Free Fabulous Creature by Zilpha Keatley Snyder Page A

bowed and curtsied and then jumped up and down waving and shouting, “Good-by, Prince. Good-by Prince.”
    James waved back. After they’d gone, he sat on the rock for quite a while, composing a letter to Max in his head. Max wasn’t going to believe this one.

CHAPTER 6
    T HE WAD OF paper arched neatly, bounced off the rim of the wastepaper basket and fell to the floor. It was very strange, since he’d been writing poetry all his life, that now when something really important had happened—the kind of thing that had inspired poets down through the ages—he suddenly seemed to have lost his touch. Of course, most of his poetry in the past had been humorous and satirical and in a style that wasn’t particularly suitable for what he had in mind at the moment. The trouble seemed to be that while what he was trying to express was incredibly exciting and original and significant at what you might call the gut level, it kept coming out at the verbal level sounding surprisingly ordinary and trite. He’d tried sonnets, triolets, ballad form, blank verse and anapestic pentameter, all with about the same results—another opportunity to practice basket shooting.
    He sighed, and pulling Jenkin’s A Man for All Ages across the desk, he opened it to page thirty-two, which was as far as he had gotten in a whole month at New Moon Lake. He might as well get some work done on the da Vinci thing. There probably wasn’t any new way to say what he had in mind anyway. After all, where could you go after “How do I love thee” and “My luv is like a red, red rose”?
    There was a knock, and Charlotte opened the door. When she saw James at his desk, she paused in the doorway. In the Fielding family one didn’t interrupt intellectual exercise unless it was absolutely necessary. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t want to interrupt your train of thought.”
    “Don’t worry,” James said. “It’s already derailed.”
    Charlotte glanced at the wads of paper in and around the wastepaper basket. “Having trouble with Leonardo?” she asked.
    “Well, not exactly.”
    “Well, what I came in to say is that we’re thinking about driving in to New Moon. Would you like to come along?”
    “No, I guess not, thanks. Now that I’ve finally gotten started on this thing, I guess I’d better keep at it awhile.”
    As Charlotte was leaving, James suddenly said, “Mom.” Charlotte had always been easy to talk to on almost any subject. At least comparatively easy, judging by what he’d heard about other people’s mothers. But when she stopped and came back, he changed his mind. There just didn’t seem to be any way to put his feelings about Diane into words without somehow trivializing them. “Oh, never mind,” he said. “We’ll talk about it later.”
    “I’m in no particular hurry, if there’s something you’d like to talk about.”
    “No. It can wait. Right now I’d better stick with Leonardo.”
    He didn’t, however, stick with Leonardo for very long. When he heard the Volvo’s motor starting up, he went to the window. William was just getting into the passenger side of the front seat. Charlotte was driving as usual. It wasn’t that William was a bad driver. It was just that on longer trips he tended to start concentrating on some important issue and forgot to notice such minor details as stop signs or oncoming traffic. So Charlotte encouraged William to concentrate on his important issues and let her handle unimportant routines, particularly the ones that were potentially lethal. As James watched from his window, she deftly backed and turned the old Volvo and set off briskly down the narrow dirt road.
    James went back to his desk, poked at the da Vinci notes, wandered out the door and down the stairs. It wasn’t until he was in the front yard that he realized where he was heading. The week that the Jarretts were to have been in Sacramento wasn’t quite over yet, but it was possible that they might have decided to