Mystery #24: Mary Anne and the Silent Witness
Whew, I love the BSC, but some of these mysteries are truly far-fetched and ridiculous. Here are the bullet points of this wackadoo:
The BSC starts baby-sitting for a new client, The Martinezes, whose previous baby-sitter abruptly quit after there was a garage fire while she was on the job.
The BSC thinks the fire might be linked to Reginald Fowler, a developer who wants to buy up and tear down the houses in the Martinezes’ Miller Park neighborhood so he can build a development. There has been other vandalism nearby and Luke, one of the Martinez kids, is definitely hiding something and being threatened/intimidated to keep a secret.
The BSC, furious about the prospect of a development ruining Miller’s Park, writes five thousand letters to the editor of the Stoneybrook paper and get themselves into a public feud with Fowler. They decide to investigate him and find out he is a serial developer with a secret identical twin.
Turns out that Beau, the boyfriend of the Martinezes’ former baby-sitter Allie, accidentally started the fire while smoking in the Martinezes’ garage, and Reginald Fowler’s estranged twin saw him fleeing and blackmailed him into vandalizing the park as a way of sabotaging Fowler’s development plans.
Per their new protocol, the BSC cooks up a scheme with Sergeant Johnson of the Stoneybrook Police Department to catch the bad men in the act, and the Stoneybrook town council later decides not to allow the development and to designate the park as a historical landmark so it can’t ever be developed.
I mean… when the members of the BSC go to college or leave town, who will fight crime in Stoneybrook?
