Moans and Groans and Dinosaur Bones Read online

  For Antigone Karvounarakis Delton:

  Hallelujah, we all sing!

  (Though someone is off-key.)

  Welcome, welcome, Christmas Love,

  Our own Antigone!

  —J.D.

  Contents

  1 Bad Deed Plans

  2 Good News and Bad News

  3 Double Trouble

  4 Lost and Found

  5 All Aboard … Finally

  6 First Stop: The Ritz

  7 Mummies (but No Daddies)

  8 A Fake Dinosaur

  9 By Hook or by Crook

  10 A Dog Named Roger

  11 Betsy Ross

  12 Molly’s Imagination Pays Off

  “Winter is boring,” sighed Molly Duff to her best friend, Mary Beth Kelly.

  “It’s too long,” said Mary Beth. “And too cold. The snow is all dirty, and my boots leak.” She kicked a pile of gray snow.

  “Nothing exciting ever happens. Just school and more school and Pee Wee Scout meetings every Tuesday,” said Molly.

  “Even Pee Wee Scouts is boring in the winter,” agreed Mary Beth. The girls were on their way to a Pee Wee Scout meeting.

  “I bet we’ll just do some project, and Sonny will wreck his with too much glue, and Roger will stick Rachel’s braids together. It’s so boring,” said Molly.

  “Let’s not go to Pee Wee Scouts!” said Mary Beth. “Let’s do something exciting instead!”

  Molly stopped in her tracks. Not go to Pee Wee Scouts? What a scary idea! Molly got shivers down her back just thinking about it. Was such a daring thing possible? And what would her mother say when she found out? Unless, of course, she never found out …

  “What would we do instead?” asked Molly.

  “Something,” said Mary Beth. “Anything. Something different than looking at creepy Roger.”

  “What if we get caught?” said Molly. “It’s like playing hooky from school. We could get arrested.”

  “Pooh,” said Mary Beth, waving the idea away with her mitten. “Scouts isn’t like school. I mean, there’s no law that says you have to go to a Pee Wee Scout meeting. It’s something you volunteer to do, like joining the army.”

  Molly thought about that. Was her friend right? If there was no danger, then why did it feel so scary?

  The girls sat down on a park bench to think about it.

  “We’re going to be late for the meeting,” Molly said nervously.

  “We’re not going to the meeting,” said Mary Beth. “While they’re having their boring old meeting and talking about good deeds, we’re going to be having the time of our lives!”

  “Yeah!” shouted Molly. “Good for us!”

  The girls sat in silence. Then Molly asked softly, “What are we going to be doing?”

  “Well,” said her friend, “we could go to a movie.”

  “I don’t have any money,” said Molly.

  “Or,” Mary Beth went on, “we could go sliding on the hill.”

  Molly looked at the rivers of melting snow running down the street.

  “Too wet,” she said. “Half the hill is dead grass.”

  Then Mary Beth jumped up and said, “Let’s do something bad instead of something good! Let’s do bad deeds instead of good deeds! Let’s ring someone’s doorbell and run and hide!”

  Molly looked at Mary Beth in surprise. Molly might agree to miss Scouts, but she hadn’t lost her senses.

  “That’s dumb,” she said. “I don’t feel like being a criminal just because we want to have some fun.” Missing a meeting was one thing. Facing her mother across a desk at the police station was definitely something else.

  The girls listed things to do. Molly even wrote them on a corner of her spelling test paper. Make cookies. No good, because they’d need a stove and then their mothers would know they were skipping Scouts. Roller-skate. Too wet. And skates didn’t fit over snow boots. Go to the zoo or the mall. How would they get there? They didn’t drive.

  “There isn’t much excitement around here,” said Mary Beth with a groan. “If we lived in California like Ashley, we could go to Hollywood and see the stars.”

  “If we lived someplace with a racetrack, we could go to a car race. I saw it on TV.”

  “I guess we live in a boring place,” said Mary Beth.

  The girls picked up their mittens and their books. They both knew where they were going. Even if they were late and it was boring, Pee Wee Scouts was still the only thing around.

