Emmy and the Rats in the Belfry Read Online Free PDF Page B

“Now, listen, lady—”
    â€œSo nice to meet you, Miss Squipp!” Emmy said loudly, waving as she backed away.
    Raston’s voice rose. “I may be exceptionally good-looking, and of course I do have remarkably perky ears—”
    â€œShut up, Ratty!” said Joe under his breath. “Come on, Ana. You can help cut up the Sissy-patches.”
    â€œBut I’m a manly rodent!” cried the Rat. “Handsome! Not cute !”
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    Emmy sat on a high stool at the far end of the store and kicked her feet against the rungs. She tried to read the professor’s formula for Sissy-patches, but the jumble of numbers and symbols made no sense to her, and she put it back on the counter.
    Everyone else was busy. Brian was clinking among blue and green and golden bottles in a tall cabinet and making notes on a chart. Joe and Ana were cutting the Sissy-patches into neat squares. Chippy, gripping a pencil stub between his paws, was drawing a diagram of a sling that would hold Sissy. And Sissy, when she wasn’t being measured for the sling, was getting a reading lesson from her brother.
    â€œSee? ‘S’ is for ‘Spiny,’ and ‘Squirrel,’ and … and ‘Schenectady’!” Raston sorted through old cage tags for more words beginning with s .
    â€œSchenectady,” Joe repeated. “I just heard that name somewhere.”
    â€œIt’s where Ratty and Sissy were born, remember?” Emmy leaned forward. “That’s what the tag said—Shrinking Rat of Schenectady. The professor’s old lab was there, and Cheswick Vole was the lab assistant. It was Cheswick who went out and found Ratty and Sissy in their nest.”
    Ana looked up. “I’m going through that town,” she said. “Tomorrow, on the train. It’s one of the stops on the way to those people I have to live with.”
    â€œHaven’t you even met them?” asked Joe.
    Ana shook her head, looking miserable. “I wish I could just stay here.”
    Chippy put his pencil down. “Would you like to come to Rodent City for a visit? Mother invited you, you know. She wants to make you acorn cookies.”
    Ana glanced over her shoulder at Gwenda Squipp, who was still busily talking with the professor. “I wish I could. But we’re leaving tomorrow. And Squippy keeps an eye on me wherever we go.”
    Emmy swung her legs, thinking hard. Was there a chance that Ana could stay in Grayson Lake? Probably not, if there were relatives who would take her. And Emmy knew better than to ask her parents if Ana could live with them—not with the trouble Emmy had been in lately.
    But it was exactly that trouble that Emmy could not figure out. How had her room gotten so messed up? She certainly didn’t think she had been sleepwalking, but as Joe had pointed out on the way to the Antique Rat, she wouldn’t remember it if she had.
    Emmy slipped off her stool and stood by Brian. The tall cabinet was full of bottles and vials, each holding a colored liquid or powder and each with its own special rodent power. Would there be something in there that would cure sleepwalking? Who knew, maybe she could even find something that would help Ana.
    â€œBrian,” she began, when her eye was caught by a slender bottle half full of a silvery dust.
    She lifted it from its shelf and held it close to her face, peering inside. It was almost as fine as powder, and it glittered as if made up of very small, very shiny scales.
    â€œScaly-Tailed Squirrel Dust,” she read from the label. “Suspension of Disbelief.” She passed it under her nose and sniffed. “It smells lemony. Like furniture polish.”
    Brian looked up from his chart. “Better not breathe it in, Emmy.”
    â€œBut what does it do?”
    â€œI don’t know. You’ll have to ask the professor.” Brian bent over the chart again. “Maybe it means you stop