Mystery #34 - Mary Anne and the Haunted Bookstore Part 2
Part One.
This has been a really hard book to get back to, mainly because so far there's absolutely nothing interesting about it. Plus I've had a rough week as far as early mornings go, so my brain isn't quite in gear yet. So, the only thing to do is just to launch in!
Chapter Four
Mr. Cates calls again at the next BSC meeting and asks for one sitter to take the kids to the movies, and any additional sitters who want to, to come and help him set up the store. Even though I feel sure that Kristy would have some huge problem with this, she ends up being one of the sitters (alongside Mallory, Mary Anne and Logan) to roll out for Operation: Tidy The Bookstore.
There's a teenage boy on the desk who shows off a bit how much he doesn't care, and then reveals that he and his father are the only living descendants of Benson Dalton Gable.
I googled Benson Dalton Gable to see if I should be actually impressed, and the first hit was a recap of this book, so no.
Alex, said teenage boy, then goes on to get really irritating really fast, claiming that his ancestor was an author around the same time as Poe, but that he was far better, wrote "literature" compared to "schlock", and on and on and on. I already hope that someone dies in this book, and that Alex is either the killer or the victim.
Mary Anne and Logan are about to get to work on some painting, and Alex goes off to find some plastic sheeting. But then, he doesn't return quickly enough, and they find him coming out of the basement. Then, for no apparent reason, he sticks his head in a portion of wall to see what's inside.
Sinister.
So far, all I'm getting out of Alex is that he's really defensive about his ancestor's place, but I guess we're supposed to see him as semi-villainous by now.
A university professor shows up to discuss Poe and Gable with Mr. Cates, and we're quickly told that she's incredibly superstitious, what with wearing a four leaf clover and carrying a rabbit's foot. Which I guess is also setup for later on, so an adult will overreact to all the goings-on so as to lend credence to the mystery.
The Professor goes on to recount that Gable and Poe communicated via letter, and that Gable was probably one of those people who did like Poe's work back in the day, and so Poe thought he was awesome, because who doesn't like to get praise? Alex, of course, interjects at this point to say that he thinks that Gable was too well-renowned to have much interest in Poe's work, and that clearly what happened was that Poe knew that Gable was a far superior writer and started the correspondence to learn some writing tips.
There's a brief interlude where Alex steps under a ladder to make a point and the Professor gets upset because it's bad luck, and then Alex is suddenly claiming that because there's a carving of ravens on the fireplace, Poe "stole" the idea of The Raven from Gable. Just at the point where Alex is beginning to insinuate that Poe felt jealous and even murderous about Gable's success, everyone tries to tell him that he's an idiot, only to get distracted by the Professor freaking out over the black cat. Mary Anne comments that "I found myself doing a lot more than painting", and I can't even work out what that's meant to mean. If she means that she's listening in, just say that.
I feel like this whole thing is actually sort of offensive to Poe, to include this whole subplot about how everyone is arguing over whether he feuded with some little-known small-town writer. But never mind that, because then Alex decides to open an umbrella inside, and the Professor goes off again.
YES. WE GET IT. SHE IS SUPERSTITIOUS. That's five different examples of her superstitiousness in seven pages. That's just a bit of overkill.
I think I know why this book is so long, now. It reiterates each point five times to make sure we really get it. It's not enough that the Professor is awkward around the black cat and carries a four leaf clover - no, there also need to be shoe-horned references to ladders and opening umbrellas inside so we really get it. If that was even over the course of the book, it'd be fine, but all this is within a few pages.
Right, well. After the Professor and Alex leave, Mr. Cates leaves to go pick up the kids and give Kristy and Mal a ride home, while Ms. Spark goes to the pharmacy, leaving Mary Anne and Logan behind to wait for one more delivery. There's a vague reference to the workmen all leaving in a hurry, but that's not explained any further.
The delivery arrives really quickly, so Logan and Mary Anne have the bookstore to themselves with nothing to do. Before Logan can suggest the obvious way to pass the time, though, Mary Anne starts freaking out because she can hear the "fluh-dub, fluh-dub" of a beating heart. I don't know who she's murdered this time, but she's really nervous. Logan tells her that he can hear it too, proving that it's not just her guilty conscience, but that it must just be dripping water or something. When it stops suddenly, Mary Anne is freaking out even more, because if it were a drip, it would have continued. My money is on some sort of Alex-related shenanigans.
When Mr. Cates and Ms. Spark get back, she tells them about it, and they both agree, it must just be a drip, and/or the spooky old house getting to them.
