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"Mr. M., what is it?" one of them called. "Can we come see?"
"Erin," he said in a stronger voice than anybody had ever heard him use. "I want you to lead everybody back up the orchard path. Wait for me on Miss Hammond's porch. Right now."
"What is it?" Erin said.
"Erin." Erin wondered why he sounded so angry with her. She hadn't done a thing. She saw something bumping up against the rocks. It looked like a garbage bag with a white thing tied to one end of it. "Erin," he said again. "Do as I say right now. All of you follow her."
And they did, slowly, reluctantly with many glances over their shoulder to try and figure out why the redhaired lady was sitting on the rock with wet pants and her hands over her face and why Mr. M. was glaring at them so intently.
"Maybe they're in love and he wants to be alone with her," Katie said to Erin.
"Don't be dumb," Erin said. "He just met her."
"There's something down there in the water," Liz Slocum said. "It looks like a pile of garbage."
"I think it's a dead whale," said a sixth grader.
"I don't think it's garbage or a whale," Jimmy Slade said in his nasty, spooky voice. "I think it's a dead body."
And Erin knew suddenly that he must be right and that was the reason Mr. M. had yelled at her in that angry way. Somebody had to get the kids away from the body and Mr. M. decided Erin could do it. He had given her an important job.
"It doesn't matter what it is, Jimmy," Erin said. She concentrated on speaking each word separately, the way she thought a grownup would talk in a crisis. "We just have to go sit up on the porch and wait for them."
"I'm not getting anywhere near that wolf," said Danny Slocum. He was only in the fifth grade and he'd been bitten by a dog when he was six years old. You could still see the long scar down the side of his nose. One hundred and fifteen stitches he liked to tell anybody who asked.
"It's not a wolf," Erin said. "It's a Siberian husky. Her name is Kasha. And you don't need to worry. I know how to handle dogs." Erin was surprised at the confidence in her voice. Perhaps Mr. M. had put it there. Or the redhaired lady. She didn't know. But she liked the way she sounded.
Copyright © 1998 by Elizabeth Winthrop. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the Publisher.