Storm Horse by Nick Garlick

Author:Nick Garlick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.

IT WAS A record player. A stereo record player. At first glance it looked like a big brown box, but when he unfastened the catches on the sides, it split into three parts. The bottom half was the turntable, with shiny black dials on the front and a thin silver spindle sticking up in the center. The top half was two boxes: the loudspeakers.

“Where did you get that?” Aunt Elly asked. Again, she wasn’t annoyed. Just curious.

“It was Mom’s,” Flip said, trying not to sniff but not succeeding. “She bought it at the shop where she worked. A music shop.”

“It looks terribly expensive,” said Aunt Elly.

“It was,” Flip said. “But what happened was, a man who bought it sold it back to the shop a month later because he needed the money. So because it was secondhand, Mom got to buy it much cheaper, and the owner of the shop let her because he knew how much his customers liked her. He said it was a sort of bonus. Otherwise she could never have afforded it.”

Aunt Elly gazed admiringly at the record player. She touched the dials and picked up the speakers. “I’ve seen pictures of these in the paper. Stereo. Sound from two speakers. It’s all terribly modern, isn’t it?”

Flip nodded. “Mom was really proud of it. Nobody else we knew had one. The neighbors used to come around specially to listen to it. She was always playing her records on it. Until … ”

He tried to finish the sentence but couldn’t. Seeing the player hadn’t made him feel better at all—only sadder.

“Until she left?” Aunt Elly suggested.

“Until she left,” Flip agreed. Without thinking, he reached out and traced a cross with a circle around it on the turntable. “That’s when I hid it.”

“Hid it? From who?”

“Dad,” Flip said. “He was so angry when she left he started smashing her things and I thought he was going to break that too. So I hid it.”

“Didn’t he know it was gone?”

“She’d put it in my room before she went, and he hadn’t noticed. When he did see it was gone, I told him she’d taken it with her. And he believed me.”

“And you’ve had it ever since?” Aunt Elly asked. “All this time?”

Flip nodded.

“None of us saw you bring it with you.”

Flip felt embarrassed. He didn’t know where to look. “That’s because I hid it from Uncle Andries too.”

Aunt Elly considered him with a kind but puzzled look in her eyes. “Why did you do that?” she asked.

Flip took a deep breath. “Because I heard him talking to our landlord when he came to Amsterdam,” he explained. “The landlord said the rent hadn’t been paid and Uncle Andries said he didn’t have any money to pay it. So the landlord said he’d take all the furniture in our apartment as payment and Uncle Andries said that would be fine. So I hid the record player in my suitcase in case Uncle Andries found it and left it behind with everything else.

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