The Dinosaur Mystery (3 page)

And in one of those seats was Pete Lawlor!

“Pete!” Mr. Diggs cried. “What are you doing here? I thought you were off your shift by now. And why was the sky show running?”

Pete seemed surprised to see everyone standing there. “Uh … yeah. Dr. Skyler left a message and … well I thought I heard something suspicious in here when I was coming off my shift, and so I … I thought I'd better check it out. Then I figured, what if someone got at all this expensive equipment in here, so I decided to try it out.”

“Well, goodness, Pete, that's why we have a camera security system, so you don't have to be everywhere at once,” Mrs. Diggs said, “And where's Nosey?”

Pete shifted from one foot to the other. “I left him with the morning guard, the way I usually do when I sign off. I'd best be going.”

With that, Pete rushed by the Aldens without so much as a hello. When everyone went inside, they found Pete's hat on one of the seats along with his flashlight.

Mr. Diggs sighed and shook his head. “That young man is going to leave the museum unlocked one of these days or damage something valuable, and then where will we be, Emma? I'm almost tempted to let him go, but we've never had a guard here who loved the museum so much. Imagine, running the sky show at this hour just to check the equipment!”

“What is this machine anyway?” Benny asked. “Why is it full of holes?”

“It's a special kind of projector, Benny. When the light goes through all those little holes, it makes stars on the ceiling,” Mrs. Diggs explained.

Benny, who liked any kind of machine, took a closer look. When he did, he heard a sharp voice.

“Don't touch that, little boy! Leave it alone!”

Everyone whirled around to see who was shouting at Benny. Up in a windowed office overlooking the planetarium stood a woman with short, straight, brown hair. She was shaking her finger at everyone below.

“Eve, my goodness!” Mr. Diggs called up. “It's Emma and me, and we've brought our guests. Please come down to meet them.”

A minute or two later, the woman joined everyone. “I'm sorry, Archie. You know the planetarium doesn't open until ten, even to school groups,” she said. She looked at the Aldens as if they were trespassing. “In any case, we can't open today with all the confusion.”

“We realize that, Eve,” Mr. Diggs said. “Pete mentioned you'd left a message at the security desk. Not that Pete was any kind of help in here watching the sky show just now.”

The woman's eyebrows shot up. “Watching the sky show? Today? Why of all things! That's no help at all. I simply called the security desk to ask them for the hundredth time to fix the lock. The people keep wandering in here with their lunches and their coffee cups and their … and now this school group you brought in. It's just too much.”

“Now, now, Eve,” Mrs. Diggs said, patting the woman's shoulder. “That's why we're here. This isn't a school group. It's the Alden family, and they've come to help us out. Children, this is our planetarium director, Dr. Eve Skyler.”

Henry, who was standing closest to Dr. Skyler, smiled and put out his hand, but the woman didn't seem to notice.

“I'm sure I don't need children underfoot with everything I have to do,” Dr. Skyler said. “Just look around. There are buckets of paint the painters just left here. Don't even ask me how they got into my planetarium in the first place! They leave their lunch bags and soda cans lying around. Everything is in a mess.”

Jessie spoke up. “But we're not regular visitors, Dr. Skyler. We could clean up the planetarium in no time so that you could keep running your sky shows. That's why we came.”

Again, the woman ignored Jessie and the other Aldens. Instead, she turned her attention to Mr. and Mrs. Diggs.

“Emma, if you and Archie think I can't run the planetarium, then you should just tell me, and I'll resign immediately.”

“There, there, Eve,” Mrs. Diggs said in a soothing voice. “We want you to do what you do best, which is to teach everyone about the stars and the sky. And you can't do it with all this rubble and noise.”

Mr. Diggs signaled for the children. “We've brought five pairs of helping hands here to move the construction materials out of here and do a cleanup. They've worked in museums and old houses, so they know how to be careful around valuable things, I promise you. This will free up your time to get the sky shows up and running tomorrow.”

Dr. Skyler didn't agree. “Tomorrow! That isn't possible even if we had five adult workers here, let alone these children!”

Jessie spoke up. “Just try us and see how we do.”

With several pairs of eyes on her, Dr. Skyler nodded. “All right, but mind you, you'll have to be careful around the projector. Don't go stirring up any dust near there. The cleaning things are through that door. And put everything back in the same place it came from.”

“We know,” Henry led the other children toward the storage room.

“Boy, she sure doesn't want us around,” Benny said.

“She will when we make this place spic-and-span,” Henry said. He handed out work gloves, trash bags, and dust cloths to everyone.

As the children got themselves organized for a big cleaning job, they couldn't help thinking about Pete, too.

“It sure seemed strange that he was just sitting in the planetarium watching a movie so early in the morning, don't you think, Jessie?” Henry asked.

“Maybe he's absentminded,” Jessie answered. “He doesn't seem too organized.”

“Not like us!” Benny said proudly as he whizzed around pushing a big broom in circles.

“Well, you children look like a regular cleaning team,” Mrs. Diggs said when the Aldens came back into the planetarium with all the cleaning gear. “I know you'll do a wonderful job.”

Mr. Diggs had a stack of posters in his hand. “If you finish up here this morning, you can take these Dino World posters and put them up around the area this afternoon. It's about our big opening next week.”

