Who Is Frances Rain? by Margaret Buffie

Author:Margaret Buffie [Buffie, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Children's Fiction
ISBN: 978-1-894786-69-0
Publisher: Kids Can Press Ltd.
Published: 2012-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

I PUSHED my hair out of my eyes and walked around to the path, keeping a sharp eye on the woman just in case she spotted me. I followed the path until I was about ten feet from the shore. Just to be on the safe side, I hid behind the trunk of a wide jack pine. Would she be able to hear my voice, I wondered, turning the tape recorder on again.

“Ahem!” I said loudly. “Ahem, ahem.”

No response. So I described the people in the canoe.

“The two men paddling have dark skin and braided hair and are wearing identical blue and white plaid shirts,” I whispered loudly.

As they moved closer, I realized they were, in fact, twins. They sat unsmiling at either end of the canoe. The man at the back slid his paddle tight against the side of the canoe while the other one rested his across the gunwale. The steerer brought the canoe neatly up to the dock. It slid to a stop, seeming to pass through my own little Beetle at the same time.

Now I was able to see the two passengers on the floor of the canoe — a man and a girl. He was big and wide, dressed in a black coat and wide-brimmed hat. He tried to stand up, making the canoe wobble. The guide at the rear pointed at the floor and said something. The girl clutched at each gunwale and closed her eyes.

The man sat down again, but I knew from the angry movements of his jaw and his jabbing finger that he was not happy with the orders. The guide looked straight ahead, ignoring the lethal finger. I had the feeling that he’d heard it all before.

The girl kept her eyes closed until the canoe stopped rocking. She opened them again when Frances stepped onto the dock. The girl gazed up at her shyly, eyes squinting against the sun. The man in black looked up, too, and I saw his face clearly for the first time. It had a flabby chin that hung from ear to ear. His close-set eyes looked like two pushed-in eyes on a flat potato. His nose was a small smudged thing, but his mouth was like a frog’s — a wide moist slit.

I shuddered when I saw it. The look he gave Frances should have knocked her over, but it didn’t. She even offered him a hand up.

He ignored her hand and sat where he was, staring at her. She shrugged and walked by, stopping to speak to the guides. The paddler in front hopped out and held the canoe steady.

The Toad Man stepped heavily onto the dock. He was big all right, even taller than he looked sitting down, and really wide, with rounded shoulders under the dark overcoat and the huge fur collar. He took off his hat. The scalp underneath was flat and freckled and edged with a thin fringe of white hair.

I dived behind a tree as his nasty gaze swept the island.

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