Annie's Adventures Read online

  The Sisters 8 Book 1

  Annie's Adventures

  Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  * * *

  With Greg Logsted & Jackie Logsted

  Illustrated by Lisa K. Weber

  * * *

  Sandpiper HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT

  BOSTON 2008

  * * *

  Copyright © 2008 by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  Illustrations copyright © 2008 by Lisa K. Weber

  All rights reserved. For information about permission

  to reproduce selections from this book, write to

  Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,

  215 Park Avenue South,

  New York, New York 10003.

  www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com

  Sandpiper and the Sandpiper logo are trademarks of the

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  The text of this book is set in Youbee.

  Text design by Carol Chu.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Baratz-Logsted, Lauren.

  Annie's adventures / by Lauren Baratz-Logsted ;

  with Greg Logsted and Jackie Logsted.

  p. cm.—(The sisters eight ; bk. 1)

  Summary: On New Year's Eve, the octuplets Huit—Annie, Durinda,

  Georgia, Jackie, Marcia, Petal, Rebecca, and Zinnia—discover that

  their parents are missing, and then uncover a mysterious note

  instructing them that each must find her power and her gift if they

  want to know what happened to their parents.

  ISBN 978-0-547-13349-2 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-0-547-05338-7 (paperback)

  [1. Sisters—Fiction. 2. Abandoned children—Fiction.]

  I. Logsted, Greg. II. Logsted, Jackie. III. Title.

  PZ7.B22966An 2008

  [Fic]-dc22

  2008000602

  Printed in the United States of America

  MP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  * * *

  For Julia Richardson,

  obviously and with love

  * * *

  Annie Durinda Georgia Jackie

  Marcia Petal Rebecca Zinnia

  * * *

  PROLOGUE

  The story always begins the same.

  Once upon a time, there were eight sisters who would all one day be eight years old.

  At the same time.

  They were octuplets, you see.

  Their names were Annie, Durinda, Georgia, Jackie, Marcia, Petal, Rebecca, and Zinnia. They were each born a minute apart on August 8, 2000. All eight had brown hair and brown eyes. And although they were all the same exact age, give or take a few minutes, each was one inch taller than the next, with Zinnia being the shortest and Annie the tallest.

  And their story always begins the same, so:

  Please stop reading if you have read about the Sisters Eight before, and go directly to chapter one.

  Please keep reading if you have not read about the Sisters Eight before.

  Please keep reading if you have read about the Sisters Eight before but your memory is lousy.

  Please keep reading if you have read about the Sisters Eight before but you simply like the writing here and want to read this part over and over again.

  Eight girls in one story, or one series of stories. This is bad news for boys, who may suspect that there are no snails or puppy dogs' tails in this book. However, there might be snails and puppy dogs' tails, but the only way you will ever know this is to read further. Remember: girls can be just as grubby as boys—you just have to give them half a chance.

  The family name of the Sisters Eight was Huit, which is French for eight and pronounced like "wheat," as in cream of, which I hope you never have to eat. On New Year's Eve 2007, as you shall soon see, their parents disappeared, or died, one of the two—this was a fine holiday present for the sisters, let me tell you.

  Parents disappeared, presumed dead, actually dead—parents don't fare very well in children's stories these days, I'm afraid. Best to be a child and not a parent, then.

  The Sisters Eight lived in a magnificent stone house, which you will see more of very soon. It could practically have been a castle. It was therefore not the kind of house you would want to leave under any circumstances, certainly not after your parents had disappeared. Or died. You would not want to be taken away from your sisters, separated. And so they had to endeavor—as you would no doubt do too—to hang on to their home and to one another, keeping the truth away from the prying eyes of adults, who would surely have split them all up like so many stalks of wheat cast upon the wind.

  Not an easy task—sticking together with loved ones—when you are seven, soon to be eight.

  And where was this magnificent stone house? Why, it might have been anywhere in the world—even right next door to you—so why quibble? However, if there were octuplets in your class at school, you would probably have noticed by now, so perhaps that's not the case.

  One thing was for sure: there were undoubtedly many cats in this almost castle, cats who would also have been taken away if word got out that the parents of the Sisters Eight had disappeared. Or died.

  As we approach the beginning of our first adventure, it is that fateful New Year's Eve 2007 and the girls are about to discover the disappearance of their parents-odd, the idea of discovering that which has disappeared—as well as a note hidden behind a loose stone in the wall of the drawing room of their magnificent home. The note reads:

  Dear Annie, Durinda, Georgia, Jackie, Marcia, Petal, Rebecca, and Zinnia,

  This may come as rather a shock to you, but it appears you each possess a power and a gift. The powers you already have—you merely don't know you have them yet. The gifts are from yours parents, and these you must also discover for yourselves. In fact, you must each discover both your power and your gict in order to reveal what happened to yiour parents. Have you got all that?

