The Keeper by Guadalupe García McCall

Author:Guadalupe García McCall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2021-10-21T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Because we are more than a little shocked by our discovery, Ava and I rush right up to my room to talk in private when we get home.

“Wait,” I tell Ava, because she’s freaking out. She’s walking back and forth across my room, talking too fast to be understood, going on and on about cloaks and witches and secret paths in the woods. I can’t make any sense of it. “Slow down. Let’s sit and calm down first. Okay?”

Ava nods and scoots herself onto my bed. Baxter gets up on the bed with her and she hugs him.

“What are we going to do?” Ava’s eyes gleam with unshed tears. “We’re just kids! We’re no match for the Keeper!”

“First of all, we don’t know for sure that Ms. Phillips is the Keeper,” I say. “All we know is that she was watching us.”

“And she ran away when we caught her!” Ava reminds me. “How much more guilty does she have to act?”

I shake my head. “Hmmm . . . maybe. But she could have been scared of Baxter. He was trying to eat her pants.”

“Okay, fine, but she was acting pretty creepy, don’t you think?” Ava asks me. “We should call the police.”

I remove the scope from around my neck and hang it over my desk chair. “I don’t know about that,” I tell her. “Maybe if we knew what she wants with us—with me. If we had some evidence of what she’s trying to do, we could tell Mom and Dad.”

“Do you really want to wait to find out what she wants?” Ava asks, holding tightly on to Baxter, who’s looking back at me like he wants me to rescue him from Ava’s anxious hug. “’Cause I don’t. I’d rather have Mom and Dad call the sheriff right now. Tell him what we saw. Let him figure it all out. That’s his job. To figure things out.”

“They won’t believe us. You know they won’t.” Frustrated, I scratch my head and plop myself down at my computer desk to think. “We need to spy on her, the way we did with Mr. Morris. We need to know what she does, where she goes, who she talks to . . .”

“If she’s working with anyone,” Ava chimes in.

“Yes. Everything,” I say. “We need to know as much about her as she seems to know about us before that Blood Moon gets here.”

Baxter whines and Ava lets him go. He sniffs around my bed and then curls up by Ava’s feet. I think about how his barking was the only reason we know that Ms. Phillips was out there, and I’m grateful he was there to chase her away.

Ava pulls her legs up and hugs them in front of herself. She doesn’t look as certain of this as I am. “I’m not sure that’s going to work,” she says. “I mean, she might just decide to lie low for a while.”

“Then we’ll have to sneak up to her house, peek in if we have to, see what she’s up to,” I tell her.

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