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"I don't care if you do or not." I said and kept walking back toward the house. Cleo followed, but looked back periodically. "Forget about him. Cleo," I muttered. He looked up at me and walked alongside,

"Maybe they're right about you!" I heard Elliot scream. I didn't turn around.

My heart was still pounding after I went into the house. I could hear Mommy moving around in the kitchen, Should I just go in and tell her about him? I wondered. I'd better, I thought. She would find out and she would want to know why I didn't tell her. We shouldn't keep secrets from each other. ever. I reminded myself.

"What is it?" Mommy said when I appeared in the kitchen doorway.

"We have new neighbors. I just met the son."

"What?" She wiped her hands on the cloth and turned from her chicken stuffing. "What son?"

I described him to her

and all he had told me. I practically did it without taking a breath.

"I saw the sign out front of the Baer house. but I never imagined anyone would buy it so fast," she said. He must have sold it very cheap."

I told her how Cleo had taken to Elliot.

"Don't get too friendly," she advised. "Sometimes people try to get you to be friends and talk to them just so they can make up stories about you. Be careful," she added. "I didn't think that house would sell so fast," she repeated, as if she had been assured of it.

I nodded. and Cleo and I left her looking like she was in deep thought. I was, too. I sat in my room with Cleo at the foot of my bed. I felt torn. I didn't want to drive Elliot away, but I couldn't help myself. Cleo looked disappointed that I had done that. Every time I moved, he lifted his head in anticipation, probably thinking we were going to get back out there and talk to that boy again.

"You heard Mommy," I said. "He's just trying to dig up stories to tell about us."

Still. I couldn't help being intrigued. We finally had real neighbors. I was never interested in knowing or seeing Mr. Baer. He looked like a grouchy old man whenever I did set eyes on him. It didn't surprise me that people would have suspected him of doing something terrible to one of us.

But Elliot, his sister, and his father were different. They were another family. At the moment I was actu-11y more interested in knowing about his sister. What was she like? How did she dress? What music did she listen to? What books and magazines did she read? Learning anything about her was intriguing.

Worst of all, my meeting Elliot and hearing about his family suddenly heightened my loneliness. My room looked like a prison cell, the walls bare now except for the toy cars on the shelves and some of the bug cages. The flow of thick, gray clouds streaming in from the east quickly shut down the little sunshine in the room. Dreary was a good word for how I felt. I thought.

Unable to stop myself, I rose and headed downstairs.

Cleo close at my heels. Mommy was still in the kitchen. but she heard me and called to ask what I was doing.

"I need some worms. I think I'm going to go fishing tomorrow in the afternoon," I told her.

She didn't reply, and I hurried out. It was a lie, and lies lay in the air like bad odors in our home. I half hoped to see Elliot still in the woods nearby, but he was gone. Gathering up one of my worm cans. I traipsed slowly over the meadow toward the cool dark earth in the forest. where I knew worms were plentiful. Cleo wandered about nearby. I could hear him crashing through brush. Every once in a while, he returned to see if I was still there. I mixed some wet earth with my worms and collected quite a few mushy ones. as Noble used to call them.

The sky was completely overcast now, but it didn't look like it was going to rain. Unable to keep my curiosity under lid. I decided to cross through the forest, following paths well known to me, and reached a point from where I could easily look upon the old Baer property without being seen myself.

I saw Elliot working on setting up some lawn furniture with a man who was obviously his father. He had a similar build, and although his hair was not as red, it was a reddish brown. He was a few inches taller. I watched them together for a while, and then, because of the overcast. I saw a light go on in an upstairs window.

The old Baer property was nowhere as attractive as ours. I thought, but it had a large. twostory Queen Anne house with a wide front porch and a small back porch. The grounds obviously had been neglected to the point that the lawn was overgrown and frill of weeds. The vegetation from the forest nearby seemed to be encroaching rapidly, as if it had fully intended to overrun the house itself eventually. There was a broken wagon tipped to the left and a rusted wheelbarrow beside it. The wood cladding looked like it desperately needed a few coats of paint, and some of the shutters were broken and hanging by a single hinge.

Cleo came up beside me and sat. panting. His coat was full of small branches and leaves, and he had mud halfway up his legs. I would have to work him over considerably before taking him into the house, What I feared the most, however, was that he would just start to bark at Elliot and his father, and they would see me spying on them.

"Quiet," I warned him and put my hand on his neck, holding him tightly so he would know I didn't want him charging out of the brush.

Suddenly the lighted window was thrown open and a buxom girl with hair more like her father's leaned out. She was wearing only her bra and a pair of panties.

"Dad!" she screamed. "Dad!"

Elliot's father put down his screwdriver and walked around to the side of the house so he could look up at her.

"What?"

"The water is coming out brown. How am I supposed to take a shower and wash my hair in brown water?"