  “Where were you guys?” shouted Roger White as the girls walked down Mrs. Peters’s basement steps. Mrs. Peters was their troop leader. Troop 23 met in her basement. Sonny’s mother, Mrs. Stone, was assistant leader. She was already passing out cupcakes. The same boring kind of cupcakes they had every week, Molly noticed.

  “Where were you? Where were you?” Roger pestered the girls again.

  “Nowhere,” said Mary Beth.

  “Hey, how could you be nowhere?” shouted Tim Noon. “You have to be somewhere!”

  “It’s good you got here, girls,” said Mrs. Peters. “I was just about to tell everyone the big news.”

  I’ll bet, thought Molly. Big news to Mrs. Peters meant things like a visit to a farm to see baby pigs, or a trip to the market to shop for an easy meal as a surprise for their parents. Molly began to wish she’d decided to ring doorbells after all.

  “The news,” said their leader, “is that we are taking an overnight trip! We are going to Center City on a train, and we’ll stay overnight in a hotel! We’ll go to the Science and History Museum, where we’ll see real dinosaur bones and learn about people who lived in the past.”

  Molly almost choked on her cupcake. Mary Beth looked stunned.

  “We almost missed this meeting because of your silly idea!” she whispered to Molly.

  “It was your idea!” said Molly. “Not mine.”

  But Molly couldn’t even remember whose idea it had been. And it didn’t matter. Because all of a sudden Pee Wee Scouts appeared to be more exciting than it ever had been in the past. A trip on a real train! Overnight in a real hotel! Dinosaur bones! What a close call that was. She might have missed it all just to go to a movie or to go sliding on brown grass.

  Everyone was talking at once.

  “Do our parents have to come?” shouted Sonny Stone, glaring at his mother.

  “Can we sleep on those little shelf beds on the train?” asked Patty Baker. “And put our clothes in those little net hammocks? I saw that in an old movie.”

  “I’m scared of trains,” said Tim Noon. “Sometimes they crash.”

  “Scaredy-cat,” scoffed Roger White. “I’m going to sit in the cockpit and help the driver drive.”

  “He doesn’t sit in a cockpit,” said Kevin Moe, who knew a lot of things. He was very smart, and Molly wanted to marry him someday. Him or Jody, that is. Jody George was smart too and had a wheelchair he let the Pee Wees ride in sometimes.

  “A cockpit is for a pilot in a plane,” Kevin went on. “An engineer drives a train.”

  “My uncle is an engineer,” said Kenny Baker. “And he doesn’t drive a train, he works in an office.”

  “That’s another kind of engineer,” said Jody.

  “My uncle’s a pilot,” said Lisa Ronning. “He flies those jumbo jets across the ocean.”

  Now everyone wanted to hear about jumbo jets.

  Mrs. Peters held up her hands, which meant silence. One by one people stopped talking.

  “Remember to raise your hand when you want to speak,” she reminded them. “We won’t be sleeping on the train, and parents won’t be coming, and the train will not crash,” she went on.

  Rachel Meyers’s hand was waving. �
��Mrs. Peters, I’ve been to Center City with my aunt and we ate in a fancy restaurant at the top of a big tower and it turned around while we ate. The whole restaurant. Will we be going there?”

  “How could a restaurant turn around?” asked Tracy Barnes.

  “Maybe it’s on wheels or something,” said Kenny.

  “I don’t know if our restaurant will revolve,” said Mrs. Peters firmly. “But we’ll have a good time. Now I have to tell you the next part of the news. On this trip, we’ll earn a brand-new badge.”

  Before she could say more, the Pee Wees broke into loud cheers. They loved new badges. They had quite a few badges already. One for baby-tending, one for working with pets, and several for helping out in the community. But they could never have too many. A new badge was an exciting thing to hear about.

  “What do we have to do on the trip to get a badge?” asked Tracy.

  “What’s the name of the badge?” asked Patty.

  “It will be called our museum badge!” said Mrs. Peters. “Doesn’t that sound like fun?”

