"Babysitters Club 02 Claudia And The Phantom Phone Calls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Babysitters Club)

Kristy, Stacey, and I jerked to attention.
"What is it? What is it?" I cried.
Mary Anne had turned pale.
With one shaking hand, she pointed at the paper. With the other hand, she held the paper away from her, as if it might bite.
"Is something on the paper?" I shrieked. I
jumped away. I absolutely hate spiders.
"No, in the paper," Mary Anne managed to say.
Kristy grabbed it from her and she and Stacey kneeled on the ground and leaned over the pages Mary Anne had it opened to.
" 'Angry Pig Goes Hog Wild'?" asked Kristy, reading one of the larger headlines.
"No!" cried Mary Anne.
" 'Depressed Trucker Drives Self Crazy"?" asked Stacey.
"No!"
"What is it, Mary Anne? Just tell us," I shouted. "You're driving MS crazy."
Mary Anne had calmed down a little. She took the paper back and read: " 'Phantom Caller on Rampage in Mercer.' " She cleared her throat and glanced at us. Then she began to read again. " 'The thief, whom police have nicknamed the Phantom Caller, struck again in Mercer on Tuesday night. Following the pattern of his previous burglaries, he began making phone calls, this time to the home of Thornton and Sophia Granville of 236 Witmer Court, shortly after four P.M. He never spoke, simply hanging up the phone when someone answered. The Granvilles left their home at seven-thirty to attend a meeting of the school board. When they returned at ten-fifteen, they
found all of Mrs. GranviUe's jewelry missing. Nothing else had been taken, despite the fact that a considerable amount of silver, as well as Thornton Granvflle's famous and very valuable coin collection, were in the house.
" 'This is the sixth home the Phantom Caller has robbed in the past two weeks, and the second home in Mercer. The first four robberies occurred in New Hope.' " Mary Anne stopped reading.
"So what is so scary about that?" asked Stacey. "You should hear what goes on in New York City every day."
"But don't you see?" asked Mary Anne. "He's getting closer and closer to Stoney-brook Ч to us. First New Hope, then Mercer. Stoneybrook is the nearest town to Mercer."
"Well, it's still twenty miles away," I said. "Does he always steal jewelry?"
"Yes," replied Mary Anne. "Just jewelry. It says in the next paragraph that he really knows what he's looking for. Now here's the scary part: He makes those phone calls to find out whether anyone's home. But sometimes if the people don't go out he robs them anyway, and they don't know it until they realize the jewelry's missing. He's in the house while they are. He's never hurt anyone, but what do you think he'd do if he met someone face-to-face
in the middle of a burglary? Now think about this," she went on. "We don't know what kind of jewelry the people we baby-sit for have."
"Oh," said Stacey, "no one around here is as rich as those Granvilles sound."
"But maybe it doesn't matter," said Kristy. "And what if the Phantom Caller were watching the house or something and saw the parents go out. He might go ahead and rob it if he thought just a baby-sitter and a couple of little kids were there."
"I still don't know," said Stacey. "I think you guys are worrying about nothing."
Suddenly I clapped my hand to my mouth. "Oh, my gosh!" I cried.
"What?" the others shouted.
"When I baby-sat for the Marshalls on Wednesday, the phone rang twice and each time I answered it, the caller hung up without saying a word!"
"Oh, no!"
"You're kidding!"
"I think," said Kristy seriously, "that we should hold an emergency meeting of the Babysitters Club Ч right now."
Chapter 3.
The members of the Baby-sitters Club gathered numbly in my bedroom.
"This is terrible," moaned Kristy. "How can we baby-sit under these conditions?"
Nobody said a word. To ease the tension, I took a gigantic chocolate bar out of my notebook, carefully peeled back the wrapper, and offered pieces to Kristy and Mary Anne. I didn't even bother to feel bad that Stacey couldn't eat any. The three of us chewed in silence.
"Look," said Stacey after a while, "I think we're worrying about nothing. The Phantom Caller hasn't even robbed anybody in Stoney-brook, so he's still at least twenty miles away." She turned to Mary Anne. "What makes you so sure he'll come here next? Maybe he'll decide that with the police on his tail he should just clear out and go rob people in Oklahoma."
"That's true," said Mary Anne slowly.
"And in the second place, if anyone we sit for does have some fantastic piece of jewelry and the Phantom Caller has heard about it, don't you think we'd have heard about it, too? I mean, it wouldn't be any secret then."
"That's true, too," I said, "but . . . well, what if we just happened to be baby-sitting somewhere and a burglar just happened to try to break in? Not the Phantom Caller necessarily, but any burglar? It could happen, you know, and we should be prepared."
"You're right," said Kristy. "Good babysitters should be prepared for anything."
"Maybe," said Stacey, "we should arrange a code we could give each other over the phone that would be a signal for the other person to call the police. Let's say I'm baby-sitting for Jamie Newton, and I hear a burglar. Okay. I want to call the police, but I don't want the burglar to hear me calling the police, right?"
"Right," said the rest of us.
"So what I do is call Claudia, for example, and I say, 'Hi, it's Stacey. Have you found my red ribbon?' and that's a signal that I'm in trouble and need Claudia to call the police."
"Hey, that's a neat idea!" said Kristy.
"Yeah!" agreed Mary Anne. "But how would Claudia know where you are? How would she know where to send the police?"
"That's right. That's a good question, Stace," I said/ "because what if the burglar were listening in on an extension? I couldn't just say, 'Okay, I'll call the police. Where are you?' That wouldn't do you any good at all."
"Aughh! Listening in on an extension! That is so creepy!" screamed Kristy.
"But it could happen," I said. "It happened in that thriller, The Night of the Weird. You know, the one where they find the babysitter Ч "
"Stop! Stop! Stop! Don't say any more. I don't want to know!" cried Kristy.
"All right, but the point is," I said, "that we should all know where each one of us is sitting and when."
"Well," said Mary Anne, "there's the record book."