Hard Hat by Bonnie Bryant Read Free Book Online Page B

staring at the dancing shadows they cast on the walls and floors. It was pure inspiration for a ghost story expert like Stevie Lake. She was getting ready to scare the daylights out of all of them. And they’d love every minute of it. Things were looking up. A little.
    It took a few minutes to set up their story circle. They pulled boxes back around the fireplace, set some candles in it, then set even more in a semicircle around the hearth. Stevie took the seat of honor, facing the fireplace.
    A great deal of food was produced. Regina set out some of their goodies, including the marshmallows, but she kept the cheese crackers and chocolate milk until later.
    Ann passed around her big bag of raisins, whicheverybody enjoyed. Gordon offered them all a drink of his blue fruit punch. They all said no thank you to that, favoring instead Peter’s apple juice.
    “Ah, thirteen candles!” Stevie began. “A perfect number for a night like tonight, for it was exactly the number of candles that Lady Griselda lit on her husband’s bier the night her head fell off.”
    She paused for dramatic effect. In the moment of silence, she heard two truck doors slam right in front of the house.
    “Did you bring the key?” a too-familiar voice demanded from the street, just on the other side of the boarded-up windows. It was the same man who had been there in the afternoon: Frank.
    “What kind of idiot do you think I am?” said the other man.
    “You don’t want me to answer that, Maurice,” Frank said.
    He clearly hadn’t said it to be funny. These guys were mean and they weren’t going to be pleased to find the
kids
back again.
    “Hide!” Regina said.
    Good idea, but where?
thought Stevie. As fast as they could, the group blew out all the candles. Theycouldn’t go up higher in the house because the staircase to the next floor didn’t have any stairs on it. It would be treacherous in broad daylight and deadly in the dark.
    The group clustered behind a stack of wooden planks and did everything they could to stop breathing, or at least to stop sounding as if they were breathing. Stevie wondered if the pounding in her chest could be heard downstairs. She suspected that it could.
    Next to her, Stevie could feel that Gordon’s knees were shaking and he was shivering. Once again she saw Peter take the little boy’s shoulders and hold them for comfort. She was just beginning to wonder where her own comfort was going to come from when she felt Regina grab her around the waist. It didn’t exactly make her feel better, but it let her know that Regina did, in fact, have some nerves after all. There was some comfort in that. She put her own arm around Ann’s shoulders.
    “Come on! Bring that stuff down here!” Frank bellowed.
    Maurice hauled something into the house and, mercifully, downstairs instead of up.
    “Hey, the light’s on!” Maurice said.
    The kids looked around at one another. Had they really left it on?
    “I left it on,” Peter whispered. “So we could find our way out.”
    Stevie could have sworn her knees were knocking. It turned out to be Gordon’s knee knocking against hers.
    “Yeah, well, you must have left it on last time!” said Frank. “Remember who’s paying the electricity bill!”
    “Sure, for this twenty-five-watt bulb. Big deal,” said Maurice.
    He made two more trips down to the basement while Frank grumbled about how slow he was.
    “Okay, that’s it,” said Maurice.
    “Did you lock it up good?”
    “I locked it up good,” Maurice answered. “And I turned off the light to save you some precious money, like you need any help in that department.”
    “Let’s stop the chitchat and get out of here,” Frank said.
    The door slammed. There was the now familiar sound of the key in the lock and then in the padlock. Footsteps down the stairs. Truck doors opening. Truckdoors slamming. The engine turning over. The sound of the truck fading into the distance.
    “Ah-chooooooo!” It was Ann.
    It was such