Monster Lake (2 page)

“
A
zoologist?
What’s that?”

“
It’s someone who studies
animals. There’s a zoology lab not too far from here, where
scientists do research. That’s where my Dad worked,
until…”

“
Until what?”

Terri’s suntanned shoulders slumped in
despair. Here was that bad subject again. “Until he and my Mom got
divorced, and he moved away.”

“
Oh,” Patricia
said.

And this was something Terri didn’t quite
understand. She knew what divorce was, but she didn’t see why a
divorced person would stop working at the place they usually
worked. One day, a couple of weeks after the divorce, Terri asked
her Mom if she could call her father at the zoology lab. “He
doesn’t work there anymore, honey,” Mrs. Bennet sadly told her. “He
moved away.” And Uncle Chuck later told her the same thing.
“Sometimes when people get divorced, Terri, they move far
away.”

Far away,
the words repeated now in her
mind…
they move far away…

Just one more thing that made her feel
sad.

“
But that must’ve been
neat, having a Dad who studied animals,” Patricia said, not
realizing Terri’s constant sadness over the topic.

“
Yeah,” Terri agreed. “It
was. I guess it runs in the family. My mother has a zoology degree,
and she works at the same lab that my Dad used to work at. And my
Uncle Chuck teaches biology at Devonsville Junior High. I’m going
to be a zoologist too, when I’m an adult.”

“
Sounds like a neat job.”
Then Patricia leaned forward, looking at the big toad that Terri
gently grasped behind by its legs. Its big eyes, like black
marbles, never blinked. Loose white skin under its throat fluttered
back and forth. Then—

Terri squealed and quickly put the toad back
down on the ground.

“
What happened?” Patricia
asked.

Terri laughed, then turned the garden hose
back on to wash her hands.

“
It peed in my hand!” she
said.

««—»»

Terri washed her hands off
again, with water
and
soap, once they got into the house.

“
What a great house,”
Patricia noticed, her eyes glancing around.

“
Yeah, it is nice,” Terri
replied half-heartedly. It was a nice house, with big spacious
rooms, but…

More bad feelings.

It seemed that anytime she looked at
anything—anywhere in the house—she was again grimly reminded of her
father. Right now, for instance, here in the kitchen. It reminded
her of all the times she and her father and mother had had
breakfast together in the mornings, before the school bus came and
picked her up at the bus stop down the street. She looked at the
microwave oven and remembered the time her father had taught her
how to use it, how to set the digital timer that beeped, how to
adjust the heat setting. Next, she looked at the big four-burner
range and recalled how her father liked to make bacon and cheese
omelets for the whole family every Saturday morning. And they were
great omelets.

“
It seems so empty all the
time now,” Terri said without really thinking.

“
Well, maybe your Dad will
come back someday,” Patricia offered. “Maybe he and your Mom will
get back together.”

“
I hope so…”

By now, Patricia could probably guess that
this was not Terri’s favorite thing to talk about. “But your Uncle
Chuck lives here too, doesn’t he?”

“
Yeah, he has since my Dad
left. He drives my Mom to work every morning, and picks her
up—that’s where he is now. And he looks after me during the day,
when school’s out for vacation.”

thunk, thunk

The sound of car doors closing.

“
Here they come now,”
Patricia said, glancing out the window which she could see from the
dining room.

Terri glanced out too, and sure enough,
there was the car in the driveway, with her Mom and Uncle Chuck
getting out.

“
What are all those things
they’re carrying?” Patricia asked.

But this was a familiar sight to Terri. Both
her mother and Uncle Chuck carried two big black briefcases each as
they trundled up the driveway toward the front door.

“
Mom has to bring a lot of
work home from the zoology lab,” Terri eventually answered. “She
only used to work part-time, but since the divorce she works every
weekday.”

“
Well,” Patricia
considered, “at least she’s home on the weekends, so you can do
stuff with her then.”

“
Not really. She has so
much work from the lab, she has to work on it at home on Saturdays
and Sundays now.”

“
Oh, that’s a
bummer.”

“
Hi, Mom, hi, Uncle Chuck,”
Terri greeted when they both walked in.

“
Hi, kids,” Terri’s mother
replied, smiling in her dark pumpkin-orange business
dress.

“
Who’s this?” Uncle Chuck
asked when he saw Patricia.

“
This is my friend,
Patricia,” Terri introduced. “This is my Uncle Chuck.”

“
Hi,” Patricia
said.

“
Pleased to meet you,
Patricia,” Uncle Chuck returned the greeting. Uncle Chuck was tall
and thin, with short dark hair and a nice smile.

“
Patricia will be in
seventh grade when school starts,” Terri said. “I was just telling
her that she’ll have you as her biology teacher.”

“
That’s great,” Uncle Chuck
said. “So you must be new in town?”

Patricia nodded. “I only just moved to
Devonsville a few weeks ago. It’s a really nice town.”

“
So what have you girls
been up to?” Terri’s mother asked.

“
We were playing badminton
while Uncle Chuck was picking you up at work,” Terri
said.

“
And we saw this
absolutely
huge
toad in the back yard,” Patricia cut in.

“
We do seem to have a lot
of toads around here,” Terri’s mother added. “They’re all over the
place.”

“
Because you’re so close to
the lake, right?” Patricia asked.

Terri’s Mom and Uncle Chuck traded strange
glances at Patricia’s remark. And this just reminded Terri how
strange overall her mother and Uncle Chuck had been acting
lately.

“
Well, yes,” Terri’s mother
eventually answered Patricia.

But Uncle Chuck looked a little disturbed.
“Uh, girls? You weren’t at the lake today, were you?”

“
No, Uncle Chuck,” Terri
answered. “You said kids shouldn’t go there unless an adult’s
around.”

