WHEN HAD A OUIJA BOARD ever solved so many mysteries so fast? For the first time in days, Poco felt happy. Not only was she sure that the deadly enemy had kidnapped Juliette, she also knew who the deadly enemy was! Everything pointed to it—her worries and fears about Juliette’s disappearance, her suspicions about Angela’s yard and the old woman who had moved into the apartment above the garage.
Miss Bone. There could be no other.
Georgina looked frightened when Poco explained the facts to her and Walter Kew during lunch the next day. Unfortunately the Ouija’s predicted snowstorm had amounted to only a fine dusting. They were all sitting as usual in the school’s dreary basement cafeteria.
“Miss Bone!” Georgina cried. “Oh, Poco! Do you really think so?”
“I’m positive. I have good antennae about these things. I would have told you yesterday, but I didn’t want to upset you any more than you already were.”
“I must have terrible antennae,” Georgina replied. “Angela’s yard looked fine to me. I wouldn’t have thought anything was wrong there if you hadn’t told me.”
“What is wrong there?” asked Walter, who was huddled at their lunch table, trying to look as invisible as possible. Georgina couldn’t help glaring at him. She was not at all resigned to having him in their group. He was a strange person. Also, he seemed to be slouching unnecessarily close to Poco.
“The yard was invaded by an evil power just after the Harralls went to Mexico,” Poco explained to him. “The little animals who lived there began to disappear. We aren’t sure whether they were scared away or whether something bad has been happening to them.”
There was a pause while Walter pulled his baseball cap up just high enough to fit a sandwich underneath. Georgina took a bite of her hot lunch. Poco was too nervous to eat.
“You should try drinking a little milk at least,” Walter said, looking concerned. “Even when you’re worried, you have to keep up your strength.”
Poco shook her head and pushed her lunch aside. “One thing we figured out is that Miss Bone collects the bodies of small animals,” she went on. “Mice and moles. We saw her pick them up ourselves.”
“What does she do with them?” Walter asked.
“We don’t know,” Georgina said.
“Yet,” added Poco. “You can see why George and I are so worried about Juliette. If she went back ‘home,’ as the Ouija board told us she did, she would have run directly into Miss Bone.”
“But didn’t Miss Bone tell your mother she hadn’t seen Juliette?” Walter asked.
Poco exhaled sharply. “Miss Bone wouldn’t tell on herself, would she? If a person has an uncontrollable appetite for small animals, she would never admit it!”
“An uncontrollable appetite! Oh, how horrible!” Georgina exclaimed. She pushed her hot lunch away and covered it with several layers of paper napkins. “Do you think that’s what Miss Bone has been doing? Eating those poor little animals?”
“There is no way to know what she does with them,” Poco replied briskly, “without a more thorough investigation. I know we promised Angela not to start anything until she got back. But I think in this case even she would want it. Her house is in the clutches of an unknown power. Also, Juliette’s life may depend on what we find.”
“If Juliette still has a life,” Walter Kew cautioned. “She could be a Siamese spirit by now.” He gazed sadly at Poco, and it was clear he saw some likeness in their situations. Slowly he was losing his awkwardness around her, and even around Georgina. Not that he acted any less strange elsewhere. He still hid in the shadows of the school corridors and refused to speak to people. In fact, it was quite daring of Poco and Georgina to be seen here sitting with him at lunch. He had never been invited to join any group before.
“Walter, that is not a nice thing to say,” Poco told him severely. “You are much too concerned with spirits. I am beginning to think you are more interested in the dead than you are in the living.”
“I am,” Walter admitted. “They are easier to talk to.”
Georgina cast her eyes upward. “Our group is operating under the belief that Juliette is alive and well and can be rescued,” she said. “If you can’t believe that, you can’t be with us.”
“No problem. I believe it,” Walter said. “What should we do next? Ask the Ouija about Miss Bone?”
“That,” replied Georgina, “is the one thing we are not going to do. We’ve had enough of that weird Ouija eye. I am beginning to think it may be dangerous!”
At this moment, a bell rang. Everyone in the lunchroom leapt to their feet and made for the trash barrels with trays and bags.
“Come over to my house after school,” Georgina told the others under cover of the scuffle. “What we need to do now is set up a system for investigating Miss Bone.”
“You mean for spying on her?” Walter inquired, holding the door open for Poco.
“Yes,” Georgina snapped. “That’s exactly what I mean.”
