in that giant house and she's, like, a thousand years old. No one in the neighborhood can remember her ever being young.”

My logical brain told me that Hunter was only trying to scare us, but my illogical heart pounded wildly. Between hearing the voice on the monitor, sneaking around in the dark, and listening to a story about a witch, this was turning into one creepy night.

“Maya!” a shrill voice shrieked.

We all jumped, even the boys. Footsteps pounded the dead leaves on the ground as Anya stomped over to us. Arms crossed over her chest, she yelled, “What are you
children
doing out here?”

Again with the emphasis on “children.” Sigh.

Maya shrank back. If she was a turtle, she would have just retreated into her shell. “We're hanging out, Anya,” she said. “I didn't think we had to stay in the house. You're in charge of Rishi tonight.”

“Well, I'm in charge of you three, too.” She pointed at Maya, Darcy, and me. “And I came downstairs to find you gone. What if something had happened to you when I was in charge? Mom and Dad would kill me.”

No, don't worry about the mysterious, awful thing that happened to us in that scenario, Anya. The more important thing is that you would've been punished.
I made a mental note to thank my parents for keeping me an only child.

“Get in the house!” Anya ordered, then stormed back the way she came.

The three of us turned to follow her. The fun was over, for now.

I glanced over my shoulder to wave good-bye to Zane, but he looked uncharacteristically serious.

“Find me at school on Monday,” he said, eyes set intently on me. “I have to tell you something.”

I
loved science class. And this term we were studying weather, which — though it wasn't astronomy — was still pretty cool. But Mr. Mahoney was tough. He's the Simon Cowell of teachers. You could get every question right and he'd point out that your handwriting could've been better. But, even so, I wasn't expecting the horror that landed on my desk Monday.

We'd had a quiz the previous week on converting Celsius to Fahrenheit and vice versa. There were only four problems and I'd thought it was pretty easy. As Mr. Mahoney passed the graded quizzes back, I sat at my desk, thinking excitedly about Zane wanting to tell me something, and remembering the crazy night at Maya's house.

Darcy, who sat in front of me, got her quiz back first, and I saw a 100 scrawled at the top of hers. When I got mine, though, there was a giant 75 in bold at the top. There was also a note from Mr. Mahoney that said:
See me.

My stomach dropped into my feet. Possibly onto the floor. It probably rolled down the hall and into the bathroom to throw up on its own.

What could've gone wrong?
I wondered. To convert Celsius to Fahrenheit, you multiply the temperature by nine, divide that answer by five, and then add thirty-two. I checked out the problem with a big red X next to it.
Convert 38 degrees Celsius to Fahrenheit.
Okay … 38 times 9 is 342; 342 divided by 5 is 68.4. And that plus 32 is 100.4. And that was the answer I had written down. What the heck? Had Mr. Mahoney made a mistake?

I had trouble paying attention during the rest of the class. I couldn't wait for it to be over so I could show Mr. Mahoney that I'd gotten the problem right. Finally the bell rang. I picked up my stuff, told Darcy I'd meet her in the next class, and walked up to Mr. Mahoney's desk.

He looked at me from under his big bushy eyebrows. “Norah Burridge, what can I do for you?”

I held the paper out. “You wrote ‘see me' on my quiz and you marked an answer wrong that wasn't really wrong.”

“Ah, yes,” he said in his gravelly voice. “Well, Norah, your calculations were correct, but the answer was certainly wrong.”

Huh?

Mr. Mahoney stood and walked over to the far left side of the board, where the four quiz questions still remained. “You correctly calculated that 38 degrees Celsius is 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit. However, what was the question?”

I stepped closer to the board.
Oh no.
Question number four wasn't “convert 38 degrees,” it was “convert 30 degrees.” I'd copied the wrong number down from the board. Just like I had done with my math homework last week. What was wrong with me? Was I having trouble focusing? Maybe running Partners in Crime on top of my homework was too much?

“This note is for your parents.” He handed me a folded-up piece of paper. “I've noticed you squinting a lot in class, especially when you try to read the board. And now this mistake as well. I'm recommending that you get your eyes checked.” At my blank look, he added, “You may need glasses.”

I didn't know if that was bad news or good news. It
would
explain why I'd been having those mess-ups lately. But … glasses?! I couldn't imagine them on me.

My shoulders sagged. I took the note and turned to leave. “Thank you, Mr. Mahoney.”

“Norah,” he said. His voice was a little softer than the one he used in class. “If you do need glasses, let me know and I'll change your grade.”

But even that didn't make me feel better.

 

Darcy
passed me a note in English.

 

Partners in Crime meeting. After school. You, me, Fiona. The Java Lamp. We need to come up with our next steps for Maya's case.

 

I smiled, pleased that she'd gotten over whatever was bothering her the other day and had invited Fiona along. I scribbled back:
I'm in
. Then I pretended to yawn, stretching my arms up into the air so I could drop the note onto Darcy's desk behind me.

The prospect of getting one of those giant face-size cookies from the Java Lamp made me feel a little bit better after my “I may need glasses” revelation. What was also making me feel better was knowing that I had an excuse to talk to Zane sometime today. But about what?

I was reminded of a conversation I'd had with Maya when Darcy and I were working on our first case. Maya had been nervous to talk to me, as usual, but then she'd blurted out that Zane had a secret.

She never told me what it was, which really stank. But at the same time, it made me like Maya more because she could obviously be trusted with secrets. After Hunter started teasing Maya on the way home from school, Zane had walked with her to protect her. And they'd become friends. I'd wondered if the big secret was that they were becoming boyfriend and girlfriend, but it didn't seem like that was it.

After the last bell, I hung around my locker, wondering if Zane might stop by. I didn't want to be standing there doing nothing and looking desperate. So I reached into my book bag front pocket, where I'd stashed the piece of paper I'd found on the ground behind Hunter's house Saturday night.

I squinted, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. It looked like some sort of swirly design. Was it three connected butterflies? No, the thing on the right looked like a butterfly, or a sideways heart, but the rest of it … I shrugged and stuffed it back into my backpack. It was just someone's elaborate doodle. Not a clue.

I wondered if Zane was waiting for me at
his
locker, so I closed mine and walked down the opposite hallway to find him. I didn't know which locker number was his but knew it was in this block. I stopped, looked around, and sighed. He wasn't there. I stood still for a moment, trying to decide whether I should give up and leave. Then a big hand grabbed my upper arm and spun me around.

“Hey, Norah,” Slade said in a mocking tone. “I hear the Old Witch is after you.”

Great. Hunter had told his best friend about Saturday night. Just what I needed. More taunting from Slade.

He did his best evil witch cackle, throwing his head back and laughing. His fingers were still wrapped around my arm. I tried to pull away, but his grip only tightened.

Darcy came up beside me and growled, “Take your hand off my best friend or I will punch you into next week.”

Wow. A time-traveling beatdown. Darcy's threats were creative.

Slade let go, but his dark eyes never left mine. “Watch out.” He pointed at us as he stepped backward. “One of you girls is next. The witch is hungry.”

“Ignore him,” Darcy said, leading me away. “Someone's waiting for you at your locker.”