“Claud? Is that you?” I asked.

Claudia’s grandmother Mimi had let me in and told me to go up to Claudia’s room. So I had — and now all I could see was a pair of legs sticking out from behind an armchair.

“Yeah, it’s me,” said a muffled voice.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Looking for my Cheese Doodles. I know they’re around here somewhere … but not under this chair, I guess. Look what I did find, though.”

Claudia’s legs disappeared. A hand clutched the back of the chair. Then she stood up. She was holding a paintbrush. “I’ve been looking for this. I wonder how it got under the chair. But where are the Cheese Doodles?”

I giggled. Claud is just like a squirrel. She hides food — then forgets where she hid it.

“I’ll look under your bed for you,” I volunteered.

I flopped onto my stomach, scrunched underneath the bed, and poked around in the art supplies Claudia keeps there. “Jackpot!” I exclaimed. “Here are the Cheese Doodles and a whole pack of those mini candy bars.”

“Oh, goody!” said Claud. Even though our meetings are held just before dinner, Claudia always provides us with snacks, since we’re starving by five-thirty. Well, she provides most of us with snacks. Dawn won’t touch much of Claud’s junk food.

“Hi, you guys!” Mary Anne came in just as I was crawling out from under the bed. “I brought Tigger over. I hope you don’t mind. He needed a change of scenery.” Mary Anne set her gray kitten on the floor. Tigger immediately found a piece of ribbon and began batting it around.

Dawn and Mal showed up next, and Jessi appeared last. She usually does. She’s very busy in the afternoons, between ballet classes and a steady sitting job.

My friends were all crawling around on the floor playing with Tigger, so I called the meeting to order.

“Any club business?” I said loudly.

At the sound of my voice, everyone scrambled to their usual places — Claudia, Mary Anne, and Dawn on Claudia’s bed, and Mal and Jessi on the floor. I always sit in Claud’s director’s chair. And I wear a visor.

I am the president and I must look like I mean business.

“The treasury is getting low,” spoke up Dawn, our treasurer. “But when I collect dues next week, I think we’ll be okay.”

Maybe I better stop for a moment and tell you how our club runs.

As I’ve said, I’m the club president. This is because the idea for the club was mine. I got it way back at the beginning of seventh grade when my mom and my brothers and I were still living next door to Mary Anne. Mom was just getting to know Watson then. Anyway, one evening, Mom realized she needed a sitter for David Michael. Sam and Charlie and I were all going to be busy. So Mom had to find someone else. I watched her make call after call. And as I was watching, it occurred to me that Mom could save herself a lot of time if she could call one number and reach several sitters at once.

That was it! A brilliant idea! I did some baby-sitting in my neighborhood then. So did Mary Anne and Claudia. We decided to start a baby-sitting club. We also decided we should have a fourth member. That was when Claudia introduced us to Stacey McGill, a new friend of hers who had moved to Stoneybrook from New York City. Stacey had lots of experience and was a terrific sitter, too. We asked her to join us, we began advertising, and just like that we had a baby-sitting business.

We decided that if we were going to be serious about our business, then we had better run it professionally. First, we agreed to hold regular club meetings three times a week. We told our clients they could reach us at Claudia’s number on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Frdays from five-thirty until six. (Claudia has her own phone and personal, private phone number.) One of us was certain to be free to take any job that came in.

Then we voted ourselves officers of the club. I was made the president … for obvious reasons.

Claud was made the vice president, since we would always be meeting in her room and using her phone. Plus, people would probably be calling the club number even when we weren’t meeting, and Claudia would have to deal with that extra work.

Mary Anne, who’s the neatest and most organized of the four original club members, was named secretary. Boy, does she have a lot of work to do. It’s her job to line up sitting appointments, to keep all our schedules straight (such as when Claudia goes to art lessons or when Jessi has ballet classes), and to keep the club record book up to date. The record book is crucial (that’s a really good word, meaning ‘very, very important’) to the running of the club. In it, Mary Anne keeps track of all our clients and their addresses and phone numbers. And on the appointment calendar pages she schedules our sitting jobs. (The treasurer also uses the record book, but I’ll get to that in a minute.) Mary Anne is a wonder. I don’t think she’s slipped up yet. None of us has ever been booked for two jobs at the same time or anything like that.

Last but not least, we made Stacey McGill our treasurer. It was her job to keep track of how much money each of us earns (just for our own information), to mark it down in the record book, and to collect dues for our treasury. What do we use our treasury money for? Two main things. 1. Entertainment, such as club sleepovers and pizza parties. 2. Funds for supplying our Kid-Kits.

