"You"ve been rotten to Nicky today. Really rotten. I"m going to have to tell your mother about this."
"Aw - " began Jordan.
"Nope!" I cried. "I don"t want to hear a word about it. Right now I"m going to look for your brother. Mallory will be in charge. I want to see the porch and the kitchen sparkling by the time I get back. And if you give Mallory any trouble, your mother will hear about that, too."
I marched out of the Pikes" house. The triplets had rarely seen me angry. Thafs because I rarely get angry. Sometimes I pout or feel cross, but I don"t often scold. And I had never scolded the Pikes. I felt kind of bad about it, but the triplets had really been mean to Nicky. I hoped Mallory knew I wasn"t angry at her. Oh, well. I"d straighten everything out when I got back.
As I ran down the street, my anger began to turn to excitement. I realized that I was finally going to have the chance to test my theory!
I didn"t bother to call for Nicky. I ran right to my own house, darted across the lawn, around to the back, and into the barn. I paused to let my eyes adjust to the dim light.
Just as I expected, the bale of hay that Mom had shoved over the trapdoor had been moved aside. In fact, the trapdoor itself was open. I drew in my breath and stepped boldly down the ladder.
"Nicky?" I called, but my voice was no higher than a whisper.
I jumped down the last two rungs.
"Nicky?"
That was when I realized I didn"t even have a flashlight. If Nicky wasn"t going to answer me, then I"d have to go after him. I ran into our kitchen, found a flashlight, and ran back out to the barn.
"Nicky!" I called again as I lowered myself through the trapdoor.
I thought I could hear heavy breathing, but when I shined the light around I saw nothing but darkness. An awful thought struck me then: What if I was wrong? What if it wasn"t Nicky in the pa.s.sage? What if it was Jared?
The thought scared me so that I climbed all the way back up the ladder and sat down on the bale of hay.
I considered calling my mother.
I considered calling Mary Anne.
I considered calling the police.
But I didn"t call any of them. I wanted to solve the mystery. I turned over the evidence and the clues I had gathered: I had found some very old things in the secret pa.s.sage. They looked like they had been there for years. I had kept them.
I had seen some things in the pa.s.sage that had later disappeared.
Some other things had appeared in the pa.s.sage and stayed there (like the peanut sh.e.l.ls and the bread crust).
I had heard tons of weird noises coming from the pa.s.sage. I"d heard a lot of them during the day, but I"d heard some of them in the dead of night.
Nicky might be in the pa.s.sage now . . . and he might not. I decided to take a chance.
I eased myself through the trapdoor again and jumped onto the dirt floor. Now there was something that had always bothered me. Why was the dirt floor so hard-packed? Simple, I answered myself. Because it had been walked on a lot, even before I found it. Someone had been using the pa.s.sage frequently - and it wasn"t Jared, since ghosts don"t weigh anything.
I took a deep breath and marched forward.
"Nicky!" I called. "I"m coming after you right now."
I heard footsteps then, far down the pa.s.sage. With a pounding heart, I followed them.
Chapter 14.
The footsteps began to run, and I ran after them.
The footsteps thumped up the stairs. I thumped after them.
Then I turned the corner and shined the light ahead of me to the end of the pa.s.sage.
Crouched in one corner was a small figure.
"Nicky!" I exclaimed. "So it is you, after all."
Nicky didn"t answer. I ran to him.
"Nicky?" I said again.
"Oh, Dawn!" he burst out. "Why"d you have to find me?"
"Is this your secret place? Is this where you go when you disappear?"
He nodded. "Well, not right here. Usually I stop when I get to the stairs. I mean, this is your house. I didn"t want to trespa.s.s or anything. . . . We are somewhere inside your house, aren"t we?"
"Yeah. You don"t know where the pa.s.sage ends up?"
"Just in this dead end, I thought."
"Nope. Not quite. I"ll show you." I was pretty sure my wall was unlocked, so I released the catch.
Nicky watched wide-eyed as the wall in front of him began to move back. Through the opening, my bedspread appeared, then the dresser, the curtains, and the armchair. Nicky found himself practically in my room.
He stood up and peered inside, then looked back at me. "Whoa . . ."
"My bedroom," I said. "Come on in."