  Mrs. Peters tried to make her voice sound exciting, but it didn’t work. No one looked as if they thought a museum badge was fun. The Pee Wees all groaned.

  Their leader made another try. “Just think of all the old things you will see!” she said. “Mummies and dinosaurs and old pots and gold coins. All you have to do to earn your badge is choose your favorite and write a little paper about it or draw a picture of it.”

  Many of the Pee Wees did not think it was fun to do something they did in school. And writing sounded like school. Molly secretly liked to write. Especially lists and book reports. But she didn’t want the other Pee Wees to know that, so she groaned too. But she was already thinking of how hard it might be to choose just one thing out of all the things in the museum to write about. She had the feeling she would want to write about quite a few of them. She knew that it was a big museum. She didn’t want to draw a picture. That was for babies. It was for the Pee Wees who were too lazy to write, like Roger, thought Molly. Roger would probably draw a picture. When the Pee Wees had been working on a badge for reading, Roger took baby books out of the library instead of real books. It was like cheating.

  “Mrs. Peters, can we write a paper and draw a picture?” asked Rachel.

  Rachel was a show-off sometimes, thought Molly. Even if Molly wanted to do both, she wouldn’t brag about it.

  “I suppose so,” said Mrs. Peters to Rachel.

  “I guess a picture or a paper won’t be so bad,” said Mary Beth.

  “Now for the last thing,” said their leader. “I need one more parent to help me on the trip, since Mrs. Stone can’t leave the twins alone and Mr. Stone is out of town.” Larry Stone was Sonny’s adoptive dad. Sonny looked relieved.

  The other Pee Wees looked worried. No one wanted their parents there.

  “She said parents weren’t coming,” grumbled Lisa.

  “It would spoil the trip for whoever had their parents along,” whispered Mary Beth. “I sure hope mine don’t volunteer.”

  Rachel’s hand was waving again. “My mom or dad can come,” she said.

  “Why would Rachel want her parents there?” Tracy said to Molly.

  Molly didn’t know. She was just glad her own mother worked on weekends.

  “My parents could come, too,” said Jody.

  Jody was so good-hearted, he wouldn’t even mind having his parents around, thought Molly.

  “You didn’t let me finish. I already have a parent who has volunteered to come,” said Mrs. Peters. “I am pleased to say that Molly’s mother, Mrs. Duff, has agreed to take some time off work to help out.”

  Molly couldn’t believe her ears! In one minute, one second even, her trip had been ruined. The other Pee Wees made comforting noises. They could afford to feel bad for her, she thought. They were safe. They knew their own parents would be at home, where they belonged. Even though Jody and Rachel might not mind, the rest of the Pee Wees definitely did not want their parents along on a Pee Wee trip.

  “That’s too bad,” said Mary Beth.

  “She should be working,” said Molly crossly.

  Mrs. Peters was telling the Pee Wees what to pack and how to behave. She was telling them about manners and that there would be no running or shouting on the train or in the hotel. Usually Molly would be making a list. But this time she wasn’t even listening. After all, her mother would pack for her. And she surely wouldn’t run and shout with her mother nearby. She wouldn’t be able to do anything that was any fun.

  On the way home Molly tried to think of ways to make her mother change her mind. Wasn’t her mother too old to travel with a lot of rowdy children? And who would keep her dad company? Had her mom thought of that? What if Molly’s grandma got sick or Mrs. Duff was needed at work in an emergency?

  When Molly got home, she said, “I don’t think we should leave Dad alone for a whole weekend. He’ll get lonesome.”

  “He’d have plenty to do,” said Mrs. Duff. “But guess what? Dad is invited to come with us! After your meeting today Mr. Peters called to say he’s coming, and he wants Dad to join him. Isn’t that great?”

  Rat’s knees. Now she had two parents to ruin her trip instead of one! Why had she even mentioned it? Still, it wasn’t Molly who had made her dad come. It was Mr. Peters, and it had been arranged before Molly even asked.

  “Just in case you don’t really want to come, Jody’s mom and Rachel’s mom could come,” said Molly in a last-ditch effort to save the trip.

