The Orphan of Awkward Falls by Keith Graves Read Free Book Online Page A

to apprehend the culprit. I am rather speedy, you know, having once outrun an Oldsmo—”
    “You caught the intruder, Norman? Excellent work! Ran him off, did you? Tossed him over the wall?”
    “Actually, sir, I have the intruder right here.”
    “Here?” An angry snort was followed by footsteps stomping up the stairs.
    Josephine saw the silhouette of a very short, round man, who arrived at the top of the steps and began yelling up at the huge robot towering over him.
    “Norman, you ninny!” he wheezed, out of breath from the climb. “I’ve told you a BILLION times, outsiders are never allowed inside! That’s why they’re outsiders! If we let them inside, they become insiders!”
    “Your logic is flawless as always, sir.”
    “Well, let’s have a look at the perpetrator, as long as I’m here.”
    The little man barged past the robot toward Josephine. As he stepped into the light, her jaw dropped.
    “The master” was not a little man at all. He was a boy.

The boy glared at Josephine suspiciously. “Who are you, and what are you up to? Are you a spy sent by the orphanage? Did the man in the black suit put you up to this?”
    He was the unhealthiest-looking kid Josephine had ever seen. His marshmallow-pale skin made her wonder if he had ever been outdoors in his life. She winced at the boy’s neglected teeth, which were badly in need of a patient dentist. His uncombed white hair showed no evidence of having been shampooed in recent months. His unclipped fingernails were dirty, his thick glasses smeared with fingerprints, his too-large white jacket and trousers spotted with stains from numerous sloppy meals. The boy was overweight, underexercised, and smelly.
    Josephine found him repulsive, yet somehow interesting, like some long-forgotten cheese discovered at the back of the refrigerator.
    “Of course I’m not a spy!” said Josephine. “And I don’t know any man in a black suit.”
    He snorted. “A likely story!”
    The boy hurried over to a small stepladder near the wall, climbed to the top step, and pulled a lever. A crude periscope made from rusty pipes and telescope parts slid down from a tube in the ceiling. Like a submarine commander, he squinted into the eyepiece, rotating the periscope in every direction. “I know he’s out there!” he said. “I’ve spotted him before, you know, skulking around in his black suit, hiding in the trees outside the fence. I’m fully aware of what you people are up to.”
    “I am not a liar. And please make this…this
thing
let go of my arm.” She glared up at the robot. “It hurts!”
    “Norman is not a thing,” he declared. “He is an ingenious creation, built by my grandfather, Celsius Hibble, one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century.”
    “I don’t care who built it. Just make it let me go!”
    “You
should
care!” The boy ignored her pleas, instead removing his smudgy glasses and wiping them with his coattail. “Grandfather was no mere tinkerer. He won the Nobel Prize in science, a feat I hope to match someday. He was very famous. This estate was his, in fact. He did much of his groundbreaking work here, prior to his murder.”
    Josephine gasped. “Murder! That’s terrible!”
    “Terrible, indeed.” The boy became somber. “Ten years ago, Grandfather was killed in this very room by his lifelong assistant, a terrible man named Fetid Stenchley. The fiend strangled him with his bare hands.”

    Josephine gulped and instinctively touched her throat at the thought of it.
    “Why would your grandfather’s assistant murder him?”
    “No one knows. The man was a lunatic. He’s been locked inside the Asylum for the Dangerously Insane ever since, serving a life sentence. A fitting punishment for killing one of the world’s top geniuses in cold blood, I’d say.”
    Finally satisfied that no one else lurked outside, the boy pulled the lever again and the periscope slid back up to the ceiling. He hopped down from the ladder and