The Mysterious Matter of I. M. Fine Read online

  I picked up the mouth book and looked at the back. There was nothing there but the usual ad for other books in the series. “Where?” I snapped.

  “Not that one,” he said, taking it out of my hand. “This one.”

  The book he handed me looked different from the others. It didn’t say Chillers on the cover, for one thing, though it was clearly a horror story. The picture showed two anxious-looking boys cowering in front of a crumbling Victorian mansion. Ghost Walk, it was called. I flipped it over. There were two paragraphs on the back telling the plot of the book and trying to make you want to buy it.

  “Look at the last page,” J.D. said. So I did.

  “I. M. Fine lives in Wimberly, Pennsylvania,” it said.

  Wow! It must have been his very first book. Before Chillers even started. Before he became famous. Before he went underground.

  “Great work, J.D.,” I said. “Our first real break! Now we have something to go on.” Then I stopped gushing for a minute, because something was tickling my memory.

  “Say—guys! Doesn’t that name ring a bell with you? Wimberly, Pennsylvania?”

  “Not with me,” said J.D.

  “Well, I’ve heard of it,” Beamer said. “It’s near where my grandparents live. Pretty small. Kind of on the outskirts of Philadelphia.”

  “Yeah, but that’s not it. It’s familiar to me, too—and I never met your grandparents.”

  I sat down on the floor beside J.D., amid the scattered books, closed my eyes, and thought. Where had I heard that name before?

  Then it came to me. Kute Kandy Corporation. Jelly Worms.

  “Guys,” I said, “you’re not going to believe this!”

  10

  About a week after school let out, Beamer’s mom and dad drove us up to Harper’s Mill, Pennsylvania. That’s where his grandparents live. Beamer goes there every summer to visit for a couple of weeks. This time, he asked if he could bring a friend.

  Now, as much as I enjoy spending time with Beamer, I wouldn’t normally go hinting around for an invitation to join him on a trip to visit his grandparents, which is exactly what I did. But I had my reasons.

  You see, Beamer spends his days at the community swimming pool when he’s there, since his grandmother still works and his grandfather is busy with this invention business he has out in the garage. The swimming pool is nice, Beamer said, with a snack bar and all. And he knows some of the town kids, and they’re nice, too.

  All of which was beside the point, as far as I was concerned. The key thing to know about the Harper’s Mill swimming pool—and the reason I wanted to go there—is that it’s a short walk to the bus station. And by bus, it’s less than a half-hour ride to Wimberly, Pennsylvania—home of I. M. Fine.

  Now, I was fully aware that Beamer’s grandparents probably wouldn’t approve of the two of us running off to Wimberly to stalk a famous author—though they wouldn’t have to know about it, of course. And for that matter, I hadn’t exactly gotten Beamer to agree to it, either. But I would. I was sure of it.

  So there we were, barreling along the highway, listening to moldy oldies on the radio, when suddenly something flashed through my mind. Something I had forgotten to consider, what with planning to hunt down I. M. Fine and all. It was this: I was about to spend two whole weeks with a pair of complete strangers. And, Beamer or no Beamer, I was going to feel like the duck at the dog’s picnic.

  To make things worse, these weren’t merely complete strangers; they were elderly complete strangers. The house, I suddenly knew, would be dark and smell of cats. Every surface would be covered with little china knickknacks. The grandmother would hover over me constantly, afraid I would stain the sofa or drop crumbs on her carpet. The food would be soft and bland. At night, we would watch reruns of I Love Lucy.

  I should have known better.

  No cats, it turned out, no knickknacks, no clutter. Just this very modern house, with ceilings so high and walls so stark and plain that you felt like you were in a church or a museum. Every room had sliding glass doors that looked out onto the woods, making you feel like you were in a tree house.

  The Gordons were more than just kind to me. From the way they acted, you’d think that I was a movie star or maybe a princess, and that I was doing them this great favor by inviting myself to spend two weeks at their house. I felt really bad remembering all the negative thoughts I’d had on the drive up there.

