by Edward Lee
Patricia’s voice lowered. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Remember this morning when I left your house, and you were going to go back to the boathouse to get your library card?”
“Yeah,” Terri said. How could she ever forget that! It was the whole reason she’d gotten caught by Uncle Chuck.
“Well,” Patricia went on, “I was going home, like you said, and I was cutting across our neighbor’s yard right by a bunch of trees and—”
“What!” Terri whined.
“Something jumped out at me from the trees. I fell down on the curb and cut my leg, and I was bleeding pretty bad.”
“But what was it?” Terri couldn’t help but ask. “What jumped out at you?”
“You’ll never believe this,” Patricia said. “But it was a toad, bigger than any toad I’ve ever seen in my life! And…it had fangs!”
Terri was astonished. “I never told you, Patricia, but last night I woke up and looked out my window and I saw the same exact thing! I saw these giant toads hopping around in the yard, and they had fangs! And then, after you left this morning, I went back down to the boathouse, and I used my library card to get into that other back room.”
“Terri!”
“And in the room were lots of these glass tanks, and the tanks were full of toads with fangs! And there were big salamanders too—”
“With teeth?” Patricia asked.
“Yeah, they all had sharp teeth, just like the salamander we saw on the dock this morning. What did your parents say when you told them about it?”
Patricia paused on the line. “Well, I didn’t tell them, I couldn’t. They’d never believe me. They’d think I was making it up.”
Terri had no problem understanding this. “I got out all my Golden Nature books today, and looked through them, and I was right. There aren’t any toads or salamanders that have teeth. None in the whole world.”
“But there must be,” Patricia continued. “We saw them, so we know they’re real. And I’ve got to find some way to prove it to my parents.”
“How?”
“Well, I don’t really know. But maybe we can think of something.”
Terri wasn’t sure if she thought this was a good idea. “Patricia,” she said, “the only way to prove it would be to go back to the boathouse and try to catch one of the toads or salamanders.”
“Okay. Why don’t we do that?”
“Because it’s dangerous!” Terri exclaimed. “And, anyway, I can’t go there anymore because…I got caught.”
“Ter-ri! Who caught you?”
“My Uncle Chuck,” Terri glumly reported. “When he got back from driving my mother to work, he came down to the lake and caught me.”
“Did you get grounded?” Patricia asked.
“I don’t know yet. I’ll find out when my mother gets home from work, and I’m pretty sure that’s what’s going to happen. But my Uncle Chuck made me stay in my room all day.”
“Bummer,” Patricia said.
“Yeah, I know.”
“But what are we going to do?” Patricia logically asked next. “There are a lot of weird things going on, you have to admit. And—jeeze—you said you saw more toads and salamanders with teeth in the backroom of the boathouse. That can only mean one thing.”
“What?” Terri asked.
“Your mother and your Uncle Chuck—they’re the ones who are behind it.”
««—»»
Terri knew exactly what Patricia meant; she’d already thought of that herself. All those toads and salamanders in the glass tanks proved that her mother and Uncle Chuck must know what was going on. And Terri had to admit something else: whatever was going on, it was definitely weird…
Terri wanted to talk more, but just then Uncle Chuck stepped into the kitchen and sternly said, “You’ve talked long enough, young lady. It’s time for you to hang up and go back to your room.”
Terri explained to Patricia that she had to go, and then she hung up the phone. Her eyes averted to the floor, she walked back to her bedroom.
“And make sure you stay there, young lady,” Uncle Chuck called behind her. “I’m going to pick your mother up from work now, and you better not even think about coming out of your room. Do you hear me?”
“Yes,” Terri peeped. She shuffled back to her bedroom, closed the door. A few minutes later, she heard the car door thunk closed from outside, the engine started, then the car pulled out of the driveway and drove off down the road.
Instantly, Terri felt frustrated and bored. At least Patricia’s all right, she thought. But—
There was just too much to think about, and worry about.
And be scared about…
She had to find the answers, and she knew the answers had to be in the backroom of the boathouse. I could go again now, she realized. Uncle Chuck was gone, picking her mother up. But with her luck he’d come right back just to see if she was still in her room. I can’t risk it, Terri wisely decided. She could get into too much trouble. The only other thing she could do, she knew, was look up some of those complicated words she’d seen on the computer screen, the tanks, and the bottle labels, but—as hard as she tried—she still couldn’t remember any of them. So she was still faced with the problem of getting to the backroom of the boathouse, so she could look at the words again, write them down, and then look them up in the dictionary. That was the only way.
Or…
Was it?
There was still one other thing she could try, wasn’t there?
Something that hadn’t occurred to her.
Yes! she thought.
Maybe the boathouse wasn’t the only place where she could read those words again.
Uncle Chuck, she knew, had been working down there all afternoon. And when he’d come back up to the house, what had he been carrying with him?
The briefcase! Terri realized.
Maybe those words were in the briefcase too.
