基本信息出版社：Knopf Books for Young Readers
页码：144 页
出版日期：2003年08月
ISBN：037582572X
International Standard Book Number：037582572X
条形码：9780375825729
EAN：9780375825729
装帧：精装
正文语种：英语

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Maureen Swanson is the scourge of the neighborhood. At age nine, she already has a reputation as a hard slapper, a loud laugher, a liar, and a stay-after-schooler. The other kids call her Stinky. So sometimes when Maureen passes the crumbling (and haunted?) Messerman mansion, she imagines that she is Maureen Messerman–rich, privileged, and powerful. Then she finds a way into the forbidden, boarded-up house. In the hall are portraits of seven young women wearing elaborate gowns and haughty expressions. Maureen has something scathing to say to each one, but then she notices that the figures seem to have shifted in their frames. So she reaches out her finger to touch the paint–just to make sure–and touches . . . silk! These seven daughters of privilege are colder and meaner than Maureen ever thought to be. They are wicked, wicked ladies, and Maureen has something they want. . . .
作者简介 Mary Chase was a newspaper reporter, playwright, and novelist. Her best-known play, Harvey, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
文摘 The Old Messerman Place

Maureen Swanson was known among the other children in her neighborhood as a hard slapper, a shouter, a loud laugher, a liar, a trickster, and a stay-after-schooler.

Whenever they saw her coming they cried out, ?Here comes Old Stinky,? and ran away.

Sometimes she would pretend she hadn?t seen them. She was a good pretender. If she was pretending she was a queen or a movie star or Maureen Messerman, she would not notice. At other times she would chase them, slap the one she caught, then run and hide until the trouble died down.

Her mother often said to her father, ?How I wish Maureen could be a little lady: sweet, kind, and nice to everyone.?

He frowned. ?She better learn to mind first. She better stop hanging around that Old Messerman Place.?

The Old Messerman Place, which took up half a city block, was walled in, boarded up, deserted. You couldn?t see inside because the brick walls were too high, and the spruce trees growing just inside the walls grew so tall and so close together that even when you threw your head back and looked up, all you could see were four chimneys like four legs on a giant?s table turned upside down.

In the middle of the wall that faced the boulevard hung a pair of high, wide iron gates across a bricked driveway where once carriages pulled by horses had gone rolling into the grounds. You couldn?t see where they had rolled or where they had stopped because just inside the gates tall wooden boards were nailed together and a sign read: Private Property. Keep Out. Trespassers Prosecuted.

Some people insisted the Old Messerman Place was haunted, that at night they often saw lights flickering through the trees and in the daytime they heard a tap-tapping kind of sound like someone pounding with a hammer in there. Occasionally the neighbors called the police, who came down the boulevard with sirens screaming, unlocked the gates, pried open the boards, and looked ar
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