Fiendish Deeds Read Online Free PDF Page B

enjoy doing extra research, in future just stick to the story, please. This isn’t the first time you’ve taken up class time with your overactive imagination, you know.”
    Joy had stood staring blankly over Miss Keener’s shoulder to avoid her enormous unblinking eyes, when the poster on the wall behind her came into sharp focus.
    “But I thought imagination was more important than knowledge,” Joy had suddenly protested, looking up at the crazy-haired man sticking his tongue out at her.
    Miss Keener had just sighed wearily. “I’m afraid you have that backward, dear. Now go on, or you’ll miss your bus.”
    Joy had slunk out without another word.
    Although tempting, she’d decided not to point out that Miss Keener was no Einstein.

CHAPTER 4
    T he sky was an ominous flint-gray that Saturday morning as the siblings left their house.
    Joy wore a tweed suit with matching coat belted tight at the waist, and a purple turtleneck. A wide-brimmed brown felt hat with a leather cord pulled tight under her chin and a pair of oxblood leather boots completed her look.
    She called it her adventuring ensemble.
    “Don’t you feel that running around in a dead person’s clothes is a bit odd for a girl of almost twelve?” Joy had once overheard her mother ask her father. From her position on the landing, she couldn’t make out the muffled reply. “No, I’m not saying it’s your fault, sweetness,” her mother answered, “but yes, it’s true that if you’d cleared out the basement as promised, she would’ve never gotten into all of those creepy old things….”
    Joy had snuck back upstairs, fuming. What business was it of theirs anyway? But she wasn’t particularly worried—the likelihood of her father clearing out the basement was about as great as his building a zeppelin port on the roof.
    Nevertheless, the mere thought gave her a shiver. It was one of Joy’s greatest delights, raking through the dusty boxes down there. The forgotten possessions and mysterious artifacts—it was like exhuming the dead without all the noxious gas and maggots! Rifling through them, the strange old objects seemed to hum with some sort of quiet energy transmuted by their long-lost owners—as if waiting to be seized up and put to purpose again.
    Joy was only too happy to oblige.
    PROPERTY OF MS. MELODY HUXLEY, said the yellowed label on the trunk where Joy had found the suit, coat, and boots. Inside she’d uncovered more clothes and curios, as well a locked diary that she’d tried for hours to pick unsuccessfully. And while she supposed she could have sawn through the leather clasp, somehow it just didn’t feel right to open it without a suitable display of finesse.
    In addition, there were four albums thick with photos of the house’s former owner, a petite woman whom Joy found beautiful with her fine features, boyish hair, and crooked smile. She was often pictured in the very same tweed suit Joy now wore. So otherworldly and cool was Ms. Huxley that Joy even forgave her apparently insatiable lust for blood, as demonstrated by her posing in photo after photo grinning with a shotgun above piles of dead birds, winking in a pith helmet among slaughtered predators, and giving the thumbs-up in front of a black roadster as she lashed a deer with a lolling tongue to the hood. It was also a different age, Joy reminded herself—one before the advent of plastic wrap and Styrofoam and the practice of packaging everything up into less distasteful portions.
    So, her disconcerting penchant for blowing away all creatures feathered and furry aside, Joy saw an inspiring woman in Ms. Huxley’s fading likenesses—a woman full of conviction and confidence, whether firing an arrow or hoisting a cocktail, eyes ever twinkling with mischievousness. A woman to whom life was not simply about fulfilling the expectations of others, but about defining oneself without fear or compromise.
    Unfortunately, her once luxurious suit and coat now gave off a serious