The Dreadful Future of Blossom Culp Read Online Free PDF Page B

ought to stay clear of Bub and Champ. Bub’s spent five semesters in the sophomore year, and Champ’s old enough to get married.”
    “Don’t I know it,” Daisy-Rae said, smirking again. I suspected she knew more than she was letting on.
    “What do you know?” says I.
    She reached down under her skirts and scratched at a flea bite through a hole in her stocking. “When nobody notices you’re there, you hear things. Besides, Roderick and me, we live out just past Leverette’sWoods. We cut through on our way home. You know that swimmin’ hole out there with the big rope hangin’ down?”
    “I heard tell of it,” I said.
    “Well, them three—that Bub and Champ and yore Alexander—they mosey out there about every afternoon these warm days to swim. That’s where they do their big talkin’ and smokin’ and makin’ plans for Halloween. It’s a sight. Me and Roderick, we spy on ’em.”
    “Smoking?” says I. “If Alexander’s mama gets wind of him smoking, she’ll wear him out. And as to Halloween, what are you talking about, Daisy-Rae? Alexander’s on the committee for the Halloween Festival. He’s left Halloween pranks and stunts behind him, to hear him tell it.”
    Again Daisy-Rae smirked.

    That’s how I happened to pay a visit out to Leverette’s Woods myself one mild October afternoon, guided there by Daisy-Rae and her little brother, Roderick. Whatever Alexander was up to, I meant to get to the bottom of it.
    Old Man Leverette once owned all that territory out past the streetcar trestle over Snake Creek. He owned the woods that bear his name, with a well-known Lovers’ Lane winding through it and the swimming hole. He also once occupied a large frame farmhouse just beyond the woods, now going to rack and ruin. Come to find out, Daisy-Rae and herbrother occupied a chicken coop behind the old abandoned Leverette farmhouse.
    Old Man Leverette himself has retired into Bluff City. However, since he’s a lover of peace and quiet, he’d have done better to keep to the countryside.
    I met Daisy-Rae under the shade tree after school. She knew how to blend in with the crowd. I never saw her coming till she was right there beside me.
    She wasn’t easy in her mind till we’d crossed the road to where her brother, Roderick, sat waiting on the steps of Horace Mann School. He was a pathetic little gnome of about nine, and there was no doubt that him and Daisy-Rae were blood kin. Like her, he was slack-jawed, with a face far older than the rest of him.
    As his only garment, he wore a small pair of bib overalls. His bare shoulders had no more meat on them than a coat hanger. He shambled toward us. His posture was bad, and since he was clutching his middle, I figured he had the bellyache.
    But Daisy-Rae, being a big sister, summed up the situation. “Now what have you got?” she inquired, taking him by an ear and giving him a good shake.
    Roderick’s teeth rattled, but he said nothing.
    “Come on.” Daisy-Rae turned his ear inside out. “Let’s see what it is this time.” She reached down inside the bib of his overalls and felt around in there. Presently she drew up a long tail with a gray mouse struggling at the end of it.
    I’m not nervous of vermin, but the idea of carryingaround a live mouse with those scratchy little claws down the front of your overalls gave me the willies. Daisy-Rae swung the mouse by the tail over her head and let fly with it. The mouse lit running.
    “I swan,” she said to me, “I have to shake him down every blessed day, and you wouldn’t credit what I find on him.”
    She got a good grip on his hand, and off the three of us strolled, out past the sidewalks and into open country.
    “You can call me Blossom,” I said, just to put Roderick at his ease.
    But Daisy-Rae said, “He won’t call you nothin’. He don’t have a lot to say.”
    When we got out past the trestle bridge and onto dirt road, I noticed that Daisy-Rae was less gawky. Even Roderick, who had a