The Girl with the Silver Eyes by Willo Davis Roberts

Author:Willo Davis Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aladdin

9

AS SOON AS MONICA HAD gone to work in the morning—with a headache, she said, and Katie wondered if it was because she and Nathan had had a real fight before he left the previous night—Katie called the number where she’d reached Dale Casey.

A man’s voice answered, a gruff voice.

“May I speak to Dale, please?”

“He’s busy now,” the man said. “He’s got chores to do before he can talk to anybody. He’s got to weed the garden and mow the grass.”

Katie thought quickly. “Couldn’t—couldn’t he call me back? Couldn’t I leave my number?”

“Well, I guess so. What is it?”

She told him the number, and repeated her name, hoping the man was writing it down. But though she waited in the apartment all morning, no one called.

While she was waiting, she sat down and composed a letter to the girl, Kerri Lamont, and addressed it to the return address on the letter Monica had gotten yesterday from her friend Fern. And then, remembering, she went looking for the letter itself.

Monica hadn’t answered it yet, so it was still lying on her desk in the bedroom. Ordinarily Katie wouldn’t have thought it very nice to read someone else’s mail, but surely this was a special case. Maybe Fern Lamont would say something about Kerri that would give her a clue to what she wanted to know.

The letter was written in terrible handwriting. Mrs. Anderson would have given Mrs. Lamont an F in penmanship, Katie thought. And most of what she wrote wasn’t very interesting, all about Mrs. Lamont going back to work now because the kids were in school, except that now they were out for vacation, and she couldn’t find a decent sitter, and she didn’t really like the job all that much, and Charles (that was her husband) didn’t think about anything but bowling and left everything else to her.

Mrs. Lamont sounded like a whiney sort of woman. Katie wasn’t surprised that her husband wanted to bowl rather than sit around home and listen to her. She complained about everything. But, finally, at the very end of the letter, Katie found what she’d been looking for.

“The boys run me ragged with their noise and their dirt, but it’s still Kerri who bothers me the most. She is such a strange child,” the word strange was underlined, “and I’ve never been able to talk to her. She just looks at me with those unusual eyes and doesn’t say anything back. She doesn’t cause trouble, exactly, but she makes everyone uncomfortable, for some reason. I guess I shouldn’t say that, she is my own daughter, but it isn’t just me. Charlie is always looking and raising his eyebrows and asking what’s the matter with her. As if I know! Why do men think the kids are a woman’s responsibility? He never takes the kids anywhere, or does anything for them except pay their bills—”

There was more, but that was the important part. Kerry had “unusual” eyes, and she was “strange,” and her mother didn’t understand her, either.

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