Terri went back to her room and sat glumly on the bed. With all the bad things that had happened lately—now this. Would it ever end? For the last year, it seemed, nothing good had happened. First, her parents’ divorce, her father moving away. Then the strange way her mother had been acting, and all the extra hours she had to work, and Uncle Chuck too. Then the big toad with teeth, and the salamander, the strange glass tanks she’d seen in the boathouse, and all the other weird things that had been going on. And now this—
Terri’s best friend had gotten hurt and was in the hospital to get stitches…
It’s not fair, Terri thought. Sometimes the world just isn’t fair at all…
She stayed in her room the rest of the day, as Uncle Chuck had ordered. All she could do was worry about Patricia. But she’d been right about Uncle Chuck. She sat looking out her bedroom window for the entire afternoon, keeping her gaze trained on the backyard. As expected, hours later, Uncle Chuck had trudged back up to the house, toting his briefcase. He’d spent most of the day working down at the boathouse.
And what bothered Terri most was that her mother and uncle must know about the giant, fanged toads and salamanders because they had so many of them in those glass tanks she’d discovered in that locked back room.
Terri strained her mind to think of a reason for this. The only thing she could guess was that her mother’s zoology laboratory must have discovered some new kind of toad and salamander that were unknown to the world until now, and that’s why they had so many of them in those glass tanks: to study them and do research on them. And some of the toads and salamanders must have gotten out of their tanks somehow and gotten into the lake.
That would explain the toads I saw in the back yard last night, Terri guessed. And the huge salamander Patricia and I saw on the pier this morning…
She only wished she could find out more, but how could she? Once her mother got home from work—and Uncle Chuck told her about how Terri had snuck into the boathouse—she’d probably be grounded. There’s no way I’ll be able to get into the boathouse again, she realized, and if there was one thing she knew, it was this:
The boathouse was the place that held all the answers.
But…
Wait a minute, Terri thought, wondering.
Those words she’d seen on the computer screen, those strange, complicated words. Plus there were the typed words on the labels that had been taped to the weird glass bottles, as well as more typed labels on the tanks. Terri had no idea what the words meant, but maybe she could look them up, couldn’t she?
I could look them up in the dictionary! she thought.
But there was one big problem with that:
She couldn’t remember the words!
She sat down at her desk, got a pad of paper and a pencil out of the drawer. She tried to remember the words, or even parts of the words. If she even remembered a part of one, she could write it down quickly, and then maybe remember the rest of it.
She stared down at the pad of paper, reaching far back in her mind, trying to jog her memory.
Jeeze! she thought in complete frustration.
She just…couldn’t…remember…the words!
Then she put the pencil down. Maybe she’d remember the words later, if she didn’t try to think about them so hard. Sometimes memories would just pop up when you least expected them to. If you tried too hard to remember something, it wouldn’t work. She’d had this problem a few times before, on school tests. When she couldn’t remember an answer to a question, she’d sit back for a moment, close her eyes, clear her mind, and then the answer would come.
But when she did this now, she came up with nothing! She’d been in such a hurry when she was in the boathouse, she didn’t have time to really concentrate, and she hadn’t thought to write anything down.
What am I going to do? she wondered.
It was so frustrating. And she couldn’t ask Patricia because Patricia was in the hospital, and Terri had no idea how long she’d have to be there. She didn’t even know what was wrong with her!
And Patricia probably wouldn’t remember the words either, Terri decided in still more frustration. She probably didn’t even see them. And she couldn’t have seen the words on the labels because Patricia was never in the backroom. It was just me.
How would she ever find the answers?
thunk-thunk-thunk!
Terri nearly jumped an inch off her bed, startled. Someone was knocking on her bedroom door. Before she could even get up, Uncle Chuck’s voice announced from the other side of the door:
“Terri, Patricia’s on the phone.”
««—»»
Terri’s excitement raced through her. Patricia’s called! It didn’t mean that Patricia was out of the hospital but at least it meant that she was all right; otherwise, she wouldn’t be able to call.
“Keep it short, young lady,” Uncle Chuck said when she came out of her bedroom. “Don’t forget, you’re still being punished.”
“Okay, Uncle Chuck,” Terri peeped in reply. She raced to the kitchen, picked up the phone.
“Patricia! What happened? I called earlier and your mother said you had to go to the hospital! Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I’m okay,” Patricia answered over the line. “I got a big cut on my knee, and I had to get stitches.”
“Did it hurt?”
“Well, not really. The doctor sprayed this cold stuff on the cut and it made my skin numb, so I didn’t feel anything. It hurt when I fell down, though.”
“What happened?” Terri asked, relieved that her friend was okay.
Patricia’s voice lowered. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Remember this morning when I left your house, and you were going to go back to the boathouse to get your library card?”
“Yeah,” Terri said. How could she ever forget that! It was the whole reason she’d gotten caught by Uncle Chuck.
“Well,” Patricia went on, “I was going home, like you said, and I was cutting across our neighbor’s yard right by a bunch of trees and—”
“What!” Terri whined.
“Something jumped out at me from the trees. I fell down on the curb and cut my leg, and I was bleeding pretty bad.”
“But what was it?” Terri couldn’t help but ask. “What jumped out at you?”
“You’ll never believe this,” Patricia said. “But it was a toad, bigger than any toad I’ve ever seen in my life! And…it had fangs!”
Terri was astonished. “I never told you, Patricia, but last night I woke up and looked out my window and I saw the same exact thing! I saw these giant toads hopping around in the yard, and they had fangs! And then, after you left this morning, I went back down to the boathouse, and I used my library card to get into that other back room.”
“Terri!”
“And in the room were lots of these glass tanks, and the tanks were full of toads with fangs! And there were big salamanders too—”
“With teeth?” Patricia asked.
“Yeah, they all had sharp teeth, just like the salamander we saw on the dock this morning. What did your parents say when you told them about it?”
Patricia paused on the line. “Well, I didn’t tell them, I couldn’t. They’d never believe me. They’d think I was making it up.”
Terri had no problem understanding this. “I got out all my Golden Nature books today, and looked through them, and I was right. There aren’t any toads or salamanders that have teeth. None in the whole world.”