Chapter Five
We start with a Claudia notebook entry, imploring the rain to "do'nt bother to come back annother day". It's interesting that this ghostwriter has appeared to try to go for some consistency in Claud's spelling, because every single time Claudia uses a contraction in this entry, it's got the apostrophe in the wrong spot - there's a "did'nt" and two "was'nt"s, as well. At least, I'm thinking that it's an attempt at consistency, until I notice that in two consecutive sentences, she says "wurst" and then "wurest". Well, it was a good start.
Stacey and Claudia met up at the movies to see Star Wars, with Tom, Gillian and Charlotte Johanssen. This could be a nice piece of consistency, because that's the movie Claudia wanted to watch at the sleepover in The Ghost At Dawn's House. When Tom is asked if he's ever seen Star Wars before, he gets a bit snotty because everyone has.
While at the movie, they run into the Pike triplets, plus Vanessa and Margo - Nicky and Claire have been left out of this scene due to, I don't know, a kid excess.
Tom asks to go to the bathroom, and Claudia goes out with him to get a drink of water and wait for him outside the men's room. She ends up standing there and waiting until she can hear the music start, and then starts to get nervy because she's worried he might be sick and she can't follow him in. She ends up knocking on the door and calling out, and who comes out, but Alan Gray! ("By Monday afternoon, everybody at SMS would know that she had knocked on the door of the men's bathroom" - why is that particularly embarrassing? It's not like she walked in!)
Alan teases her a bit, then goes back in and calls out for Tom, but of course he's not in there. He's given Claud the slip, and is playing video games in the lobby. Claudia drags him back in to the film, and at the end, Tom loudly announces, "It's so juvenile to come to the movies with your mom."
I guess we're meant to think of him as a terrible kid, but he just seems like a ten year old who thinks he's super cool. Especially since we know that his mom left and he's upset, he's clearly just putting up a huge front.
Stacey, Claudia, Charlotte, Gillian and Tom end up joining the Pikes at a huge table at Pizza Express afterwards. Karen, Andrew and Mrs. Engle show up, apparently just for a cameo as they then proceed to do nothing for the rest of the chapter.
There's some triplet shenanigans where someone pushes in front of Adam in line for a video game and so there's a shoving match, but actually, astonishingly little happens for the rest of the chapter at all, even though it goes on for another four pages. I'm left sort of wondering what the point was.
Chapter Six
I don't want to recap chapter six.
Why?
Within seven lines, we have allergy speak.
Abby, Stacey, Claudia and Mary Anne go back to Poe and Co. Abby gets immediately sent upstairs to watch Tom and Gillian, Stacey and Mary Anne get put on book duty, and Claudia's artistic talents put her on trim-painting duty.
Mary Anne leaves Stacey alone for about thirty seconds so she can introduce Abby to Tom and Gillian, and when she comes back, Alex is already trying to chat her up. Mary Anne wanders in and cock-blocks him (though she notes that the fact that he's trying to pick up jailbait makes him seem more normal, so take from that what you will), so he abruptly changes the subject and asks if Mary Anne has seen anything "weird".
This is where I stop thinking, "Hm, this seems a little troubling" and straight into, "Really, what were they thinking?"
Alex tells Stacey and Mary Anne that there's a "mystery" surrounding Gable's death, but it is known that one of his last known visitor was Poe, and name-drops The Tell-Tale Heart and The Cask of Amontillado to make his point clear without directly saying it.
It's coming from the character of a big-mouth high school boy, but still. The mystery of this book is rapidly becoming, "Is this bookstore haunted by Edgar Allen Poe's murder victim?", and even though I know already the answer is going to be, "Definitely not", that makes me quite uncomfortable. I mean, Poe was a real person, I'm not really down with implying that he had a murderous streak because he wrote some dark books.
There's a little side comment about Tom being a pain in the ass again, but Mary Anne doesn't dwell on this too long, because she's got more important things on her mind: she can hear meowing coming as if from nowhere. She studies the place, getting increasingly nervous, until she realizes: it's coming from inside the walls. Just like in The Black Cat (in case we didn't make the connection - after all, it's been three chapters since they last mentioned that book), the bookstore's resident cat got trapped in one of the walls they were working on.
A workman and Mr. Cates work together to break a hole in the new wall, and the cat jumps out. Everyone is relieved that the cat is safe, and a little angry at the workmen who didn't look to make sure it was a cat-free wall.
Except Mary Anne, of course, who goes to the BSC meeting proclaiming that it's officially a Mystery now.
So far their list of clues:
- A cat jumped out of a closet onto Ms. Spark. Probably Tom's fault, since he told her to look in there, and he hates Ms. Spark.
- Mary Anne and Logan heard a weird heartbeat.
- The cat got trapped in a wall.
- Alex is always hanging around, and doesn't like the bookstore idea.
Hypotheses:
- Alex could be trying to stop the bookstore from opening.
- The Professor is really superstitious, and also really pro-Poe, and Alex could be just trying to scare her off.