Nicky followed me inside. I showed him how the wall dosed up.
"You can"t even see a crack!" he exclaimed.
"I know," I said. "I looked for a secret pa.s.sage in the house forever, and I never found this."
"I found the other end really easily," said Nicky in a small voice.
Nicky looked completely out of place in my bedroom. He was dirty and dusty (so was I, for that matter, but only slightly), he had chocolate cake mashed on one arm, and his cheeks were streaked with tears. Messy as he was, he was sitting on my clean white bedspread. I didn"t care, though.
"You want to tell me about it, Nicky?"
He shrugged.
"How"d you find the other end?"
Nicky sighed. "One day Adam kept teasing me about this book I was reading. So I took the book - "
"Was it Great Dog Tales?" I interrupted.
"How did you know?"
"I saw it in the pa.s.sage once. You must have left it there."
"Oh. Well, anyway, I took the book and I ran away. I didn"t break the two-block rule, Dawn. I swear I didn"t. The back of your barn is exactly two blocks from the front of our house. I didn"t know if any of you guys were home, but I didn"t think you used the barn, so I snuck inside. It"s so quiet in there."
"I know."
"And I was looking for a place to read when I found the trapdoor instead. I opened it up and climbed down the ladder. And that"s how I found the pa.s.sage."
"And you started coming back?" I prompted him.
"Yeah. I kept a flashlight buried under some hay near the trapdoor, and I could go in the pa.s.sage and think of mean things to say to the triplets or read or look at my coin collection."
"Your coin collection? Oh, boy. I have about a million questions to ask you."
"You do?" Nicky looked puzzled.
"Yeah. See, I thought the secret pa.s.sage had a ghost."
"A ghost?" Nicky shrieked. "I"ve been going some place where there"s a ghost?"
"No, silly," I said. "You were the ghost."
"Oh."
"I mean, I think you were. Do you have an Indian-head nickel in your coin collection?"
"Yeah."
"Did you lose it?"
"Yup. But I found it again."
"I found it too." I told him about the stormy night and the Trip-Man.
Nicky laughed.
"Did you ever bring snacks over here?" I asked.
"Lots of times," he replied. "Once, I even brought an ice-cream cone. The Frosty Treats truck drove by just as I got to the barn. So I bought a cone. It was called a Fancy Old-Fashioned Ice-Cream Parlour Cone and it cost a whole dollar."
"I found the end of the cone," I told him. "And some other things."
"Sorry," said Nicky. "I guess I didn"t clean up too good."
"Too well," I corrected him, "and you cleaned up just fine. I only found a couple of things. I thought the ghost had a sweet tooth."
Nicky giggled. "I was here just this morning eating peanuts. That"s why I wasn"t hungry for lunch," he confessed. "You know," he went on, "now that I know you used the pa.s.sage, you answered a question for me."
"What"s that?"
"I used to see these old things in the pa.s.sage."
"A key, a buckle, and a b.u.t.ton," I said.
"Yes. Did you take them? I couldn"t figure out what happened to them."
"I took them," I said. "They"re in my drawer. Where"d you get that other key, though?"
"What other key?"
"The really old one. The one at the bottom of the steps."
"I"ve never seen another key," replied Nicky. "So it can"t be mine."
"Are you sure? I know it wasn"t there a few days ago."
"It isn"t mine. Honest."
"I believe you," I said, my skin crawling. If the key wasn"t mine and it wasn"t Nicky"s, whose was it? Jared"s?
"Whaf s the matter, Dawn?" asked Nicky.
I shivered. "Nothing. . . . I"m sorry I ruined your secret hiding place."
"That"s okay," replied Nicky, but he didn"t sound as if it were okay at all.
"I don"t mind that you were coming to our pa.s.sageway, Nicky/" I told him. "I really don"t. But you do know that it wasn"t quite right, don"t you?"
Nicky looked worried. "What?"
"Well," I said, "technically, I guess you were trespa.s.sing, but that"s not what I mean. What I mean is that, for one thing, you scared me. You made noises when you were in the pa.s.sage. That was another reason I thought we had a ghost."
"I didn"t mean to make any noise."
"I know you didn"t. By the way, did you ever hide in the pa.s.sage at night?"