Is Anybody There? Read Free

leaving me alone.
    “What do you expect me to do?” Mom had asked them. “I have to work.”
    “He could stay with
us,
Caroline.”
    Oh wow! Mom and I had had a meaningful discussion. But if Mom knew about
this,
I’d be back to square one.
    “I just wondered,” I said vaguely.
    “Sarah!” When Miss Coriander raises her voice, she really raises it. Miss Sarah came in a flash. “Did you see anybody at the Mullens’ house today, Sarah?”
    Miss Sarah pulled off her gardening gloves: “I saw that young man, Nick,” she said. “He came down the steps and got in his car. He was wearing those short khaki shorts and that tight white T-shirt.”
    “That’s what he wears to his
job
,” I said,wondering why I was bothering to defend Nick, especially now that I knew about the photograph.
    “Didn’t that dog of the Dellarosas bark some today?” Miss Coriander asked.
    “Oh, him!” Miss Sarah dismissed Patchin with a wave of her hand.
    “And why are you asking about someone at the house, Marcus?”
    So they hadn’t seen anything. I had to think fast or they’d worm the whole story out of me, and call Mom right in the middle of her Christmas rush, and she’d have to come home and … I’d have to tell Mom myself, anyway. A missing key is dangerous stuff. But
I’d
tell her, not them. It would be the same thing if I asked to borrow their emergency key. There’d be questions and a lecture about responsibility and more suggestions to Mom.
    “Someone left a gift by the door,” I said. “That’s all. I thought you might have seen who it was.”
    “Someone left a gift?” Miss Coriander cast an accusing glance at Miss Sarah. “How did you miss that, Sarah?”
    “It must have been while I was at the market.You weren’t keeping an eye out, Coriander.”
    I began edging away. “I guess I’ll find out at Christmas,” I said. “No sweat. Just checking.”
    Now I couldn’t wait to go back and look some more for the key because I’d just thought of something. What a relief! The key could have fallen off the nub. Of course that was what had happened. I’d told myself not to panic, but I hadn’t listened. Easy now to imagine myself hanging it up this morning on its loop of worn tape, to imagine it swinging gently, dropping. Or maybe …
    “Was there a big wind today?” I asked Miss Sarah.
    She gave me one of her sharp, double-barreled blue-brown stares. “Wind? What is all this about? What are you up to, Marcus?”
    “Nothing, honest, Miss Sarah.” I had backed myself partway through the oleander hedge. “Well, see you!” I was in our yard now, running in my new, zigzag, crouched position across the front of the house toward the live oak tree. Miss Sarah and Miss Coriander wouldn’t miss this strange maneuver. “What’she up to
now
?” Miss Sarah would ask. “Isn’t Marcus too old to still be playing army?”
    I stood in the shade of the tree, panting a bit before I got down on my hands and knees. It was gloom and doom down here. I wished I had our big flashlight. But the flashlight was in the house, and the house was locked, and I didn’t have the key. … Catch-22, as Mom always says. My hands kept finding things among the dead leaves that I didn’t even want to think about. I was sure by its shape that this one was either a very small pinecone or a piece of dried-up dog poop. Probably poop. Probably Patchin’s. Well, better Patchin’s than a strange dog’s.
    Lots of gross-feeling things down there, but no key.
    I stood up, bumping my head, and then I saw the small shine of metal as a ray of sun slanted in. I peered closer. There was the key. I stared at it for the longest time. It was hanging from a sticking-out nub, all right. But this was the wrong nub.

CHAPTER
3
    I wasn’t sure what to do next, so I stood, telling myself that I must have put the key back in the wrong place. But I didn’t believe it. Then I decided that it still had to be Nick. Easier to blame him than me anyway.
    I saw