- The bookstore is haunted by the ghost of Gable.
This has been a really hard book to get back to, mainly because so far there's absolutely nothing interesting about it. Plus I've had a rough week as far as early mornings go, so my brain isn't quite in gear yet. So, the only thing to do is just to launch in!
Chapter Four
Mr. Cates calls again at the next BSC meeting and asks for one sitter to take the kids to the movies, and any additional sitters who want to, to come and help him set up the store. Even though I feel sure that Kristy would have some huge problem with this, she ends up being one of the sitters (alongside Mallory, Mary Anne and Logan) to roll out for Operation: Tidy The Bookstore.
There's a teenage boy on the desk who shows off a bit how much he doesn't care, and then reveals that he and his father are the only living descendants of Benson Dalton Gable.
I googled Benson Dalton Gable to see if I should be actually impressed, and the first hit was a recap of this book, so no.
Alex, said teenage boy, then goes on to get really irritating really fast, claiming that his ancestor was an author around the same time as Poe, but that he was far better, wrote "literature" compared to "schlock", and on and on and on. I already hope that someone dies in this book, and that Alex is either the killer or the victim.
Mary Anne and Logan are about to get to work on some painting, and Alex goes off to find some plastic sheeting. But then, he doesn't return quickly enough, and they find him coming out of the basement. Then, for no apparent reason, he sticks his head in a portion of wall to see what's inside.
Sinister.
So far, all I'm getting out of Alex is that he's really defensive about his ancestor's place, but I guess we're supposed to see him as semi-villainous by now.
A university professor shows up to discuss Poe and Gable with Mr. Cates, and we're quickly told that she's incredibly superstitious, what with wearing a four leaf clover and carrying a rabbit's foot. Which I guess is also setup for later on, so an adult will overreact to all the goings-on so as to lend credence to the mystery.
The Professor goes on to recount that Gable and Poe communicated via letter, and that Gable was probably one of those people who did like Poe's work back in the day, and so Poe thought he was awesome, because who doesn't like to get praise? Alex, of course, interjects at this point to say that he thinks that Gable was too well-renowned to have much interest in Poe's work, and that clearly what happened was that Poe knew that Gable was a far superior writer and started the correspondence to learn some writing tips.
There's a brief interlude where Alex steps under a ladder to make a point and the Professor gets upset because it's bad luck, and then Alex is suddenly claiming that because there's a carving of ravens on the fireplace, Poe "stole" the idea of The Raven from Gable. Just at the point where Alex is beginning to insinuate that Poe felt jealous and even murderous about Gable's success, everyone tries to tell him that he's an idiot, only to get distracted by the Professor freaking out over the black cat. Mary Anne comments that "I found myself doing a lot more than painting", and I can't even work out what that's meant to mean. If she means that she's listening in, just say that.
I feel like this whole thing is actually sort of offensive to Poe, to include this whole subplot about how everyone is arguing over whether he feuded with some little-known small-town writer. But never mind that, because then Alex decides to open an umbrella inside, and the Professor goes off again.
YES. WE GET IT. SHE IS SUPERSTITIOUS. That's five different examples of her superstitiousness in seven pages. That's just a bit of overkill.
I think I know why this book is so long, now. It reiterates each point five times to make sure we really get it. It's not enough that the Professor is awkward around the black cat and carries a four leaf clover - no, there also need to be shoe-horned references to ladders and opening umbrellas inside so we really get it. If that was even over the course of the book, it'd be fine, but all this is within a few pages.
Right, well. After the Professor and Alex leave, Mr. Cates leaves to go pick up the kids and give Kristy and Mal a ride home, while Ms. Spark goes to the pharmacy, leaving Mary Anne and Logan behind to wait for one more delivery. There's a vague reference to the workmen all leaving in a hurry, but that's not explained any further.
The delivery arrives really quickly, so Logan and Mary Anne have the bookstore to themselves with nothing to do. Before Logan can suggest the obvious way to pass the time, though, Mary Anne starts freaking out because she can hear the "fluh-dub, fluh-dub" of a beating heart. I don't know who she's murdered this time, but she's really nervous. Logan tells her that he can hear it too, proving that it's not just her guilty conscience, but that it must just be dripping water or something. When it stops suddenly, Mary Anne is freaking out even more, because if it were a drip, it would have continued. My money is on some sort of Alex-related shenanigans.
When Mr. Cates and Ms. Spark get back, she tells them about it, and they both agree, it must just be a drip, and/or the spooky old house getting to them.
Chapter Five
We start with a Claudia notebook entry, imploring the rain to "do'nt bother to come back annother day". It's interesting that this ghostwriter has appeared to try to go for some consistency in Claud's spelling, because every single time Claudia uses a contraction in this entry, it's got the apostrophe in the wrong spot - there's a "did'nt" and two "was'nt"s, as well. At least, I'm thinking that it's an attempt at consistency, until I notice that in two consecutive sentences, she says "wurst" and then "wurest". Well, it was a good start.
