Free The Boy Who Drew Monsters: A Novel by Keith Donohue Page A

straightened out the bottles and leftovers on the shelves. Each time he passed a window, he checked the locks, and double-checked the front door and the side entrance. He wrote his name in the dust on the coffee table and erased it with his sleeve. At three o’clock, he went into the mudroom to stare through the picture windows at the road that wound through the fir trees. He counted off the minutes between the first flash of yellow in the distance to the moment when the school bus turned the corner and came into full view. At the next driveway, the Quigley twins skipped down the steps in their matching plaid skirts and green jackets. Alert to the possibility of any oncoming traffic, he watched them cross the road and followed with his gaze until they were safely through the front door. Their obsessive border collie nearly knocked them over when they stepped inside. “Hello,” he mouthed silently. “Good-bye.” The red lights of the school bus stopped blinking, and with a belch of smoke it rumbled away. Framed in the windows, the children’s heads bobbed like dolls.
    Right after the twins got home, his father was due. Sometimes it was just a few minutes after, sometimes up to half an hour. There was no way to count on him. Better to go back to the kitchen table and pretend to be reading when he arrived. Pretend, because he had already read the book three times. First on Friday, when his father had handed it to him. They always overestimated how long it would take, and the books in the fifth-grade home curriculum were much too easy. For those first few books, when the hour finally arrived for his father to quiz him, Jack Peter often had forgotten some of the details, so now he spent the week going over the text again and again. His parents thought him a slow reader because he never seemed to get any further along in a book, but he was faster and smarter than they could ever guess.
    His thoughts strayed from the page. Nick would be home by now, and he could picture his friend sitting down to an afternoon snack, Mrs. Weller flitting around in the background, asking about school, and good old Nick letting her know that everything was just fine, nothing new, and maybe he had drawn some monsters in his notebook.
    At four o’clock, the front door opened suddenly and in came his father, tired and disheveled. A black slick of grease crossed his pants at midthigh, and his hands were covered with the same goo. He saluted his son and went to the kitchen sink to lather and scrub. “Sorry it got so late, Jip. I went over to check on the Hollisters’ place, up by the crescent, and something had gotten in through a hole in the crawl space. Dug a big, big hole and squeezed right in underneath and made itself at home. I could fit my whole self in it. Nothing worse than trying to keep out something that wants to come in.”
    “Did you see who it was?”
    “What?” He laughed and rubbed his hands furiously under the hot running water. “Not a who. A what. And, no, I didn’t ever find out if it was a cat or a raccoon or a whatever. Maybe a skunk by the smell of things, but I had a devil of a time fixing up the hole so it won’t get in again.”
    Jack Peter sidled up to his father and leaned against the counter next to him. “Maybe it was a big mouse.”
    “Right, like the one your mother said was hiding in your room. This old place is crawling with mice,” he said. “Just last week, I found a whole bunch of them had made a nursery school down in my workshop. Let’s go take a look. Get to the bottom of the secret of the hidden mouse.”
    They went upstairs together, and though he had not heard the rattle from the desk since the morning, Jack Peter knew what to expect. His father removed his left shoe and held it in his hand. “They’re wicked quick,” he said. “You’ve got to be ready before you see ’em or you haven’t got a chance.”
    “What are you going to do with that shoe?”
    “If there’s a mouse in there,