Susannah and the Poison Green Halloween by Patricia Elmore, 1982.
This is the second book the Susannah Higgins mystery series.
Halloween doesn’t start out well for Susannah’s best friend, Lucy. Her father accidentally threw out her costume, thinking that it was trash because it was mostly made out of tin foil. (She was planning to be the Death Queen character from a comic book.) As she desperately tries to put together a last-minute costume for Susannah’s Halloween party, her father tries to buy her a costume at the discount store. Unfortunately, all the discount store left was a Little Bo Peep costume. Lucy thinks that she’s going to be mortified, showing up in something so childish when she told everyone her costume would be really cool. When another girl from school, Carla, comes by and teases her about her costume, Lucy gets the idea to make it a kind of double costume, painting her face an evil green so she can rip off her sweet Little Bo Peep mask and be the sinister Death Queen underneath.
Carla says that the secret identity costume idea is pretty good, but before she can go to the party, she has to buy a costume of her own. She had to wait for her stepfather’s pay day because her parents bought a new dress for her older sister, Nadine, for a high school dance earlier. As Carla explains about her delay in getting her costume, she mentions her sister’s social worker coming to dinner. Susannah asks why Nadine has a social worker, and Carla says that her sister got into trouble with drugs a couple of years before, but she’s not really supposed to talk about it. Lucy and Susannah want to do some trick-or-treating before the party, and Carla asks if they’ll wait for her to get her costume first. The other girls aren’t willing to wait, but they say that they’ll get some extra candy for her when they start out, and they’ll meet her at her family’s apartment at the Eucalyptus Arms apartment house. In her recounting of that Halloween night, Lucy says right out that it was at the Eucalyptus Arms that someone gave them poisoned candy.
When they reach the Eucalyptus Arms, Carla isn’t home yet, but they meet up with Knieval Jones (Lucy’s nemesis and Susannah’s occasional helper from the previous book), who is dressed like a vampire, and get some stale granola bars from Carla’s sister, Nadine. A nice lady name Mrs. Sweet gives them homemade cupcakes, and Mr. O’Hare, who is a vegetarian and thinks that sugar is poisonous, gives them organic treats from the natural food store. However, the strangest experience they have is in Mr. Mordecai’s apartment. Mr. Mordecai is a strange man with whitish eyes. He insists that they come in and pay their respects to the deceased “Jeremiah.” There is a coffin in the room with a wreath on it. The kids are spooked, but Susannah notices something odd about the wreath, which gives her an idea of who/what “Jeremiah” is. Mr. Mordecai gives them popcorn balls, and they leave.
They meet up with Carla, and Susannah’s grandfather, Judge Higgins, drives all four children to the party. However, Knievel and Lucy get into a fight over their treat bags, spilling both of them into the gutter and ruining their candy. Lucy is mad at Knievel, but then Knievel suddenly gets sick. At first, Lucy thinks that he’s just eaten too much because he’s been sampling his treats and stealing some of hers. Knievel misses the party because he’s sick, but it turns out to be much worse than that. The next day, the police come to the school to tell them that Knievel was poisoned and to interview the children about everything that happened the night before.
Because Lucy and Knievel spilled and ruined their bags of candy, it’s hard to say exactly what Knievel ate before he got sick, and Lucy never ate any of it. Carla had the same treats as the others, and she is also ill and being examined by a doctor, just in case she was also poisoned. Susannah turns her treat bag over the police for analysis. She never touched her candy because she had more than enough to eat at the Halloween party.
By process of elimination, they determine that the poisoned treats had to come from one of the apartments at the Eucalyptus Arms, and that it must have been in something homemade or unwrapped, not wrapped, commercially-made candy. Lucy says that they really know better than to eat unwrapped treats from a stranger, but Susannah points out that Knievel was hungry and ate treats almost as fast as he got them, regardless of whether they were wrapped or not. There are only a handful of suspects who could have handed out the poison in homemade or unwrapped treats, but which of them did it and why?
The title of the book is based on the fact that the apartment house is painted an ugly shade of green and all of the questionable treats the kids received were colored green.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction
One of the best things about this book for me is that it was originally published in the year I was born, and it’s a Halloween story, and I happened to be born only a few days before Halloween. Even if I hadn’t already read and liked the first book in this series, that would have endeared me to this book right away. I originally read the first book in the Susannah Higgins series as a child in elementary school, but I think that’s the only book in the series that I read at the time. It might have been that the library didn’t have the full series and the first book was the only one I could find or that book was one of the many that I found at a used book sale and the others weren’t there. It’s been so long that I can’t remember. I just remembered one scene from the first book for years, and it took me a long time to figure out what I was remembering.
