The Secret of the Missing Grave Read online

  The Secret of the Missing Grave

  The Secret of the Missing Grave

  By

  David A. Crossman

  DownEastBooks

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 1999 by David Arthur Crossman

  Jacket illustration © 1999 by Chris Van Dusen

  ISBN 0-89272-456-0 (hardcover)

  ISBN 0-89272-470-6 (paperback)

  DownEastBooks

  www.nbnbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Crossman, D. A. (David A.)

  The secret of the missing grave / by David A. Crossman.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Summering on a Maine island, thirteen-year-old Ab joins her friend Bean in investigating the odd noises in her boarding house and solving the mystery of a missing treasure and stolen paintings.

  ISBN 0-89272-456-0

  ISBN 0-89272-470-6 (pbk.)

  [1. Islands Fiction. 2. Maine Fiction. 3. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Title.

  PZ7.C882845 Sg 1999

  [Fic]—dc21 99-21629

  CIP

  Dedicated to my son and daughter,

  my nieces and nephews,

  and the Bean and Ab in all of us.

  Also to Rebecca Libby who looks just like Ab.

  Contents

  1. Ghosts in the Walls

  2. The Treasure Tunnel

  3. Widow of the Moors

  4. “Every Work a Masterpiece”

  5. The Discovery

  6. Something Unexpected

  7. Trapped

  8. Everyone on Earth Is Out of Town

  9. The Secrets of Maud Valliers

  10. A Web of Lies

  11. Trapped Again

  12. “You’ll Never Guess What I Found”

  13. Too Much Trouble

  14. Something Spooky

  15. Sinister Deeds

  16. One More Mystery

  17. Suddenly at Sea

  18. Caught in the Act

  19. Things That Go Bump in the Night

  20. By the Skin of Their Teeth

  21. The One Who Got Away

  Epilogue

  1

  GHOSTS IN THE WALLS

  “THE MOSES WEBSTER HOUSE IS HAUNTED,” said Ab. She skipped a stone in the direction of a little squadron of ducks that paddled along undisturbed in the cove. They seemed to sense they had nothing to fear. Abby wasn’t very good at skipping stones, though she practiced every summer under Bean’s expert tutelage.

  “Everybody knows that,” said Bean matter-of-factly. “You gotta get lower down, like this,” he added, folding himself at right angles to the earth, “then heave, like this.”

  Ab pretended not to watch as the tiny, round-bottomed stone danced across the glassy surface as though it were winged and weightless. The ducks still didn’t fly—she knew they wouldn’t leave their little ones—but they sure scattered in a hurry. The first skips seemed miles apart. The rest got closer as the stone lost its momentum, then finally trickled into a little chatter of numberless splashes. She lost count at twenty-two.

  “More wrist, less arm,” Bean instructed. “Like I told you.”

  “Who cares?” said Ab. She flipped a wisp of red hair from her face.

  “You look weird when you do that,” said Bean.

  Ab sank to her knees on the damp vegetation at the water’s edge. She picked up a stick and poked at an empty urchin shell that had probably been a gull’s dinner not long before. “Do what?” she said.

  Bean kicked at a nearby chunk of granite and focused his impassive eyes on nothing in particular. “I don’t know,” he said enigmatically.

  Ab was a girl this summer; that was the problem. Of course, she’d always been a girl, but he’d always been able to overlook it before. This summer, though, well ... there wasn’t any way around it. When she left last year, she was just Ab. Now she was thirteen and a girl all over the place. He’d noticed as soon as she got off the boat. When she did things like flipping her hair and tilting her head in that curious way, it just made it worse. That’s what he was thinking, but he couldn’t find the words to make sense of it, and he wouldn’t have said them if he could.

  Ab looked at him slyly and flipped her hair intentionally. She knew. She wasn’t sure what exactly, but somewhere inside she knew.

  Bean figured it was going to be a long, difficult summer. Already he was halfway wishing it was Labor Day and Ab and her folks were heading back to New York. He feigned an uninterested glance in her general direction.

