The Halloween Hoax (3 page)

“Can you breathe fire yet, Miss Dragon?” Mr. Drew asked with a wink.

“Still working on it, Daddy,” Nancy said.

“Maybe I should cook my famous spicy barbecue meatballs,” Hannah joked. “That should do the trick.”

A car horn honked outside. It was Mrs. Fayne in her catering van. She had agreed to drive the girls to the WRIV-TV station so they could look for clues.

Nancy gave her dad and Hannah a good-bye kiss. She had told them all about her new case the night before.

“Why don't you just ask the others at the TV station if they think it's haunted?” Mr. Drew asked. “Wouldn't that be easier?”

“Sure,” Nancy said. She took one last sip of
her milk. “But it wouldn't be as much fun!”

Nancy ran outside and climbed into Mrs. Fayne's van. As she squeezed between a stack of platters and her friends, she noticed that the van smelled like pickles.

“Good morning!” Bess said cheerily.

Nancy's eyes widened when she saw Bess. Her friend was wearing a weird-looking pair of goggles. The lenses made Bess's eyes look twice their size!

“What are
those
?” Nancy asked.

“They're ghost goggles I built myself,” Bess said. “Now I'll be able to see ghosts in the dark.”

Nancy smiled. Bess loved to fix and build things more than anything.

“I brought a compass,” George told Nancy. She held up a round device that looked like a watch. “I looked up ghost hunting on the computer.” Nancy nodded. George knew more about finding information on the computer than anyone else Nancy knew. “The needle will spin
out of control if there's a ghost in the room . . . not that I believe in ghosts,” George added.

“I brought stuff too,” Nancy said. She opened her small backpack. “My plastic clue bag as usual. And this. . . .”

Nancy pulled out a writing pad. The first page had a line drawn down the middle to form two columns. Over the first column Nancy wrote
Ghosts
. Over the second,
No Ghosts
.

“Every time we find a clue we will put it into one of these two columns. The column with the most clues will win,” Nancy explained. “And I have a feeling which one that will be.”

Mrs. Fayne dropped the girls off in front of the WRIV-TV building. While she delivered platters to a store down the street, the girls filed into the station.

“Remember,” George whispered, “we're here to see Dudley. He's the one who thinks his studio is haunted.”

Bess pulled off her ghost goggles as they walked across the lobby. A guard sitting behind
a desk looked up and smiled. Nancy read the nameplate on the desk: BEATRICE ARMSTRONG

“May we see Dudley, please?” Nancy said.

“Dudley doesn't work here on weekends,” Beatrice replied.

The girls stepped away from the desk.

“We have to get into Dudley's studio,” Nancy whispered. “But how will we do that without Dudley?”

A young man stepped into the lobby. He looked around and said, “Okay! Who's here for a tour of the TV station?”

A few people stepped forward.

“We are!” George blurted.

“We are?” Bess asked.

George raised an eyebrow at Bess. Soon the girls were following the tour all the way down the hall.

“My name is Brad,” said the man. “Our first stop will be the newsroom, where you'll all meet Sy the Weather Guy!”

Nancy recognized a door with creepy crawlies
painted all over it. “This is the place,” she said in a whisper.

The girls slipped away from the tour and inside Dudley's studio. The set looked just like it had the day before. Except the bat house was gone, and the test tubes on the counter were filled with colorful liquids.

Bess put on her ghost goggles and looked around. She pointed to the floor. “Ghost footprints!” she exclaimed.

Nancy looked down. She didn't need Bess's goggles to see two green footprints on the floor-and they seemed to be glowing!

George held up her compass. The needle was spinning around wildly. “There
are
ghosts in this studio!” she said.

Nancy groaned under her breath. Now George was starting to believe in ghosts too!

“There's got to be a reason for everything,” Nancy told her friends.

“While you look for reasons,” said Bess, “I'll look for more ghost footprints in the back.”

She walked to the back of the studio. Nancy and George inspected the counter. Next to the test tubes they found a small piece of paper.

George picked up the paper and studied it.
“These words are pretty long,” she said. “It must be the formula for some science experiment.”

“Maybe Dudley wrote it,” Nancy guessed.

George held the formula next to her autographed sneaker. “The handwriting on the note doesn't match Dudley's signature,” she said. “So it can't be his.”

Nancy pointed to a blue fingerprint on the paper. “Whose fingerprint is that?” she asked. “What do you think, Bess?”

No answer.

“Bess?” Nancy called. She turned and looked around. Bess was nowhere in sight!

A Secret Room

Nancy and George darted around the studio looking for Bess. They searched under tables, around cameras, even behind a life-size cardboard cutout of Dudley.

“Maybe the ghosts got her,” George said.

“Stop it, George!” Nancy hissed. She felt her heart pound as she leaned against the back wall. “She couldn't have just disappeared like—”

She gasped as the wall behind her began to swing back. She grabbed George's arm, and the two spun around with the wall.

“Whoooooaaaaaaa!” Nancy and George cried.

