Free The Orphan of Awkward Falls by Keith Graves Page A

certain French ambassador, whose visits to Hibble Manor Stenchley had deemed suspiciously frequent, mysteriously hanged himself in his room before breakfast. No one noticed that the rope was the same one the hunchback had been fooling around with the previous evening.
    On another occasion, the glamorous daughter of an oil magnate, who had begun to spend more evenings than Stenchley would have cared for attached to the professor’s arm, slipped and fell to her death from the third-floor balcony. Everyone agreed it was a tragic accident.
    Then one of the professor’s favorite nephews came to spend his summer vacation at Hibble Manor, but disappeared after only six weeks. The police deduced that the boy must have wandered into the forest and been attacked by wolves, who probably carried him off totheir den. Such incidents were not unheard of in northern Manitoba in those days.
    Coincidentally, at the time of each of the mysterious deaths, Stenchley’s gardening activities increased. He seemed to always be digging a new hole, planting yet another pear tree. Visitors often commented on the hunchback’s green thumb, as the trees consistently produced surprisingly large fruit. When they asked what fertilizer he used, Stenchley only grinned.
    Now, as the mad hunchback wandered through the grounds of the manor, there was an entire orchard of pear trees, all as healthy as that first one. Stealthily, he made his way from the fruit trees to the overgrown hedge maze, which he had planted as well, avoiding the house itself, for fear of being seen. He crawled under the hedge, within sight of the front door of his old home, and scratched out a shallow nest in the dirt. Exhausted from his long night of running, he spun around in the nest once, then curled into a tight ball and fell asleep.

In the dim light of Thaddeus’s lab, Josephine watched with a mixture of amazement and disgust as Thaddeus meticulously sorted through the gnarled body parts of the widow Gladstone’s dead weasel. Felix nibbled happily on a discarded bit of lung that fell on the floor. From a walk-in freezer, Norman fetched various replacement parts sealed in jelly jars and Ziploc bags. He placed the frozen liver of a raccoon, a pig’s spleen, a fox’s eyes, a rat’s tail, and some other things Josephine did not recognize in a bowl of water to thaw. The boy periodically reached into the bowl, fished out what he was looking for, and deftly stitched it onto the carcass. His stubby fingers handled the scalpel like an experienced surgeon, and worked so quickly, Josephine could barely follow what he was doing. Norman seemed to read his master’s mind, handing him the appropriate tool just when he needed it. Only occasionally did he snap, “Not that one, Norman—the one with the hook on the end!”
    Josephine was amazed at Thaddeus’s skill. “How did you learn to do that?”
    He shrugged, without looking up from his work. “Genius runs in the family, I suppose. I’ve spent a lot of time studying Grandfather’s notebook, at least the few parts that I can understand. Most of it is in some kind of code that I can’t decipher.”
    “Why would he write in code?”
    “Obviously he wanted to keep his experiments secret. Judging from his diagrams, it’s clear that Grandfather was working on far more complex things than the simple procedures I piddle around with. I suspect that a genius of his stature was onto something really big.”
    “Can I see the notebook?” she asked, casually reaching for it.
    The boy snatched the book off the table and looked at her as if she were mad. “Don’t touch it!” he said. “This book is the most valuable possession I have. It is written in Grandfather’s own hand. If it were to be damaged, I could never replace it!”
    Josephine held her hands up and backed off. “Okay, okay! I won’t touch it, I just want to look. I won’t even breathe on it.” She gave him her most innocent smile. “Please?”
    The boy squinted and