Stacey and Claudia met up at the movies to see Star Wars, with Tom, Gillian and Charlotte Johanssen. This could be a nice piece of consistency, because that's the movie Claudia wanted to watch at the sleepover in The Ghost At Dawn's House. When Tom is asked if he's ever seen Star Wars before, he gets a bit snotty because everyone has.
While at the movie, they run into the Pike triplets, plus Vanessa and Margo - Nicky and Claire have been left out of this scene due to, I don't know, a kid excess.
Tom asks to go to the bathroom, and Claudia goes out with him to get a drink of water and wait for him outside the men's room. She ends up standing there and waiting until she can hear the music start, and then starts to get nervy because she's worried he might be sick and she can't follow him in. She ends up knocking on the door and calling out, and who comes out, but Alan Gray! ("By Monday afternoon, everybody at SMS would know that she had knocked on the door of the men's bathroom" - why is that particularly embarrassing? It's not like she walked in!)
Alan teases her a bit, then goes back in and calls out for Tom, but of course he's not in there. He's given Claud the slip, and is playing video games in the lobby. Claudia drags him back in to the film, and at the end, Tom loudly announces, "It's so juvenile to come to the movies with your mom."
I guess we're meant to think of him as a terrible kid, but he just seems like a ten year old who thinks he's super cool. Especially since we know that his mom left and he's upset, he's clearly just putting up a huge front.
Stacey, Claudia, Charlotte, Gillian and Tom end up joining the Pikes at a huge table at Pizza Express afterwards. Karen, Andrew and Mrs. Engle show up, apparently just for a cameo as they then proceed to do nothing for the rest of the chapter.
There's some triplet shenanigans where someone pushes in front of Adam in line for a video game and so there's a shoving match, but actually, astonishingly little happens for the rest of the chapter at all, even though it goes on for another four pages. I'm left sort of wondering what the point was.
Chapter Six
I don't want to recap chapter six.
Why?
Within seven lines, we have allergy speak.
Abby, Stacey, Claudia and Mary Anne go back to Poe and Co. Abby gets immediately sent upstairs to watch Tom and Gillian, Stacey and Mary Anne get put on book duty, and Claudia's artistic talents put her on trim-painting duty.
Mary Anne leaves Stacey alone for about thirty seconds so she can introduce Abby to Tom and Gillian, and when she comes back, Alex is already trying to chat her up. Mary Anne wanders in and cock-blocks him (though she notes that the fact that he's trying to pick up jailbait makes him seem more normal, so take from that what you will), so he abruptly changes the subject and asks if Mary Anne has seen anything "weird".
This is where I stop thinking, "Hm, this seems a little troubling" and straight into, "Really, what were they thinking?"
Alex tells Stacey and Mary Anne that there's a "mystery" surrounding Gable's death, but it is known that one of his last known visitor was Poe, and name-drops The Tell-Tale Heart and The Cask of Amontillado to make his point clear without directly saying it.
It's coming from the character of a big-mouth high school boy, but still. The mystery of this book is rapidly becoming, "Is this bookstore haunted by Edgar Allen Poe's murder victim?", and even though I know already the answer is going to be, "Definitely not", that makes me quite uncomfortable. I mean, Poe was a real person, I'm not really down with implying that he had a murderous streak because he wrote some dark books.
There's a little side comment about Tom being a pain in the ass again, but Mary Anne doesn't dwell on this too long, because she's got more important things on her mind: she can hear meowing coming as if from nowhere. She studies the place, getting increasingly nervous, until she realizes: it's coming from inside the walls. Just like in The Black Cat (in case we didn't make the connection - after all, it's been three chapters since they last mentioned that book), the bookstore's resident cat got trapped in one of the walls they were working on.
A workman and Mr. Cates work together to break a hole in the new wall, and the cat jumps out. Everyone is relieved that the cat is safe, and a little angry at the workmen who didn't look to make sure it was a cat-free wall.
Except Mary Anne, of course, who goes to the BSC meeting proclaiming that it's officially a Mystery now.
So far their list of clues:
- A cat jumped out of a closet onto Ms. Spark. Probably Tom's fault, since he told her to look in there, and he hates Ms. Spark.
- Mary Anne and Logan heard a weird heartbeat.
- The cat got trapped in a wall.
- Alex is always hanging around, and doesn't like the bookstore idea.
Hypotheses:
- Alex could be trying to stop the bookstore from opening.
- The Professor is really superstitious, and also really pro-Poe, and Alex could be just trying to scare her off.
- The bookstore is haunted by the ghost of Gable.