Read Online Baby-Sitters Beware by Ann M. Martin - Free Book Online

all?"
    "That’s it." I said. I was disappointed. The Who's Who didn't have very much what's what, in my humble opinion.
    "Yeah." Abby sounded disappointed, too.
    "Let’s photocopy it," said Kristy. "There could be a clue there."
    Abby picked up the book. Pretending to stagger slightly under its weight, she turned toward the photocopy room. "Anybody have change?" she asked.
    We pooled our change and Abby, still in her
    fake stagger mode, lurched away.
    A few minutes later she came lurching back.
    "Ha, ha ..." Kristy began. Her voice trailed off.
    Abby's face was a ghastly greenish-white.
    "What’s wrong?" I asked, jumping up from the table. Abby dropped the Who's Who with a thump. She also dropped several photocopies of the page about Mr. Seger.
    And one photocopy, very crooked but quite clear, of a photograph of Kristy, Mary Anne, Claudia, Stacey, and Dawn.
    “Where did you find this?" demanded Kristy.
    Abby sat down in the chair. Color was returning to her face. Her voice sounded normal, but abnormally serious, for her. "It was just sitting there, staring up at me from the recycle bin."
    "Right on top?" I asked.
    "Well, not right on top." Abby looked a little sheepish. "I was sort of going through it while the machine was making copies. You know, checking out what other people make copies of. Anyway, there it was, just underneath the first few pieces of paper. It was creepy. I mean, it freaked me out."
    "It’s the photo that was taken of us when we solved that pet-napping mystery, with
    Dawn," said Kristy. "The one that was in the Stoneybrook News. Remember? Jessi and Mal were on the ends and got cropped out and were majorly annoyed."
    "That’s where the burglar found our names!" Claudia exclaimed. "He must have looked up 'Kristy Thomas' in the news index and found our picture in the paper. That’s why all the phone calls and weird stuff have been happening to just the four of us, unless Dawn, all the way out in California — "
    "Mary Anne talked to Dawn on Sunday and told her what was going on," said Kristy. "Dawn would have told Mary Anne then if she'd been getting weird phone calls or anything, and she didn't."
    "Talk about major clues," said Abby. "I mean, this proves that the burglars must be behind the vandalism, right? They saw your name, Kristy, and mine, and looked us both up in the newspaper index and since I'm not famous all over town — yet — they found you. Wow. I bet Jessi and Mal are going to be glad they got cropped out of the photo now!"
    "It could be." Kristy had picked up the photocopies of the information about Mr. Seger and handed them around to each of us before tucking the extra ones in her notebook.
    "Someone could have looked up any one of
    the five names in the newspaper index," I pointed out. "Not that I believe that. What I believe is that your burglar did get Kristy's name from her tag."
    "That means he was here, in this library, not too long ago. Too bad we can't find out who made copies," Abby said regretfully. Then she brightened. "You think he's still here?"
    "No!" said Claudia so firmly we all jumped..
    We looked quickly and nervously around. But nobody sinister was lurking nearby. Or if they were, they were cleverly disguised as a teenaged boy helping his kid sister with her homework, two older women thumbing through a towering stack of financial reports, and someone who looked like a college student staring glumly down at an open book without turning a page.
    "Let's check out Mr. Seger in the Stoneybrook News index," suggested Kristy.
    Claudia put the Who's Who back on the shelf, and we went to the computers. We scrolled through the index twice, but Mr. Seger wasn't as famous as the Baby-sitters Club. He'd never made the news, at least not according to the index.
    "Or not under the name he's using now," said Abby darkly.
    We looked" at her. "Well, maybe it is a fake name," she said. "You never know."
    It was time to go. We'd done all the investigating we could do for one day. We