Because I was very young during the early 1980s, it was a long time before I understood that this was a period when people were especially worried about the possibility of poison and razor blades in Halloween candy. Like other kids of the 1980s and 1990s, I had to watch those Halloween safety videos that warn you to be careful and to inspect candy for signs of tampering before eating it. (Specifically, I saw this video, which I found one day on YouTube. I watched this 1970s film on reel-to-reel when I was in elementary school because they hadn’t yet installed TVs and VCRs in the classrooms yet and they had a library of old films that I’m pretty sure they bought when they originally built the school in the 1970s. The sound quality wasn’t any better when I saw it for the first time, but it still cracks me up that the ultimate solution to the girl’s unsafe Halloween costume turns out to be gradually changing it to be a different costume.) In 1974, a father murdered his own son for the insurance money, hoping that some random sadist would be blamed for the crime because there were already urban legends about such things. Even though it wasn’t long before the truth of the father’s crime came out, this incident added to the urban legends, seeming to confirm the stories of Halloween poisonings. Because of this, my early Halloweens were very different from the ones my parents had in the 1950s. I was allowed to go trick-or-treating, but I never received any homemade treats, like the popcorn balls and candy apples my parents sometimes got. By the time I was trick-or-treating, only fully-wrapped, commercially made candy was considered safe and acceptable.
At first, I thought that the solution to this mystery would be that Nadine had made marijuana granola bars because we were told right away that she was involved with drugs in the past. There have been real-life cases of children accidentally getting into drugs owned by family members, including cases that have become part of the Halloween urban legends. However, that’s not the case in this story. Susannah’s Aunt Louise, who is a nurse at the children’s hospital, tells Susannah that marijuana was one of the first things they ruled out when they were testing to see what had poisoned the children. The children were vomiting and hallucinating, so Aunt Louise says that it appears to be an overdose of some kind of medicine.
Aunt Louise wasn’t mentioned in the previous book in the series, but she comes to stay with Susannah because her grandparents have to go out of town. Again, Susannah’s parents are simply not mentioned in the story. It’s never clarified whether Susannah is an orphan or living with her grandparents for another reason, although I think it’s implied that she’s an orphan by the parents’ absence and the lack of any mention of why.
Carla is a new character who didn’t appear in the previous book, but again, children in these books do not live in conventional two-parent households. Nadine is actually Carla’s stepsister, and the two of them haven’t known each other very long and are having problems adjusting to their parents’ remarriage and living together. Books with divorced parents or blended families were becoming increasingly common in children’s literature during the 1980s and 1990s, and they were a regular staple of books that I read when I was young. It was pretty common for there to be at least one character with divorced parents in the books I read, but this series stands out to me because it seems like every kid in it so far is either from a divorced family or lives with relatives other than their parents, for some reason. A mixture of different family situations is to be expected, but an overwhelming number of kids in almost the same situation just seems a little odd.
The author does a good job of making everyone at the apartment house look equally suspicious. A number of people at the apartment house have secrets, and some of them are truly dangerous. One of the characters in the story, a man Nadine and Carla call “Uncle Bob” because he’s a friend of Nadine’s father, seems to be showing inappropriate attention to the girls. Carla is afraid to be alone with him, hinting that things that he does when she’s alone with him make her uneasy or even frightened. Uncle Bob isn’t the poisoner, but he does seem to have inappropriate sexual interest in the girls. There isn’t anything explicit described in the story, but the way that the characters refer to Uncle Bob and the dirty magazine that Lucy says she found in his trash can along with a bunch of empty liquor bottles imply what Uncle Bob is like when other adults aren’t watching. Carla says that she’s tried to tell her parents about it before, but nobody believed her because Uncle Bob has been such a good old friend of her stepfather, and he can’t picture him doing anything wrong. When she finally confides the problem to Nadine, Nadine confirms that she’s had the same experience with him and that her father didn’t believe her either, but she’s going to make sure that he listens this time. Susannah also says that they are going to tell the police about it and her Aunt Louise, and while Uncle Bob may not have actually done anything that would cause him to be arrested, he’s going to get some severe warnings and maybe some professional help.
The Light in the Forest by Conrad Richter, 1953.
