Fear Stalks Grizzly Hill (2 page)

Brian shook his head. “It would have to be an awfully big cat to have long claws like these. Have you seen Mr. Webber’s cats?”

“No,” Mr. Everitt grumbled. “Glen’s not the friendliest of neighbors. He keeps pretty much to himself. I’ve never been inside his house.”

“Tomorrow we’re going to look for tracks around the grizzly’s den,“ Alan said. “We may even find the animal that made them.”

“Don’t count on it,” Mr. Everitt snapped. “Go home, where your parents can keep their eyes on you. If you care anything about the safety of animals in the wild and the peace of the people who live here, you’ll leave the forest alone.”

Tugging on Rusty’s leash, he stomped off toward his house.

“Don’t pay attention to him,” Alan whispered. “Mr. Everitt is always an old crab. Besides, we’re not bothering the animals.”

Brian studied the plaster cast in his hands. “The animal who made these paw prints isn’t large enough to be a grizzly, but the pads on his feet do look something like a bear’s.”

“I told you!” Sean said, his heart racing. “That thing we were tracking
is
a bear! And where do bears go? To their dens, that’s where. If we crawl into that grizzly’s den tomorrow, we’re going to find him waiting for us!”

S
TOP WORRYING ABOUT BEARS
,” Brian said. “Help me pick everything up.” He scraped up the splatters of plaster and put them into the empty measuring cup. Then he, Sean, and Alan collected the casts of the strange-looking tracks.

Brian examined each one, brushing the dirt from them. “Most of these are good,” he said happily. “They’ll be great in my report. The only problem is that I’ll have to identify them. What animal made the tracks? And where are we going to find it?”

“C’mon,” Alan said. “I’m getting hungry. We can take a shortcut home through the Shaws’ backyard. They won’t care.”

Sean looked around and saw that they had traveled in a semicircle through the edge of the forest behind the houses on Grizzly Hill. As they walked across the grass behind a red brick house, Sean glanced at a window.

A large lizard with a hideous dragonlike face peered through the glass at Sean.

“Yikes!” Sean cried out. “What’s that thing?”

“A pet iguana,” Alan said.

“It’s more like a pet monster,” Sean said. “Who’d want to snuggle up with a pet like that? Dracula? Frankenstein?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Shaw,” Alan said. He lowered his voice as a short, heavyset man walked around the corner of his house and came toward them. “Here comes Mr. Shaw now.”

Mr. Shaw greeted Alan with a smile, and shook hands as Brian and Sean were introduced. He nodded toward the plaster casts in Brian’s hands and asked, “What have you got there?”

“Casts I made of some weird paw prints we found among the trees,” Brian said. He handed him the cast on top. “See the marks from the long claws? We don’t know what animal this is.”

Mr. Shaw shook his head. “I’m afraid I can’t help you,” he said. But he studied the cast with such concern that Brian wondered if the print meant something to Mr. Shaw—something he wasn’t telling.

“Do you know what—?” Brian began, but Mr. Shaw interrupted.

“I think you’d better ask someone else,” he said.

“Tomorrow morning we’re going exploring in the woods,” Alan told him, “so maybe we’ll see the animal and find out. I’m going to show Brian and Sean the giant grizzly’s den.”

Mr. Shaw looked stern as he said, “Under the circumstances, it might be better if you stayed out of the woods.”

“Why?” Alan asked.

Mr. Shaw rumbled for an answer. Finally, he said, “Well, we aren’t sure what kind of animal this is, are we? It could be dangerous.”

“Are we talking about bears?” Sean asked.

For an instant Mr. Shaw looked startled, “What’s all this about bears?” he asked.

“Don’t mind Sean. He’s worried about meeting up with a grizzly,” Brian said. He took the plaster cast back from Mr. Shaw as he said, “Do you know a lot about animals?”

“I do have an interesting collection of pets,” Mr. Shaw said. “My wife and I care for a pair of parakeets, some tropical fish, and the iguana, which lives in a glass aquarium on a table by the large window.”

“How’d you happen to get an iguana?” Sean asked.

“Someone brought him to the local animal shelter. She didn’t want him. No one wanted him. I felt sorry for the poor little thing, so I brought him home with me. Since my retirement I’ve been spending a lot of time as a volunteer at the animal shelter.”

Sean was curious. “What kind of animals do they have at the shelter? Aren’t they mostly dogs and cats?”

“Yes,” Mr. Shaw answered. “However, at the present time I’m helping to care for a coatimundi. It was brought to the shelter by a woman who liked it when it was a cute baby animal, but doesn’t want it now that it’s an adult and has sharp teeth and bites. The woman claimed it was a gift from a friend who moved away, but between you and me, I’m sure the woman was lying. I think the coatimundi was taken from the wild in South America, smuggled into this country, and sold as a pet.”

Mr. Shaw’s cheeks and nose turned red, and his eyes sparked with anger as he went on. “I can’t understand the stupidity of smuggling wild animals out of their natural habitat and trying to make domestic pets out of them!”

A gray-haired woman opened the back door.

“Arthur!” she called.

“A wild animal has wild instincts, and can—”

“Arthur!” the woman persisted. “Mrs. Jones is here.”

Mr. Shaw seemed to suddenly realize that his wife was calling him. He blinked a few times and said, “Yes, Agnes?”

“Mrs. Jones from the animal shelter is here,” Mrs. Shaw repeated. “She’s brought us the miniature dachshund you said you’d take care of while his owner is in the hospital.”

Mr. Shaw beamed. “Of course, of course,” he said. “Tell Mrs. Jones I’ll be right with her.”