The Kid-Kits were my idea. I thought that a good way to entertain the kids we sit for would be with a box of fun. So we each decorated a cardboard carton and filled it with our old games, books, and toys. Then we bought some stuff like coloring books, activity books, and crayons. We take the Kid-Kits on our sitting jobs so the kids can play with them and not be bored. We use the treasury money to replace things that get used up.

How did Dawn, Jessi, and Mal join the club? Well, Dawn joined not long after she moved here from California. She and Mary Anne had become friends quickly, our business was growing, and we needed extra help. So Dawn became our alternate officer. That meant that she could take over the duties of any other member if someone had to miss a meeting. That didn’t last long, though. Unfortunately, Stacey had to move back to New York City. (This was especially unfortunate since she and Claudia had become best friends, and now they really miss each other.)

Anyway, after Stacey left, two things happened. Dawn became our new treasurer — and we realized we needed lots more help. Our club was doing a ton of business. (Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. But we did have a problem.) We’d already signed up two associate members, kids who don’t come to meetings, but who are good sitters we can call on in a pinch. They are Shannon Kilbourne, who lives across the street from me in my new neighborhood — and Logan Bruno, Mary Anne’s boyfriend! But they weren’t enough. We needed a regular member to replace Stacey. My friends and I thought and thought. We liked Mallory Pike, whom we already knew is good with kids, even if she is younger than the rest of us, but the problem was that her parents don’t allow her to sit at night, except at her own house. Finally, we took on Mal and her friend Jessi. We figured that if they could take over a lot of our afternoon jobs, the rest of us could handle the nighttime stuff. So far, it’s working just fine. Jessi and Mal are our junior officers.

There’s one other thing I better tell you about — our club notebook. The notebook is different from the record book. It’s a sort of journal. We’re all responsible for writing up every single job we go on. Then, once a week, we’re supposed to read about the jobs in the notebook. It’s really helpful. We can find out if the kids we sit for are having problems the rest of us should know about, or how one of us sitters handled a sticky situation, and other important things, like if any kid has food allergies or special fears. The notebook was my idea and I know it was a good one. I also know that most of the other club members think writing in it is a big bore. Well, too bad. Writing in the book is one of our few club rules.

“Okay,” I said, from the director’s chair, “the treasury is in good shape. Anything else?”

“Aw, look at Tigger!” Dawn said suddenly. Tigger was sitting in one of Claudia’s shoes, which was pretty cute — but I was trying to conduct a meeting.

“Anything besides Tigger?” I said sternly.

Five heads snapped to attention. And just then the phone rang. I was nearest to it, so I answered it. “Hello, Baby-sitters Club … Hi, Mrs. Rodowsky.” (I heard Dawn groan, and I waved my hand at her to make her quiet down.) “Tuesday?” I repeated. “Okay, I’ll get back to you … Yes … Okay, good-bye.”

I hung up. Mary Anne had opened the record book to the appointment pages. “This coming Tuesday?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Let’s see. You’re free, Kristy, and so are you, Dawn.”

“You can have the job, Kristy,” said Dawn quickly.

I grinned wickedly. “Is Jackie too much for you?” I asked.

“Nooo. Not exactly. You know I like him. His brothers, too. It’s just … Well, you never know what’s going to happen at the Rodowskys’.”

That’s true. And it’s all because of Jackie, the middle of the three Rodowsky boys. Shea is nine, Archie is four, and Jackie is seven — and a walking disaster. He’s just totally accident-prone. And he doesn’t have little accidents like skinned knees. No, he’s more apt to lock himself in the bathroom and then get his hand caught down the drain of the tub. I could understand why Dawn preferred not to sit for him.

“Schedule me for Tuesday,” I told Mary Anne. Then I called Mrs. Rodowsky back to tell her that I would be sitting.

I had just hung up when the phone rang again. Then four more times. For quite awhile, all we could do was schedule jobs, although Claudia did manage to pass around the Cheese Doodles and little candy bars.

The meeting was almost over when Mary Anne suddenly said in a sort of strangled voice, “Uh, where’s Tigger, you guys?”

We searched Claud’s room from top to bottom. We found a bag of Doritos, a box of Mallomars, some GummiBears, and a package of Twinkies — but no Tigger.

Mary Anne was just beginning to get tearful when we heard someone say, “Perhaps you are looking for this.”

Standing in Claud’s doorway was her sister Janine, cradling Tigger. “I found him sitting on my computer,” she said. She was trying to look cross, but you could tell she wanted to smile.

Mary Anne greeted Tigger as if he’d been missing for a year or so, and then the meeting ended.

Jackie Rodowsky, I thought as Charlie drove me home. Would my afternoon with the walking disaster be fun … or, well, a disaster?