Monster Lake

“’Bye,” Terri said.

She waited a minute in her bedroom, then she went out into the hallway. Uncle Chuck had gone into his own bedroom and was coming out again right now.

With the briefcase.

Terri waited a few moments more. Then she quietly walked out to the kitchen and looked out the big sliding-glass door into the backyard.

There they go, she thought, looking on. Just like every night…

Through the glass door, she could see her mother and Uncle Chuck walking across the back yard, to the narrow gravel path that led to the boathouse.

««—»»

“Wow!” Terri said. “That’s a big bandage.”

Patricia, sitting in a chair, was holding her knee up, to show Terri the large white bandage on it.

“And it doesn’t hurt?” Terri asked.

“Naw,” Patricia said. “It just itches a little. I have to go back to the doctor’s in a week, so he can take the stitches out.”

Terri had quickly fixed herself a spaghetti TV dinner in the microwave, then she’d gone immediately to Patricia’s house. And why shouldn’t she? Her uncle had given her permission.

“So you didn’t get grounded?” Patricia asked.

“Nope. I lucked out. But—” Terri took out the piece of paper from her pocket. “Look what I brought.”

“What is it?” Patricia wanted to know.

Terri explained it all, about the words she’d seen in the boathouse, and how she’d been able to write them down after seeing them again on the notepad she’d found in her uncle’s briefcase.

“Terri!” Patricia exclaimed. “You really took a big chance! If your uncle had caught you in his bedroom right after catching you in the boathouse, you really would’ve been grounded!”

“I know,” Terri admitted. “But I had to find these words. I’m sure they’ll give us a lot of answers to all the weird things that have been going on lately. But the only dictionary I could find was one of those real skinny ones they gave us in first grade—you know, just when you’re learning to read.”

“Oh, yeah,” Patricia said.

“And it didn’t have any of these words in it. Do you have a dictionary, like a big one for adults?”

Patricia rubbed her chin. “Yeah, I think so. I think there’s one in the den. But we’ll have to ask my father’s permission first.”

“Okay. Let’s do it.”

Patricia’s father was in the living room, sitting back in a big recliner chair reading the newspaper. The television was on, with a baseball game. “Yankees,” he said to himself, “what a bunch of dopes.” Patricia asked if they could use the dictionary, and her father said yes without thinking twice. Terri would at least have expected him to ask why; most adults always did.

“This is great,” Terri commented as Patricia took her into the paneled den. A big hard-covered dictionary sat opened on top of a low dark-wood bookshelf.

“That’s the biggest dictionary I’ve ever seen!” Terri remarked.

“Yeah, and if this doesn’t have those words in it,” Patricia guessed, “then nothing will. What’s the first word?”

“‘Reagent,’” Terri said, and pointed to the word on the paper so Patricia could see it.

Patricia turned to the R’s in the big dictionary, skimmed her finger down the page. “Here it is,” she said and began to quote, “‘Reagent: a substance used to react with another substance.’”

Terri frowned, and wrote the definition down on her piece of notebook paper. Then she read the next word. “Transmission.”

“Isn’t that something in a car?” Patricia asked.

“Well, yeah, I think it is, but it’s got to mean something else too.”

Patricia, then, turned to the T’s. “You’re right,” she told her. “It also means ‘to cause to go to another person or place.’”

Then Terri read off the other words, and Patricia looked them up.

Genetic meant having to do with “genes,” and genes were these special things in all living cells.

Mutation meant change.

And carnivore meant—

They both knew what that word meant…animals that eat meat. Which meant these animals had… teeth.

««—»»

“Yeah, this is really weird, all right,” Terri said. She and Patricia were sitting out on the curb now, trying to put together what they’d read in the dictionary. The word, of course, that bothered her most was carnivore. Something that eats meat, something that has teeth. Like the toads and salamanders, she thought. They definitely had teeth. But, as she’d told Patricia, when she read about toads and salamanders in her Golden Nature books, it stated that neither animal had teeth. And she remembered something else, too. The books said that toads and salamanders were insectivores, and when they looked that word up in the dictionary they discovered that it meant an animal that ate insects, not meat.

“Yeah, it’s weird,” Patricia agreed, “and what’s weirder is that your mother and uncle know all about it.”

And my father knew all about it too, Terri realized, before he got divorced from my mother and moved away.

The other word they’d looked up was counter-reagent, and that was something that reacted against a reagent, which was sort of confusing. A reagent was a substance that reacted with another substance, so a counter-reagent was something that reacted against that.

All the pieces are here, Terri thought, sitting next to Patricia at the curb. Now if only I can put all the pieces together and make sense of them.

“You know what we have to do, Terri,” Patricia said in a low voice.

“What?”

“We’re going to have to go back to the boathouse.”

“We can’t!” Terri insisted. “My Uncle Chuck said we couldn’t!”

“Yeah, well he said we couldn’t last night too, but we went anyway.”

“I’ll get grounded!”

“Not if they don’t find out.”

“No!” Terri said firmly. “Absolutely not.” And then she remembered what her uncle had warned her of. “It’s really dangerous. You heard my uncle; the pier could break, and we could fall in the water.”

“Aw, come on, Terri,” Patricia objected. “The pier’s not going to break. He just said that because he doesn’t want us to go down there and find out what’s really going on.”

Terri smirked. She knew Patricia was right. But still, she couldn’t allow it. “No way. We’re not going to go back there. I could get in too much trouble.”

“Suit yourself,” Patricia said. “But can you think of another way to find out what’s really going on around here?”

After a long pause, Terri thought to herself with her chin in her hands, No, I can’t. “We’ll figure something out,” she said instead. “Maybe we can go to the library tomorrow, find out more about those words.”

“Well, I guess we could try that,” Patricia said, but she sure didn’t sound very convinced.