Before the children could even get a look at the posters, Dr. Skyler stepped between them and Mr. Diggs. “If they're going to help me out, Archie, they won't have time for putting up posters. I'm afraid those will have to wait.” With that, Dr. Skyler shooed Mr. and Mrs. Diggs out the door so the Aldens could get down to work.

CHAPTER 4

Someone Goes Down a Hole

“W
hew!” Henry said several hours later when the children finally finished moving the construction materials to the hall. “Dr. Skyler wasn't kidding. That sure was a lot to clear out of there.”

Jessie pushed back her braid for the umpteenth time. “Not to mention just plain old cleaning. We still have to vacuum, wash, dust, you name it.”

“I name … lunch!” Benny piped up.

“I'm hungry, too,” Soo Lee said. “Is it lunchtime, Jessie?”

“It sure is,” Jessie answered. “Dr. Skyler took a break, so we might as well do the same.”

“Let's eat at the museum cafeteria,” Violet suggested. “Mrs. Diggs said she would leave coupons for us there for anything we wanted.”

When the Aldens got to the busy museum cafeteria, chicken fricassee was the special of the day. The children took trays and got on the long line. While they were waiting, Jessie felt a tap on her shoulder.

“So you couldn't finish the job after all, could you? Had to rush off so you could go help Dino World,” Dr. Skyler said. “I don't know what Emma and Archie were thinking, bringing a bunch of children to work in a museum.”

Jessie put down her tray. “Sorry. We were only taking a lunch break. We finished moving all the construction things out, just like you told us. This afternoon we'll do the real cleaning. I'm sure we can finish so you can start up the sky shows tomorrow.”

This didn't calm down Dr. Skyler. “Not if you're taking lunch breaks all the time.”

The woman stomped out of the cafeteria.

The younger children looked at Jessie and Henry. What was this all about?

“Oh, bother,” Henry said, “I guess we'd better have a quick lunch and get right back.”

After eating quickly, the children headed back to the planetarium. When they arrived upstairs, they saw Dr. Skyler pushing a loaded cart.

Henry ran ahead. “Wait! Wait! Why are you moving that stuff back inside?” he asked Dr. Skyler. “We put it all down the hall next to the Dumpster the way you told us.”

Dr. Skyler whirled around, startled by Henry's voice.

“Don't be ridiculous,” she said, “I was just returning to get something.”

Jessie checked one of the black trash bags, “But I know I put this bag in the Dumpster down the hall where you said.”

“Never mind what you did and what I said,” Dr. Skyler snapped. “I need you to finish up in here. There's still plenty of rubbish to take out, not to mention the vacuuming and cleaning. You've got a full afternoon's work here. This list has all the jobs left to do. Here, take it.”

With that, Dr. Skyler left. When the children went inside the planetarium, they got a big surprise.

“Somebody moved things back here!” Henry cried. “Those are the same tool boxes we moved out of here before lunch.”

“We practically have to start over again,” Jessie said.

Eve Skyler was right. It did take the Aldens the whole afternoon to get through the work list. They were too tired and too busy to figure out how so much of the construction rubbish wound up back inside the planetarium instead of outside where it belonged.

This setback didn't stop the Aldens. They were going to finish up no matter what was going on with Dr. Skyler. They swept, and they vacuumed. They washed, and they dusted. And by the time they were done with all of it, the museum was closed, and it was dark outside.

“We haven't had a breath of air all day,” Jessie said. “Let's take the long way back to the apartment and walk outside, okay?”

“Good idea,” Henry agreed. “I could use some fresh air after all that dust and dirt.”

The children left a note telling Dr. Skyler they had finished.

“Phew, I'm glad we're done with that,” Jessie said when everyone reached the sidewalk. “It feels good to be outside. I guess tomorrow we'll put up some of those posters Mr. Diggs showed us. That'll be a lot more fun. And Dr. Pettibone will be back. Maybe we can work with him instead.”

The children walked along slowly, happy to be outdoors for a change. If they hadn't been so tired, they would have enjoyed looking in the shop and restaurant windows just like all the city people with a free night ahead.

“Maybe tomorrow night we could eat in one of these cozy restaurants,” Jessie told the younger children, who were trailing behind. “A city like this has so many different places to eat. Wouldn't you like to try one of them, Benny?”

For once, Benny didn't have anything to say, even about eating. Something more important than food had caught his attention.

“Hey, did you see that?” Benny pointed across the street.

“I saw it! I saw it, too!” Soo Lee jumped up and down. “Somebody went down a hole in the street. Just like a rabbit!”

The older children looked at each other. Whomever Soo Lee and Benny had seen had disappeared.

“You mean where that manhole is over there?” Jessie asked.

“And somebody just went down it,” Benny said.

Henry looked up and down the street. “Are you sure, Benny? I don't see any power company workers around or anything. Pete mentioned they sometimes use the underground tunnel to check on things. Was the person wearing a hard hat?”

“No,” Benny said. “He was wearing a white beard.”

The children stared at the manhole. The outer rim of the cover was sticking up as if someone had been too rushed to pull it tight. Then a car drove right over it, and the manhole cover locked into place.

“Whoever went down there better be careful about coming up again,” Benny said.