Monster Lake Read Free Page A

by
ourselves. I mean, I’ve never seen any snakes around here… Anyway,
that’s why my Mom and Uncle Chuck were going out back. They do
their work in the boathouse.”
    Patricia turned her fork idly in her cheese
enchiladas. “But isn’t that—you know—kind of weird?”
    “ What?”
    “ Turning a boathouse into
an office?”
    Terri thought about that. Sure, her mother
was a zoologist—just like her father had been—and the boathouse was
close to the lake. But the work she brought home every night came
from the laboratory she worked at just outside of town. What could
it have to do with the lake?
    Yeah, she finally had to admit to herself. I guess it is kind of weird. And that
thought only reminded her more of how weird her mother had been
acting over the past few months, and Uncle Chuck too.
    “ And another thing,”
Patricia went on. “Did you see the weird way your mother and your
Uncle Chuck looked at each other whenever you mentioned the
lake?”
    Terri had noticed that too,
and she couldn’t deny it. “You’re right,” she agreed. “It was
almost like they were… hiding something from us.”
    “ That’s right,” Patricia
agreed. “And it must have something to do with the lake or the
boathouse.”
    Terri couldn’t imagine what
it could be. What could they possibly want
to hide? she wondered.
    Then Patricia asked, “Have you ever been in
the boathouse?”
    “ Yeah, a few times, back
when my father lived here.”
    “ What was it
like?”
    “ Well, like I told you, my
father turned it into an office, or I should say he turned the
front room into an office.”
    “ You mean there are other
rooms?”
    “ A few,” Terri
recalled.
    “ What was in
them?”
    Terri hesitated. “I don’t really know,” she
confessed. “Mom and Dad told me to never go into any of the other
rooms.”
    Patricia held her hands out. “See, there’s
another weird thing. Whatever it is they’re hiding, it must be in
those other rooms.”
    Terri hadn’t considered that. But she had to
admit: Patricia was right. There did seem to be an awful lot of
weird things going on lately.
    Patricia leaned over the kitchen table,
lowered her voice. “Don’t you want to know what it is? What they’re
hiding?”
    “ Well, yes,” Terri
agreed.
    “ Well, then…”
    “ Well, then what? ” But this was a
phony question on Terri’s part, because she already had a pretty
good idea what Patricia was going to suggest.
    “ Why don’t we sneak down
there?” Patricia said.
    “ We can’t!” Terri
exclaimed. “We’re not allowed. If I took you down there without my
Mom’s permission, I’d get into all kinds of trouble!”
    Patricia grinned like a cunning cat.
“They’ll never know,” she said. “We’ll go in the morning, when your
Uncle Chuck is taking your Mom to work.”
    Terri thought about it.
    We really
shouldn’t, she thought.
    But—
    “ Okay,” she said. “That’s
just what we’ll do.”
     
    ««—»»
     
    The best thing about summer
vacation was that she could stay up a little later and watch TV.
Terri preferred the Disney Channel and the National Geographic
shows about nature and wildlife and animals in other countries,
and, of course, The Simpsons. But tonight, she found it hard to pay attention to
her favorite shows. Her mind felt like it was somewhere else, and
she thought she knew why…
    Patricia had been right.
Terri’s mother and Uncle Chuck were acting weird. Those strange, foreboding glances
they’d exchanged, Uncle Chuck’s lie about snakes, and then the
entire business with the boathouse. Terri supposed she’d known
something was wrong all along, but she’d never wanted to admit it
to herself. It was hard enough that her father and mother were
divorced, and that she hadn’t seen her father for so long—plus her
fear that she’d never see him again. Sometimes, when things were
too hard to cope with, people would overlook the obvious. There
were a lot of strange things going on