  Halfway wishing.

  “You know about a ghost in that house?”

  “Sure,” said Bean. He sat down on a piece of sun-bleached driftwood. “I had a friend who lived up there before the Proverbs turned it into a B and B.”

  “You mean Dave Johnson?” said Ab. Her memory of the island and its inhabitants went back just as far as Bean’s.

  “Yeah,” Bean replied, a little miffed at having lost the exclusive option on that piece of information. Fact was, most of the things worth remembering in his life involved Ab in one way or another. He knew that when she left in the fall, he’d get that feeling like a punctured balloon, same as always. Then the leaves would fall, and snow would cover the island like frosting on a frozen cake. He’d go to school, go skating and sliding, play basketball and baseball, work and have fun like everyone else, but he’d be only half there. The rest would be tucked up inside somewhere, warming its toes beside that little crust of summer in his heart, waiting for Ab to return.

  “Well?” said Ab, a little impatiently.

  “Well, what?” said Bean, quickly looking up and away.

  “What did he say, Davey Johnson? Did he see the ghost?”

  “Nope,” Bean replied flatly. He let the word just hang there. He knew that would get her all worked up, and he didn’t much mind if it did. After all, she was getting him worked up, whether she knew it or not.

  “But ... ,” Ab said at last. “Come on, out with it.”

  “He used to say he heard things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  Bean picked a piece of grass and stuck it between his teeth. “I’m not sure I should say.”

  “Why not?” Ab demanded indignantly.

  “’Cause.”

  “’Cause why?”

  “Well,” said Bean, “you’re stayin’ there, ain’t you? All summer long. I’d hate to scare you off.”

  “Don’t you worry about me, Beanbag,” said Ab, using his full nickname. “I’m not scared of anything.”

  “Didn’t say you was, did I?” said Bean calmly. He drew the grass between his thumb and forefinger and let the seeds fall on the breeze. “You’re the one who brought it up.”

  “So, what did he hear?” asked Ab, a little less belligerently. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know any more about it, but she wasn’t going to let him know that.

  Bean lowered his voice confidentially. “Breathing.”

  “Breathing?” echoed Ab, wide eyed in spite of herself. “What kind of breathing?”

  “Like this,” said Bean. Leaning close to Ab’s ear, he drew in a slow, mournful breath and squeezed it raspingly out to the tail end.

  A splendid shiver trickled like ice down Ab’s spine, and the fine golden hairs on her arms stood at attention.

  Bean nodded. “And,” he said mysteriously, “something else.”

  Ab’s eyes popped open even wider. “What?”

  “Footsteps .”
>
  “That’s what I heard,” cried Ab, unable to contain herself any longer. She jumped to her feet. “Breathing and footsteps.”

  “You did?” said Bean, nearly choking on his Adam’s apple. He’d only been kidding.

  “Yes. When I was in bed last night.”

  “What time was it?”

  “I don’t know. I went up about nine-thirty or ten, read a little while, then turned out the light.”

  Nothing remained of Bean’s pretense. “What happened?”

  “Well,” said Ab, sinking once more to her knees and drawing Bean with her. She bent close to him. “At first I thought it was just somebody bumping around in the room upstairs,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper.

  “So? Maybe it was,” Bean reasoned.

  Ab shook her head dramatically. “Then I remembered there is no room upstairs, only attic.”

  This time when she flicked the hair from her face, Bean didn’t even notice. “Really?” he said breathlessly.

  She nodded.

  “What’d you do?”

  “Very, very slowly,” said Ab. slipping easily into her storytelling mode, “I got out of bed and tiptoed to the door.”

  “Did you turn on a light?”

  “No,” Ab replied a little sharply. She hated to be interrupted just as she was getting started.

  Bean was incredulous. He’d have turned on the light. Especially in that big, drafty old house. “I bet you did.”

  “Did not,” Ab protested.

