said
It was a children’s dictionary, left over from way back when she was in the first and second grade.
Of course!
This was a dictionary for kids, not adults. And those words she’d written down were definitely adult words. So—
She knew there must be one in the house somewhere. The only problem was finding it. Or maybe she could go to the town library—surely they’d have
Then she looked up, at the sound of voices.
She walked to her door. Yes, she could hear her mother and Uncle Chuck talking in the kitchen, but their voices were muffled. Terri pressed her ear against the door and tried to listen.
The voices still couldn’t be heard well enough to understand.
Next, she put her hand on the doorknob and very carefully turned it, so not to make any noise. Then she pulled the door open to a narrow crack.
And now she could hear…
“Well, what I didn’t tell you yet,” Uncle Chuck was saying to her mother, “was that Terri got into the boathouse this morning. You must’ve forgotten to lock the door last night when you came up.”
“How could I have been so forgetful?” her mother scolded herself. “What did she see?”
“Not much, at least I don’t think so. I caught her in the office. The only thing she could’ve seen was the desk, and some preliminary notes.”
“But what about the backroom?” her mother fretted next. “She didn’t get into the backroom, did she?”
“I don’t see how she could have,” Uncle Chuck replied. “The door was locked.”
“But I’m really getting worried,” her uncle continued. “Things are really getting dangerous.”
“I know,” her mother agreed.
“I mean, can you imagine? If she went to the boathouse and actually got into the backroom, and saw the specimen tanks? She’d be terrified. Or, worse, if she got in there and found the key…” Uncle Chuck paused as if troubled. “And opened the trapdoor?”
“Don’t even say it!” her mother said in the most dreadful voice Terri had ever heard.
The kitchen conversation halted for a few moments, as though Terri’s mother and uncle were thinking about things. Then her mother said, “What did you do? When you caught her in the boathouse?”
“I sent her to her room,” Uncle Chuck said. “Didn’t really know what to do.”
“The poor thing. She must be so confused; I never have even a minute to spend with her since the project, and with her father being gone, that can only make it worse for her.”
Terri continued to listen eagerly at the crack in her opened bedroom door.
“But I’m really getting worried now,” her Uncle Chuck said next. “I mean, they’re getting bigger.”
“I know, bigger each day. And they’re coming up into the yard at night,” her mother said. “I saw them last night—they were all over the place.”
The big, bumpy toads with teeth.
“What are we going to do?” Uncle Chuck said next, and he sounded desperate. He even sounded… scared.
“What are we going to do,” he continued, “if those things get into the house?”
««—»»
Just the way he’d said it—those
The words chilled her to the bone. But could that be possible? Could those horrible fanged toads and salamanders actually get into the house? At first, Terri didn’t think so. But then she thought back to some other things she’d heard her mother and Uncle Chuck say.
Meaning the toads and salamanders, Terri had already figured. But how could they get
And something had gone wrong.
This seemed to Terri to be a strong possibility.
And they’d said something else, hadn’t they? Something that scared her even more.
With the big padlock on it.
Why was it locked? What was in it? Why would her mother and uncle be so concerned about Terri finding the key and opening the trapdoor up?
Questions, questions!
And Terri was still determined to find the answers, and she knew that some of the answers at least would come when she found a way to look up those words she’d found in Uncle Chuck’s black-leather briefcase.
“Terri?”
It was her uncle’s voice, on the other side of her bedroom door. “I’d like to speak with you for a moment.”
“Okay,” Terri said.
Her door swooshed open, and there was Uncle Chuck standing there. He wasn’t tapping his foot, which was a good sign, and another good sign was that he hadn’t called her
“What is it, Uncle Chuck?” Terri asked.
“Well, I just wanted to say that you can come out of your room now; you’ve been punished enough.”
Great! She didn’t have to stay in her room anymore!
“But I just want you to know,” Uncle Chuck went on, “that the reason I punished you is because we love you very much and we care about you, and we don’t want you to do things that you shouldn’t. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Uncle Chuck,” Terri said. But she couldn’t resist asking the next question. She wanted to see what Uncle Chuck would say. “How come I shouldn’t go to the boathouse?” she asked him next.
“Well, honey, because, like I’ve said, the boathouse is dangerous. Those old boards on the pier could break, and you could fall in the water.”
Terri managed to keep her thoughts to herself. That wasn’t the real reason, and she knew it. But instead, she changed the subject. “Are we going to have dinner now?”
“Well, no, honey. Your mother and I are still working on something very important for your mother’s job, and we have to get to work right now, so we don’t have time to eat dinner. But I want you to fix yourself something in the microwave, okay?”
Terri nodded. “Can I go to Patricia’s?”
“Sure, but only after you’ve had something to eat,” her uncle said. “And make sure you’re home before dark.” Then he stepped back from the door. “And you can watch TV later too. I’ll see you later.”
