Me and Fat Glenda Read Online Free Page B

his “raw materials.”
    They seemed to have everything figured out, and I only hoped they wouldn’t be disappointed when they went to see about renting the house. Drew must have been a little worried, too, because he kept warning Inez not to appear “too anxious” when they saw Mr. Creasey; that might make Mr. C. up the rent.
    The thing that kept bothering me the most was that, even though it was a nice sunny afternoon and there were houses all up and down the street, not a single person came in sight the whole time we were there. Anybody would have known we were looking at the house for the second time that day because of the garbage truck parked out in front. Yet nobody showed up, not even Glenda.
    All the way to Mr. Creasey’s office, Inez kept humming and eating raw mushrooms from the bagful she’d gathered that morning on her bicycle trip to the woods. Every other mushroom out of the bag, she popped into Drew’s mouth while he drove. Luckily, I had just had a chance to slap an L-burger together when we went home to get Inez and I was eating that now, cold. I know I saidI couldn’t go on with the alphabet-burgers after sharing K-burgers with Toby at our last meal together, but I guess the prospect of having a friend again had cheered me up, and anyhow the L was sitting around handy at the moment.
    Finding Mr. Creasey took a little while. We got to the old business section in Havenhurst all right and found 108 Broadway. It was an upstairs office over a hardware store that still had advertisements for barnyard feed in the window and rolls of chicken-coop wire for sale out front.
    The stairway up to Mr. Creasey’s office was so dusty that our shoes left prints on the steps. At the top, the sign lettered on the door said that Mr. Creasey was a lawyer, realtor, county clerk, insurance agent, tax consultant, private detective, and notary public.
    Drew turned the knob, which squeaked as though it was hurting. The door opened with a groan and we all walked in. Mr. Creasey was nowhere in sight, nor was anybody else. There was a big desk with papers and ledgers on it, all covered with dust, and some old chairs with cracked leather seats and oatmeal-colored stuffing peeking out. In the corner there was a long row of dark green metal filing cabinets, standing about six feet high.
    While Drew talked in an unnaturally loud voice to try to attract someone’s attention, Inez stalked around the office looking for cobwebs. Not that Inez was finickyabout things like that or ever did “white glove” tests in other people’s houses—not Inez. No, it was just that Mom really loved cobwebs and she knew right away that this was a good place to hunt for some. Back in California, she had never let anybody brush away cobwebs or even kill spiders for that matter.
    â€œBecause cobwebs are nature’s original designs and can give you the most wonderful ideas,” she had once explained. “Like snowflakes, no two are ever alike.” When she found a cobweb, she would draw its patterns on a piece of paper and put it away for her designs in hand-blocking or batik-making or weaving or whatever she was excited about at the moment.
    Now Mom was crouching down, her eyes level with the top of Mr. Creasey’s desk (she had spotted a terrific cobweb that looped across from one of the big ledgers to the top of an inkwell) when there was a sharp, crunching noise from behind the file cabinets.
    Drew stiffened and said, “Mr. Creasey?” in an extremely loud voice. It was the kind of voice a person uses when he thinks there are burglars in the house and hopes there aren’t. I just stood there with my knees turning to jelly and my fingers to ice. I didn’t know if Drew or Inez had seen it but, along the tops of the file cabinets, I distinctly saw something very peculiar and very much alive bobbing up and down, and slowly moving toward us
    A second later, a man stepped out from