Read Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls Online
Authors: Ann M. Martin
Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls (10 page)
“That's right,” he said shyly. “What I was wondering isâI mean, I know this is lastminute, but could youâwould you like to go to the Halloween Hop with me?”
This wasn't happening. It couldn't be. In a
few minutes, I would wake up and find that the phone call was just part of a very real dream, like Dorothy's trip to Oz.
I pinched myself. It hurt. “I'd like to, Trevor. Thanks.”
“You mean you can go?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, good. I'll meet you there ⦠at the dance. Friday at four, okay?”
“Okay. Trevor?” (I had to ask him.) “How did you know where to reach me? This isn't my house.”
There was a pause at Trevor's end of the phone. “I sort of found out from Alan Gray.”
“Aha.”
“IâI know you know about Alan and the baby-sitting book. And, see, every time Alan took it, he'd check to see where Kristy'd be sitting ⦠and then he would write down where
you'd
be sitting and give me the information. He knew I liked you. He caught me writing a poem about us once.”
“A poem? About us?”
“Yeah ⦔
“Do you still have it?””
“No,” said Trevor sheepishly. “I threw it away.
I was so embarrassed. Alan started singing some dumb song about kissing in a tree. Everybody heard him.”
“So
that's
how he found out,” I said.
“Yeah. Well, he felt bad about teasing me, since we're friends, so he began looking up your appointments for me. It was just his way of apologizingâ¦. I guess now I owe
you
an apology. I'm really sorry, Claudia. Alan told me what happened last night. He didn't want to get me in trouble, so he didn't mention my name in front of the police. But when he got home, he phoned me and said I better straighten things out with you, no matter how shâhow hard it is for me. I'm sorry I've scared you with the phone calls. I really like you. I've been noticing you all year. I was just afraid to talk to you.”
“That's all right, Trevor. I'm glad you finally did. I like you, too. I'll see you Friday.” I hung up the phone. I was going to go to the Halloween Hop after all! What a day!
“Hey, girls!” I called to Nina and Eleanor. “We're going to celebrate. Get your coats. I'll treat you to ice cream cones!”
So we celebrated. We celebrated the happiest day of my life.
The Halloween Hop was terrific. Kristy and Alan were there, and so were Stacey and Pete. Stacey looked like she was having fun. Maybe Pete would help her forget about Sam Thomas. Mary Anne didn't go and seemed quite happy about it.
On Thursday night, the night before the dance, Stacey and Kristy and I ran around to each of our houses as a group, trying on outfits for the others to approve. We had made a unanimous decision not to go in costume. We wanted to look nice. Besides, the boys had said they wouldn't be caught dead in costumes. Stacey and I ended up with baggy jeans and new bulky sweaters. We couldn't talk Kristy out of a plaid jumper and red turtleneck, but the next day, Alan didn't seem to care. When we got to the school gymnasium (after dashing home, changing out of our school clothes and into our dance clothes, then dashing back), Alan met Kristy with a grin on his face
that was as big as the ones on Trevor's and Pete's faces.
After I hung up my coat, Trevor and I stood at the punch table and laughed about his phone calls and the Jell-O accident. When we ran out of things to talk about, we danced. To be honest, Trevor isn't much of a dancer and neither am I, but we had funâlots of funâanyway.
I had a new friend.
On the Monday after Halloween, Mr. Peters handed back our math tests. My eighty-six had worked out to a B-plus. I gave my family the good news at dinner that night.
“Bravo!” said Dad.
“I'm so proud,” said Mom.
Janine got up and actually gave me a little hug.
And Mimi smiled gravely and said, “I knew you could do it, my Claudia.”
Two days later, the police caught the Phantom Callerâfor real. They caught him in the act. A Mr. and Mrs. Johnson Neustetter, who lived in a house in Mercer that was more like a palace, got two of the Phantom's phone calls on Wednesday afternoon. The Neustetters had been following the accounts of the Phantom in the news and
alerted the police. On a hunch, the police staked out the Neustetters' that night. They arranged for the Neustetters to go out (figuring the Phantom was watching the house from somewhere). Sure enough, about twenty minutes after they'd left, the Phantom showed up. The police let him get into the house and all the way into Mr. Neustetter's safe before surprising him. He confessed to everything.
That night the Phantom was behind bars.
But guess whose mystery didn't get solved. The Goldmans'. The Phantom said he'd never been in Stoneybrook. So the police decided the Goldmans really had been robbed by a copycat thief. With the Phantom behind bars, though, no one would try that again. It would be too risky.
With that news, Mary Anne was back in the Baby-sitters Club. As soon as she and her father heard the news, Mary Anne begged to be allowed to baby-sit again, and her father gave in.
We celebrated the capture of the Phantom at our next club meeting. I was ready with soda, a big bag of potato chips, another of peanut M&M's, and an apple and a package of crackers for Stacey.
“Well,” said Kristy, tipping her head back and
getting ready to drop a handful of M&M's in her mouth, “we survived the Phantom Caller.”
“Yeah,” I said. “This club can do anything.” I opened up four cans of diet soda and handed them around.
“Here's to success,” said Stacey.
“To us,” said Mary Anne.
“To the Phantom,” said Kristy, giggling.
“Here's to the Baby-sitters Club!” I cried. We grinned and clinked our soda cans.
Dear Reader,
When I was young, my friends and I used to baby-sit a lot, and sometimes my best friend, Beth, and I would get scared when we were sitting at night. We thought we should develop a telephone code so that we could alert each other in case of trouble. The way the code was supposed to work was that if I sensed trouble I would call Beth, give her a code word, and then she would call the police for me. Of course, we never had a phantom phone caller like Claudia did, and we never had to use our code, but we had a lot of fun scaring ourselves. Later, when I began to write the second Baby-sitters Club book, I remembered my sitting adventures with Beth and used them to help tell the story.
It's okay to be afraid when you're baby-sitting at night. That's natural. I know I was sometimes scared even when I didn't need to be, and that was because I read a lot of mysteries, especially Nancy Drews, just like Claudia. Since I liked reading mysteries so much, I decided I would try to write one. So
Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls
became the first mystery in the Baby-sitters Club series. Several more followed, and they were so popular that soon we launched the Baby-sitters Club Mysteries.
Happy (spooky) reading,
Ann M. Martin
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ANN MATTHEWS MARTIN
was born on August 12, 1955. She grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, with her parents and her younger sister, Jane. There are currently over 176 million copies of The Baby-sitters Club in print. (If you stacked all of these books up, the pile would be 21,245 miles high.)
In addition to The Baby-sitters Club, Ann is the author of two other series, Main Street and Family Tree. Her novels include
Belle Teal
,
A Corner of the Universe
(a Newbery Honor book),
Here Today
,
A Dog's Life
,
On Christmas Eve
,
Everything for a Dog
,
Ten Rules for Living with My Sister
, and
Ten Good and Bad Things About My Life (So Far)
. She is also the coauthor, with Laura Godwin, of the Doll People series.
Ann lives in upstate New York with her dog and her cats.
Copyright © 1986 by Ann M. Martin.Â
Cover art by Hodges Soileau
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc.
SCHOLASTIC
,
THE BABY-SITTERS CLUB
, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
First edition, 1995
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
e-ISBN 978-0-545-53248-8