The wall stopped spinning. Nancy and George stumbled forward into a small room. It was jam-packed with cardboard boxes and racks of clothes.

“How did we end up here?” asked George.

Nancy was dizzy but not worried. “A trick wall! The wall was probably part of Dudley's set,” she said. “Strange things happen on TV all the time.”

“Then what happened to Bess?” George wondered.

“I don't know,” Nancy said, looking around nervously. Suddenly they heard a noise.

CLUNK . . . CLUNK . . . CLUNK . . .

Nancy and George froze as the sound got louder and louder. It sounded like heavy footsteps. Suddenly Bess popped out from behind a clothing rack.

“Bess!” Nancy said, smiling with relief.

“How do you like this secret room?” said Bess. “And check out this groovy stuff!” She wore a floppy hat on her head and clunky platform shoes on her feet.

“Groovy?” Nancy asked.

“It means cool,” Bess said. “My mom uses that word sometimes.”

Nancy scanned the room, reached into a box near her foot, and pulled out a poster. On it
was a yellow smiley face and the words “Have a Nice Day!”

Next she flipped through a rack of clothes. She found bell-bottom pants, colorful minidresses, and faded jeans with patches sewn all over. One satin jacket had
RIVER HEIGHTS HIGH, CLASS OF
'78 across the back.

“This stuff is from the 1970s,” said Nancy.

“That's ancient history!” Bess cried.

George held up two black discs, each with a hole in the middle. “These are called records,” she explained. “My mom and dad still have a few.”

“Do your parents have these, too?” Bess gulped. She had picked up two jars. One was filled with pairs of fangs. The other was packed to the rim with rubber eyeballs.

“Creepy!” Nancy said. As she hung up the satin jacket, something else fell off the rack. It was an orange-colored lab coat. Written across the back was “Dr. Funk-n-Stine.”

“Who is Dr. Funk-n-Stine?” Nancy asked. Suddenly the girls heard a loud noise.

BOOM! FIZZZZZ!

They all jumped.

“What was that?” George whispered.

“It's coming from behind the wall,” Nancy murmured.

The girls ran to the trick wall. They pushed on it, and the wall spun around. Soon they stumbled back into Dudley's studio.

Nancy gasped when she saw the test tubes on the counter. The colorful liquids they'd seen before were now bubbling and fizzing over the rims. “They weren't doing that when we came in,” she said.

“Maybe the ghost did it,” Bess suggested. “The same ghost who left the green footprints.”

The girls jumped as the studio door swung open. Brad the tour guide was leading his group into the studio.

“This is where we tape
Dudley the Science Dude
,” Brad said. He stopped when he saw the out-of-control test tubes. “Cheese and crackers—what's up with that?”

Bess kicked off the platform shoes. “We were just leaving,” she said. She shoved the floppy hat into Brad's hands. Then Nancy, Bess, and George raced out of the studio.

“What happened?” Mrs. Fayne asked as the girls jumped into the van. “You girls look like you saw a ghost!”

“Just his footprints, Mom,” George told her.

Bess turned to Nancy. “Write all the stuff we saw today in your Ghosts column, Nancy,” she said.

“Don't forget about this,” said George. She held up a piece of paper. “I grabbed that science formula on the way out.”

“Are you sure it's the formula?” Nancy asked.

“Sure I'm sure,” George answered. But when she glanced down at the paper, her eyes popped wide open.

“What's the matter, George?” asked Nancy.

“The blue fingerprint is still there,” George replied. “But the whole science formula has
disappeared
!”

Funk-n-Stine Online

“How could a whole science formula vanish?” Nancy wondered as she paced across the purple rug in her bedroom. “Think hard.”

“I'm thinking so hard my brain hurts,” Bess said.

It was Sunday morning. The Clue Crew was working on the case in Nancy's bedroom. Her room was also their Clue Crew headquarters, with a special drawer in Nancy's desk for their clues and a computer for research.

“They sell trick pens with disappearing ink,” George said. “I saw some in a joke shop once.”

“But what about all the other stuff we found
in the back room?” asked Nancy. “And who was Dr. Funk-n-Stine?”

“Let's find out,” George said, turning to the computer. She went online and searched for Dr. Funk-n-Stine. A colorful website soon appeared on the screen.

“What does it say?” Bess asked.

“‘This site is dedicated to Dr. Funk-n-Stine,'” George read aloud. “‘And his groovy show.'”

George clicked on a picture of a TV set. A photo of a bunch of kids appeared. They were dancing in bell-bottom pants and platform shoes.

“Those are the clothes we saw in the secret room!” Nancy pointed out.

“It looks like they're in some haunted lab,” said George. “Check out the cobwebs and jars filled with creepy stuff. Just like the jars we found yesterday.”

A man in the picture wore an orange lab coat and clunky-looking boots. His hair stuck out wildly like a dandelion puff.

“That must be Dr. Funk-n-Stine,” Nancy said. “He must have been a scientist like Dudley.”