The Tilting House by Tom Llewellyn

Author:Tom Llewellyn [Llewellyn, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-78080-5
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2011-03-22T23:00:00+00:00

AS SOON AS WE RETURNED from the camping trip, Mom hustled us back into the car and drove us straight to Dr. Trumble’s office. He stitched up two cuts on my leg and a deep one on Aaron’s cheek. We both were going to have scars. Aaron was thrilled—he thought it would make him look like a pirate.

The metal box sat unopened on our bedroom dresser. The box was built as solid as a safe, and its key was lost forever under the moss. I asked Lola to come over to take a shot at it.

Lola had never been in our house before. I watched her nervously as she walked through the front door. She stumbled a bit on the tilting floor and then stood as still as a marble statue as her eyes scanned the words, numbers, and diagrams on the walls. A smile flitted across her face, but she hid it quickly.

“It’s even weirder than I thought,” she said.

We went up to my room and tried prying the box open, but we succeeded only in breaking one of Dad’s best screwdrivers and one of Mom’s butter knives. Lola ran home and came back with one of her mom’s oyster forks. We broke that, too. Her mom noticed. Apparently, she polishes the silverware once a week.

We took a break from the box and went outside to ride bikes until dinnertime. When Mom called us in, I left my bike lying on our front lawn, just a few feet from our porch steps. When I went out to get it after dinner, it was gone. I was sure I knew who’d stolen it.

The Purple Door Man collected junk and hated kids. He wasn’t one of those guys who seemed grumpy until you got to know him and then realized he was gruff but lovable. He was gruff all right, but he definitely wasn’t lovable. At least once a day, he yelled at us to stop making so much noise.

But that’s not all he did. He stole from us.

To be fair to the Purple Door Man, it started with the toys we left in front of his house. We’d step inside for lunch and come back out to find our Frisbee or football gone.

At first, we figured some kid cruising through our neighborhood had picked them up. Or maybe we had left them somewhere else. Then it started happening more often and it started happening even if the toys had been in our yard.

Now, two weeks after the horrible camping trip, my bike disappeared from in front of our house.

I felt sick. It was the middle of summer. My birthday and Christmas were months away, and here I was stuck with nothing to ride.

The Purple Door Man yelled to me from his front porch, “Sad about your bike, eh, sonny?”

“What? Did you see who took it?” I asked anxiously.

“I’m not sayin’,” he said, “but it serves you right for all the noise you kids are always makin’!”

From the way the Purple Door Man said this, I knew he’d been the one who’d stolen my bike.

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