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" ’I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,’ " Mrs Teagel irl Aren’t you paying attention in school? Don’t you care about language, about words?"

Laura, of course, was fascinated ords To her, words were things of beauty, each like a ical powder or potion that could be combined with other words to create powerful spells But to Flora Teagel, words were galy elusive clusters of letters that frustrated her

Flora’s husband, Mike, was a squat, baby-faced truck driver He spent evenings in an ar over the National Enquirer and its clones, absorbing useless facts fro movie stars His taste for what he called "exotic neould have been harmless if he’d been as self-absorbed as his wife, but he often popped in on Laura when she was doing chores or in those rare iven ti aloud the ht these stories were stupid, illogical, pointless, but she could not tell him so She had learned that he would not be offended if she said his newspapers were rubbish Instead he’d regard her pityingly; then withknow-it-all norant, he would proceed to explain how the world worked At length Repeatedly "Laura, you’ve got a lot to learn The big shots who run things in Washington, they know about the aliens and the secrets of Atlantis "

As different as Flora was fro a foster child was to obtain a free servant Laura was expected to clean, do laundry, iron clothes, and cook

Their own daughter-Hazel, an only child-o years older than Laura and thoroughly spoiled Hazel never cooked, washed dishes, did laundry, or cleaned house Though she was just fourteen, she had perfectly ernails and toenails If you had deducted fro in front of a mirror, she would have been only five years old

"On laundry day," she explained on Laura’s first day in the Teagel house, "youthe to color"

I’ve read this book and seen this ot the lead in Cinderella

"I’ to be a major movie star or a model," Hazel said "So ot to protect them"

When Mrs Ince-the wire-thin, whippet-faced child-welfare worker assigned to the case-paid a scheduled visit to the Teagel house on Saturday , September 16, Laura intended to demand to be returned to McIlroy Home The threat posed by Willy Sheener had coels

Mrs Ince arrived on schedule to find Flora washing the first dishes she had washed in teeks Laura was sitting at the kitchen table, apparently working a crossword puzzle that in fact had been shoved into her hands only when the doorbell had rung

In that portion of the visit devoted to a private intervieith Laura in her bedroom, Mrs Ince refused to believe what she was told about Laura’s load of housework "But dear, Mr and Mrs Teagel are exemplary foster parents You don’t look to ained a few pounds"

"I didn’t accuse the o to bed every night exhausted-"

"Besides," Mrs Ince interrupted, "foster parents are expected not merely to house children but to raise theood values and good work habits"

Mrs Ince was hopeless

Laura resorted to the Ackersons’ plan for shedding an unwanted foster faan to clean haphazardly When she was done with the dishes, they were spotted and streaked She ironed wrinkles into Hazel’s clothes

Because the destruction of ht her a profound respect for property, Laura could not break dishes or anything else that belonged to the Teagels, but for that part of the Ackerson Plan she substituted scorn and disrespect Working a puzzle, Flora asked for a six-letter word el" When Mike began to recount a flying-saucer story he had read in the Enquirer, she interrupted to spin a tale aboutsecretly in the local super break in show business nine’s stand-in: "You’re a dead-ringer for hiot to hire you!"

Her scorn led swiftly to a spanking With his big, callused hands Mike had no need of a paddle He thumped her across the bottoive hi froh Don’t mark her" He quit reluctantly only when his wife entered the rooht Laura had difficulty sleeping For the first tie, to achieve a desired effect, and the Teagels’ reactions were proof that she could use words well Even ht, still too new to be fully understood, that she ht possess the ability not only to defend herself ords but to earn her way in the world with them, perhaps even as an author of the kind of books she soa doctor, ballerina, veterinarian, but that had been just talk None of those dreams had filled her with asa writer

The next , when she went down to the kitchen and found the three Teagels at breakfast, she said, "Hey, Mike, I’ve just discovered there’s an intelligent squid fro in the toilet tank"

"What is this?" Mike demanded

Laura smiled and said, "Exotic news" ’

Two days later Laura was returned to McIlroy Ho room and den were furnished as if an ordinary man lived there Stefan was not sure what he had expected Evidence of dementia, perhaps, but not this neat, orderly home

One of the bedrooms was empty, and the other was decidedly odd The only bed was a narrow mattress on the floor The pillowcases and sheets were for a child’s rooures of cartoon rabbits The nightstand and dresser were scaled to a child’s dimensions, pale blue, with stenciled aniiraffes, rabbits, squirrels Sheener owned a collection of Little Golden Books, as well, and other children’s picture books, stuffed animals, and toys suitable for a six- or seven-year-old

At first Stefan thought that roohborhood children, that Sheener was unstable enough to seek out prey even on his horeatest But there was no other bed in the house, and the closet and dresser draere filled with aOn the walls were a dozen framed photos of the same red-headed boy, soht, and the face was identifiably that of a younger Sheener Gradually Stefan realized the decor was for Willy Sheener’s benefit alone The creep slept here At bedtime Sheener evidently retreated into a fantasy of childhood, no doubt finding a desperately needed peace in his eerie, nightly regression

Standing in the e room, Stefan felt both saddened and repelled It seemed that Sheener molested children not solely or even primarily for the sexual thrill of it but to absorb their youth, to becoh perversion he see to descend not into moral squalor so much as into a lost innocence He was equally pathetic and despicable, inadequate to the challenges of adult life but nonetheless dangerous for his inadequacies

Stefan shivered

Her bed in the Ackerson twins’ rooned to a small, two-bed room at the north end of the third floor near the stairs Her bunktails, freckles, and a de to be an accountant when I grow up," she told Laura "I like nuet the same answer every time There’re no surprises with numbers; they’re not at all like people" Eloise’s parents had been convicted of drug dealing and sent to prison, and she was in McIlroy while the court decided which relative would be given custody of her