Mary Anne should never have thrown away that chain letter she got in the mail.

MY fear returned.

With shaking hands I lifted the lid of the box.

All I could see was tissue paper.

"Claudia? Do you have any tweezers?" I asked. "I'm not touching this."

"Oh, for heaven's sake." Claudia took the box from me and pulled the tissue paper up. she crumpled it into a ball, which she dropped on the bed.

"Ew!" shrieked Dawn, jumping away from the paper, and the rest of us screamed, too.

When we calmed down, we dared - all six of us - to peer into the box.

"What is it?" asked Mallory.

"It looks like a necklace," I replied.

Lying in the box was a tiny glass ball on a delicate gold chain. The ball was hollow, and inside was what looked like a seed - a small, blah, yellowish-brown thing.

I lifted the necklace out, afraid that at any moment it might go up in a puff osmoke, or that we might go up in a puff of smoke.

"Hey, here's a note!" I exclaimed.

"Oh, brother. which one of us is going to read it?" asked Dawn.

"I - I guess I better," I said. "I mean, Kristy's right. The box was mostly addressed to me."

I dropped the necklace on the bed (everyone scrambled away from it), and opened up the note.

"Handwriting?" asked Kristy.

I shook my head. "Nope. More cutout letters from the newspaper."

"So what does it say?" asked Claudia.

"It - it says," I replied shakily, "well, see for yourselves."

I spread open the note on Claudia's bed. The members of the Baby-sitters Club leaned over to look at it, although I noticed that nobody got too close.

The note said: HALLOWEEN IS COMING. BEWARE OF EVIL FORCES. WEAR THIS BAD-LUCK CHARM, MARY ANNE - OR ELSE.

Mary Anne's Bad-Luck Mystery
Published by Scholastic Inc. 1996
ISBN: 0590436597