Georgina’s spy system was amazingly easy to arrange. It consisted mostly of two or more members of the group hiding, whenever possible, in the bushes across from Miss Bone’s garage apartment. These were the same bushes that the friends had fled to on that first frightening night. They proved especially useful now because they could be reached from behind the Harralls’ main house. Miss Bone could not see the investigators going in or coming out.
Not that she would have seen anyone, anyway. Sight, it soon appeared, was not Miss Bone’s most powerful sense. This was discovered by Poco and Walter when they saw her smash her car into the Harralls’ garage door one evening as she was returning home.
“Miss Bone couldn’t see that the garage door was down,” Poco reported to the group the next day. “She thought it was up and tried to drive through.”
“It is painted black,” Walter said. “And she didn’t have her headlights on, because it wasn’t quite dark.”
“Remember how Miss Bone tried to sniff us out the first time we watched her?” Georgina asked Poco. “I think her nose is sharper than her eyes, and that she picks up information that way, sort of like a …”
“Shark,” Poco said.
“Yes!”
“Or a bat. Vampire bats smell blood close to the surface of the skin.”
Georgina glanced around nervously at this, but since they were only in Poco’s kitchen eating popcorn after school, there did not seem much chance of such creatures being nearby.
“Anything else to report?” she asked the investigators.
“Miss Bone is very old and very ugly,” Poco said. “She has crooked teeth and a wart on her chin.”
“She has enormous hands with blue veins all over their backs,” Walter added. “And pointed feet. There is a lump where her shoulders meet.”
“Yes, I’ve noticed that. It gives her a weird bend. What is it?”
No one knew.
She wore a long, rough, wheat-colored cape, a type of clothing the group had never seen on anyone before.
“It reminds me of something from the olden days,” Georgina said.
“It reminds me of witches,” Poco said straight out, a thought they’d all begun to have. “Any normal old woman would go to the hairdresser and have her hair done right. Even Walter’s grandmother goes and gets a permanent. Miss Bone’s hair scraggles around as if she doesn’t care.”
“Maybe she has more important things to think about,” Walter said.
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Poco replied.
Daily they watched Miss Bone for signs that Juliette was in her power. And nightly they came also, when they could find an excuse to get out of the house. Walter had the easiest time because his grandmother went to bed early, or at least turned off her hearing aid so that he could sneak past her in the kitchen. He became the usual night watchman at the Harralls’ garage, a position he liked so well that he didn’t mind going outside anymore and stopped his dreadful slinking walk—at least after six P.M.
Poco took the afternoons with Georgina, when one or the other didn’t have to go to Girl Scouts or piano lessons. And Georgina took the weekends with Walter because Poco so often had to visit relatives or have them in to visit her. The Lambert clan was togetherish, as Georgina frequently complained.
“You should tell your family that you are a person with a life of your own!” she advised Poco. “How can they expect you to grow up and get anything done in the world when you’re constantly having to go to all their lunches and dinners?
For the most part, everyone came to watch whenever they could. The weather was mild for early December. No other snowstorms threatened. There were many afternoons when the bushes across from Miss Bone’s door hid all three investigators at once and could be seen to shake from the bottled-up energy and whispering going on behind them.
Miss Bone not only looked strange, she had many disturbing habits, the investigation soon revealed. She liked being out after dark. With a small but powerful flashlight, she prowled the neighborhood, often stopping on the sidewalk to peer into other people’s lighted windows.
She was attracted to the moon and sometimes came outside simply to stand in its cold glare.
She collected mysterious plants and grasses from along the roadsides, and brought them back to her apartment. She also collected mushrooms, strange spiked flowers, and bird nests, which she set out to dry on the little front stoop. (Georgina inspected this place, close up, whenever she dared.)
Poco, driving home with her mother one day, passed Miss Bone’s dark, rusty car parked by the road and, looking beyond it to a field, saw her caped figure holding a butterfly net, ready to strike.
Walter watched her come into a hardware store where he and his grandmother had gone to buy a snow shovel. He followed her to the counter and heard her ask the store man for rat poison.
“Rat poison!” Poco’s and Georgina’s eyes opened wide when they heard this.
Walter nodded. “And the store man said, ‘What, Miss Bone? Back for more already?’”
“Good grief!” cried Georgina. “Maybe she has been poisoning all those little animals.”
Walter looked worriedly at Poco to see how she would fake this, for if Miss Bone had been poisoning moles and mice, might she not also have done it to Juliette?
“I will not think of such things,” Poco said, turning her head away. “Until we have evidence. We must keep up our investigation. Harder than ever!”