Free The Ghost in the Third Row by Bruce Coville

You might break it.”
    â€œI don’t care if it breaks!” I yelled. “Get me out of here!”
    Chris started to say something, but she was interrupted by an angry voice yelling about “all the racket going on down there!”
    It was Pop.
    I stopped pounding. I knew Pop would get me out of the coffin. But I had a feeling when he did I might wish I was back inside it again.
    The next few minutes were a jumble of voices and noises. Pop yelled at Chris about the trouble she was causing, and Chris yelled right back, trying to explain to him about my being trapped in the coffin.
    Finally it dawned on him what she was saying. “Damn fool kids,” he muttered. He began banging at the side of the coffin. Suddenly the bottom opened up, and I came crashing down onto the floor.
    â€œOuch!” I yelped. “That hurt!”
    â€œServes you right!” said Pop gruffly. “The two of you don’t have any business fooling around down here, anyway. Let me see your hands,” he added.
    At first I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then I realized that he had noticed what I hadn’t even felt in all the excitement: my hands were scraped and bleeding from pounding on the lid of the coffin.
    I held them out for his inspection. He grabbed them, turned them over roughly, then said, “We’d better take care of these. Come with me.”
    Glancing at each other nervously, Chris and I followed Pop to his office, which was where we had been trying to go before we got distracted by all those props. Only we had intended to go in without Pop, so we could check things out.
    Actually, I’m not sure “office” is the right word for the place. It was just a large, dingy room filled almost to overflowing with stuff most people would consider junk. A big old wooden desk stood to the right of the door, and a cluttered table stretched along the left wall. At the back of the room was another door, pulled nearly shut.
    Personally, I thought it was wonderful. Most of the stuff that looked like junk was really souvenirs from all of Pop’s years at the theater: posters, playbills, tattered scripts—all kinds of stuff. And the new stuff was all from the theater, too. I recognized a couple of props I knew we would be using in our show. It was clear they were only half-finished, and it dawned on me that Pop must be working on them.
    But the most amazing things had to be the pictures. A few dozen of them hung on the rear wall, mounted in cheap black wooden frames. The glass had cracked in three or four of them, and a few had started to fade. Even so, they were impressive. They were all pictures of important stars—people I recognized immediately from all the old movies I had watched with my father. And every one of them was autographed.
    I was dying to go over and look at them more closely. But the way Pop said, “Sit here,” when he plunked me down in the chair beside his desk made me change my mind.
    So I sat and glared at Chris as she casually wandered over to the wall and began to inspect the pictures.
    Pop sat down at his desk and began rummaging through the drawers. As he did I looked over the rest of the room. I was surprised to see what looked like a bed in the next room.
    Did Pop live in the theater?
    I made up my mind to ask around and see what I could find out.
    â€œHere, give me your hands,” said Pop. He was holding a tube of some kind of salve he had pulled out of one of the drawers.
    I stuck out my hands and let him start rubbing on the salve. As he did, I noticed a large scrapbook sitting on the far side of the desk.
    It was open to a page that contained a single sheet of yellowed newspaper. It was upside down, but even from where I was sitting I could make out the huge black headline: “ACTRESS KILLED IN TRAGIC ACCIDENT AT GRAND THEATER.”
    It was the article we had been trying to find in the library!
    Underneath the headline there was a