Monster Lake (9 page)

She searched the room three times—no
briefcase. She was so frustrated she wanted to throw her arms up
and shriek. But just as she was about to check the room one more
time, she turned, and her foot touched something—

What?
she thought slowly.

Her foot touched something under the
bed.

Terri dropped to her knees very quickly, and
pulled up the bed’s fluffy comforter, and there it was—

Finally! I found it!

The black-leather briefcase had been slipped
under the bed, almost as if it had been deliberately hidden.

Hidden,
Terri thought.

But it
had
been hidden. Uncle Chuck had
obviously slid the briefcase under the bed so no one would see
it.
No one, as in me,
Terri realized. There was no one else to hide it from.
Uncle Chuck must have suspected that I might come
in here,
Terri easily recognized,
so he stuck the briefcase under the bed where I
wouldn’t be able to see it
. And this could
only mean what she already suspected: Her mother and Uncle Chuck
knew all about the weird things going on around here, and they were
deliberately trying to cover everything up to keep Terri from
finding out about any of it.

Well,
she thought.
Not anymore.

She paused for another moment, gazing down
excitedly at the front edge of the briefcase.

Yes, it was exciting.

Exciting to know that, very possibly, all
the answers to all the questions she had were right here at her
fingertips.

And it’s time to find
those answers,
she decided.

She slid the black
briefcase out from under the bed, pushed the two black-metal
latches with her thumbs—
click-click!
—and opened the
briefcase.

««—»»

The first thing Terri saw when she opened
her uncle’s briefcase were several glossy textbooks with very
complicated titles on the covers, titles she didn’t understand. She
wished she could look through the books but she knew there wasn’t
time: Uncle Chuck would be home soon, and so would Terri’s mother.
Instead Terri lifted the books up and looked under them.

A spiral notepad lay there, just like the
kind Terri herself used for her schoolwork. The cover of the
notepad was turned back, and she could see handwriting on the first
page.

Uncle Chuck’s
handwriting,
Terri could tell immediately.
And then there was something else in the notepad she recognized
just as swiftly—

The words!
she celebrated.

She remembered now; seeing them again
sparked her memory instantly.

The words she’d seen on the computer screen
in the boathouse, plus the words on the glass tanks and the labels
on the weird glass bottles full of gunk.

Here they were again. The first line
read:

LOT 2b: TRANSMISSION FAILURE

Then the second line read:

LOT 3: POSITIVE REAGENT

TRANSMISSION OF GENETIC

CARNIVORE MUTATION.

And written closer to the bottom of the
page, still in her Uncle Chuck’s handwriting, was:

COUNTER-REAGENT 6b ADMINISTERED

…
and then yesterday’s
date.

Exactly as she remembered from her quick
trip to the boathouse this morning.

Okay,
Terri told herself.
You’ve finally
found the words, but you still don’t know what they mean,
so—

She took out her Bic pen and the piece of
paper from her shorts, and quickly wrote the words down.

That done, she realized
time was getting short.
I’ve got to get
out of here now.
She glanced uneasily at
the door.
They’ll be coming home any
minute.

Using her good sense, then, she was about to
put the textbooks back and then close the briefcase, but something
made her hesitate. Terri’s curiosity was so strong, sometimes she
simply couldn’t resist it.

Can’t hurt to just take a
quick look,
she thought.

She picked up the notepad from out of the
briefcase. Most of the pages had been folded over and she began to
flip through it from the top page.

Pretty much the same thing
as the last page,
she concluded as her eyes
scanned down each handwritten line. She also recognized her
mother’s handwriting on some of the lines; Terri didn’t find it
difficult to recognize her mother and Uncle Chuck’s handwriting
because she’d seen it so many times when they left notes for her in
the kitchen, and now she saw that her mother had written in the
notepad just as much as Uncle Chuck had, if not more. But this was
no surprise really, because Terri knew they worked together in the
boathouse frequently.

Terri continued to flip
through the notepad. Still more of the same words,
particularly
reagent
and
transmission,
but with different numbers after the word
Lot.
Another thing she noticed was
that each line had a date after it, and the further she went in the
notepad, the older the dates got.

And this sparked still more of her
curiosity.

How far back do the dates
go?
she wondered.

So she flipped back to the very first page
of the notepad, and read the first line.

The date was six months ago.

But that wasn’t all that Terri noticed. She
squinted her eyes, tilted her head.

Something seemed…strange.

She looked harder at that very first
handwritten line.

She stared at it.

And then she realized what was strange.

The line wasn’t written in her mother’s
handwriting, and it wasn’t written in Uncle Chuck’s either.

All at once, Terri felt dizzy and
confused.

That’s…my father’s
handwriting!
she realized.

««—»»

And just when she
realized
that,
Terri heard the familiar sound coming from outside, at the
front of the house:

thunk-thunk!

Two car doors being closed, which meant that
her mother and Uncle Chuck had just pulled up in the driveway, and
had already gotten out of the car!

Terri moved so fast her hands looked like
blurs. She put the notepad and then the textbooks back in the
briefcase, closed the briefcase lid, and slid it back under the
bed. When she dashed for Uncle Chuck’s bedroom door—

On, no! I’m going to get caught again!

—
she heard the front door
opening.

