Free Sammy Keyes and the Dead Giveaway by Wendelin Van Draanen Page B

there's a mind-jolting
crash
, and shards of glass shoot through the room.
    Mrs. Willawago screams and drops to the floor while the reporter dives for cover behind a chair. I yank Patch back and hide behind the hallway wall. My eyes are cranked wide, my heart is whacking against my chest, and when I peek out around the corner, I see that the French door now looks like the mouth of a glass shark.
    And then I see a big rock sitting on the carpet right in front of it.
    I jet down the hall, shove Captain Patch in a bedroom, then hurry over to Mrs. Willawago, who's holding her heart and breathing like she's just run a mile. “Are you all right?” I ask her.
    “Did somebody
shoot
?” she asks back, her voice all shaky.
    The reporter is half standing behind the chair, and hiseyes are like little planets doing a half orbit of his head, back and forth, back and forth.
    “No,” I tell her. “It was just a rock.”
    But even from across the room I can see that this is not just some wayward rock.
    It's a message.

EIGHT
    The rock that's crashed through the French door is smooth and shaped like a large, flat egg. And on it, written in black marker, is SELLORSUFER .
    For a minute it's like I'm trying to make out a license plate again, because the words are kind of crammed together. And either it's a puzzle I'm not getting or a word's misspelled.
    And what kind of moron busts your window with a misspelled threat?
    But just as I'm deciding that, yeah, this was definitely a misspelled threat, the doorbell rings. And before anyone can react to
that
, Mrs. Stone comes busting through the front door in her Birkenstocks and socks, shouting, “Annie! Annie!” She spots her and cries, “Look what somebody threw!”
    She's flushed. Out of breath. Shaking.
    And she's holding a smooth, egg-shaped rock.
    “It says sell or suffer!” she cries. Then she sees all the broken glass. “Did you get one, too?”
    So I nod and show Mrs. Willawago the rock that had crashed through her French door. “You got the same message.”
    “Why… it's misspelled!” Mrs. Willawago says, blinking at me. Then she looks at Mrs. Stone's. “So is yours!”
    “Let me see,” the reporter says.
    So there they all are, in a huddle around these rocks, and I don't know—something about it seems funny: (a) someone's just busted their windows with a menacing threat and they're worried about the spelling? And (b) how embarrassing would that be? To toss a rock through someone's window and misspell the message? I mean, what if they'd written CELLORSUFFER ! O R MOVEORDYE !
    Anyway, the good thing about it is that Mrs. Willawago and the reporter don't seem scared anymore—they're actually laughing about how the person who'd thrown the rock must be an uneducated oaf.
    Mrs. Stone finally stops them, saying, “Look at all this glass!”
    The reporter nods. “That must've been a very old window — definitely not safety glass.”
    “It could have killed you!” Mrs. Stone says, her eyes all wide. She wags her rock and says, “And this one could've killed Marty! He was just going out the slider—it missed him by inches!”
    The reporter nods. “You ladies should call the police.”
    So Mrs. Willawago goes to the phone, saying, “I can't imagine that whoever did this thinks it'll make us move. Good Lord, do they really believe they can get away with this?”
    Now, while Mrs. Willawago's on the phone, the reporter produces a small notebook and says, “You must be Teri Stone, Annie's neighbor?”
    “That's right.”
    “She told me a little about you. I'm Cal Torres, ma'am. From the
Times.
Did you say your husband's name is Marty?”
    Mrs. Stone nods.
    “The two of you have lived next door how long?”
    “Twelve years.”
    The reporter glances over at Mrs. Willawago talking on the phone in the kitchen, then turns to face Mrs. Stone. “I'm going to do everything I can to help you. What's going on here is just wrong.”
    “Oh, thank you!” Mrs. Stone says, her face