  That night, we had Chinese takeout Mrs. Gordon had brought in from Philadelphia on her way home from work. This was the usual way of things at their house. On the weekends, Mrs. Gordon cooked. Every other night, the food came from restaurants. None of it was regular American food, either. You name it, we ate it: Indian food, Chinese, Mexican, Italian—even this Japanese stuff called sushi, which has raw fish in it.

  Mrs. Gordon took the food out of the Styrofoam containers and served it in pretty bowls. We ate at the table with linen place mats and silver and candles and everything. It was like being at a party.

  At about 9:30, Beamer’s grandparents said good night. They belonged to the “early to bed, early to rise” school of thought. Mrs. Gordon threw us a kiss as she headed down the hall.

  “Wow, Beamer, your grandparents are so sweet!” I said.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “It’s genetic. That’s where I got all my sweetness.”

  I punched his arm—in a friendly sort of way, you understand.

  He reached for the remote control and turned on the TV.

  “Beamer,” I said cautiously.

  “What?”

  “Um . . . tomorrow.”

  “‘Um . . . tomorrow,’ what?”

  “Well, I was thinking. I mean, part of the reason I’m here is . . . well, shouldn’t we be planning a trip to Wimberly?”

  He sighed and made a little face.

  “I don’t know, Franny,” he said. “The thought of taking a bus to Wimberly and bothering some writer guy feels kind of creepy to me.”

  “Not as creepy as what might happen if we don’t.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” he said.

  “Come on, Beamer. It won’t be creepy. It’ll be fun. We’ll get to meet a famous author!”

  “And make him hate us.”

  “Well, I bet you’ve never been hated by a famous author before.”

  Beamer gave me the look.

  “You thought it was a good idea two months ago.”

  “Yeah—only now it feels really creepy. And what I really want to do tomorrow is go to the pool—okay? And right now, I want to watch TV.”

  He grabbed the remote and started flipping channels. We both sat there watching as one image flowed into another. Somebody giving a speech. Somebody selling gold earrings. A rerun of E. R. A talking head. Another talking head. A car commercial. A sitcom of some young people sitting around in a living room. Somebody praying. A lipstick commercial. An animal documentary.

  I just kept my mouth shut. Why spoil the moment?

  11

  We got to the pool early, before the heat of the day had set in and the crowds had arrived to take all the lounge chairs. We slathered on sunblock, dragged two chairs into the shade of a big leafy tree, and got comfortable. I closed my eyes and listened to the peaceful sounds of summer—water splashing, the occasional squeal of a baby, and the swish of the wind in the trees. I promptly fell asleep.

  At around eleven o’clock, lots of kids started arriving and the snack bar opened. We bought hamburgers and fries and sodas and candy bars and took them over to our chairs to eat. A couple of kids came over and said hi to Beamer and he introduced us.

  One of them was a girl named Allison. She had black hair and freckles and looked like she worked out at a gym or something. You know, strong.

  “Are you still diving?” Beamer asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “And swimming.”

  “She can’t get into her room, for all the trophies,” another girl said.

  “Oh, shut up, Kristen,” Allison said, blushing.
/>   “She might be in the Olympics someday,” Beamer told me. “Allison’s famous.”

  “Oh stop!” she said.

  While they were talking, I just happened to glance into Allison’s tote bag. In it was a copy of the newest I. M. Fine book, The Ghost of Creepy Hollow.

  “Is that any good?” I asked, pointing to the book.

  “What? Oh, yeah. It’s great! Want to borrow it when I’m through?”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “Just curious.”

  “Let’s get something to eat,” Kristen said, gazing longingly at our burgers. “I’m starving.”

  “See you later,” Allison said, and they headed over to the snack bar. Beamer gave me the look again.

  “Can it, Beamer,” I said. “All I did was ask if she liked the book.”

