Mystery #18: Stacey and the Mystery at the Empty House
The Johanssens are going on a trip to France, and they’ve hired Stacey to house-sit and walk Carrot, their dog. Stacey’s psyched for the easy money. It’s all fun and games until she hears a report on the radio about a convict who’s escaped from a nearby prison. And until Carrot starts acting up by scratching and chewing things and making messes. Then things start to get strange…
“Being in that empty house, all by myself, was really starting to make me feel jumpy.” - Stacey, page 52
First, Carrot is growling when Stacey shows up one afternoon. Then she notices a glass in the sink that she could swear wasn’t there the day before. The coffee machine is warm even though she hadn’t used it. There are wadded-up Kleenex in a trash can she’d already emptied. And she finds Carrot’s leash on a hook by the wrong door. There’s a lingering smell of toast when she arrives one day. Stacey manages to shrug it off but I say RUN, BITCH, RUN!
Stacey then has a weird encounter with a meter reader, and the next day when she gets to the Johanssens’ house their newspaper is missing, even though the neighbors’ papers were delivered as usual and the Johanssens hadn’t paused or canceled their service while out of town. Another day, her watch isn’t where she left it, and then she finds a brush with red hairs in it in the bathroom. The Johanssens don’t have red hair, but the escaped convict does. Yikes bikes!
Stacey asks the BSC for help, and they question how someone else would be getting in if there’s no sign of a break-in. This is when I remembered that Stacey mentioned Carrot having a doggy door, and that she also mentioned Charlotte’s friends - like Becca Ramsey - might be missing her while she’s gone. Hmm. Could one of Charlotte’s friends be sneaking in the doggy door to play with Carrot? I’m just not convinced that Ann M. Martin would go full escaped-convict-squatter.
Claudia helps Stacey search the house for “clues” and the girls have an emergency BSC meeting at which they schedule someone to accompany Stacey to the Johanssen house for the next few days. Stacey and Claudia find a broken vase upstairs; they assume Carrot knocked it off an end table and Stacey buys a replacement with her own money. But when she and Claud go to the house to replace it, it’s already back on the end table, uncracked. Um…
When Claud and Stacey check the house the next day, there’s a new note left by the answering machine with the phone number for the train station written on it. The BSC rushes to the train station, where they spot a man with red hair - the same shade as the hair in the hairbrush - rushing toward the Johanssens as they get off the train. Stacey thinks she’s about to witness a triple homicide, but instead Dr. J hugs the man and greets him warmly. Turned out he’s a friend who’d been staying at the house — he’d left Stacey a note, but Carrot had chewed it up on Stacey’s first day of housesitting. It was his hair, his glass, his Kleenex, etc. and he broke and replaced the vase. Okay so my guess was wrong but I was right about one thing — no full escaped-convict-squatter. TBH I’m just glad Stacey SSDGM-ed.