  The note is unsigned.

  And what has happened to their parents? Well, we don't know that yet, do we? If we did, then this would be the end of our story, not the beginning...

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was New Year's Eve 2007, approximately ten o'clock, and we were just getting ready to celebrate Christmas.

  This may seem an odd time to celebrate Christmas, but on December 25, we had been stranded by snowstorms in Utah. Our parents had decreed that we celebrate our belated holiday on the eve of another holiday, and so we were about to enjoy a twofer. Or so we thought.

  "But where are the presents?" asked Zinnia.

  We were in the drawing room, which sounds like a room you draw pictures in but that we actually just sit in. On this night, we were sitting around a dying fire, waiting for something exciting to happen.

  Betty came in with her dust cloth, which wasn't exciting at all. Betty was our mother's invention, a black and gold robot designed to make our life easier by doing the cleaning. But something had gone wrong with Betty's programming.

  "Why don't you dust the floor under the tree?" Zinnia suggested to Betty. "That way, it will be cleaner there when our presents arrive."

  Betty took the dust cloth, which she had draped over one of her accordion arms, and with one pin-cered hook placed it upon her own head.

  Do you see what we mean about Betty?

  "Good job, Betty," Zinnia said. Really, what else could one say?

  "Bye, Betty!" we all shouted after her as she exited the room. Betty would probably now head outdoors to dust under the wrong tree.

  The drawing room was our favorite room of the house. There was a grandfather clock and even a suit of armor propped in one corner. Daddy always said every home should have one—the suit of armor, not the clo
ck. Daddy hated clocks. The walls of the room were made out of big slats of gray stone, which was cool in summer, but not so hot in winter.

  "Perhaps Mommy and Daddy are waiting until we go to sleep, as usual," Annie said to Zinnia, "and why do you always have to worry so much about presents anyway?"

  "I don't know why you have to be so bossy," Durinda said to Annie.

  "Because she's the oldest," Georgia said. There was something sneering about the way she said it, like she was thinking of staging a coup.

  "Do you always have to sneer so much, Georgia?" said Petal in a rare stab at speaking out of turn. Petal was our shy girl.

  "The mouse roars," observed Rebecca snidely.

  "I don't think you should pick on Petal," said Jackie, our peacemaker.

  "And I don't know why you have to stick up for everyone all the time," observed Georgia. Then she sighed. "I'm bored."

  "How can you be bored?" Annie asked. "You got caught in an avalanche in Utah. Wasn't that enough excitement for you?"

  Georgia yawned. "It was just a tiny avalanche. I could have swam out myself if you'd only left me there another hour."

  "Excuse me," said Marcia, staring into the rapidly diminishing fire in the fireplace, "but hasn't anyone noticed something is missing?"

  "Such as?" prompted Rebecca.

  "Perhaps I shouldn't have said something," Marcia self-corrected.

  "Well," said Georgia, "if you're not going to say something, then why did you say anything at all?"

  "No, not that," Marcia said, growing impatient. "What I should have said was, 'Hasn't anyone noticed someone is missing?' Or some ones?"

  "I'm afraid you've lost me," said Petal.

  "Mommy and Daddy," Marcia prompted. Marcia was the observant one among us. "You know, those adults we live with?"

  We looked around and realized she was right.

  When had we last seen Mommy and Daddy?

  Turn the clock back about twenty minutes:

  "I'm going to the woodshed for logs for the fire," Daddy had said.

  "I'm going to go fix a tray of eggnog for us all," Mommy had said.

  "How long do you suppose," Petal asked now, "it takes a person to gather wood for a fire? Or pour ten glasses of eggnog?"

  "Dunno," Zinnia said. "I suspect five minutes for the first, perhaps another three for the second if you put the carton back in the fridge. So, five and three—eight. It should have taken them eight minutes."

  "But they were doing it simultaneously," Georgia said, "not one after another, so they both should have been back within five minutes, tops, even if Mommy took a really long time putting the carton back. Even if she decided to bring us cookies too."

  "I could be wrong," said Annie, "but I think it's a littie early to file a missing-persons report."

  "But they should have been back at least fifteen minutes ago!" Zinnia said, clearly starting to panic. "More, if you consider the time we've spent talking since we realized it was twenty minutes since they disappeared!"

