Mystery #34: Mary Anne and the Haunted Bookstore
A new bookstore named Poe & Co. is opening in Stoneybrook and Mary Anne is doing an English project about Edgar Allan Poe, inspired by the new bookstore, so of course the new owner calls the BSC looking for a baby-sitter. Mr. Cates has two children, Tom and Gillian, whose mother just left, and an assistant named Cillia Spark who has some chemistry with Mr. Cates and who the kids resent and like to prank.
Mr. Cates enlists members of the BSC to help get the store ready, and eager nerds Mary Anne and Mallory (relatable, though), among others, jump at the chance. The bookstore is opening in the Benson Dalton Gable house; apparently Gable was a writer around the same time as Poe but obviously didn’t leave the same legacy. Gable’s descendants, though, have a bone to pick — they think if they could find all of Gable’s works, that he’d be in Poe’s league. Alex, the son of the Gable descendant who sold Mr. Cates the store, is hanging around acting grumpy and probably claiming he’s read Infinite Jest. In actuality, he’s clearly creeping around trying to find Gable’s lost manuscripts. He’s convinced that Poe stole ideas from Gable and that Gable was shortchanged. Not only that, he and a Stoneybrook U professor both think Poe may have killed Gable in an argument over a manuscript. Meanwhile, Mary Anne thinks she hears a beating heart while she and Logan are alone in the store (maybe she’s been reading too much “Tell-Tale Heart” or maybe it’s her Big Mouth-style hormone monster). Or maaaybe the store is haunted?
In true BSC mystery that-escalated-quickly style, all of a sudden the Cates’ black cat gets stuck in a wall and a raven finds its way into the store… interesting how all these hijinks are straight out of Poe stories, hmm. And THEN, they find what they think is a literal grave in the basement and wonder if it’s the final resting place of Benson Dalton Gable. Cillia Spark is thrilled (to completion, if you ask me) when the local newspaper comes and writes a splashy story about the “hauntings” at the future bookstore. It generates enough press that Mr. Cates pushes up the opening to capitalize on it. Is the bookstore really haunted, though? OBVIOUSLY NOT, as evidenced by the boom box that Mary Anne, Mallory, and Stacey find in the basement. In it is a cassette tape of heartbeat sounds. Shocking, right? In a peak BSC Detectives move, Mallory goes home to get the triplets’ detective kit. The girls pull a print from the cassette tape and then pull print from their suspects’ coffee cups and make comparisons. They narrow it down to Mr. Cates, the bookshop owner, and Mr. Gable, the descendant of Benson Dalton Gable who sold Mr. Cates the building.
Once Mary Anne realizes that all of this was likely for publicity, she understands that Mr. Cates has to be the culprit (with an assist from Cillia Spark). And she’s right — everything was faked (except the cat-in-the-wall thing, that was an accident) and she catches Mr. Cates in the act. But then… it’s all cool and everyone’s fine with it even though fifteen minutes earlier Mary Anne was feeling sad about being used. Oh well! Classic Mary Anne doormat behavior (although, unfortunately, also relatable).
The bookstore has a profitable opening, Mary Anne wins a rigged door prize contest, and they find some of Benson Dalton Gable’s papers in a secret compartment of his desk and learn that he and Poe had communicated but that Gable was sick and was not murdered by Poe. (Duh.)
