Free The Hole in the Wall by Lisa Rowe Fraustino Page A

stomach, I went out to see how many eggs I could kick around today.

    It was still raining hard, and I had to leap mud puddles on my way to the chicken coop. The water runoff had left mini canyons and craters all around the yard, so I had to watch where I landed.

    When I opened the door, Barney greeted me with the wimpiest little doodle-do I had ever heard, and no hens took to the air. No hens sat on their nests. No hens were anywhere in the coop, and no eggs, either. Had a fox gotten in? But how? I hadn’t left the outside door open yesterday. I hadn’t! It was shut tight when I came in. I didn’t see any signs of a predator. No clumps of feathers or trails of blood around, and we would have heard the commotion anyway. Once when a wild dog got a hen, Barney let the whole world know, and the hens joined in.

    Those hens had to be around here somewhere. Probably had enough of me stealing their future chicks and snuck off to lay their eggs in a secret hidey-hole. Our hens never went far, though. They liked being fed. So out I went to look for them, in the pouring rain after all. Shoot. Why hadn’t Ma told me to wear my raincoat? I grabbed an empty feed sack to hold over my head as I searched the chickens’ favorite hiding places.

    Nope, no sign of them under any of the bushes or the porch steps or perched on Jed’s castle. Not even a lonely feather. And the dish next to the lawnmower was half full of Jed’s Stupid Cat’s food. The chickens would have cleaned that up if they’d gone near it.

    Ouch. My stomach hurt. Those dough rocks were doing somersaults. Pa would blame me for this. He’d make me pay. Oh, I wished I knew where to find Jed. I’d run away and stay with him. He’d understand.

    I was searching high and low for the third time when Barbie came outside—in her raincoat and carrying an umbrella. “Ma wants to know what’s taking you so long. She wants the new eggs now so she can take them—hey, why are you looking at me like a beggar?”

    “I’m dying of cookie dough poisoning. And all of the chickens have been kidnapped by Colonel Sanders.”

    “Sebby! You lost the hens? You’re dead all right.” She was looking under the porch. I was glad I had taken Odum’s pebble to bed. Now it was safe in my pillowcase.

    “I already looked everywhere. Three times. The chickens aren’t anywhere. ”

    “You look three times for your sneakers every morning, too, and they aren’t anywhere in the house until someone else points at them.” Yeah, that was true. My sneakers have invisible cloaking powers that only work on me.

    She checked all the bushes and Jed’s castle and the cat food corner, then she headed into the henhouse. I followed her. “Shish, there’s no use. I’m telling you, they aren’t—what are you doing?”

    “What does it look like I’m doing?”

    It looked like she was going to the feed closet at the back of the building, but there was no way the chickens could get in there.

    “Why look there?” I said. “The chickens can’t get in. I never, ever leave that door open, or the chickens would eat—”

    I was interrupted by a howl and a blur of gray and white fur that shot out of the closet, between Barbie’s feet, and out the henhouse door. Which I’d decided to leave open for the moment in case the chickens showed up and wanted back in.

    “—everything. How did Jed’s Stupid Cat get in there?”

    “Gee, Seb, I don’t know. Why don’t you ask your sneakers?”

    “But—”

    “Sh!” Barbie put her finger over her lips and leaned into the closet. “Do you hear that?”

    I listened hard, heard rain on the roof, heard myself breathing, and then I heard a pathetic faint cluck . . . cluck . . . cluck.

    “Sounds like they’re back behind all this mess of yours. Sheesh, Sebby, what do you do on Saturdays when you’re supposed to be out here cleaning?”

    “This is how I clean,” I said with a shrug. Everything was put away. So what if I didn’t take the