Odds Are Good Read Free

“Duffy,” and have words like
book, radio, wallet
, or whatever it is he’s just put down and left behind, stuck in the middle.
    Me, I think turnips are brighter.
    But since Duffy’s my cousin, and since my mother and her sister are both single parents, we tend to do a lot of things together—like camping, which is how we got into the mess I want to tell you about.
    Personally, I thought camping was a big mistake. But since Mom and Aunt Elise are raising the three of us—me, Duffy, and my little sister, Marie—on their own, they’re convinced they have to do man-stuff with us every once in a while. I think they read some book that said me and Duffy would come out weird if they don’t. You can take him camping all you want. It ain’t gonna make Duffy normal.
    Anyway, the fact that our mothers were getting wound up to do something fatherly, combined with the fact that Aunt Elise’s boss had a friend who had a friend who said we could use his cabin, added up to the five of us bouncing along this horrible dirt road late one Friday in October.
    It was late because we had lost an hour going back to get Duffy’s suitcase. I suppose it wasn’t actually Duffy’s fault. No one remembered to say, “Your suitcase, Duffy,” so he couldn’t really have been expected to remember it.
    â€œOh, Elise,” cried my mother, as we got deeper into the woods. “Aren’t the leaves beautiful?”
    That’s why it doesn’t make sense for them to try to do man-stuff with us. If it had been our fathers, they would have been drinking beer and burping and maybe telling dirty stories instead of talking about the leaves. So why try to fake it?
    Anyway, we get to this cabin, which is about eighteen million miles from nowhere, and to my surprise, it’s not a cabin at all. It’s a house. A big house.
    â€œOh, my,” said my mother as we pulled into the driveway.
    â€œIsn’t it great?” chirped Aunt Elise. “It’s almost a hundred years old, back from the time when they used to build big hunting lodges up here. It’s the only one in the area still standing. Horace said he hasn’t been able to get up here in some time. That’s why he was glad to let us use it. He said it would be good to have someone go in and air the place out.”
    Leave it to Aunt Elise. This place didn’t need airing out—it needed fumigating. I never saw so many spiderwebs in my life. From the sounds we heard coming from the walls, the mice seemed to have made it a population center. We found a total of two working lightbulbs: one in the kitchen, and one in the dining room, which was paneled with dark wood and had a big stone fireplace at one end.
    â€œOh, my,” said my mother again.
    Duffy, who’s allergic to about fifteen different things, started to sneeze.
    â€œIsn’t it charming?” asked Aunt Elise hopefully.
    No one answered her.
    Four hours later we had managed to get three bedrooms clean enough to sleep in without getting the heebie-jeebies—one for Mom and Aunt Elise, one for Marie, and one for me and Duffy. After a supper of beans and franks we hit the hay, which I think is what our mattresses were stuffed with. As I was drifting off, which took about thirty seconds, it occurred to me that four hours of housework wasn’t all that much of a man-thing, something it might be useful to remember the next time Mom got one of these plans into her head.
    Things looked better in the morning when we went outside and found a stream where we could go wading. (“Your sneakers, Duffy.”)
    Later we went back and started poking around the house, which really was enormous.
    That was when things started getting a little spooky. In the room next to ours I found a message scrawled on the wall, BEWARE THE SENTINEL , it said in big black letters.
    When I showed Mom and Aunt Elise they said it was just a joke and got mad at me