The Tutor Read Online Free PDF Page B

Jamaica a few years before, Brandon not much older than Ruby now. Everyone was smiling except Ruby, who was laughing her head off. Brandon stood behind her, his hand on her shoulder.
    Ruby went into the kitchen. Through the sticking-out window she could see a crescent moon just above the dark mass of the forest. The air was clear or her eyesight especially keen tonight, because the two points of the crescent looked sharp. She switched on the lights and the outside went away.
    Points—that was what those arms on a star were called! Sometimes she was so slow. Zippy’s water bowl was empty again. She filled it.
    “How about hot dogs?” she said. Hot dogs sounded good. She took a package from the freezer. Hot dogs tasted better on the grill and Ruby knew how to work it, turning on the gas, then pressing the button that made the spark, but she didn’t feel like going out on the deck. Not because of the darkness, nothing like that, don’t think that for a moment. Too cold for grilling, nothing more.
    Ruby boiled two hot dogs, found they were out of buns, stuck them inside folded slices of bread, sat down at the table with everything she needed: mustard, relish, Sprite,
The Complete Sherlock Holmes
. The sitting room at 221-B Baker Street in early April 1883 materialized, grew more and more solid.
    “I am a dangerous man to fall foul of!”
said Dr. Roylott, the terrified woman’s stepfather. Then he seized Holmes’s poker
and bent it into a curve with his huge brown hands
.
    The brown was because of all those years in India, the same reason the cheetah and the baboon were running around his crumbling manor—whoa! No cheetahs and baboons in India: Africa, my dear Watson, as Ruby knew from the Discovery Channel. So was this a clue? She’d come back to that later. What was bothering her—
What? What?
she thought as she took a big relishy bite of hot dog—had more to do with . . . the poker. Dr. Roylott bent that poker to show how dangerous he was. But—Ruby ran her eye back up the page—there, only a few paragraphs above, Dr. Roylott stepped forward,
shaking his hunting crop
. No mention in between of him putting the hunting crop down, or sticking it in his teeth, or asking Watson to hold it for a sec. So was she supposed to think that he’d twisted the poker with his huge brown hands while holding the hunting crop at the same time? Or—could it be that this was some kind of mistake, a mistake by the guy clever enough to think up Sherlock Holmes, the cleverest detective in the world? Or—
    “Ruby?”
    Ruby looked up. There was Mom, in the kitchen.
    “Didn’t you hear me come in?” Mom was still in her coat, that beautiful gray one with the black fur collar, but the side door to the garage was already closed.
    “Hi, Mom.”
    “What have you done to your hair?”
    “Thumbelina,” Ruby said. “You like it?”
    “It’s different,” Mom said. Mom’s own hair was as black as that collar and glossy too; Mom had gorgeous hair, no doubt about that. “Kyla’s father drove you home?”
    “Yeah.”
    “You remembered to thank him?”
    “Yeah.”
    “How was your day?”
    “Good.”
    “Got much homework?”
    “A little,” Ruby said, although that was more an impression than hard fact.
    “I’ve brought some dinner,” Mom said, lifting a bag from the Blue Dragon with a grunt, as though she found it heavy, and setting it on the butcher block. Ruby smelled oyster sauce, which meant that duck thing that no one ever ate. Mom’s eyes had crescents under them that reminded Ruby of the moon, except they were dark.
    “Or have you eaten already?”
    “Just a snack,” Ruby said, although she was about full.
    Mom glanced up at the clock—7:55—got busy with the cartons, plates, forks, spoons.
    “Why don’t you take your coat off, Mom?”
    Her mother looked at her in a funny way. For a second Ruby thought she was going to come over and give her a hug, which would have been nice, not that Ruby didn’t get hugs,