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.