Young Whit and the Shroud of Secrecy by Dave Arnold & Phil Lollar

Author:Dave Arnold & Phil Lollar [Arnold, Dave & Lollar, Phil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: JUVENILE FICTION / Readers / Chapter Books, JUVENILE FICTION / Religious / Christian / Action & Adventure
Publisher: Focus on the Family
Published: 2019-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

Johnny rushed to the house, hoping against hope that nothing bad had happened. Jumbled thoughts raced through his mind. He knew the note was from the mysterious boy he had seen when setting up his lightning-capture experiment on the water tower when he first came to town. The handwriting on this note was exactly the same as on the note the boy had written then, helping Johnny solve the Confederate gold mystery.

He still hadn’t met the boy and didn’t know who he was. Johnny had bumped into dozens of kids tonight on the street trick-or-treating, and it could have been any one of them. Who was this boy? Why didn’t he introduce himself? Why was he being so mysterious?

Johnny stopped when he got to his porch. Maybe the man is still in the house, he thought. That forced him to calm down. He couldn’t help his family if he rushed in and was caught himself.

He moved to the bay window and peered into the living room. It was deserted, with no signs of a struggle, just a lamp turned on low. He went back to the front door, inched it open, and slipped inside. He made his way carefully to the kitchen. Also empty. Everything was put away neat and clean. Johnny’s heart quickened. Did the man kidnap them? Did he hurt them? Or worse?

Then he heard it: a sort of scratching and scraping sound coming from down the hallway. He saw the door to the inner sanctum—his father’s study—was open, and a dull light from within it spilled out onto the hallway floor.

Johnny swallowed hard and crept down the hall toward the study. The scraping and scratching got louder, and he imagined all sorts of awful things that might be making that sound: Fiona scratching the word hobo into the floorboard before breathing her last; McDuff scratching on the side of a coffin his family members were imprisoned in. The gruesome possibilities seemed endless.

His hands felt clammy, and he began to sweat, causing his bioluminescence potion to smear and run into his eyes. He wiped them, shook his head to clear his thoughts, and tiptoed closer to the study door. He stopped just outside it—the scratching and scraping louder now—braced himself against the wall, and craned his neck to look around the corner.

“I wondered when you’d get home,” a voice said.

It was his father. He sat at his desk, hunched over the ancient journal, scrawling some notes on a pad of paper with his fountain pen.

Johnny exhaled and rushed inside. “Where are Fiona and Charlie?” he asked.

“In bed, of course. A lot of kids came by tonight. They were exhausted.”

Harold discreetly slid a folder over the pad he’d been writing on. Johnny noticed, but he was so relieved that he didn’t care at the moment. He collapsed into the leather guest chair. His father looked at him curiously. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Dad, before I left there was a hobo at the door asking for food,” Johnny said.

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