  Bean let it pass. “Then what?”

  “I opened the door, real quietly,” Ab mimed the action in the air, “and went down the hall.”

  “Why down the hall?” said Bean impatiently.

  “That’s where the door to the attic is. Do you mind if I finish my story?”

  “I wish you would,” Bean retorted. “Just quit leavin’ out stuff.”

  Ab rolled her eyes. “Anyway,” she resumed with a touch of long-suffering, “I got to the door and pressed my ear against it. Thump! Bump! Bump!” She issued the sound effects suddenly and sharply so that Bean jumped in his skin.

  “They’re not footsteps,” he said, dressing his discomfiture in indignation.

  “The footsteps came next,” Ab continued, pleased with the effect her narrative was producing. If she had to live with ghosts, Bean was sure by golly going to know what it felt like. She stamped on the ground. “But they weren’t coming from the attic.”

  “Where, then?”

  “I couldn’t make that out,” said Ab, lowering her voice further still. “One second they seemed to be coming from the walls, then the ceiling. Every time I thought I’d figured it out, they’d come from somewhere else.”

  “Wow,” said Bean unwittingly. He hadn’t meant to sound impressed.

  “It was as if I was surrounded by ghosts in heavy shoes.”

  Bean was bug eyed. He didn’t talk for a minute. He was too busy digesting what he’d just heard. “How long did the sounds last?” he said finally.

  Ab shrugged. “I don’t know. A minute, maybe. I was just going to go call my dad when they stopped.”

  For a while Bean pondered in silence. There had to be a rational explanation. That’s what his mother would say. “I bet somebody was just putting luggage away or something,” he declared.

  “Who?” said Ab. “There are only six other people in the house, including the Proverbs, and they were all down in the kitchen playing cards. I heard them.”

  “Mice, then.”

  “Mice? I don’t think so. Elephants maybe.”

  “What did they sound like?”

  “What do you mean?” said Ab. “They sounded like footsteps.”

  “No. I mean, were they walking back and forth, around in circles, jumping up and down ... ?”

  “Oh, I see what you mean. Let me think.” She forced her memory. “I think ... yes, there was a kind of pattern. Up and down.”

  “Up and down?”

  “Yeah. From the bottom of the wall to the top of the wall.”

  “Dash away, dash away, dash away all,” said Bean automatically.

  “Earth to Bean,” said Ab, tapping him on the head.

  He ignored her. “Did it sound like more than one person?”

  “Or whatever,” said Ab.

  Bean allowed for that. “Or whatever. Was there more than one, do you think?”

  Ab pondered again. “No,” she said seriously. “I don’t think so. Come to think of it, they weren’t like footsteps at all, really.”

  “Oh, great.”

  “No,” said Ab. “I mean, now that I think about it, they were more like ... they weren’t as regular as footsteps.”

  “More random, you mean?” Bean asked.

  “Yeah, random,” said Ab, a little surprised. “That’s what I was going to say, but I didn’t think you’d know what it meant.” Actually, she hadn’t thought of it at all, but it’s the word she would have used, if she had thought of it.

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “And something else,” Ab recalled suddenly. “There was a kind of metal sound to them.”

  “Metal?”

  “Yeah. It wasn’t just thud, thud, like this,” she said, stamping her foot on the ground. “It was more as if someone was dragging around one of those big, old cast-iron frying pans Mrs. Proverb has down in the kitchen. They weigh a ton.”

  Bean smiled slyly. “Strong mice.”

  “Elephants,” said Ab, and they laughed.

  “Then I heard the breathing.”

  Bean nearly swallowed his tongue. “You did?”

  Abby looked at her watch. “Ice cream time.”

  They got cones from the little take-out on Main Street. Then they went to the wharf, where they made seats of some wire mesh lobster traps that someone had hauled out for repair. Bean had chocolate ice cream, as always. Ab had cookies ‘n’ cream, as always.

  “That doesn’t sound like any ghost I ever heard of,” said Bean. He wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his T-shirt.