Terri, frantic now, froze in the hallway. If
she closed her uncle’s door too fast, they’d hear it, but if she
didn’t close it fast enough, and get back to her own room, she’d
get caught red-handed.

Hurry!
she screamed at herself.

Gritting her teeth, she pulled the door
shut, then dashed for her own bedroom but not before she could see
outside light in the foyer, which meant that her mother and Uncle
Chuck were already in the house!

creak-creak!
she heard next.

The old wood tiles in the foyer.

Her mother and Uncle Chuck were about to
enter the hallway!

Terri managed to edge into her own room just
as she saw the two shadows step into the hall.

Then, very softly, she clicked her door
shut.

She could hear footsteps coming down the
hallway. But her mother and Uncle Chuck weren’t saying anything,
and that bothered her. Had they seen Terri duck into her room at
the last second?

She leaned against the wall in her bedroom,
holding her breath, keeping her fingers crossed.

The footsteps got closer.

And closer.

Then they faded away as Terri’s mother and
uncle passed her door and went into the kitchen.

Thank goodness!
Terri thought.

They hadn’t seen her after all. She’d made
it back to her room at the very last second.

Terri let out the long, deep breath she’d
been holding in her chest. For a moment there, she thought she
might explode! When she calmed down from her scare, she sat back
down on her bed, thinking.

The last thing she’d
discovered in Uncle Chuck’s room mystified her. Her
father’s
handwriting in
the notepad. What could it mean? It was true, both her father and
mother were zoologists—before the divorce they’d both even worked
in the same laboratory, where her mother still worked now—and that
meant that they were working on the same research projects, which
Terri understood. But what bothered her was just the idea that not
only her mother and Uncle Chuck but also her father too had been
involved in the strange things going on around here; and Terri
didn’t want to think that her father had something to do with the
giant toads and salamanders.

But mainly it just made her sad. Seeing the
handwriting only reminded her more of her father, and the divorce,
and the idea that she hadn’t seen him in months and probably never
would again, because he’d moved away.

Don’t think about
it,
Terri ordered herself. Thinking about
it only made it hurt worse.

And, besides, she had plenty of other things
to think about now, didn’t she?

She slipped out the piece of paper from her
shorts, opened it up, and looked at it.

Now I’ll never forget
those words from the boathouse,
she
thought,
because I’ve got them right here
in my hand…

Yes, she did. She’d written them all
down.

And now that I have
them,
she realized,
I can look them up in the dictionary and finally find out
what they mean.

And next she went to do just that, sliding
open her top desk drawer and rooting around. She knew she had a
dictionary around here somewhere. Or then…

Maybe it was out in the den, where she kept
her books during the school year.

Here it is,
she thought, relieved. It wasn’t the dictionary
she usually used, but at least it was a dictionary, a slim
paperback with a brick-red cover.

She looked up the first
word:
reagent.

Oh no!
she thought.

The word wasn’t there! Then
she busily looked up the other words,
mutation, transmission, genetic, carnivore,
and—

None of them were in the dictionary!

««—»»

Just another
disappointment,
Terri thought, brooding now
at her desk. And after all the trouble she’d gone to in order to
get the words—sneaking into Uncle Chuck’s room, finding the
briefcase.

All for nothing,
she thought drearily.

Or—

Maybe not.

One thing she hadn’t considered. She looked
then and saw that the dictionary she’d found in her desk was old,
not the one she usually used. Then—

Oh, man!

She looked more closely at
the dictionary and saw just how old it actually was. Right there on
the cover, it said
Elementary Dictionary,
Preschool-Age 8.

It was a children’s dictionary, left over
from way back when she was in the first and second grade.

Of course!

This was a dictionary for kids, not adults.
And those words she’d written down were definitely adult words.
So—

I’ll just have to get a
bigger dictionary,
she concluded.
A dictionary for grownups.

She knew there must be one
in the house somewhere. The only problem was finding it. Or maybe
she could go to the town library—surely they’d have
all kinds
of dictionaries
there.

But who knows when I’ll be
able to do that?
she glumly reminded
herself.
I’m probably grounded…

Then she looked up, at the sound of
voices.

She walked to her door. Yes, she could hear
her mother and Uncle Chuck talking in the kitchen, but their voices
were muffled. Terri pressed her ear against the door and tried to
listen.

Darn it!

The voices still couldn’t be heard well
enough to understand.

Next, she put her hand on the doorknob and
very carefully turned it, so not to make any noise. Then she pulled
the door open to a narrow crack.

And now she could hear…

“
Well, what I didn’t tell
you yet,” Uncle Chuck was saying to her mother, “was that Terri got
into the boathouse this morning. You must’ve forgotten to lock the
door last night when you came up.”

“
How could I have been so
forgetful?” her mother scolded herself. “What did she
see?”

“
Not much, at least I don’t
think so. I caught her in the office. The only thing she could’ve
seen was the desk, and some preliminary notes.”

“
But what about the
backroom?” her mother fretted next. “She didn’t get into the
backroom, did she?”

“
I don’t see how she could
have,” Uncle Chuck replied. “The door was locked.”

At least that’s one good
thing,
Terri thought to herself.
They don’t know I used my library card to get in,
and they don’t know I saw the stuff in the backroom…