Finally, Something Mysterious by Doug Cornett

Author:Doug Cornett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2020-04-13T16:00:00+00:00

The tall trees lining the old forest road didn’t look so scary in the daylight. In fact, they looked pretty darn normal.

Leading the One and Onlys into the Bell Woods, toward the swamp where the duckies were dumped, I remembered the way the trees had been silhouetted in the darkness the night before, how their thin branches had spidered out at me like some otherworldly Goliaths as I followed the wavering headlight of Janice Wagner’s scooter. I remembered how spooked I’d been.

But now the Bell Woods seemed so ordinary. And that’s Bellwood in a nutshell, I thought to myself. Mundane at first glance, but totally bizarre once you look underneath.

“Duckies!” Peephole hooted, standing up on his pedals and pointing at a yellow mass in the woods on our left. He lost his balance and nearly wiped out, but he grasped the handlebars just in time.

We veered off the forest road and rode into the clearing where the duckies were resting on a thick bed of mud. Unlike the Bell Woods, the duckies seemed just as eerie in the daylight as they had in the darkness the night before. Maybe even more so, because now I could see their wild little eyes peering in every direction.

“Tire tracks! Again!” Shanks said, pointing at the ground. “They lead from the road to the ducky pile. And look! There’s a bunch of footprints, too. Yay, mud!”

We ditched our bikes and ran to get a closer look.

“Guys,” Peephole said tensely, “I think whoever dumped these duckies has just been here.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked, alarmed.

“Because these tracks are fresh.” Peephole pointed a long, bony finger at the ground by his feet. “Like, really fresh.”

“Let me see,” Shanks said, bending down to inspect the tracks. Her face scrunched up for a second, and then her expression changed. She looked up at Peephole slowly.

“You’re right. These footprints are fresh. Because they’re yours.”

Peephole stood up and turned around, studying the tracks while thoughtfully scratching his chin. “Oh…yeah,” he said sheepishly.

“Well, these definitely aren’t yours,” I said, crouching down over a smattering of footprints that were only a little bit bigger than my own. “These must be Janice’s prints from last night. See how they’re facing different directions but all stay in this little area? She was dancing around a lot. I think she was practicing the victory song for the Triple B.”

“And here are some more!” Shanks yelped. There was nothing that she liked more in the world than footprints. “But these are bigger.” She measured the footprint from heel to toe with her hands, then held up her fingers for us to see. The distance from finger to finger looked about the length of a ruler. “And all these prints lead directly from the tire tracks to the duckies. I bet these are the tracks of the person who dumped the duckies….Darrel Sullivan, maybe?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“There’re even more over here!” Peephole said from about twenty feet deeper into the woods. “These have got to be Janice Wagner’s.

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