The Dinosaur Mystery Read online

  “I can move some of these things to a closet,” Mr. Diggs offered. “If they bother you.”

  “Oh, but we like all this stuff,” Benny said. “Soo Lee and I take walks and find things — like my cicadas. I keep them in my room.”

  Soo Lee showed Mrs. Diggs her special box. “Violet and I found it in the woods. It’s a bird’s nest.”

  “A fine hummingbird’s nest,” Mrs. Diggs said as she turned back the covers on the beds. “You Aldens are all such curious children. I know our staff will enjoy showing you the Pickering’s wonderful treasures.”

  In no time, the Alden children were fast asleep, all except Jessie. Without Watch at the foot of her bed, she couldn’t fall asleep right away. The guest room faced the street, and the street lamps and traffic sounds kept her awake.

  “Too noisy,” she whispered to herself as she smoothed her covers, then her pillow, and tried to get comfortable.

  “Too bright,” she whispered more loudly. She finally got out of bed and went to the window.

  The big museum, straight ahead, was completely dark. Jessie watched the cars go by and the traffic lights change from green, to yellow, to red. Even at night, the city streets were so bright. Jessie reached for the windowshade to darken the room. As she did, she heard a faint buzzing sound in the distance. Was it traffic or a radio or a television or just ringing in her ears?

  “I wish Watch were here,” Jessie said to herself as she pulled down the shade. Then she stopped. Why was a light moving across some of the museum windows?

  “Huh!” she cried suddenly. There was a large dark shape in the tall windows across the way. Jessie stepped back.

  Violet mumbled from her bed. “What’s the matter, Jessie?” she asked in a sleepy voice.

  Jessie squinted, but the light in the museum was gone, taking with it the shadowy forms.

  “Nothing,” Jessie whispered to Violet. “It’s nothing.”

  She got into bed and pulled the covers up to her chin. The room was still too bright. On the night table, Jessie could see the small mouse skull that had looked so delicate and pretty in the light. And over on a bookshelf, the glass eyes of the stuffed marmoset monkey seemed to be watching her. Jessie pulled the covers over her face, but quite a few minutes passed before she stopped seeing the huge black outline in the museum window across the way — the moving shadow of the long-dead dinosaur!

  CHAPTER 3

  Dark as Night

  “Is it okay to have another muffin?” Benny whispered to Jessie the next morning at breakfast.

  “Here, take mine,” Jessie told him.

  “How come you’re not hungry?” Henry asked his sister.

  Jessie yawned. “I’m more tired than hungry. I had the worst time falling asleep last night. First I was too hot, then it was too light in the room, then I thought I heard an alarm.”

  Just as Jessie said this, Mr. Diggs walked into the kitchen. “You must have heard a car alarm. They go off at all hours for no reason in a big city like this.”

  Mrs. Diggs came back from the pantry with more food for the children. “Pete left a message on the phone machine that everything was quiet all night.”

  At this, Jessie looked up. “Was he sure? I saw lights in the windows of the dinosaur room last night, right after I heard that alarm sound. Maybe it was Pete.”

  Mr. Diggs came around with more orange juice for everyone. “Oh, I doubt it. Pete spends the night on the other side of the museum at the control desk. We have remote cameras so he can keep an eye on the whole museum from there.”

  “But I saw a shadow in the dinosaur room, just like the ones we saw when Pete first showed us the Tyrannosaurus last night,” Jessie explained. “Somebody was in there!”

  Mrs. Diggs shook her head and smiled. “Well, with an old building like this you get all kinds of reflections from the traffic, lights, and such.”

  The children finished breakfast quickly. They couldn’t wait to get started.

  “Guess what?” Benny asked his sisters and brother. “Mr. Diggs is going to give me a real sorting box for my rocks and real museum signs — little ones — so I can label my collection.”

  “And I’m going to give Soo Lee a display box for her bird’s nest,” Mrs. Diggs told the children.

  “And guess what else?” Soo Lee asked in an excited voice. “Benny and I are going to make a museum in the boxcar in Grandfather’s backyard when we get home! Mr. Diggs said Pete will give us real museum tickets to use when people come to our museum!”