And—
There’s only one way to find out, she told herself.
Right now, Uncle Chuck wasn’t in the house; he was picking Terri’s mother up at work.
She could sneak out of her room right now, couldn’t she?
And look in the briefcase herself…
««—»»
One thing in Terri’s favor was this: if Uncle Chuck came back home unexpectedly, she’d be able to hear the car pull into the driveway. So she’d have time to get back into her room before he came in. But she knew she couldn’t fool around, she had to be quick about it, and of course, the first thing she had to do was find the briefcase. She brought a Bic pen and a piece of notebook paper with her, stuck them in the pocket of her shorts. Then, very quietly, she opened her door and left her bedroom.
The house seemed very quiet right now, maybe because she was doing something she knew she wasn’t supposed to be doing. As always, the floor of the foyer went creeeeak! when she stepped on it, and that reminded her of how Patricia had scared her this morning, by hiding in the coat closet. Terri could only guess that the wooden tiles of the foyer had gotten old, and that’s why they creaked whenever someone stepped on them.
The hall to the kitchen was dark. She tiptoed quickly across the carpet and slipped into the kitchen. She wished she’d thought of this before; she could’ve been looking for the briefcase earlier, while she was on the phone with Patricia. Darn! Why didn’t I think of that? she scolded herself. She pranced around the kitchen, looking everywhere, but—
Uncle Chuck’s briefcase wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
Where is it!
Terri looked all over the place: the kitchen table, the big veneered walnut cabinet her mother kept her bills in, the closet, even the regular cabinets. She couldn’t find the briefcase anywhere!
It must not be here, she finally realized. And that could only mean:
It must be somewhere else, like maybe in the dining room, or—
Terri’s thoughts stopped short.
Maybe it’s in his bedroo
m…
She searched the dining room from top to bottom. The briefcase wasn’t there.
Now this really was risky. Going into Uncle Chuck’s bedroom without his permission. But Terri had no choice; she needed to look in that briefcase, and this was the only way. She walked quickly back down the carpeted hallway, put her hand on the knob to Uncle Chuck’s bedroom.
She paused, took a deep breath—
Here goes nothing, she thought.
—and entered the room.
Uncle Chuck’s bedroom was neat as a pin. The bed was made, the fern-green drapes were tied open, showing the sunny front yard. All of Chuck’s clothes hung neatly in the closet, like in the men’s section of a department store. But Terri’s eyes glanced about the room in total dread—
Where’s the briefcase!
She didn’t see it anywhere! Where else could it be? It wasn’t on the floor anywhere; it wasn’t in the closet. If she didn’t find it this minute, she knew she’d have to give up because Uncle Chuck would be back soon, with her mother. That’s all I need, Terri thought. First I get caught in the boathouse, and now I’m about to get caught in Uncle Chuck’s bedroom!
She searched the room three times—no briefcase. She was so frustrated she wanted to throw her arms up and shriek. But just as she was about to check the room one more time, she turned, and her foot touched something—
What? she thought slowly.
Her foot touched something under the bed.
Terri dropped to her knees very quickly, and pulled up the bed’s fluffy comforter, and there it was—
Finally! I found it!
The black-leather briefcase had been slipped under the bed, almost as if it had been deliberately hidden.
Hidden, Terri thought.
But it had been hidden. Uncle Chuck had obviously slid the briefcase under the bed so no one would see it. No one, as in me, Terri realized. There was no one else to hide it from. Uncle Chuck must have suspected that I might come in here, Terri easily recognized, so he stuck the briefcase under the bed where I wouldn’t be able to see it. And this could only mean what she already suspected: Her mother and Uncle Chuck knew all about the weird things going on around here, and they were deliberately trying to cover everything up to keep Terri from finding out about any of it.
Well, she thought. Not anymore.
She paused for another moment, gazing down excitedly at the front edge of the briefcase.
Yes, it was exciting.
Exciting to know that, very possibly, all the answers to all the questions she had were right here at her fingertips.
And it’s time to find those answers, she decided.
She slid the black briefcase out from under the bed, pushed the two black-metal latches with her thumbs—click-click!—and opened the briefcase.
««—»»
The first thing Terri saw when she opened her uncle’s briefcase were several glossy textbooks with very complicated titles on the covers, titles she didn’t understand. She wished she could look through the books but she knew there wasn’t time: Uncle Chuck would be home soon, and so would Terri’s mother. Instead Terri lifted the books up and looked under them.
A spiral notepad lay there, just like the kind Terri herself used for her schoolwork. The cover of the notepad was turned back, and she could see handwriting on the first page.
Uncle Chuck’s handwriting, Terri could tell immediately. And then there was something else in the notepad she recognized just as swiftly—
The words! she celebrated.
She remembered now; seeing them again sparked her memory instantly.
The words she’d seen on the computer screen in the boathouse, plus the words on the glass tanks and the labels on the weird glass bottles full of gunk.
