The Case of the Haunted Haunted House (3 page)

Haunted houses needed
scary
stuff. Skeletons. Axes dripping with fake blood. Pictures with eyes that followed you around and creepy things like—

Suddenly a hand shot out and clamped around his ankle.

Milo screamed.

The pile fell over, and Gordy climbed out laughing. “Oh, man. That was great. You should have seen your face.”

Milo stomped away. Shoving the puzzle in the lost-and-found bag, he grumbled, “Gordy and his stupid jokes.”

Jazz nodded sympathetically as she tossed in a DVD. “Tell me about it. Remember the time he tried to tie my sneaker to my chair?”

For the next half hour everyone worked steadily, even Gordy. Carlos found some yellow streamers they could use to make a mummy. Spencer swept the floor, and Jazz and Pria carried out the trash. Milo took the lost-and-found bag to the front office, but the door was locked, so he dropped it in the back of their classroom closet.

“This is going to be the best Spring Thing booth ever,” he told Jazz as they walked home together. “Wait till Chris hears. He'll be sorry he ever made that bet.”

“I hope he doesn't hear too soon,” Jazz said. “Chris hates to lose.”

Milo shrugged. It wasn't as if her brother could do anything about it. How could Dunk the Teacher compete with a haunted house?

The next morning when Milo got to school, he saw a crowd of kids staring and pointing at the learning cottage.

“What's going on?” he asked a kindergartner.

She looked up at him with wide eyes. “They say it's haunted.”

Milo laughed. “It isn't really haunted. We're just making it into a haunted house for the Spring Thing.”

The girl looked doubtful. “Are you sure?”

“Sure I'm sure.” He spotted Jazz and pointed. “It was her idea.”

Jazz walked up to them. “Some kid just told me there's a ghost inside the learning cottage.”

A third grader turned around. “I heard that it groans and rattles chains.” He let out a long, eerie groan.

The kindergartner burst into tears.

Jazz took her hand. “Don't cry. There isn't any ghost. Come on. I'll take you in and show you.”

“No!” The girl snatched her hand away and ran off.

“This is ridiculous,” Jazz fumed.

Milo shrugged. “I don't know. It could be good. Like advertising for our haunted house, right?”

“Not if kids are scared to go inside,” she pointed out.

“That's just one kindergartner being a baby,” Milo said.

Jazz still looked worried. “What if Ms. Ali hears what they're saying? Maybe she'll decide a haunted house is too scary for little kids after all. Maybe she'll shut us down.”

Oh.

All that cleaning. All that planning. He would hate to see it wasted, that was for sure. Then he thought of something he'd hate even more: helping to run a makeover booth.

The school bell rang, and kids lined up to go inside.

“You're right,” he told Jazz. “We'd better do something about this crazy rumor—and quick!”

At recess, Milo waited for Jazz at the flagpole. “I think we should find out how this rumor started.”

Jazz shrugged. “Probably a kid said something about our haunted house, and some other kid heard it wrong.”

“I guess,” Milo said. But their whole class knew all about the plans for the Spring Thing. Wouldn't somebody have set it straight?

They split up. Milo headed to the playground, where a gaggle of first-grade girls were clustered on the jungle gym. When he mentioned the learning cottage, they shrieked.

“I heard the ghost was a boy who died a long, long time ago,” one girl said. “His mean teacher locked him in the closet and forgot about him.”

“They only put that trailer in last year,” Milo told her. “I think we would have heard if someone died in it.”

The girl looked disappointed. “Well, maybe he died somewhere else and then moved to the learning cottage because it was nicer.”

Right, Milo thought. “Listen, I just want to know who told you it was haunted.”

They all looked at one another.

“I heard it from her—”

“Well,
she
told
me,
and
I
told—”

“No, you didn't! We heard it at the same time, then
you
—”

Milo gave up and walked away.

A group of bigger kids was gathered on the basketball court. He spotted Jazz at the edge of the crowd.

When he came up, she said, “I think I found our rumor starter.” She nodded at a tall boy at the center of the circle. “Cody claims he saw a ghost last night inside the learning cottage.”

“What was he doing here at night?” Milo asked.

“He lives right over there, in that blue house across from Emily S.” Jazz pointed. “I know because he's on my brother Chris's football team.”

Cody was telling the kids about the ghostly light he had seen bobbing around in the learning cottage.

“And that's not all,” Cody went on. “I
heard
it, too. It went like this.” He let out a long, low moan. A few of the girls screamed and giggled. Cody smirked.

“What did you find inside?” Jazz asked.

Cody looked startled. “Inside what?”

“What do you think?” Jazz said. “The learning cottage. Didn't you go in?”

Everybody looked at Cody.

Quickly he said, “Sure. I mean, I tried. But it was like there was this force field all around. I just kept hitting it and bouncing off. Crazy!”

“Crazy is right,” Jazz grumbled as the bell rang and they all lined up. “I think Cody was too scared to go inside, so he made up that stupid force-field story.”

She probably was right, Milo thought. Still, that didn't mean Cody had made up the whole thing. If he'd been scared, something had scared him. A bobbing light. Moaning.

A crawly feeling crept up Milo's back.

What if there really
was
a ghost?

To Milo and Jazz's relief, Ms. Ali didn't seem to have heard the ghost rumors. Teachers were strange. They always knew if you had gum in your mouth and when they should call on you because you didn't know the answer. But they never seemed to notice the important stuff.