Horns & Wrinkles Read Online Free Page B

sudden needed retying, and then his pocket watch needed winding, and then he got to working on his neck, where he always got a kink whenever you tried to hurry him along.
    "All right," Mom complained, tapping a foot, "what about this Uncle Floyd? What happened to him? You said it was his story too."
    "Oh, he stayed on shore, calling Huntington coarse names," Grandpa B said.
    "So he didn't lose his horn?"
    "Not that day. I think it even grew a little. There was a lamb or two that went missing around suppertime."
    "Did he ever lose his horn?" Fran asked.
    "Don't know," Grandpa confessed, putting a hand over his heart to show that he was telling us exactly what he'd been told himself, without any of his famous add-ons. "He disappeared about a week later, never to be seen again. He went down to the river one night, to fetch a bucket of water, and never came back."
    "Are you sure about that?" Dad asked.
    "Heard that part on good faith from the young lady that Huntington saved."
    "How'd you ever get a chance to ask her such a question?" Mom was eyeing Grandpa suspiciously.
    "Well, she turned out to be my Great-Grandmother Nettie—great-great-great to you girls—who lived to a very ripe old age and had a talk with me when I was a sprout."
    "What was she like?" Lillie wanted to know.
    "Pretty as you, and kindly."
    "So what happened to Floyd?" I said.
    "Rock trolls," Grandpa B reported with a satisfied nod.
    "Don't you think," Mom asked, "that it's far more likely that he somehow fell into the river and drowned?"
    "Along this stretch of river?" Grandpa scoffed. "Why, who knows what might have happened, but I can tell you this much for sure: old Huntington never saw his brother again, even though he more than once offered to give away everything he owned if it would bring Floyd back. I think he felt kind of to blame, him being the eldest and all."
    Grandpa looked about to launch into further details, but a station wagon whipped up in front of our house without cutting its headlights. A sour-looking Dr. E. O. Moneybaker struggled out the passenger door. One-shot, who'd been driving, tried to lend the doctor a hand but got waved off.
    Once I explained who they were, everyone stampeded down to meet them.
    "Bad pictures," Dr. Moneybaker barked, waving a grainy print under the streetlight beside our sidewalk. "We're trying to find Duke so we can take another batch."
    "Isn't he home?" my mother asked.
    "Not at the moment," the doctor groused, dabbing at his forehead with a folded hanky, "though his folks are. I'm afraid there's been a small accident."
    "How small?" Grandpa called out. Aunt Phyllis was his youngest child.
    "It appears," the doctor said, blinking at us through his thick eyeglasses, "that Duke's parents have been turned to stone."
    There was a general all-round gasp.
    "Stone?" Grandpa B fumed, pushing his way up front. "What kind of stone?"
    "Does it matter?"
    "And you call yourself a doctor?" Grandpa B snapped. "Gangway! There might still be time to save 'em."

Eight
Stone

    Grandpa always shed about seventy years whenever anything rivery was going on, so he got to Duke's front door first. Without knocking he barged in, declaring, "It's me."
    Right behind Grandpa came Dad, still in his pajamas, who called out, "Phyllis?"
    The rest of us crowded in behind Grandpa and Dad, none too brave. So far as I knew, no one in our family had ever been turned to stone before.
    When Dr. E. O. Moneybaker and One-shot arrived, the doctor announced, "They're in the kitchen."
    Everyone flocked to the back of the house, straining not to touch anything on the way. The rooms were so still and watchful that there had to be a spell at work somewhere. In the living room, the old-fashioned mantel clock was still ticking, but its hands kept bouncing off 8:28, as if some hidden wall were keeping them from reaching the next minute.
    We all squeezed into the kitchen, where the empty purple leash was lying on the floor and the back door was hanging