Dog Whisperer Read Free Page B

shorts and a Yarmouth Clam Festival t-shirt to bed, so all she needed was some sneakers and a hoodie. She started out of her bedroom, then went back and swapped her sneakers for her L.L. Bean boots.
    It was raining even harder than she expected, and she should have put on her slicker, first. But she was already soaked now, so it probably didn’t matter. Even though it was light out, now, it was really, really foggy, and she couldn’t really see the soft glow of the lighthouse up on the point. But, she could hear its foghorn, as well as the one way up at Halfway Rock.

    Their town was a long peninsula, with a couple of islands, which were connected to the rest of the town by bridges. Her family’s house was right on the water and had a tiny floating dock. Her mother went kayaking almost every morning, and she would paddle for a couple of miles up and down the sound. They also had an old wooden skiff, which they usually kept upside down on the lawn, because the shoreline was all rocks, with no sandy places.
    They had neighbors on both sides—and all along the peninsula—but their yard had lots of trees, so it always felt really private. The trees meant that they didn’t get much sun, but her parents had had a wooden deck built, anyway. Sometimes, they had supper out there, at a picnic table. Lots of nights, they would hang out on the deck until after dark—unless the black flies got so annoying that they would have to go indoors to escape them.
    It was so difficult to see through the rain and fog, that she stood on the deck and listened, instead. Wind, rain, waves crashing against the rocks.
    Maybe Josephine had just been acting weird, and there wasn’t anything out here at all.
    Maybe.
    The lawn sloped downhill to the rocks, and the grass was so wet that she was really glad she’d
changed into her boots. There were a few branches strewn around, but other than that, everything seemed to be normal. She turned around to check every direction but didn’t see anything other than grass, a few bushes, and their garden—where her mother and grandmother had planted tomatoes, zucchini, and some flowers. So far, though, mostly only the weeds were thriving.
    There was a low rumble of thunder, and she immediately decided to go back indoors. Besides, she was really tired.
    She was halfway back to the house, when she felt—well— something . She felt afraid, or anxious, or—urgent. Yeah, she definitely felt this strange sense of needing to take action. Immediately .
    But, doing what ?
    Maybe her father was right, and she had just eaten way too much food at the baseball game, and now she had, like, indigestion. Which would make more sense if her stomach hurt—but, it didn’t.
    There was a flash of lightning, and then more thunder, coming from the direction of the harbor, and she ducked instinctively. Okay, she would just check the yard one more time, really fast, and then go back to bed.
    She walked down to the edge of the grass,
above the rocks, and towards one of their neighbors’ houses.
    She squinted through the fog, but all that she could see was crashing waves and rocks. Lots of rocks. The Peabodys’ dinghy, tied to their dock, and bobbing up and down in the choppy water. A few lobster buoys. Other than that, she couldn’t find anything unusual, or—wait!
    There was something out there!

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    Emily looked more closely, and realized that there was a large, white shape on the rocks. Was it an old sail, maybe? Or a piece of plastic, or some Styrofoam? But, the shape seemed to be too big for that. What it looked like was an animal of some kind. In fact, it looked like a polar bear.
    Whoa. She was almost a thousand percent sure that there were no polar bears in Maine—but what if one had gotten lost, and drifted down from—what, the North Pole? No, that was just silly. It was probably only some junk that had washed up onto the rocks because of the