The Penderwicks at Point Mouette by Jeanne Birdsall Read Free Book Online

hadn’t been very filling. Batty followed him, ignoring the dark corners of the living room. She cared about only one thing now—seeing the all-important postcards. She made it to the refrigerator, and there they were. First she looked at the England postcard. It showed a tall red bus going over a stone bridge, and across the top was a word that Batty spelled out for Hound.
    “O-X-F-O-R-D,” she said. “That’s where Daddy is with Iantha and Ben. Iantha told me about the red buses.”
    There was no answer from Hound, because his nose was jammed under the stove, continuing his search for food. Batty turned to the shiny New Jersey postcard, with its wide white beach and blue ocean. It was looking at the New Jersey ocean that gave Batty her idea. If a shell could float all the way from the Maine ocean to the New Jersey ocean—and Jane had said so—a letter could, too. Batty would float Rosalind a letter, and she would do it right now to give the letter time to reach New Jersey by tomorrow. She needed only her drawing pad and markers, and they were over there on that bookshelf. In a moment, Batty had the pad open on the floor, and all the markers spread out, ready for letter writing. She had so many things to tell Rosalind—about how much she missed her, and about Jeffrey and Hoover and the shadows on her bedroom wall—that she hardly knew how to begin. And, too, there was that problem with spelling. She did know how to spell her sister’s name, though, so she started there. In big blue letters, she wrote ROSALIND, and although she’d gotten too close to the edge and had to make the N and D small, she was very proud of what she’d done so far.
    She thought for a while, trying to figure out how to spell
miss
, as in
I miss you
, but when she couldn’t work out whether it was
mis
or
miss
or something else altogether, she used a gold marker to write LOVE instead.Then, since somehow she’d managed to fill up most of the paper, she finished off with BATTY in red letters. Rosalind would know what she meant. She always did.
    And now came the hard part—throwing the letter into the ocean. Batty pushed open the heavy sliding door, shoving with all her strength, then stepped out into the night. How dark it was outside, and how much louder the ocean sounded all of a sudden! Clutching her letter, Batty crept to the edge of the deck but could go no further. Not without Hound, who had stayed inside, and not, she realized now, without the orange life jacket. Rosalind had made it clear that Batty would drown without that life jacket, but now she was too tired to go back for it. She wasn’t going to be able to send her letter and Rosalind would never know how much Batty missed her.
    Out there on the cold deck, Batty started to cry, and once she started she couldn’t seem to stop, even when Hound gave up on the stove and came outside to find her. He licked her face, but she sobbed on and on and thought she might sob forever, or at least until breakfast. But she didn’t have to wait that long, because Hound, finding that he couldn’t soothe her, wisely went looking for the one person who could, and soon he came back with Jeffrey, who sat down beside Batty and put his arm around her, and that was wonderful. She told him everything, about theshadows and the postcards and how she needed to throw the letter into the ocean, and he didn’t laugh at her or even smile, and then he offered to throw her letter into the ocean for her, which he did, just like the hero she’d known him to be since the very first day she met him.
    “There,” he said, coming back to her on the deck. “Letter launched.”
    “And you won’t tell Skye and Jane, right?”
    “Penderwick family honor.” He inspected her for traces of further crying. “Do you feel better now? A little bit? Wait—I know what else we can do. Stay here.”
    Jeffrey disappeared back into the house, but before Batty had time to get scared all over again, he was back with his