And something had gone wrong.
This seemed to Terri to be a strong possibility. An experiment, she wondered.
And they’d said something else, hadn’t they? Something that scared her even more.
Something about the trapdoor, she recalled. The trapdoor she’d seen this morning in the backroom of the boathouse.
With the big padlock on it.
Why was it locked? What was in it? Why would her mother and uncle be so concerned about Terri finding the key and opening the trapdoor up?
Questions, questions!
And Terri was still determined to find the answers, and she knew that some of the answers at least would come when she found a way to look up those words she’d found in Uncle Chuck’s black-leather briefcase.
“Terri?”
It was her uncle’s voice, on the other side of her bedroom door. “I’d like to speak with you for a moment.”
“Okay,” Terri said.
Her door swooshed open, and there was Uncle Chuck standing there. He wasn’t tapping his foot, which was a good sign, and another good sign was that he hadn’t called her young lady.
“What is it, Uncle Chuck?” Terri asked.
“Well, I just wanted to say that you can come out of your room now; you’ve been punished enough.”
Great! She didn’t have to stay in her room anymore!
“But I just want you to know,” Uncle Chuck went on, “that the reason I punished you is because we love you very much and we care about you, and we don’t want you to do things that you shouldn’t. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Uncle Chuck,” Terri said. But she couldn’t resist asking the next question. She wanted to see what Uncle Chuck would say. “How come I shouldn’t go to the boathouse?” she asked him next.
“Well, honey, because, like I’ve said, the boathouse is dangerous. Those old boards on the pier could break, and you could fall in the water.”
Terri managed to keep her thoughts to herself. That wasn’t the real reason, and she knew it. But instead, she changed the subject. “Are we going to have dinner now?”
“Well, no, honey. Your mother and I are still working on something very important for your mother’s job, and we have to get to work right now, so we don’t have time to eat dinner. But I want you to fix yourself something in the microwave, okay?”
Terri nodded. “Can I go to Patricia’s?”
“Sure, but only after you’ve had something to eat,” her uncle said. “And make sure you’re home before dark.” Then he stepped back from the door. “And you can watch TV later too. I’ll see you later.”
“’Bye,” Terri said.
She waited a minute in her bedroom, then she went out into the hallway. Uncle Chuck had gone into his own bedroom and was coming out again right now.
With the briefcase.
Terri waited a few moments more. Then she quietly walked out to the kitchen and looked out the big sliding-glass door into the backyard.
There they go, she thought, looking on. Just like every night…
Through the glass door, she could see her mother and Uncle Chuck walking across the back yard, to the narrow gravel path that led to the boathouse.
««—»»
“Wow!” Terri said. “That’s a big bandage.”
Patricia, sitting in a chair, was holding her knee up, to show Terri the large white bandage on it.
“And it doesn’t hurt?” Terri asked.
“Naw,” Patricia said. “It just itches a little. I have to go back to the doctor’s in a week, so he can take the stitches out.”
Terri had quickly fixed herself a spaghetti TV dinner in the microwave, then she’d gone immediately to Patricia’s house. And why shouldn’t she? Her uncle had given her permission.
“So you didn’t get grounded?” Patricia asked.
“Nope. I lucked out. But—” Terri took out the piece of paper from her pocket. “Look what I brought.”
“What is it?” Patricia wanted to know.
Terri explained it all, about the words she’d seen in the boathouse, and how she’d been able to write them down after seeing them again on the notepad she’d found in her uncle’s briefcase.
“Terri!” Patricia exclaimed. “You really took a big chance! If your uncle had caught you in his bedroom right after catching you in the boathouse, you really would’ve been grounded!”
“I know,” Terri admitted. “But I had to find these words. I’m sure they’ll give us a lot of answers to all the weird things that have been going on lately. But the only dictionary I could find was one of those real skinny ones they gave us in first grade—you know, just when you’re learning to read.”
“Oh, yeah,” Patricia said.
“And it didn’t have any of these words in it. Do you have a dictionary, like a big one for adults?”
Patricia rubbed her chin. “Yeah, I think so. I think there’s one in the den. But we’ll have to ask my father’s permission first.”
“Okay. Let’s do it.”
Patricia’s father was in the living room, sitting back in a big recliner chair reading the newspaper. The television was on, with a baseball game. “Yankees,” he said to himself, “what a bunch of dopes.” Patricia asked if they could use the dictionary, and her father said yes without thinking twice. Terri would at least have expected him to ask why; most adults always did.
“This is great,” Terri commented as Patricia took her into the paneled den. A big hard-covered dictionary sat opened on top of a low dark-wood bookshelf.
“That’s the biggest dictionary I’ve ever seen!” Terri remarked.
“Yeah, and if this doesn’t have those words in it,” Patricia guessed, “then nothing will. What’s the first word?”
“‘Reagent,’” Terri said, and pointed to the word on the paper so Patricia could see it.
Patricia turned to the R’s in the big dictionary, skimmed her finger down the page. “Here it is,” she said and began to quote, “‘Reagent: a substance used to react with another substance.’”
Terri frowned, and wrote the definition down on her piece of notebook paper. Then she read the next word. “Transmission.”
“Isn’t that something in a car?” Patricia asked.
“Well, yeah, I think it is, but it’s got to mean something else too.”
Patricia, then, turned to the T’s. “You’re right,” she told her. “It also means ‘to cause to go to another person or place.’”
Then Terri read off the other words, and Patricia looked them up.
Genetic meant having to do with “genes,” and genes were these special things in all living cells.
Mutation meant change.
And carnivore meant—
They both knew what that word meant…animals that eat meat. Which meant these animals had…teeth.
««—»»
“Yeah, this is really weird, all right,” Terri said. She and Patricia were sitting out on the curb now, trying to put together what they’d read in the dictionary. The word, of course, that bothered her most was carnivore. Something that eats meat, something that has teeth. Like the toads and salamanders, she thought. They definitely had teeth. But, as she’d told Patricia, when she read about toads and salamanders in her Golden Nature books, it stated that neither animal had teeth. And she remembered something else, too. The books said that toads and salamanders were insectivores, and when they looked that word up in the dictionary they discovered that it meant an animal that ate insects, not meat.