Here they were again. The first line read:
LOT 2b: TRANSMISSION FAILURE
Then the second line read:
LOT 3: POSITIVE REAGENT
TRANSMISSION OF GENETIC
CARNIVORE MUTATION.
And written closer to the bottom of the page, still in her Uncle Chuck’s handwriting, was:
COUNTER-REAGENT 6b ADMINISTERED
…and then yesterday’s date.
Exactly as she remembered from her quick trip to the boathouse this morning.
Okay, Terri told herself. You’ve finally found the words, but you still don’t know what they mean, so—
She took out her Bic pen and the piece of paper from her shorts, and quickly wrote the words down.
That done, she realized time was getting short. I’ve got to get out of here now. She glanced uneasily at the door. They’ll be coming home any minute.
Using her good sense, then, she was about to put the textbooks back and then close the briefcase, but something made her hesitate. Terri’s curiosity was so strong, sometimes she simply couldn’t resist it.
Can’t hurt to just take a quick look, she thought.
She picked up the notepad from out of the briefcase. Most of the pages had been folded over and she began to flip through it from the top page.
Pretty much the same thing as the last page, she concluded as her eyes scanned down each handwritten line. She also recognized her mother’s handwriting on some of the lines; Terri didn’t find it difficult to recognize her mother and Uncle Chuck’s handwriting because she’d seen it so many times when they left notes for her in the kitchen, and now she saw that her mother had written in the notepad just as much as Uncle Chuck had, if not more. But this was no surprise really, because Terri knew they worked together in the boathouse frequently.
Terri continued to flip through the notepad. Still more of the same words, particularly reagent and transmission, but with different numbers after the word Lot. Another thing she noticed was that each line had a date after it, and the further she went in the notepad, the older the dates got.
And this sparked still more of her curiosity.
How far back do the dates go? she wondered.
So she flipped back to the very first page of the notepad, and read the first line.
The date was six months ago.
But that wasn’t all that Terri noticed. She squinted her eyes, tilted her head.
Something seemed…strange.
She looked harder at that very first handwritten line.
She stared at it.
And then she realized what was strange.
The line wasn’t written in her mother’s handwriting, and it wasn’t written in Uncle Chuck’s either.
All at once, Terri felt dizzy and confused.
That’s…my father’s handwriting! she realized.
««—»»
And just when she realized that, Terri heard the familiar sound coming from outside, at the front of the house:
thunk-thunk!
Two car doors being closed, which meant that her mother and Uncle Chuck had just pulled up in the driveway, and had already gotten out of the car!
Terri moved so fast her hands looked like blurs. She put the notepad and then the textbooks back in the briefcase, closed the briefcase lid, and slid it back under the bed. When she dashed for Uncle Chuck’s bedroom door—
On, no! I’m going to get caught again!
—she heard the front door opening.
Terri, frantic now, froze in the hallway. If she closed her uncle’s door too fast, they’d hear it, but if she didn’t close it fast enough, and get back to her own room, she’d get caught red-handed.
Hurry! she screamed at herself.
Gritting her teeth, she pulled the door shut, then dashed for her own bedroom but not before she could see outside light in the foyer, which meant that her mother and Uncle Chuck were already in the house!
creak-creak! she heard next.
The old wood tiles in the foyer.
Her mother and Uncle Chuck were about to enter the hallway!
Terri managed to edge into her own room just as she saw the two shadows step into the hall.
Then, very softly
, she clicked her door shut.
She could hear footsteps coming down the hallway. But her mother and Uncle Chuck weren’t saying anything, and that bothered her. Had they seen Terri duck into her room at the last second?
She leaned against the wall in her bedroom, holding her breath, keeping her fingers crossed.
The footsteps got closer.
And closer.
Then they faded away as Terri’s mother and uncle passed her door and went into the kitchen.
Thank goodness! Terri thought.
They hadn’t seen her after all. She’d made it back to her room at the very last second.
Terri let out the long, deep breath she’d been holding in her chest. For a moment there, she thought she might explode! When she calmed down from her scare, she sat back down on her bed, thinking.
The last thing she’d discovered in Uncle Chuck’s room mystified her. Her father’s handwriting in the notepad. What could it mean? It was true, both her father and mother were zoologists—before the divorce they’d both even worked in the same laboratory, where her mother still worked now—and that meant that they were working on the same research projects, which Terri understood. But what bothered her was just the idea that not only her mother and Uncle Chuck but also her father too had been involved in the strange things going on around here; and Terri didn’t want to think that her father had something to do with the giant toads and salamanders.
But mainly it just made her sad. Seeing the handwriting only reminded her more of her father, and the divorce, and the idea that she hadn’t seen him in months and probably never would again, because he’d moved away.
Don’t think about it, Terri ordered herself. Thinking about it only made it hurt worse.
And, besides, she had plenty of other things to think about now, didn’t she?
She slipped out the piece of paper from her shorts, opened it up, and looked at it.