Molly McIntire misses her father, who is a doctor stationed in England during World War II. Things haven’t been the same in her family since he left. Treats are more rare because of the sugar rationing, and she now has to eat yucky vegetables from her family’s victory garden all the time, under the watchful eyes of the family’s housekeeper. Her mother, while generally understanding, is frequently occupied with her work with the Red Cross. Molly’s older sister, Jill, tries to act grown-up, and Molly thinks that her brothers are pests, especially Ricky, who is fond of teasing. However, when Molly and her friends tease Ricky about his crush on a friend of Jill’s, it touches off a war of practical jokes in their house.
Halloween is coming, and she wants to come up with great costume ideas for herself and her two best friends, Linda and Susan. Her first thought is that she’d like to be Cinderella, but her friends are understandably reluctant to be the “ugly” stepsisters, and Molly has to admit that she wouldn’t really like that role, either. Also, Molly doesn’t have a fancy dress, and her mother is too busy to make one and also doesn’t think that they should waste rationed cloth on costumes. Instead, she suggests that the girls make grass skirts out of paper and go as hula dancers. The girls like the idea, but Halloween doesn’t go as planned.
Because he laughed at the girls, saying that he could see their underwear after he sprayed them with water and ruined their skirts, the girls decide to play a trick that will give Ricky his just desserts. The next time that Jill’s friend comes to visit, the girls arrange to have Jill and her friend standing underneath Ricky’s bedroom window when they start throwing all of his underwear out the window, right in front of Ricky. Ricky screams at the girls that “this is war!” just as their mother arrives home.
Mystery Behind Dark Windows by Mary C. Jane, 1962.
Then, one night, Ellie goes out to look for her aunt’s missing cat and hears someone in the old, supposedly empty mill. When she tries to tell Tony, he doesn’t take her seriously, but Ellie knows what she heard. Ellie later goes back to the mill to take another look at the place, and she sees Jeff, a boy from Tony’s high school, hanging around. Later, she confides what she’s heard and seen in Hank, an old friend who lives on the other side of the river, and Violet, another girl from her class whose family has suffered since the closure of the mill. The two of them start helping Ellie to investigate.
The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, 1971.
With their family suddenly much larger, David’s father bought a new house for them to live in. Actually, it’s a very old house just outside of a small town. People call it the Westerly house after the former owners. Not long after the family moves in, they find out that people used to say that the Westerly house was haunted. Mr. and Mrs. Westerly used to travel around the world with their two daughters because Mr. Westerly worked for the government, but after they settled down to a quieter life in this small town in the late 1800s, strange things started happening in their house. Rocks would fly around the house, seemingly thrown by invisible hands, and someone (or something) cut the head off the carved cupid on the fancy staircase banister. The head was never found. These incidents were reported in the local paper, and people believed that the Westerly family was haunted by a 
Amanda is fascinated by stories of the poltergeist. A friend of hers where she used to live (one her mother didn’t approve of) was teaching her about the occult and how to do magic spells. When David tells Amanda that he thought that his mother was psychic, Amanda is surprised, and she offers to teach David and the other kids about magic over the summer. David eagerly accepts the offer because he finds the subject fascinating and because it’s the only thing that Amanda really seems interested in. The other kids are also fascinated at the idea, even the littlest ones, which takes Amanda by surprise. She had expected them to be scared.
Just as with the Westerly family years ago, rocks are thrown around the house or found just laying around. Things are broken in the middle of the night. Have Amanda’s rituals somehow awoken the poltergeist once more? David has his doubts, suspecting that it’s part of Amanda’s playacting, but she is accounted for when some of these strange things happen. The younger kids are still more fascinated than frightened by these strange happenings, but their stepmother finds them particularly unnerving.
There are some elements of the happenings, particularly the reappearance of the cupid’s head, that are never fully explained, although David ends up knowing more than Amanda by the end. Some aspects of the situation are hinted at. There may be a real supernatural event at the end of the story. Blair appears to have inherited psychic abilities from his mother, and there is a distinct possibility that the Westerly sisters who once lived in the house were just as unhappy with their parents for the changes in their lives as Amanda was with her mother. Although the “poltergeist” as it first appears doesn’t exist, it may be that the “poltergeist” of the past remembers what it was like to be young and unhappy and that she wanted to make amends for past wrongs and to help another troubled young girl to make peace with her life and family. But, if you don’t like that explanation, there is a more conventional, non-supernatural explanation that David considers, which equally possible. Personally, I think it’s a combination of the two, but it’s not completely clear. I think the author left it open-ended like that to make readers wonder and to preserve the air of mystery after the other mysteries have been cleared up.
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