Mystery #22: Stacey and the Haunted Masquerade
Stoneybrook has decided to host a Halloween Masquerade dance for the first time in 28 years, and everyone’s psyched. It’ll be held on the Friday before Halloween, aka Mischief Night. Stacey has decided she wants to start getting more involved at school, so she signs up to be on the decorating committee. She’s not psyched that Cokie Mason is also on the committee, but oh well. In the planning meetings, everybody outvotes Cokie on everything anyway; they decide on an Addams Family Reunion theme and go with Stacey’s idea of a red and purple color scheme (because black and orange is so done).
Some people at SMS are either overly psyched or not psyched at all about the Masquerade — the Mischief Knights, a new group who is pulling pranks and leaving messages around the school. They swap Stacey’s books from her locker with another student’s, steal a teacher’s grade book and leave a blank one behind, leave rubber chickens and toilet plungers in people’s lockers, TP-ing the school, soaping staff cars, setting classroom clocks ahead, peanut buttering doorknobs, etc. Nobody knows who the Mischief Knights are but everybody’s talking about them. Personally, I enjoy their use of wordplay while condemning their annoying pranks.
Meanwhile, some cranky guy in the community is writing letters to the editor of the newspaper saying SMS shouldn’t have the dance and create the opportunity for “another tragedy” — but the current SMSers don’t know what tragedy he’s talking about and they certainly don’t want their dance canceled. But then the decorations Stacey’s committee has collected get destroyed, this time without a Mischief Knights calling card left behind. Look, I’m sure Kristy could put her Cake Cop badge back on, obtain a weapon, and start trolling the school looking for the culprit. Let’s get her on it. Could it be Cokie, mad that everyone shot down her ideas? Grace, embarrassed that she lied about having a date? Mr. Wetzler, the community curmudgeon? Stacey herself having a Tyler Durden moment?
Claudia puts in the time and effort to make amazing posters for the Masquerade, and then someone shreds them to bits — all but one. On the remaining poster, in blood-red writing, is scrawled WILL YOU STILL LOVE ME TOMORROW? Later, somebody spray paints $10 on the gym wall, about eight feet high. No one knows what it means. Kristy calls an emergency meeting of the BSC, because… the BSC is the police? And they want to put a stop to the vandalism so the dance doesn’t get canceled.
Stacey, Logan, and Mary Anne find out that 28 years ago at the last Halloween Masquerade dance, the lights in the gym went out and someone pulled the fire alarm, which led to a stampede and a teacher named Mr. Brown dying of a heart attack. Yikes! The blackout and fire alarm were thought to be pranks but no one was ever held responsible. The BSC finds a yearbook from the year of the tragedy and realizes that both Mr. Rothman, who is supervising Stacey’s decorations committee, and Mr. Wetzler, who has been writing in to the newspaper, were eighth-graders at the time. Super sus. Stacey later finds out from Mr. Wetzler that a girl at the dance was jilted and he thinks she might have caused some of the drama at the dance.
At an all-school SMS assembly, the lights suddenly go out and students start panicking and a stampede begins but doesn’t end in tragedy — other than an actress who was part of the presentation falling off the stage and breaking her arm. Ouch. Things are getting dangerous and the BSC needs to kick it into high gear to solve this bitch. Through a combination of the “Not Pictured” section of the 28-years-ago yearbook and breaking into the SMS basements’s old student records (!!) the gang figures out that Elizabeth Connor must be the girl Mr. Wetzler was talking about — and that she used to live in the Johanssens’ house. Stacey and Mary Anne snoop around the Johanssens’ basement and find LC + MR scrawled in what was once wet cement. Liz Connor + … Mike Rothman?!
Yup. Stacey confronts Mr. Rothman and he tells her everything — how he’d been popular and Liz hadn’t been, but she’d had a big crush on him, and how his friends dared him to ask her to the dance and they’d pay him $10. He did it because he cared about being popular but then he felt like shit, and so during the last dance of the night — “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” — he walked away from her and threw $10 on the floor as a sign to his friends that he couldn’t be bought. Liz ran out of the gym and then the lights went off and the fire alarm was pulled, and Mr. Brown died. Liz never returned to school.
Mr. Rothman tells Stacey that he wanted to oversee the dance committee to make sure things went smoothly this time. But when he and Stacey go to the gym to do a final check on the decorations, they find a dummy hanging from a noose (jeez) wearing a frilly pink dress like the one Liz wore to the dance 28 years ago. Welp.
And still, the dance goes on. Stacey and Robert dress as Morticia and Gomez Addams; Mary Anne dresses as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz with Logan as the Scarecrow; Abby is Lucy Ricardo from I Love Lucy (because Ann M. Martin is obsessed); Mal goes as a ballerina and Jessi as a cowgirl; Kristy dressed as Amelia Earhart and Claudia was the real MVP, dressed as a giant Twinkie. Stacey sees the new kid in her class, Cary Retlin, dressed as a knight, and figures out that he’s behind the Mischief Knights. Then, she figures out that the woman dancing with Mr. Rothman is Liz Connor in disguise — and sure enough, at the end-of-dance “unmasking” Liz Connor drops her black cloak to reveal a tattered pink frilly dress like she’d worn 28 years ago.
“It was obvious that Liz Connor was very, very crazy.” - Stacey, page 142
Turns out Liz Connor had heard that Stoneybrook was having another Halloween Masquerade dance and, having been obsessed with what happened to her 28 years ago, snapped and tried to ruin the dance. She confesses everything to Mr. Rothman and then ends up in a mental hospital. Okay then.
I’m going to go on record saying this is the best BSC mystery, and not just because it’s narrated by Stacey. This is the only one that has all the ingredients (minus murder) of a legit 1980s slasher movie and I’m here for it.
