“You won’t be. That toaster is the only heating you get. Be right back.”
Kerri and Tim left, and Andy glanced over Kerri’s austere apartment, pondering the thinness of the line between glancing and snooping. Probably opening drawers marked the boundary, but there was only one and it was open already. Kerri’s garments lay scattered on the floor, pouring out of a yawning red travel bag. She checked the single bookshelf, unbelievingly: only a dozen books, most of them fiction. Not one pocket encyclopedia, not even a bird spotter’s guide. The walls in Kerri’s bedroom in Blyton Hills (the most awesome place in the universe) were fully dressed with bookshelves and butterfly display cases and maps of other continents. The cool ones: Africa, Oceania.
Reverently, she pulled down one of the book spines, an illustrated edition of Wyndham’s The Chrysalids—the same one Andy had read as a child in Blyton Hills, per Kerri’s recommendation. She opened it.
A familiar piece of paper fluttered down onto her lap. She picked up the newspaper clipping delicately and smoothed it on the book’s cover. It had been almost three years from the last time Andy had read the article, and yet her memory misquoted hardly a couple of words.
TEEN SLEUTHS UNMASK SLEEPY LAKE MONSTER
Nancy Hardy/Blyton Hills.—The reign of terror of the “Sleepy Lake Creature”—the elusive figure that has been scaring herdsmen and campers by the upper Zoinx River—was put to an end last weekend by some unlikely heroes, namely four children and a dog.
Peter Manner (13), Kerri Hollis (12), Andrea “Andy” Rodriguez (12), and Nate Rogers (11), along with their hunting dog, Sean, are credited with the capture of Thomas X. Wickley, from California, who was reenacting an old Indian legend as part of a convoluted scheme for burglary at the historic Debo?n Mansion.
A Legend Rekindled
This is not the first time that the so-called Blyton Summer Detective Club has taken on a case that had local authorities baffled. As frequent vacationers in Blyton Hills, the half-and-half Oregonian-Californian bunch is famous in town for its crazy adventures, which often end in the arrest of evildoers!
Recent sightings of a “monster” around Sleepy Lake had been a hot topic in Blyton Hills this summer. “Rumors of lake creatures are as old as they are typical of any large water mass,” says Deputy Sheriff W. Wilson, of the Pennaquick County Police. “I myself grew up hearing the old Walla Walla tales of ancient underwater spirits that crawl up the misty shores at night. But when hunters start finding alien tracks in the mud, you know something is amiss.”
“We just had to go and see those for ourselves!” young Nate boasts excitedly, a little daredevil who makes up in courage what he lacks in size. However, when they first visited the lake, they found more than tracks: they encountered the creature itself, and it had them fleeing away! “He gave us a heck of a scare!”
Summer Detectives on the Job
For Peter, the oldest of the gang and a natural-born leader, the mystery had just begun. “We found footprints in the forest that seemed to lead straight into the mines upriver. That was odd: What business does a lake creature have in an abandoned gold mine?”
It was at that point when the kids contacted their old ally, Captain Al Urich, a retired air force veteran living in Blyton Hills.
“I have had the pleasure to work with the Blyton Summer Detective Club before and I do my best to assist them whenever they require a grown-up’s point of view, or simply someone with a driver’s license,” Captain Urich joked.
Together, the children and Captain Urich searched the woods around Sleepy Lake and the abandoned mines. “I hope to become a biologist someday, so I was eager for a closer look at that creature,” says Kerri, the brains of the team. But the clues pointed to something bigger than a prowling monster: “We went to the library and learned that the mines were connected to the old Debo?n Mansion. All our findings pointed to that house.”
The House on the Lake
Built during the Gold Rush years by a merchant-turned-prospector on a tiny islet in Sleepy Lake, Debo?n Mansion has been shunned for years by townsfolk who still resent the family’s alleged ties with piracy and witchcraft. Rumors of a haunting have persisted since 1949, when a fire destroyed part of the building and forced the bankrupt family to sell the property and relocate in town. Ms. Dunia Debo?n, last of her bloodline and the police’s main suspect in the case, refused to comment on this story.
Nevertheless, when the teen detectives finally dared investigate the house, they were in deep water. “Weather capsized our boat and we ended up stranded on the isle,” recounts Andy, who despite being a girl was never afraid to take refuge in the haunted house. “It looked like we were up for a night of frights!”
However, not only did the four friends overcome the thrills of that eventful night, but they also managed to set an ingenious trap for the fraudster himself. When police reached the isle the next morning, they found the missing children and dog guarding their astounding catch—the Sleepy Lake creature unmasked!
“Wickley had heard rumors about Debo?n’s lost gold hidden below the mansion, and he took advantage of the creature myth to scare off people while he searched for the riches,” Peter explained, recapping a new entry in the exploits of the Blyton Summer Detective Club. Criminals of Blyton Hills beware—the children are coming back for Christmas!
Andy, her mouth filled with a sweet aftertaste, put the clipping back inside the book and the book back on the shelf, reassured. That was all she wanted to find.
Plus Tim. Tim was a welcome extra. Things were all going according to plan.
Tim and Kerri returned soon enough, the former going straight to the toaster Andy had turned on, the latter snatching the bottle of vodka.
“Shit, it’s cold,” she mumbled, crashing on the bed as gently as the Hindenburg in the very narrow gap between Andy and the wall. “Go ahead, take your shoes off. Let’s do a pajama party like the old times. We’ll build a pillow fort and ask the Magic Eight Ball who will we marry.”
“We never did that,” Andy complained, undoing her boots. “You wouldn’t do it; it’s too unscientific. Instead you tried to explain genetics to me to determine who we should marry to spawn superdetectives.”
“Hey, it works with dogs. Right, Tim?”
Tim sneezed in a very dignified Sherlock Holmes fashion. Kerri was sitting up against the wall, after she’d toed her suede boots off into oblivion. She took a big gulp of vodka and watched as Andy maneuvered out of her jacket.
“You know,” she said, “sometimes it crossed my mind that next time I’d see you, you would be a boy.”