  Mr. Diggs laughed. “Well, first you have to come to our museum to get some ideas. Let’s go!”

  That morning the museum was flooded with daylight. The five Aldens looked everywhere at once. In one hall, they passed a giant Viking boat with the longest oars the children had ever seen. A couple of rooms away, a giant whale hung from the ceiling, and fingers of light made it seem as if everything were underwater.

  “First stop, the planetarium,” Mr. Diggs told the excited children. “Eve Skyler, our director, needs a lot of help there.”

  Mrs. Diggs met everyone at the planetarium entrance. “I forgot to mention that this is a big surprise for Eve,” she said in a low voice. “She’s been so upset with all the confusion around here. And who can blame her? All this dust and nails and banging, and with most of our staff busy with Dino World, she’s had to cancel a number of sky shows.”

  Mr. Diggs unlocked the door, and everyone stepped inside.

  “Oooo!” the Aldens gasped as they stepped into the darkened room.

  The only light came from hundreds of stars sprinkled across the ceiling. They could hear a woman’s deep voice talking from somewhere in the room.

  “And over in the West is Venus,” the voice was saying.

  The children tried to see who was speaking, but it was much too dark.

  “What on earth?” Mr. Diggs said.

  “Or what in heaven?” Jessie said.

  Benny asked, “How did it get to be nighttime? And how come we’re outside all of a sudden?”

  “It does feel exactly as if we’re outside.” Violet whispered. “Listen, there are crickets!”

  Violet was right. The sound of crickets filled the air just as if the children were in their own backyard looking at the stars.

  “It’s magic,” Violet whispered. “Like someone turned the morning into night and opened the roof to show us the stars.”

  “Look.” Henry pointed to the lower part of the curved ceiling. “The moon is rising in the East.”

  “It’s just a movie of stars and the moon,” Henry explained. “And the person who was talking is just a recording, and so were the crickets.”

  Mr. Diggs, who had been searching for the light switch inside the planetarium, called out, “Now get ready, children. I’ll make it daytime again. One … two … three!”

  With that, the light went on, and the sky, the stars, and the moon all disappeared. The Aldens found themselves standing in a room that looked like a round movie theater with rows of seats arranged in circles.

  And in one of those seats was Pete Lawlor!

  “Pete!” Mr. Diggs cried. “What are you doing here? I thought you were off your shift by now. And why was the sky show running?”

  Pete seemed surprised to see everyone standing there. “Uh … yeah. Dr. Skyler left a message and … well I thought I heard something suspicious in here when I was coming off my shift, and so I … I thought I’d better check it out. Then I figured, what if someone got at all this expensive equipment in here, so I decided to try it out.”

  “Well, goodness, Pete, that’s why we have a camera security system, so you don’t have to be everywhere at once,” Mrs. Diggs said, “And where’s Nosey?”

  Pete shifted from one foot to the other. “I left him with the morning guard, the way I usually do when I sign off. I’d best be going.”

  With that, Pete rushed by the Aldens without so much as a hello. When everyone went inside, they found Pete’s hat on one of the seat
s along with his flashlight.

  Mr. Diggs sighed and shook his head. “That young man is going to leave the museum unlocked one of these days or damage something valuable, and then where will we be, Emma? I’m almost tempted to let him go, but we’ve never had a guard here who loved the museum so much. Imagine, running the sky show at this hour just to check the equipment!”

  “What is this machine anyway?” Benny asked. “Why is it full of holes?”

  “It’s a special kind of projector, Benny. When the light goes through all those little holes, it makes stars on the ceiling,” Mrs. Diggs explained.

  Benny, who liked any kind of machine, took a closer look. When he did, he heard a sharp voice.

  “Don’t touch that, little boy! Leave it alone!”

  Everyone whirled around to see who was shouting at Benny. Up in a windowed office overlooking the planetarium stood a woman with short, straight, brown hair. She was shaking her finger at everyone below.

  “Eve, my goodness!” Mr. Diggs called up. “It’s Emma and me, and we’ve brought our guests. Please come down to meet them.”

