Free Penelope Crumb by Shawn K. Stout

to be quiet and turn the pages quick.
    When I slide the book back onto the shelf, a thin piece of paper sticks out of one of the pages. It’s a page torn out of a magazine, and when I unfold it, a dog’s face stares back at me. The dog gets my attention right away, but not because he looks more like a cow than a dog on account of the fact that he has brown and black spots all over his face. This dog has got one thing that makes me stop: bushy eyebrows. (Not the kind that are all caterpillary like Patsy Cline’s Marge, but eyebrows all the same.)
    If ever I was sure about a look on a face, it would be this one. This dog, who I’ve decided should be called Winston, is gazing off to the side somewhere, like he just heard somebody say,
Winston,come here, boy! It’s time to play Chinese checkers!
Because that’s what dogs with eyebrows do in their spare time.
    When I look across the page to see who might be calling him, I see a name typed sideways along the picture in tiny letters that only mice could read: Mortimer Felix Crumb.
    “Mortimer?” I say out loud. “Who’s Mortimer?” Winston looks back at me as if he might just know the answer. “Could Grandpa Felix also be a Mortimer?” Winston won’t say for sure, but his eyebrows tell me that if he could get out of that magazine page, he might be able to help track him down.
    I fold up the page, take back the picture of Grandpa Felix and my dad, and decide to be a detective once more.
    Terrible has got his alien eyeballs on me all morning. I take ant-size bites of my peanut butter toast and chew without making any noise and hope hewon’t notice me. “What’s going on?” he says, leaning across the table at me.

    I shrug and say, “Nothing.”
    He pokes his finger into my shoulder. “It better be nothing.”
    “Ow. You can only do that because Mom is at work.” Then I shove the rest of the toast into my mouth and rub my arm.
    “Wish I had a sister who was at least half normal,” he says, shaking his head. Like he’s so normal or regular. He pokes my shoulder again, and this time it hurts so much that a piece of chewed-up toast falls out of my mouth.
    I’m out the door with my toolbox and jacket before I can swallow the toast all the way down. Instead of going left on Washington Street to school, I go right and walk eight blocks to the library.
    The Portwaller Public Library is full of homeschoolers. I find Littie off by herself, reading a book called
Everything You Need to Know about Skateboarding.
“Ready for an adventure?” I say.
    Littie stuffs the book into her backpack and says, “What took you so long?” like she knew I was coming.
    I take out the magazine page of Winston and point to Grandpa Felix’s possibly new name. I tell Littie about how Grandpa Felix may also be Mortimer.
    “Mortimer?” she says. “I guess if I had a name like that, I’d go by Felix, too.”
    “We need to do another search.” At a library computer, we type in “Mortimer Crumb” and to my surprise we find one M. Crumb in Portwaller.
    “He lives in the same town as we do!” says Littie.
    I shake my head. “That can’t be right. Why wouldn’t he see us if he lived that close? Maybe that’s not the right M. Crumb.” But I write down his number and address just in case.
    Littie says, “Come on, let’s find out,” and she leads me to the information desk where there’s a phone on the counter.
    “May I help you?” asks the man behind the desk.
    “We need to make a local call,” Littie tells him.
    “Two, actually,” I say.
    “Two?” Littie whispers. I nod, and she tells the man, “That’s right, two calls.”
    The man puts his hand on the phone and looks us over like he’s trying to decide if we’re bad eggs. Then Littie puts her arm around my shoulder and says, “Don’t worry, I’m homeschooled. I mean, we both are. Homeschooled.”
    The man must decide that we aren’t bad eggs because he takes his hand off the phone and says, “Make it