"Martin, Ann M - Baby-sitters Club Mystery 022 - Stacey and the Haunted Masquerade" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin Ann M)

into social studies class, I reminded myself not to jump to conclusions. The vandalism was terrible, but it was probably just a one-time tiling. Anyway, it would be wrong to blame it on an innocent person.
Chapter 7.
"So? What do you think?" Claud stood back from her bed, where she'd laid out two of the five huge red-and-purple posters she had made. She had asked me to come to Monday's BSC meeting a little early so she could show them to me.
"They're awesome," I said finally. "They're the best posters I've ever seen." They were, too. When I had asked Claudia if she wanted to help out by making the posters for the dance, I had known she'd do a good job. But I never expected the posters to look as professional and as eye-catching as they did. "These look like something you'd see plastered on a bus in New York," I said. "Like an ad campaign from a top agency."
"Well, you helped design them," Claud pointed out. "You're the mastermind. All I did was follow your orders."
"The whole committee designed them," I
reminded her. "Well, except Cokie. She didn't like this idea."
"She'll like it now, when she sees the posters," Claudia said.
"I wouldn't count on it."
Guess what? I was right. Cokie didn't like the posters. She saw them the next morning, when the decorations committee met half an hour before homeroom in order to hang the posters in the halls.
Rick thought the posters were "incredible."
Todd said they were "wicked."
Grace couldn't believe how "artistic" they were.
Cokie? All she noticed was that Claudia had misspelled "masquerade" on one of the posters.
That made me mad. Claudia had worked hard, and she'd been especially careful about her spelling. You have to understand that for Claud to spell only one word wrong on five posters is pretty dose to a miracle. But I didn't say anything to Cokie. I just ignored her, and so did Grace, Rick, and Todd. Using a step-ladder borrowed from the janitor, we hung the posters up; two in the halls near the cafeteria, one near the main entrance, one by the gym, and one by the auditorium. They looked amazing.
"This dance is going to be the best!" Grace
said, stepping back after we'd hung the last poster. "Ted's going to be really impressed," I knew Cokie was giving me one of her Looks behind Grace's back, but I pretended not to see it. "I'm sure he will be," I told Grace. I wanted so badly to believe that there was a Ted, so I wouldn't have to believe that Grace could have destroyed the streamers and light bulbs. Now that I was with her, it was almost impossible to picture her doing such a thing. Grace has such a sweet, honest face.
"Yeah, well, Carrie had a sweet face, too," said Claud as she pulled out a purple marker and started on some careful lettering. "And look what happened at her school!"
I shuddered, remembering. Claudia and I rented the movie, Carrie, a few months earlier, and I don't think I slept for a week afterward. I like scary movies, but that one was over the top.
It was Wednesday afternoon, and my friends and I were gathered in Claudia's room for a BSC meeting. But we weren't talking about clients or schedules or any other kind of BSC business. We were talking about the latest bizarre episode at SMS.
Here's how I found out about it: When I arrived at school that Wednesday morning, Todd Long met me near the side door. "You
won't believe it," he said. "I don't believe it."
"What?" I asked. But Todd wouldn't answer. He just led me through the halls until we were near the cafeteria. The floor was covered with tiny bits of red confetti. "So?" I said. "Somebody made some weird mess here. Is this what you wanted to show me?"
Todd didn't answer. He cast his gaze around at the walls, and I followed it. That's when it hit me. The posters! That wasn't confetti on the floor. It was Claudia's beautiful posters, all ripped into minuscule bits.
I put my hand over my mouth. I couldn't speak.
"I know," Todd said grimly. "They also tore up the one near the auditorium and the one by the main entrance."
"But why?" I asked. "What a horrible tiling to do."
"ThatТs not the worst of it," Todd said. "I want you to see something else." He led me through the halls again, this time toward the gym. I had no idea what he was going to show me, but I did know one thing: I probably didn't want to see it.
"Nice, huh?" Todd asked as we rounded the last corner.
I looked up at the poster we'd hung there and drew in a sharp breath.
"At least they left one of them up," Todd
said. He was trying to lighten the situation, but it didn't work. What I was seeing sent chills down my spine, and no amount of joking was going to make those chills go away. Spray-painted across the poster, in drippy, red, bloody-looking letters was this message:
Todd was looking at me, as if he expected me to say something, but I couldn't. I was too creeped out. Instead, I helped him take the poster down and roll it up. We'd have to make more posters Ч I knew that much Ч but would they just be ruined too?
Finally, as we walked down the hall toward our lockers (it was nearly time for homeroom), I thought of something. "Do you think it might have been the Mischief Knights?" I asked Todd.
He shook his head slowly. "I almost wish it had been them," he said. "That would make this easier to understand. But if they did it, they sure didn't want anyone to know. They didn't leave a note, or their initials, or anything."
I remembered what Rick had said about the torn-up streamers, that it wasn't the Mischief
Knights' style. I'd thought he was right about that, and the same thing applied here. Ripping up posters isn't mischief; itТs vandalism, plain and simple. And writing on them is vandalism also, especially if you're trying to scare people.
And people would have been scared, if they'd seen the poster, or heard about what it said. But Todd and I agreed to keep it as quiet as we could. That's why I had waited until the BSC meeting to tell my friends about it, and to show them the poster, which I'd stuck into my backpack after we'd rolled it up.
Claudia was already at work on some new posters Ч thatТs what she was doing with the purple marker Ч while we talked about what had happened and tried to guess who had done it.
Claudia had a suspect in mind. "Little Ms. Mason," she said angrily. "Face it, she never liked my posters to begin with. I wouldn't put it past Cokie to take advantage of the fact that all those pranks have been happening at school. She knew she could do some vandalism and blame it on the Mischief Knights."
"I don't know," Kristy said, tapping her pencil against her teem. "I think the Mischief Knights really might have done it. Maybe that other stuff they did was just for starters."
"You mean they were leading up to bigger things?" asked Abby, from her perch on
Claud's art books. She was playing with one of the Twizzlers Claud had passed around. She had pulled the strands apart, and now she was braiding them back together.
"Right," said Kristy. "Just when everybody was starting to enjoy their fun and games Ч wham!"
"What about Grace?" Jessi asked. She was talking into the floor as she did one of her painful-looking ballet stretches. "Is she still a suspect, Stace?"
"Well, I don't know," I said. "It really seems unlikely. She's just too sweet, even if she is Cokie's best friend. I can't imagine her tearing into those posters."
"But somebody did it," Mal said. "And whoever it is probably looks just as sweet as Grace. But underneath, he Ч or she Ч is different."
"Oohh, creepy," said Abby, grinning. 'I'll never look at my classmates the same way again. I'll always be wondering about that nasty 'underneath' part."
"You don't have to look far, with Cokie," Claudia muttered.
"What about the streamers and the light bulbs, though?" I asked. "Why would Cokie have ruined them?"