  A minute or two later, the woman joined everyone. “I’m sorry, Archie. You know the planetarium doesn’t open until ten, even to school groups,” she said. She looked at the Aldens as if they were trespassing. “In any case, we can’t open today with all the confusion.”

  “We realize that, Eve,” Mr. Diggs said. “Pete mentioned you’d left a message at the security desk. Not that Pete was any kind of help in here watching the sky show just now.”

  The woman’s eyebrows shot up. “Watching the sky show? Today? Why of all things! That’s no help at all. I simply called the security desk to ask them for the hundredth time to fix the lock. The people keep wandering in here with their lunches and their coffee cups and their … and now this school group you brought in. It’s just too much.”

  “Now, now, Eve,” Mrs. Diggs said, patting the woman’s shoulder. “That’s why we’re here. This isn’t a school group. It’s the Alden family, and they’ve come to help us out. Children, this is our planetarium director, Dr. Eve Skyler.”

  Henry, who was standing closest to Dr. Skyler, smiled and put out his hand, but the woman didn’t seem to notice.

  “I’m sure I don’t need children underfoot with everything I have to do,” Dr. Skyler said. “Just look around. There are buckets of paint the painters just left here. Don’t even ask me how they got into my planetarium in the first place! They leave their lunch bags and soda cans lying around. Everything is in a mess.”

  Jessie spoke up. “But we’re not regular visitors, Dr. Skyler. We could clean up the planetarium in no time so that you could keep running your sky shows. That’s why we came.”

  Again, the woman ignored Jessie and the other Aldens. Instead, she turned her attention to Mr. and Mrs. Diggs.

  “Emma, if you and Archie think I can’t run the planetarium, then you should just tell me, and I’ll resign immediately.”

  “There, there, Eve,” Mrs. Diggs said in a soothing voice. “We want you to do what you do best, which is to teach everyone about the stars and the sky. And you can’t do it with all this rubble and noise.”

  Mr. Diggs signaled for the children. “We’ve brought five pairs of helping hands here to move the construction materials out of here and do a cleanup. They’ve worked in museums and old houses, so they know how to be careful around valuable things, I promise you. This will free up your time to get the sky shows up and running tomorrow.”

  Dr. Skyler didn’t agree. “Tomorrow! That isn’t possible even if we had five adult workers here, let alone these children!”

  Jessie spoke up. “Just try us and see how we do.”

  With several pairs of eyes on her, Dr. Skyler nodded. “All right, but mind you, you’ll have to be careful around the projector. Don’t go stirring up any dust near there. The cleaning things are through that door. And put everything back in the same place it came from.”

  “We know,” Henry led the other children toward the storage room.

  “Boy, she sure doesn’t want us around,” Benny said.

  “She will when we make this place spic-and-span,” Henry said. He handed out work gloves, trash bags, and dust cloths to everyone.

  As the children got themselves organized for a big cleaning job, they couldn’t help thinking about Pete, too.

  “It sure seemed strange that he was just sitting in the planetarium watching a movie so early in the morning, don’t you think, Jessie?” Henry asked.

  “Maybe he’s absentminded,” Jessie answered. “He doesn’t seem too organized.”

  “Not like us!” Benny said proudly as he whizzed around pushing a big broom in circles.

  “Well, you children look like a regular cleaning team,” Mrs. Diggs said when the Aldens came back into the planetarium with all the cleaning gear. “I know you’ll do a wonderful job.”

  Mr. Diggs had a stack of posters in his hand. “If you finish up here this morning, you can take these Dino World posters and put them up around the area this afternoon. It’s about our big opening next week.”

  Before the children could even get a look at the posters, Dr. Skyler stepped between them and Mr. Diggs. “If they’re going to help me out, Archie, they won’t have time for putting up posters. I’m afraid those will have to wait.” With that, Dr. Skyler shooed Mr. and Mrs. Diggs out the door so the Aldens could get down to work.

  CHAPTER 4

  Someone Goes Down a Hole

  “Whew!” Henry said several hours later when the children finally finished moving the construction materials to the hall. “Dr. Skyler wasn’t kidding. That sure was a lot to clear out of there.”

