The Best Halloween Ever by Barbara Robinson Read Free Book Online

this it? The Curse of the Herdmans?
    “Any place will be safer,” Imogene had said, “than Woodrow Wilson School tonight.”
    I looked around for Alice, to see if she remembered anything else about that conversation. Had Imogene said something that I didn’t hear, like, “Don’t bother to do your homework. You won’t need it after tonight”?
    But Alice had left, still looking for an outlet, and we could hear all her ornaments, clicking and clacking as she went down the hall.
    The scarecrow was gone, too, but he (or she, depending on which teacher it was) had probably gone to the office to find out what was happening.
    “I knew it!” Joanne squeaked. “I knew this would happen. And somehow
they
knew it would happen, and that’s why they’re not here. You know what Imogene said.”
    Everyone knew what Imogene said: “Any place will be safer.”
    “And the PA system isn’t working, so we don’t know who else is missing,” Joanne went on, “so you better hang on to your little brother, Louella.”
    Louella didn’t need to be told that. She was holding Howard so tight around his middle that he was all folded over. If he’d had anything to say about it, he would probably rather be missing than be halfway upside down.
    It was Joanne’s idea for us all to stay together—so if we disappeared, I guess, we’d have company our own age instead of all the first-graders.
    And, naturally, it was Albert’s idea for us to hang out near the cider and doughnuts “ … before they’re all gone,” he said. “Remember the spring concert!”
    All those refreshments disappeared after Leroy Herdman set off the fire alarm in the middle of Alice Wendleken’s piano solo. Of course everybody had to vacate the building, and of course there wasn’t any fire, and of course there weren’t any refreshments left when everybody got back. No more piano solo either, though, which was good news for everyone except Alice and her mother.
    It wasn’t unusual for food to disappear when the Herdmans were around, but it would be unusual, now, for seventeen dozen doughnuts to disappear when they
weren’t
around, so I didn’t think Albert had anything to worry about.
    I didn’t think I had anything to worry about either, till Howard’s stroller got caught on something and the something turned out to be my mother’s slipcover, with all its safety pins and eyeholes.
    I remembered what Cecil had said: “If something happens and I have to get out of the slipcover in a hurry, can I just leave it there?”
    I must have said yes, because here it was.
    “You must have said yes,” Louella echoed.
    “But why would they get out of their costume?” I couldn’t understand this because they wanted to be in the costume parade and maybe win the prize. “I was even supposed to find them and be sure they were still all pinned together.”
    “Maybe they saw Albert in his laundry basket,” Louella said, “and figured he would win the costume prize. Maybe they just got discouraged. Or maybe, like Cecil said, something happened.” And then she added, “To them.”
    Normally I would have said, “Come on, Louella. What’s going to happen to my brother that hasn’t already happened to him? He’s been painted green, wallpapered, stuck in a revolving door.” Normally I would have figured that Charlie just fell out of his costume somehow.
    But I didn’t have a chance to say anything because at that very minute all the lights went out, leaving Woodrow Wilson School as black as the Halloween night outside.

10
    A t any other time it wouldn’t matter if the lights went out at Woodrow Wilson School. For one thing, we probably wouldn’t be there if it happened at night … and when it
had
happened, once, in the daytime, Mrs. Hazelwood turned it into a lesson about energy sources and we had to draw wiring diagrams for extra credit.
    But now … on Halloween night …
    “I knew this would happen!” Joanne said, again, but of course she didn’t know