He chuckled as he glanced at the muddy paw prints on Alan’s clothes. “I see you’ve had another tussle with Rusty. I believe I’ll be taking care of Rusty in another two weeks while Mr. Everitt is traveling out of the county.”

After Mr. Shaw left, Brian said, “He really likes animals. I bet he knows a lot about them—more than he let on.”

Sean threw Brian a quick glance. “You think he knows what animal made this track, don’t you?

“C’mon, Sean,” Alan said. “I heard everything that Mr. Shaw said. He didn’t tell us anything to make Brian think that.”

“Private detectives listen to what people
don’t
say, as well as what they do say,” Brian told Alan. “Sometimes what they don’t say is important.”

“Huh? I don’t get it,” Alan said.

“I asked Mr. Shaw a couple of direct questions,” Brian said. “He didn’t answer them. He just asked another question or talked more about animals.”

Brian suddenly shoved the stack of plaster casts into Sean’s hands and began to fish in the pocket of his jeans. “Here, Sean,” he said. “You hold these. I think we’ve gone past just trying to identify an animal. We could be in the middle of a mystery—one that needs the Casebusters to solve it. I’d better start taking notes.”

But Brian dropped his pencil as a loud, high-pitched yowl made them all jump.

B
RIAN AND ALAN RACED
between the houses toward the direction of the noise. Sean, carefully hanging on to the plaster casts, ran after them. He arrived just in time to see someone in the Webbers’ driveway loading the last of a group of boxes into a van. A striped, furry paw reached out of one of the airholes in the sides of the last box, scratching furiously at the box as it tried to get out. The animal yowled again, its high screech wriggling up Sean’s backbone, making him shiver.

“What’s that?” he asked, moving closer to the van.

The man quickly shut the van doors and turned to face Sean. “Hi,” he said. “Who are you?”

Alan stepped up and introduced Brian and Sean. “This is Mr. Webber,” he said. “Brian and Sean are spending the weekend with us.”

“I’d stay and get better acquainted, but I have to take my cats to the vet for their shots,” Mr. Webber said.

“I never heard a cat make such a loud noise,” Sean blurted out.

Mr. Webber just smiled. “He is noisy, isn’t he?”

Brian reached for one of the plaster casts and handed it to Mr. Webber. “Do you have time to answer one question? We took casts of these paw prints in the woods, right outside the backyards, and we don’t know what the animal is. Do you?”

At first Mr. Webber didn’t answer. He looked surprised at the paw print. Then he frowned at it. Sean, trying to be helpful, said, “It looks sort of like a bear’s paw, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” Mr. Webber said. “A lot like a bear. If a bear is wandering around in the woods, then you kids better stay out of there.”

“Yikes! “Sean said.

Alan spoke up. “My mom and dad said there aren’t bears in the woods anymore.”

Mr. Webber looked at Sean. “I wouldn’t be so sure,” he said. “I heard that a few years ago a man hiked back into the woods, looking for bears, and he never came out and was never seen again.” He leaned closer to Sean. “Word was that he came across an angry, hungry grizzly bear.”

Scared, Sean took a step backward.

Brian flipped a page over in his notebook and began to write. “Do you remember the date the man disappeared? Or his name?”

Mr. Webber looked at Brian’s notebook and scowled. “What is this, a quiz?” he asked.

“I’m just collecting information,” Brian told him.

“I can’t give you any. I told you, I’ve got to get my cats to the vet. I haven’t got time to play games.” Mr. Webber swung up into the driver’s seat and slammed the door shut behind him.

With a screech of his tires, he backed his van down the driveway into the circular drive. But his van stopped short. A large truck, with a bright furniture company logo painted on the side, had just arrived, blocking the entrance to the road.

“That house on the other side of ours belongs to Cecelia Crane,” Alan said. “She’s a furniture designer who works from her home. She lives there with her elderly mother and aunt. Every once in a while the truck from the store comes by to load or unload pieces of furniture. While they’re doing it, the road’s blocked for a few minutes, but so far no one’s complained.”

Sean pointed to Mr. Webber, who was leaning out the window of his van, yelling at a pair of moving men, who were carrying a table from the van into Miss Crane’s house. “Mr. Webber’s complaining,” Sean said.

“Does the furniture delivery truck come by often?” Brian asked Alan.

“Once every week or so,” Alan said, and Brian made a note.

“What does the furniture truck have to do with the animal we’re trying to track?” Alan asked.

“Maybe nothing. Maybe a lot,” Brian said. “Investigators collect information. Then they sort through it to see what fits and what doesn’t.”

Alan began to laugh. “Where are you going to fit a furniture truck?”

Just then Alan’s sister, Lucy, popped out of the Nashes’ front door. “There you are!” she shouted. “I’ve been looking all over for you! Hurry up! You’re late for dinner!”

With great sighs she led them to the kitchen and handed them paper plates.

Alan groaned as he looked at the table. “Hot dogs and canned fruit cocktail. Don’t tell me. It was your turn to cook tonight, wasn’t it?”

Lucy sniffed. “Just be glad you’re getting anything.”

“Where are Mom and Dad?”

“They’re putting up bookshelves. They thought they’d be through by this time, but it’s taking a lot longer, so they said to go ahead and eat.”

Sean was hungry. He began slathering mustard on his hot dog.

“Take your plates outside to the patio table, so you won’t get the kitchen dirty,” Lucy ordered.

Sean didn’t mind. It was a beautiful evening. The sun was slowly setting, and the first star had come out. Sean listened carefully for any animal sounds besides the cricket chirps, but the woods were silent. He opened his mouth wide to take the first bite of his hot dog, when a loud scream ripped through the air.