  “Right. No other thoughts passed through your mind.”

  “Give me a break! No thoughts passed through yours?”

  “Yeah, okay, they did.”

  “So?”

  “So. Eat your burger.”

  After consuming enough greasy food to choke a horse, followed by a fairly long argument over whether you really had to wait a full hour after eating before going into the pool (which I won, my argument being that getting wet didn’t hurt you; it was just if you were actually swimming that you might get a cramp), we went into the water but stayed in the shallow end. The splashing and squealing was in full force by then.

  Maybe because there was so much happy noise in the pool, we didn’t hear the screams at first. But they were such a different kind of scream that I quickly became aware that something was wrong. I put my hand on Beamer’s shoulder to get his attention.

  “What is that?”

  We both looked around, trying to figure out where it was coming from. Other people noticed, too. They stopped what they were doing and listened. An odd stillness fell over the crowd. We could hear it clearly then—it was a girl’s voice, and the scream was one of sheer terror.

  “Over there,” Beamer said, pointing. “It’s Allison.”

  Then I saw her. She was cowering against the chain-link fence, her hands up as if to protect herself from an attack. She was staring wildly in the direction of the snack bar and screaming hysterically. A couple of her friends were trying to calm her down, but she wasn’t responding.

  We pulled ourselves out of the pool and ran over to see if we could help.

  “Allison, stop!” Kristen kept saying. “It’s okay!”

  “Make it go away!” she howled.

  “What? Make what go away?”

  Whatever it was, Allison obviously thought it was coming closer; she slid along the fence, then broke into a run.

  “NO!” she screamed, running wildly, slamming into a picnic table, then plunging into the shallow end of the pool. I was scared she was going to hit her head, and obviously the lifeguard was, too, because he dove into the water instantly and went to her rescue. She wasn’t hurt, though, except for a big scrape on her leg from the picnic table.

  The lifeguard pulled her out of the pool and tried to calm her down.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Take it easy.”

  But Allison couldn’t take it easy. She was terrified. She tried to break and run again, but the lifeguard stopped her.

  “What?” he said, squeezing her arm. “What is it? Tell me!”

  “Ggg . . . ghost,” she said. And she waved her hands around, sort of indicating something gross dripping down from the ghost’s face. The whole time, she kept her eyes plastered on the place where she thought it was standing. “It’s all . . .” she muttered, her face a mask of horror and disgust, and then she screamed, “NO!” again, and practically burrowed into the lifeguard’s armpit.

  Somebody called 911, and in a few minutes an ambulance arrived. We all stood there in shock until it pulled away.

  “I’m getting a little tired of seeing kids carted off in ambulances,” I said.

  “Yeah, me, too,” Beamer agreed. “Let’s go home.”

  In the car, the radio was playing classical music. I asked Mr. Gordon if we could switch to a news station.

  “Sure,” he said, and punched a button.

  There was a very loud ad on, so I turned the volume down a little while Beamer told about how Allison Simmons had lost her mind at the swimming pool.

  “I hate to say this,” Mr. Gordon said, “but it sounds like drugs.”

  “No way,” Beamer said. “Not her.”

  “Well, I hope you’re right,” he said.

  You could tell he didn’t think there was any other possible explanation. I knew there was, though, and Beamer did, too.

  The news came on again, so I turned it up. But it wasn’t what I was expecting. Nothing about Allison at all. A pedestrian had been hit by a car on a residential street a few hours before.

  “The victim, nine-year-old Trey Martin, is undergoing surgery at Harper’s Mill Hospital. We believe that his injuries are minor, but we will give you an update as soon as information is available.

  “The child apparently ran in front of a passing car driven by a neighbor, Hugo Reese. So far, no charges have been filed. According to witnesses, the boy seems to have suddenly panicked over something and started screaming and running toward the street. . . .”

  I turned around and glared at Beamer in the backseat. He raised his eyebrows, then nodded. Creepy or not, he was with me now.

