Sleepover Stakeout (9780545443111) Page 3

  Darcy, Maya, and I quietly made our way back downstairs and sat on the couch. The TV was still on, casting its bluish light over the dark living room.

  “I think I know what’s going on,” Darcy said.

  Maya’s eyes widened. “You do?”

  “You think it’s Anya,” I said, and Darcy nodded.

  “My sister?” Maya’s face scrunched up in confusion.

  “She has the means and the motive,” Darcy said. “She could’ve easily snuck into the room, whispered those words, and snuck back into her room before we got up there. All just to mess with us … you … whatever.”

  I usually rolled my eyes at the conspiracies Darcy came up with, but this one seemed spot-on.

  “There are two problems with that theory,” Maya said. “First, Anya wasn’t here the other two nights I heard the voice. I was home alone with my brother.”

  “Maybe you thought she was out but she really snuck in to trick you?” Darcy suggested.

  Maya shook her head. “I doubt that. Plus, there’s the other problem. This is the third time I’ve heard that voice on the monitor. And it’s not Anya’s voice.”

  “How can you tell?” Darcy said. “It’s fuzzy. There’s so much interference, I couldn’t even tell if the voice was male or female.”

  Darcy was clinging to her theory, but I wasn’t so sure. Maya had some good points there. Though Anya could have disguised her voice.

  “Anya’s a definite suspect,” I said, “but we need to investigate other possibilities. Gather more evidence. Someone really could be scared, and need help. It might not be a prank.”

  Darcy heaved a sigh. “Yeah, you’re right.”

  I had a thought, and turned to Maya. “Has the monitor ever picked up any other interference before?”

  Maya nodded. “When we first got the monitor, it picked up the sounds of a TV show from somewhere. My parents thought it was funny.”

  “And it never happened again?” I asked.

  “They changed the channel thingy,” Maya said, pointing at the back of the monitor, “and that seemed to fix it.”

  I picked up the monitor and saw a switch with two options: channel one and channel two. I wanted to play around with it but didn’t want to mess things up.

  Darcy’s face lit up. “The monitor probably couldn’t pick up interference from too far away. Let’s go outside and check out the neighbors, see if anyone’s watching TV.”

  Maya wrapped her arms around her chest. “Like … sneak around in the dark and look in their windows?”

  I understood how scary it sounded, but being a detective with Darcy had helped me become a bit braver. “We won’t have to get that close,” I explained to Maya. “At this time of night, people watch TV with the lights off.” I pointed at the TV in front of us as an example. “All we have to do is look for the glow.”

  We slipped our shoes on and headed outside. The crisp night air was chilly against my cheeks, and I was really glad I’d worn a sweatshirt. We walked down the sidewalk and stopped in front of Maya’s neighbor. All the lights in the house were off. “Looks like it’s all dark in this one,” I whispered.

  “They might have a TV room in the back, though,” Darcy pointed out. “We should circle the house.”

  Maya and I murmured in agreement. We tried to walk stealthily along the side of the house, but dead leaves and twigs kept crackling under our shoes. The moon was only a sliver of light in the black sky. Goose bumps rose up on my arms, but not from the cold.

  I suddenly had the feeling we were being watched.

  My eyes roamed all around … left, right. I was casting a nervous glance over my shoulder when I slammed into something.

  “Ouch!”

  Whoops. I’d walked right into Darcy. “Sorry,” I whispered. It would’ve been helpful if we’d thought to bring a flashlight. Darcy was dressed so dark, and with her black hair, I could barely see her.

  She stepped behind and nudged me forward. “You lead the way, blondie.”

  Great. My hair was being used as a torch. And now we’d reached the back of the house, which edged the woods. And I had to go first. I squinted over at Maya’s house, mentally calculating how long it would take to run to the door if something happened.

  “Keep going,” Darcy whispered from behind me. Maya hadn’t made a sound.

  I turned the corner into the neighbor’s backyard. They only had a small patch of grass before the border of the woods. I shivered involuntarily. Woods at night creeped me out.

  “Nothing,” Maya said in her small voice. “All dark.”

  I tore my eyes from the spooky trees and looked at the reason we were standing there to begin with: the neighbor’s house. It was all dark from the back, too. No TV light.

  Something crunched underneath my shoe. I reached down and picked up a small white piece of paper. It was hard to see with only the light of the moon, but it looked like a drawing of some kind. I stuffed it in my pocket to check it out later.

  “Okay,” Darcy said, glancing from me to Maya. “One down. We should check the neighbor on the other side of Maya’s house and then maybe two or three houses across the street.”

  My mouth fell open. We had to do this several more times?! I didn’t think my heart could take it.

  But before I could protest, a noise silenced us. A cracking twig. Like the sounds we’d made walking back here.

  “What was that?” I asked in a tone that was hushed but also clearly terrified.

  Darcy’s eyes went wide, and Darcy didn’t scare easy. She said, “A person stalking us, a big animal, aliens come to abduct us …”

  Her imagination was really limitless. Maya let out a little squeak of terror.

  I spun around, trying to see anything at all. “Where did the noise come from?”

  “I … I couldn’t tell,” Darcy said. “Maybe the woods. Maybe between the houses.”

  Maya hugged herself. “We should go back inside.”

  Another crack.

  I whipped around and narrowed my eyes at the woods. I thought my heart was going to burst out of my chest.

  Another crack.

  “It’s not in the woods,” Darcy said. “It’s behind us. Between the houses.”

  How were we supposed to get back to Maya’s if someone was blocking our way? I reached out and grabbed Darcy’s arm. Somehow I felt safer knowing she was right next to me. “What should we do?” I whispered.

  The whites of Darcy’s eyes flicked back and forth in the darkness. “Two choices. Walk toward Maya’s house and find out who or what is over there. Or head into the woods and hide.”

  I didn’t like either of those options.

  But soon the choice was taken away from us. The footsteps quickened, got louder and closer. It was too late to hide in the woods. We were frozen to the spot. And a dark shadow emerged from between the houses, the way we’d come.

  “Anya?” Maya’s trembling voice called out.

  “Nope,” the voice in the darkness said. A mean-sounding boy’s voice.

  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 Fahrenhe
it. 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.