Free The Tanglewood Terror by Kurtis Scaletta Page B

went veg in Boston. Of course it’s easy there, because there’s so many awesome restaurants.”
    “Well, I’m going for pizza with some of the guys tonight, Dad,” I cut in. Mandy and I were nearly in town. It was only a few minutes’ walk from the school.
    “Okay, cool beans. Talk to you later, bud.” He clicked off.
    Mandy took the phone and called her mom’s house, getting her little sister. They argued a bit before she hung up, but I guessed that she would tell her parents that Mandy was okay.
    “Little sisters,” she said. “They’re almost as bad as
big
sisters. You’re lucky you don’t have one.”
    “No, just a brother.” I didn’t remember talking siblings with her, but I must have. “He can be a pain too, but mostly he’s a cool little kid. You’d like him. He likes monsters.”
    “Then he’d love my little sister,” she said.
    I got a Papa’s pizza for takeout, which Mandy and I took to the empty pavilion at the park. We ate the pizzafast, since it was already getting cold. We’d settled on hamburger, since I didn’t want sausage and neither of us wanted mushrooms.
    “Oh, let me show you what I learned at the library.” She dug in her bag and pulled out a stack of paper, riffled through it, and handed me a page. It was too dark to make anything out, but she fiddled with her phone and turned it into a rectangle of brightness.
    “Flashlight app,” she said, handing me the phone. “Read quick. That really drains the battery.”
    It was an article from the
Portland Press Herald
, dated October 1932 and featuring an illustration of mushrooms and a few lines of explanation: glowing mushrooms were spreading like wildfire in northern Maine. The mushrooms in the drawings looked like the ones from the magazine except they weren’t in color.
    “Guess who drew the picture?” Mandy asked.
    “Max Bailey?”
    “Yeah. How did you know?”
    “I read his bio. I knew he was an illustrator for the newspaper.”
    “Well, now you know the mushrooms in that picture were real. They were in Maine, and they looked exactly like ours. But I couldn’t find one more word about them in the Portland paper archives. It was like they lost all interest. Somehow FDR getting elected president was more important.”
    “Maybe there was nothing more about them because there was nothing else to report?”
    “Max Bailey quit his job just after this illustration appeared. Something must have happened to him.”
    “His wife died.”
    “That happened years before he quit his job. Something might have happened
here
. He quit his job and moved so he could work on a story he never even
published
. Like he couldn’t even bring himself to write about it. It’s all connected. He saw something or discovered something that changed his life.”
    “Like a mushroom monster?”
    “Maybe.”
    “I don’t really see the point of all this,” I admitted. “Even if Max Bailey did see the exact same fungus and even if it did turn out to be a monster, how does that help us?”
    “I’m gathering facts,” she said. “Don’t you watch tape of other teams, Mr. Football? Look at the opponents’ statistics?”
    “We don’t do that in middle school,” I said. She had a point, though.
    “Well, that’s what I’m doing,” she said. “You can’t have a strategy if you don’t know what you’re up against.” She reached out for the phone. “You’re wasting the battery.”
    “Oh, yeah.” I gave it back and she put it to sleep. “Hey, can I ask you something else?”
    “I guess.”
    “So maybe you left Alden to save us all from the mushroom monster. But why did you get sent to Alden in the first place?”
    “First of all, I didn’t leave Alden to ‘save us all from the mushroom monster.’ I left to investigate a peculiarphenomenon. Second, Alden is an exclusive boarding school. I got
accepted
at Alden because I’m an excellent student.”
    “Ha.”
    “Ha yourself. Academically, it’s top-notch.”
    “Maybe it