  Allison was on the TV news that night, along with Trey Martin and two or three other kids who had been involved in strange incidents. One girl had tried to get out of her mother’s car while they were going along the highway at about sixty miles an hour. Fortunately, she had trouble unhooking her seat belt, which gave her mother time to pull over. Except for Trey, who was recovering from surgery and in good condition, none of the kids had been seriously injured, and they all seemed to have regained their senses pretty quickly. But it could have been a whole lot worse.

  Beamer switched to CNN. There was a reporter standing in the woods, with a crowd of people milling around in the background. He was interviewing a very tired-looking man in a Boy Scout leader’s uniform. It seems that the evening before, his troop had been camping out, when suddenly one of the boys had become hysterical and run off into the woods. He had chased after this kid and caught him, but the boy was really wild and had to be restrained. The kid kept screaming that a ghost was after him. The scout leader denied that they had been telling ghost stories around a campfire or anything like that. They had just been cleaning up after dinner.

  Anyway, while all this was going on, two more boys went nuts, and then another and another. All of them thought they were being chased by something and ran like crazy to get away—all in different directions. This was a big problem, because there weren’t enough Scout leaders to go after all the boys, and even when they caught hold of them, they kept trying to run away again. Plus, it was getting dark. One of the leaders used a cell phone to call the police.

  After a while, most of the kids had come back, kind of confused and embarrassed. But one boy had gotten lost, and searchers had been out beating the woods for him all night. They had just found him about a half hour before. He was thirsty and scared, but otherwise okay.

  This had happened, by the way, in Texas.

  “Sounds like what happened to Allison,” Mr. Gordon said.

  “Yeah,” we both agreed.

  Neither of us was in the mood to stay up late that night, so not long after the Gordons went to bed, we did, too.

  I went to the kitchen for a glass of ice water and was heading back down the hall to the guest room when Beamer peeked his head out of the study, where he was sleeping on the foldout couch.

  “Franny,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I was just thinking. Those books?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wouldn’t they be printed in other countries, too?”

  My heart sank. “Sure,” I said. “Of course. Probably just about everywhere.”


  “Which means . . .”

  “Yeah, Beamer,” I said. “I know exactly what it means.”

  12

  Wimberly, Pennsylvania, was a pretty place, in a quiet, old-fashioned way. You could tell the buildings lining the main street had been there for over a hundred years, maybe more. They had been modernized with big plate-glass windows and store signs, but that must have happened awhile back, because everything looked a little faded.

  The bus had dropped us off at a corner on the town’s main street. It was, to be precise, the corner of Maple and First, right in front of Starky’s grocery. It is always important to pay attention to this kind of thing if you plan to find your way back. I’d learned this lesson the hard way, courtesy of my mom, the time she forgot where she had left her car at the airport.

  “So where do you want to start?” Beamer asked.

  “How about Starky’s? Everybody has to buy groceries.”

  We went inside. It was a pretty shabby-looking place. The fluorescent bulbs flickered overhead and the linoleum was old and worn. There were two checkout counters, which seemed like one too many for this place. I guess the management thought so, too, because only one of them was open.

  A young woman stood there chewing gum and studying her fingernails with fierce concentration. The nails were about two inches long—they had to be the kind you glue on, I decided—and they curved inward, like claws.

  Beamer grabbed a Butterfinger and set it down in front of the cashier. Because of her long nails, she struggled to pick it up and run it over the scanner. Then she struggled some more to ring up the sale, flexing her hand so her fingernails wouldn’t hit the wrong buttons on the cash register. Finally, she struggled to take Beamer’s money and give him change. I caught Beamer staring in fascination. I gave him a poke in the ribs.

  “Excuse me,” I said in my most polite voice. “Could we ask you a question?”

  She nodded.

  “We’re trying to find a children’s book author named I. M. Fine. He lives here in Wimberly.”

  The name did not seem to ring a bell with her.