Monster Lake Read Free

said. “We can do that sometime.”
    “ But not soon,” Uncle Chuck
said. “It’s too hot to go down there during the summer. There’re
lots of bugs and mosquitoes and things. And snakes.”
    “ Snakes!” Patricia
exclaimed. “I’ve never seen a real snake.”
    But Terri raised her brow again.
    I’ve never seen any snakes
at the lake, she realized.
    It almost sounded like Uncle Chuck was
making it up, so Terri and Patricia wouldn’t be tempted to go down
there on their own…
    Hmmm, she wondered. Then she said, “Are we going to get pizza
tonight, Mom? Like you said we could this morning?”
    “ Oh, honey, I’m sorry,” her
mother apologized. “I hope you’re not too disappointed, but I’ve
got so much work to do tonight, I don’t have time, and neither does
Uncle Chuck.”
    I knew
it , Terri thought. Same old story.
    “ We’ll get pizza soon,
though,” Uncle Chuck said.
    “ Maybe Pamela would like to
stay for dinner,” Terri’s mother suggested.
    “ It’s not Pamela, Mom. It’s
Patricia,” Terri corrected.
    “ Oh, yes, of course. I’m
sorry, Patricia. Anyway, why don’t you cook some TV dinners for
yourselves in the microwave?”
    “ But aren’t you and Uncle
Chuck going to eat?” Terri asked.
    “ Later,” Uncle Chuck said,
and held up the briefcases. “Right now your mother and I have to
get to work.”
    “ Okay,” Terri glumly
replied.
    “ Nice meeting you,
Patricia,” Uncle Chuck said as he and Terri’s Mom headed for the
back door.
    “ Bye,” Patricia
said.
    Then the back sliding glass door slid
closed, and they were gone.
    Patricia squinted after them.
    “ You want to stay for
dinner?” Terri asked, but it was more for distraction than anything
else. She could guess what Patricia was thinking. “We’ve got all
kinds of good TV dinners.” She opened the freezer and showed her.
“Fish fillets, enchiladas, sliced turkey and gravy. They’re pretty
good.”
    “ Well, okay. But I’ve got
to call my parents first.”
    “ The phone’s right over
there,” Terri said, pointing to the end of the kitchen
counter.
    Patricia dialed her number, then asked if
she could stay. Then she hung up, looking weird.
    “ Did they say you can stay
for dinner?” Terri asked.
    “ Uh, yeah, I can
stay.”
    “ Then why do you look so
weird all of a sudden?”
    “ Well…” She glanced out the
back sliding-glass door.
    “ What is it?”
    Patricia turned back to her.
    “ Your Uncle Chuck said that
he and your mother have lots of work to do?”
    “ Yeah,” Terri said. “They
have lots of work almost every night, like I said.”
    “ You mean like office work,
right? From the zoology lab where your Mom works?”
    “ Yeah.”
    Patricia glanced back out the door again.
“If they’ve got office work to do, how come they’re walking across
the back yard with their briefcases? Toward the lake?”
     
    ««—»»
     
    The microwave beeped, and Terri, wearing
pot-holder mittens shaped like owls, took the food out. “Well,” she
said, to answer Patricia’s question, “remember that trail I showed
you, that leads to the lake?”
    “ Yeah.”
    “ There’s also a little
boathouse down there, right on the water—”
    “ Wow!” Patricia said
excitedly. “You have a boat too?”
    “ It’s just a little
motorboat, we’ve never even used it because it needs to be fixed.
But my Dad turned the boathouse into an office.”
    “ An office? Why?”
    Terri shrugged as they sat down at the
kitchen table to eat their TV dinners. “I told you, he and my Mom
are zoologists, and I guess they wanted their office to be close to
the lake so they could study the animals there.”
    “ Like the frogs and toads
and things?”
    “ Yeah.”
    “ And the
snakes!”
    Terri paused. “Well, I don’t think there
really are any snakes in the lake.”
    “ But your Uncle Chuck said
there were.”
    “ Yeah, but he may have been
making that up so you and I wouldn’t be tempted to go down there