Mystery for Megan by Abi; Burlingham

Megan had always lived in a normal house in a normal street with a normal-sized garden and an average sort of garage at the side. She had no brothers, no sisters and no pets.
She often wished she did.
    Her mum was an artist and made interesting things out of clay and her dad worked in an office and went out in a suit in the morning and came back in the same suit at night.
    Megan had a friend called Emily and a friend called Beth. She liked her house in the normal street with the normal-sized garden and the average sort of garage at the side, and she liked her
friends Emily and Beth.
    But sometimes Megan got bored, even though she tried very hard to use her imagination, like her mum told her. Sometimes she and Emily and Beth had played every game they knew how to play, had
ridden their bikes up and down the road and had hidden in every place they could think of. Then they got fed up and went back to their own homes to sulk.
    ‘You shouldn’t sulk,’ her mum said.
    ‘But I’m bored,’ said Megan.
    ‘Then use your imagination,’ said her mum.
    Megan would try, and sometimes it worked. She would fill the spaces in her head with a game where she lived in a big house with a big fluffy dog called Boots, and two older brothers called
Joshua and Jack who would look after her and give her piggyback rides and lollies, especially strawberry ones. Megan loved strawberry lollies.
    Then the sign went up in their front garden. It said For Sale in blue letters on a yellow board. A man came and knocked it in with a big wooden hammer and the noise
echoed down the street.
    ‘Where are we going?’ asked Megan. She knew her dad had found a new job and that they might have to move, but it hadn’t seemed very real until now. She had been far too busy
playing with Emily and Beth even to think about it.
    ‘We’ve found a house,’ her dad said, ‘with lots of space for your mum so she can make more things.’
    ‘What about school?’ Megan asked.
    ‘There’s another school,’ her dad said. ‘You’ll love it.’
    ‘But what about Emily and Beth?’ asked Megan.
    ‘You can write to them and they can come for a sleepover,’ her mum suggested.
    But Megan didn’t want to leave her friends. She didn’t want to hardly ever see them and she really didn’t like the thought of having no one to play with.

Megan didn’t see Buttercup House until the day they moved in.
    ‘We want it to be a surprise,’ her mum said.
    And it was a surprise! The house was huge, and looked . . . well, tumbledown, as her grandma would have said.
    As she walked through the front door, the first thing Megan saw was a wooden floor and she wondered where the carpet was. Then she noticed a small pile of fresh mouse droppings. Of course, Megan
didn’t know they were mouse droppings because she had never seen mouse droppings before. Megan saw small, round, brown blobs and wondered what they were. If Megan had looked a few seconds
earlier, she would have seen a small brown mouse watching her very carefully.
    Then Megan looked up and saw that she was in a long, narrow hallway with a big stairway climbing up the right-hand side. Megan thought that, if it wasn’t for the wall holding it up, it
would have definitely tumbled down. It was like an old person that needed propping up. Megan looked at her mum, and her mum smiled one of her I know what you’re thinking smiles.
    ‘It’s not that bad, Meggy,’ she said.
    ‘Nothing a hammer and a few nails can’t fix,’ her dad said.
    They walked through a door that was barely hanging on by its hinges and into the kitchen. Megan stared at the door. Tumbledown, she thought. Definitely tumbledown.
    ‘Just look at those views,’ her mum called to her. ‘This is what we came for.’
    Megan was still staring at the door, wondering how a hammer and a few nails could fix it.
    ‘Meggy,’ her dad said. ‘Come here.’
    He guided her through the large square kitchen to a stable door that opened on to the back