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

walked right up to Josephine, looking into her eyes suspiciously.
    “If you are lying, and you really are from the orphanage, I swear you’ll never take me alive.”
    “I’m not from the orphanage, I promise,” she said. “My name is Josephine Cravitz. I just moved in next door. I’m your new neighbor.” She smiled and stuck out her hand to shake.
    He looked at it as if it were a dead fish. “Neighbor? Urgh! I despise neighbors almost as much as I despise spies. How many of you are there?”
    “Just my parents and me.”
    “Drat! An entire clan,” he fumed. “Throw her in the dungeon, Norman!”
    “We don’t have a dungeon, Master.”
    “The torture chamber, then!”
    “What?” gasped Josephine.
Was this kid some kind of psycho?
she wondered.
    “Sadly, we lack one of those as well, sir.”
    “Bother! Where do we put prisoners, then?”
    “I don’t know, sir. We’ve never had one before.”
    The boy and the robot thought it over for a moment, then the robot said, “How about the broom closet, sir?”
    “Good idea!” The boy slapped his knee enthusiastically. “It’s dark and uncomfortable, though not as cold as I’d like. We’ll keep her in there until we decide on something better to do with her. Tie her up, Norman! And use lots of ingenious knots. Spies are expert at untying things.”
    “As you wish, sir.” The robot found a rope and began coiling it around Josephine’s body, pinning her arms to her sides.
    “Hold on a minute!” Josephine squirmed as the robot pulled the ropes tight. She had to stop this craziness, before it got out of hand. “You really don’t have to do this, I’m pretty harmless.”
    “I’ll be the judge of that.” The boy jutted his chin out defiantly. “Into the closet with her, Norman!”
    “Right away, Master.”
    “And I’ll have my dinner now. All this ruckus has stirred my appetite.”

Inside the broom closet, Josephine sat on an overturned bucket surrounded by long-unused cleaning supplies. She squirmed and strained against the ropes and quickly found that there was nothing very ingenious about Norman’s knots, after all. Having gone to yoga classes with her mom every Saturday for years, Josephine could twist her body like a pretzel into impossible poses. She dropped her shoulders and folded her arms behind her, rotating her torso and sucking in her belly at the same time. The ropes fell slack, and she was soon able to free her hands. In no time, the ropes were off, which was nice, but she was still locked inside a closet inside a locked room, which was a problem.
    She held her ear to the door and listened as the boy and the robot discussed her as if she were some diabolical villain.
    “She is obviously a spy from the orphanage, Norman.” The boy chewed as he spoke. “This whole ‘neighbor’ business is just a clever ploy to trap me, I suspect. Don’t you agree?”
    “It seems she was peeping, sir, which is very similar to spying, though not exactly analogous in the strictest interpretation of the word. So in that sense—”
    “Or maybe she and her ‘parents,’ as she calls them, are some kind of elite commando force, sent here to infiltrate our stronghold!” A loud slurping sound followed this speculation.
    “I can only hope,” ventured the robot, seriously, “that she is not an alien assassin from the planet Mars. I saw a very interesting report on television just last evening in which Los Angeles was being invaded by female Martians armed with quite fearsome weaponry. I’m afraid the city has been completely destroyed.”
    The boy smacked his forehead. “That was a movie, you dolt, not a report! I’ve told you a TRILLION times, Norman, movies are fictitious.”
    “Oh, what a relief,” the robot sighed mechanically. “I’ve been so worried all day.”
    “So who is she, then? She was up to something devious, I’m sure of it. Why else would she have been sneaking around here in the dead of night? She knows our secrets now that