  “We wouldn’t miss it for the world,” said her mom. “But it almost sounds like you don’t want us along!”

  “I do,” lied Molly. Sometimes it was just not polite to tell the truth. She didn’t want to hurt her parents’ feelings.

  “We won’t treat you any differently than anyone else on the trip,” said her mother. “We’ll just ignore you. In fact, with Roger and Sonny there, I think we’ll have plenty to do keeping an eye on them to be sure they aren’t getting into trouble.”

  Molly smiled. It was true that some of the Pee Wees needed more watching than others.

  The phone rang. It was Tracy. “Too bad about your mom,” she said.

  “Not only my mom,” groaned Molly. “My dad is coming too.”

  “Bad luck,” said Tracy. “My mom couldn’t get off work even if she wanted to.”

  “She must have a good job,” said Molly.

  Well, there was no use crying over spilled milk, as Molly’s grandma always said. She would have to be brave and try to make the best of the ruined trip.

  “Departing on track seven,” said a deep, gravelly voice that sounded to Molly as if it were coming from the bottom of a pit. “Track seven,” it repeated, “for Smoky Junction, Argyle, Rochester, and Center City.”

  “That’s us!” shouted Sonny, running toward track seven. “That’s our train!”

  “There’s no rush,” said Mr. Duff. He pointed to the sign that was lit up over the ticket windows. “The timetable says it leaves at nine-oh-four. We have plenty of time. And I’d like to get a cup of coffee first.”

  “We’ll miss the train!” shouted Sonny. “The guy said it’s reporting!”

  Rachel rolled her eyes. “That’s departing,” she told him. “And trains can’t leave before it says on the sign. It’s a law.”

  Rachel knew a lot. Molly had learned many things from her. Like where silverware and napkins went when you set the table. And how to get grape juice out of a new sweater your grandma knitted before your mom could see the stain. And now something else she’d never known. Trains could not leave before the time it said on the sign. No matter what.

  Sonny looked as if he did not believe Rachel. He went over to the door to track seven and sat down on his backpack.

  “Let’s all have a look at the model railroad set up over here,” said Mrs. Peters in her Scout leader voice. Molly’s mother herded the Pee Wees along, and Mr. Peters guided Sonny forward with the rest.

  “The t
rain is leaving!” said Sonny. “It’s going without us!”

  “Baby,” said Tracy.

  “We’ll just have a look at the model trains and then we’ll go,” said Mrs. Peters. “See, there isn’t even a line in front of track seven yet.”

  The man in charge of the model railroad was glad to have an audience. The Pee Wees watched as a little model train went up hills and down valleys and across bridges. It stopped at the little train station in the make-believe town. It stopped while the engineer switched tracks to let another train pass.

  “Isn’t it cute!” said Lisa. “Look, there are even little tables in the dining car!”

  “Hey, is there real oil in those tank cars?” shouted Roger.

  “What a dumb question,” said Mary Beth. “Of course there isn’t real oil. That would be dangerous.”

  The man didn’t call Roger dumb; he just said no. He told the Pee Wees how important trains were for carrying freight. “They carried lumber from the mills and coal from the mines,” he said.

  “Now they carry brand-new cars,” said Tim. “The car my uncle just bought came on a train.”

  “Let’s go,” whined Sonny, who wasn’t paying attention to the model trains. He was looking toward the real train that had pulled in on track seven. A small crowd was beginning to gather in front of the door that led to the track.

  The Pee Wees thanked the man and followed the Peterses to the rest rooms. When they came out, Mr. Peters and Mr. Duff made sure each Scout had their own backpack or overnight bag. They made sure they knew how to fold Jody’s wheelchair to get it on the train.

  “Well, I guess we can go to track seven and line up,” said Mrs. Peters. She began to count noses. She counted several times, Molly thought. Their leader frowned. She went to talk to Mrs. Duff.

  All four adults looked around.

  “Someone’s missing,” said Kenny.

  “Who?” asked Jody.

  “Well, it’s not Roger. Darn,” said Mary Beth. Roger was running and sliding on the marble floor and making faces at a baby in a stroller.