Philip and the Haunted House (9781619500020) by John Paulits Page A

“Sale” sign on
it so I guess nobody bought it yet. That’ll be an empty house now and look even more haunted.”
    Philip pictured the house—dark, empty,
and surrounded by tall weeds. It could be haunted for all he and Emery knew; and
there it sat—right around the corner from where they
lived.
    “ Want to go watch them take stuff out?”
Emery asked.
    “ They’re still there?”
    “ Yeah. They only got there a little
while ago.”
    Philip thought of the truck that woke him
up.
    “ Okay,” Philip said. He’d go now, but
once they’d emptied the house and left it empty and lonely and
scary looking, he planned to stay away from it. Far
away.
     
     

Chapter Two
     
    “ What a boring morning,” Philip said as
he got behind Emery in the lunchroom line to get his milk on
Monday.
    “ Are you getting chocolate or white
milk?” asked Emery.
    “ You know I never get white milk,”
Philip said, bending into the refrigerated bin to take a milk
carton.
    “ My mother makes me get white milk,”
Emery reported sadly.
    “ How’ll she know?”
    Emery shrugged. “She finds out
everything.”
    Philip ignored Emery’s complaint and slid
next to him on the bench of their lunch table. “We’re partners in
the project, right?”
    “ Yeah, but what are we going to do? It
doesn’t sound very interesting. I have the list. We’ll look at it
after we eat.” Emery opened his lunch box. “Peanut butter and jelly
again. I wish my mother wasn’t so busy in the morning with the two
babies.”
    “ Why don’t you pack your own lunch?”
Philip asked as he opened his. “Hey! Where’s my sandwich?” He
emptied his lunch box onto the cardboard tray the lunch ladies had
given him with his milk.
    “ All you have is an apple and two fig
bars?” said Emery, biting into his peanut butter and jelly sandwich
and moaning. “Grape jelly, as usual.”
    “ Where’s my sandwich?” Philip said,
louder than before.
    “ You sure you had one?”
    “ Of course I had one.” Philip
remembered watching his mother make the sandwich. She wrapped it up
and handed it to him. He put it into his metal lunch box himself.
He left the house and walked to Emery’s. He went inside to wait for
Emery and left his heavy book bag and the lunch box next to the big
bush near the sidewalk. It took about five minutes for Emery and
him to come out. He picked up his lunch box and book bag and went
to school. He put his lunch box on the shelf in the coat closet,
along with everybody else’s. Mr. Ware never let anybody go to the
closet until lunchtime, and now his sandwich was gone.
    “ You know,” said Emery, “I can see the
empty house, a little of it, from my bedroom window.”
    Hmmmm, Philip
mused. The haunted house.
    “ Emery, I put my lunch box down outside
your house today when I went in to get you, and now my sandwich is
gone. I never lost a sandwich when people lived in the house.”
    “ How could an empty house steal your
sandwich?”
    “ Then you tell me where it
went.”
    “ It’s probably still at home on your
kitchen table. Want half of this?” Emery held out the peanut butter
and jelly sandwich. “You can have it for your fig bars.”
    “ Both of them?”
    “ Well. Okay, one. I don’t like it much
anyway.” They made the exchange and finished their lunches in
silence, Philip trying in vain to figure out what happened to his
cracked pepper turkey sandwich.
    The two boys found a spot in the schoolyard
out of the chilly November wind, and Emery took the project list
from his back pocket. He unfolded the wrinkled paper.
    “ So what’ll we do?”
    Philip still had his mind on his missing
sandwich. Thinking about it made him hungry again. Half of Emery’s
sandwich didn’t fill him up. He’d make another sandwich when he got
home if he could find any cracked pepper turkey in the
refrigerator.
    “ Mr. Ware said this Community Service
project is half our social studies mark, and he spent an awful long
time talking about it,”