  Jessie pushed back her braid for the umpteenth time. “Not to mention just plain old cleaning. We still have to vacuum, wash, dust, you name it.”

  “I name … lunch!” Benny piped up.

  “I’m hungry, too,” Soo Lee said. “Is it lunchtime, Jessie?”

  “It sure is,” Jessie answered. “Dr. Skyler took a break, so we might as well do the same.”

  “Let’s eat at the museum cafeteria,” Violet suggested. “Mrs. Diggs said she would leave coupons for us there for anything we wanted.”

  When the Aldens got to the busy museum cafeteria, chicken fricassee was the special of the day. The children took trays and got on the long line. While they were waiting, Jessie felt a tap on her shoulder.

  “So you couldn’t finish the job after all, could you? Had to rush off so you could go help Dino World,” Dr. Skyler said. “I don’t know what Emma and Archie were thinking, bringing a bunch of children to work in a museum.”

  Jessie put down her tray. “Sorry. We were only taking a lunch break. We finished moving all the construction things out, just like you told us. This afternoon we’ll do the real cleaning. I’m sure we can finish so you can start up the sky shows tomorrow.”

  This didn’t calm down Dr. Skyler. “Not if you’re taking lunch breaks all the time.”

  The woman stomped out of the cafeteria.

  The younger children looked at Jessie and Henry. What was this all about?

  “Oh, bother,” Henry said, “I guess we’d better have a quick lunch and get right back.”

  After eating quickly, the children headed back to the planetarium. When they arrived upstairs, they saw Dr. Skyler pushing a loaded cart.

  Henry ran ahead. “Wait! Wait! Why are you moving that stuff back inside?” he asked Dr. Skyler. “We put it all down the hall next to the Dumpster the way you told us.”

  Dr. Skyler whirled around, startled by Henry’s voice.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, “I was just returning to get something.”

  Jessie checked one of the black trash bags, “But I know I put this bag in the Dumpster down the hall where you said.”

  “Never mind what you did and what I said,” Dr. Skyler snapped. “I need you to finish up in here. There’s still plenty of rubbish to take out, not to mention the vacuuming a
nd cleaning. You’ve got a full afternoon’s work here. This list has all the jobs left to do. Here, take it.”

  With that, Dr. Skyler left. When the children went inside the planetarium, they got a big surprise.

  “Somebody moved things back here!” Henry cried. “Those are the same tool boxes we moved out of here before lunch.”

  “We practically have to start over again,” Jessie said.

  Eve Skyler was right. It did take the Aldens the whole afternoon to get through the work list. They were too tired and too busy to figure out how so much of the construction rubbish wound up back inside the planetarium instead of outside where it belonged.

  This setback didn’t stop the Aldens. They were going to finish up no matter what was going on with Dr. Skyler. They swept, and they vacuumed. They washed, and they dusted. And by the time they were done with all of it, the museum was closed, and it was dark outside.

  “We haven’t had a breath of air all day,” Jessie said. “Let’s take the long way back to the apartment and walk outside, okay?”

  “Good idea,” Henry agreed. “I could use some fresh air after all that dust and dirt.”

  The children left a note telling Dr. Skyler they had finished.

  “Phew, I’m glad we’re done with that,” Jessie said when everyone reached the sidewalk. “It feels good to be outside. I guess tomorrow we’ll put up some of those posters Mr. Diggs showed us. That’ll be a lot more fun. And Dr. Pettibone will be back. Maybe we can work with him instead.”

  The children walked along slowly, happy to be outdoors for a change. If they hadn’t been so tired, they would have enjoyed looking in the shop and restaurant windows just like all the city people with a free night ahead.

  “Maybe tomorrow night we could eat in one of these cozy restaurants,” Jessie told the younger children, who were trailing behind. “A city like this has so many different places to eat. Wouldn’t you like to try one of them, Benny?”

  For once, Benny didn’t have anything to say, even about eating. Something more important than food had caught his attention.

  “Hey, did you see that?” Benny pointed across the street.