“
That’s right, hon. Because
lakes can be dangerous. You could fall in, plus, you know, it could
be polluted.”

Terri’s brow rose. She’d seen the lake lots
of times, and it didn’t look polluted to her. The water was crystal
clear, and she’d never seen any garbage or anything floating in it.
This seemed like a strange thing for Uncle Chuck to say.

“
But I told Patricia that
you or Mom would take us down there and show it to us sometime,”
Terri said, remembering her promise.

And again—

—
Terri’s mother and Uncle
Chuck traded weird glances.

“
Well, sure, honey,” her
Mom said. “We can do that sometime.”

“
But not soon,” Uncle Chuck
said. “It’s too hot to go down there during the summer. There’re
lots of bugs and mosquitoes and things. And snakes.”

“
Snakes!” Patricia
exclaimed. “I’ve never seen a real snake.”

But Terri raised her brow again.

I’ve never seen any snakes
at the lake,
she realized.

It almost sounded like Uncle Chuck was
making it up, so Terri and Patricia wouldn’t be tempted to go down
there on their own…

Hmmm,
she wondered. Then she said, “Are we going to get pizza
tonight, Mom? Like you said we could this morning?”

“
Oh, honey, I’m sorry,” her
mother apologized. “I hope you’re not too disappointed, but I’ve
got so much work to do tonight, I don’t have time, and neither does
Uncle Chuck.”

I knew
it
, Terri thought.
Same old story.

“
We’ll get pizza soon,
though,” Uncle Chuck said.

“
Maybe Pamela would like to
stay for dinner,” Terri’s mother suggested.

“
It’s not Pamela, Mom. It’s
Patricia,” Terri corrected.

“
Oh, yes, of course. I’m
sorry, Patricia. Anyway, why don’t you cook some TV dinners for
yourselves in the microwave?”

“
But aren’t you and Uncle
Chuck going to eat?” Terri asked.

“
Later,” Uncle Chuck said,
and held up the briefcases. “Right now your mother and I have to
get to work.”

“
Okay,” Terri glumly
replied.

“
Nice meeting you,
Patricia,” Uncle Chuck said as he and Terri’s Mom headed for the
back door.

“
Bye,” Patricia
said.

Then the back sliding glass door slid
closed, and they were gone.

Patricia squinted after them.

“
You want to stay for
dinner?” Terri asked, but it was more for distraction than anything
else. She could guess what Patricia was thinking. “We’ve got all
kinds of good TV dinners.” She opened the freezer and showed her.
“Fish fillets, enchiladas, sliced turkey and gravy. They’re pretty
good.”

“
Well, okay. But I’ve got
to call my parents first.”

“
The phone’s right over
there,” Terri said, pointing to the end of the kitchen
counter.

Patricia dialed her number, then asked if
she could stay. Then she hung up, looking weird.

“
Did they say you can stay
for dinner?” Terri asked.

“
Uh, yeah, I can
stay.”

“
Then why do you look so
weird all of a sudden?”

“
Well…” She glanced out the
back sliding-glass door.

“
What is it?”

Patricia turned back to her.

“
Your Uncle Chuck said that
he and your mother have lots of work to do?”

“
Yeah,” Terri said. “They
have lots of work almost every night, like I said.”

“
You mean like office work,
right? From the zoology lab where your Mom works?”

“
Yeah.”

Patricia glanced back out the door again.
“If they’ve got office work to do, how come they’re walking across
the back yard with their briefcases? Toward the lake?”

««—»»

The microwave beeped, and Terri, wearing
pot-holder mittens shaped like owls, took the food out. “Well,” she
said, to answer Patricia’s question, “remember that trail I showed
you, that leads to the lake?”

“
Yeah.”

“
There’s also a little
boathouse down there, right on the water—”

“
Wow!” Patricia said
excitedly. “You have a boat too?”

“
It’s just a little
motorboat, we’ve never even used it because it needs to be fixed.
But my Dad turned the boathouse into an office.”

“
An
office?
Why?”

Terri shrugged as they sat down at the
kitchen table to eat their TV dinners. “I told you, he and my Mom
are zoologists, and I guess they wanted their office to be close to
the lake so they could study the animals there.”

“
Like the frogs and toads
and things?”

“
Yeah.”

“
And the
snakes!”

Terri paused. “Well, I don’t think there
really are any snakes in the lake.”

“
But your Uncle Chuck said
there were.”

“
Yeah, but he may have been
making that up so you and I wouldn’t be tempted to go down there by
ourselves. I mean, I’ve never seen any snakes around here… Anyway,
that’s why my Mom and Uncle Chuck were going out back. They do
their work in the boathouse.”

Patricia turned her fork idly in her cheese
enchiladas. “But isn’t that—you know—kind of weird?”

“
What?”

“
Turning a boathouse into
an office?”

Terri thought about that. Sure, her mother
was a zoologist—just like her father had been—and the boathouse was
close to the lake. But the work she brought home every night came
from the laboratory she worked at just outside of town. What could
it have to do with the lake?

Yeah,
she finally had to admit to herself.
I guess it is kind of weird.
And that
thought only reminded her more of how weird her mother had been
acting over the past few months, and Uncle Chuck too.

“
And another thing,”
Patricia went on. “Did you see the weird way your mother and your
Uncle Chuck looked at each other whenever you mentioned the
lake?”

Terri had noticed that too,
and she couldn’t deny it. “You’re right,” she agreed. “It was
almost like they were…
hiding
something from us.”

“
That’s right,” Patricia
agreed. “And it must have something to do with the lake or the
boathouse.”

Terri couldn’t imagine what
it could be.
What could they possibly want
to hide?
she wondered.