  Ab was inclined to agree. “Well, whatever it is,” she said, “it’s real. I wasn’t dreaming, and don’t tell me it was my imagination.”

  “I won’t,” said Bean. “You don’t have any imagination.”

  “Yes, I do!”

  Bean shook his head. “Remember that day last summer when we spent an hour out on Lane’s Island playing Creatures in the Clouds?”

  Ab tossed the soggy end of her cone to the gulls and wiped her fingers furiously on the remains of her napkin. That was one of the things that bugged her about Bean: When he looked at clouds, he saw dungeons and battles, fiery chariots, and swirling sultans on flying carpets. All she saw, if she tried really hard, were puppies and kittens. What made it doubly bothersome was that he couldn’t seem to concoct a decent ghost from all the ammunition she’d given him.

  “I do have an imagination,” she said in self-defense. “It’s just a normal imagination, not a demented one like yours.” She stuffed her dirty napkin down his neck and, with a squeal of laughter, dodged out of his reach as he took a swipe at her.

  By the time Bean extracted the damp, sticky wad from beneath his shirt, Ab was halfway up the sidewalk leading to the Moses Webster House. Bean followed, but at the fountain he splashed water on his back and washed his hands. “I’ll get you for that,” he bellowed.

  Ab had stopped in the front yard at the wood bench by the big forsythia and was staring at the house. The tower window seemed on fire with the golden rays of the setting sun.

  “That was mean,” said Bean, trotting up beside her. “Just wait. One of these days when you least expect it ... ”

  Ab was only partly listening. She seemed miles away, lost in thought. “There’s probably a good explanation,” she said, more to herself than to him.

  “Sure there is,” Bean agreed quietly, so as not to intrude too sharply on her thoughts.

  At that instant both of them caught a subtle motion in the tower window of the Winthrop House next
door. A curtain had moved and a face appeared, watching. Neither of them could make it out, but they knew who it was. Abby shuddered visibly. “She gives me the creeps.”

  “That’s strange,” said Bean. “I’ve never seen her in the daylight before. I guess she’s not a vampire after all.”

  2

  THE TREASURE TUNNEL

  THAT NIGHT AB READ AWHILE IN BED, then lay in the dark listening so hard she could almost feel her ears pulsing. Nothing. A squirrel scurried across the floor above—they often found their way into old houses—and she heard the soft, comforting conversation of her parents as they got ready for bed. She heard the heavy drops of dew that the night collected from the fog as they fell from leaf to leaf in the trees, and she heard the distant foghorn on Puffin Ledge moan its weary warning to the dark. But of ghosts or eerie footsteps or things that go bump in the night, she heard not a whisper—until she was just beginning to drop into sleep.

  So clear it made her sit bolt upright in bed, she heard it. Breathing. Deep, sonorous, and sad. And near. She could feel a chill, damp breath on the back of her neck. Behaving as any sensible girl would, she screamed at the top her lungs and dove under the covers.

  Reinforcements were not long in coming. Scarcely had the echo of her cry died in the remotest corners of the house when a veritable herd of adults thundered down the narrow hall to her room.

  Her father was first through the door. “Ab, what is it? What on earth happened?”

  “Abby, are you all right?” said her mother, tossing herself on the bed and cradling Abby’s head on her breast. “My poor baby. Did you have a nightmare?”

  Suddenly Ab wasn’t afraid anymore. Instead she felt embarrassed and a little silly.

  “What was it, Tom? Is she okay?” said Mr. Proverb, who was now silhouetted in the doorway, tying his robe around himself.

  Mrs. Proverb was right behind him. “If that scream didn’t wake the dead, they’ll sleep ’til Judgment.”

  “Oh, great,” said Abby under her breath as the parade of adults continued to pour into her room.

  Meanwhile, her mother felt her forehead to see if she had a fever, the same way she had when she was a child. Ab didn’t really object. There was something comforting about it. Of course, she’d never say so.