  "Well," Annie corrected, "that's not technically true. We noticed—"

  "I noticed," Marcia briefly cut in.

  "—at the twenty-minute mark," Annie went on. "But that doesn't mean that's when they disappeared. It merely means that's when we noticed—"

  "I noticed."

  "—they weren't exactly here anymore."

  "This is no time for petty squabbles about time," said Jackie. "What do you think we should do?"

  "We should look for them, of course," Annie said. "There's no doubt some simple explanation, and when we find it, Georgia can go back to being bored and Zinnia can go back to worrying about presents."

  "Okay," said Durinda. "Where should we start?"

  "The kitchen?" Annie asked as much as answered.

  This seemed sensible to us, mostly because going to look in the kitchen was a lot less scary than going out into the dark night to look for Daddy in the woodshed.

  So we rose as one. Even though it seemed a safe thing to do—go to the kitchen to look for our parents—we walked with caution, as if we might find an ax murderer there. In fact, before leaving the drawing room entirely, Annie grabbed the silver spear from the suit of armor's grasp.

  "Insurance," she whispered.

  "Mommy!" we all called softly as we tiptoed. "Daddy!" we called, in case he'd snuck in the back door.

  In the kitchen, where we all ate breakfast together in the mornings before school, there was the usual boring kitchen stuff. There were the sharp knives, all still thankfully in their blocks; we checked. There was the tile floor that was so much fun to skate across, and the big picture window that looked out over the hill. There was even the talking refrigerator Mommy had invented. But there was no Mommy, no Daddy.

  Immediately, Annie crossed to the fridge. She opened the door slowly.

  "Fully stocked larder," the talking refrigerator said. "No need to shop." The refrigerator was always saying things that didn't matter to us, since we didn't have to do the shopping. It was always encouraging us to eat more too. The refrigerator thought we were too skinny.

  We ignored the talking refrigerator as Annie pulled out a half-gallon carton and held it up for all to see. In big, cheery red and green letters, the carton read Eggnog on the front.

  "It hasn't even been opened," Annie said.

  "Then where did Mommy go before?" Rebecca asked. "And where's Daddy? And what do we do now?" Fear had replaced her testiness.

  "We search the rest of the house, of course," Annie said.

  And so we did.

  We moved through the house: the bedrooms, six bathrooms, closets, the tower room, the seasonal rooms—we won't talk about the seasonal rooms right now, but we did go through them. We even checked the basement, although Petal didn't want to on account of the spiders.

  Still no parents.

  Last, we checked Mommy's study, but only briefly poking our heads in. It was a room we were normally forbidden to enter.

  "What now, Sherlock?" Georgia addressed Annie.

  "We check out the woodshed, of course," Annie said.

  And, suddenly, fear was back for everybody.

  It is one thing to look for your parents inside a house when you fully expect to find them somewhere, but it is quite another to venture outside when you are pretty sure both your parents have mysteriously disappeared.

  Still, what else were we to do?

  "I'll get everyone's coats," Durinda offered, "boots too."

  "I'll get the knives," Jackie said, "for everyone."

  "But aren't you supposed to be our pacifist?" Marcia observed.

  "I've got my spear," Annie said, ignoring Marcia.

  Outside, it was easy enough to follow in Daddy's footsteps; we were guided between the trees by the light from the moon. The footsteps went in one direction—toward the shed—with no return.

  Carefully, we placed our booted steps in the holes he'd left in the snow.

  "I'll go in first," Annie announced as we neared the woodshed. This was a very brave thing to do—also good timing, since none of the rest of us were feeling that brave right then. And, you know, she had the spear.

  Annie threw the door open hard, like a cop on a TV program who's about to make a bust. It was such a bold move. We were proud of her.

  Bravery, boldness—all for nothing. Daddy wasn't in the woodshed any more than Mommy had been in the kitchen. Wherever our parents were, wherever they had disappeared to at approximately ten o'clock in the night on New Year's Eve, they weren't in the woodshed.

  Back to the house we trudged, through our father's steps, cold and dejected now. Worried too.

  We removed our coats and boots and laid down our weapons. Except for Annie. She was enjoying holding that silver spear an awful lot.

  "What do we do now?" Petal asked, rather petulantly we thought. "What's happened to Mommy and Daddy?"

  "They've disappeared, obviously," Georgia said.

  "Or else they're dead," Rebecca put in.

  "
Stop frightening Petal and Zinnia," Jackie said evenly.

  "Well, aren't you frightened?" Georgia demanded.

  Jackie tilted her head to one side and considered this. "Yes and no," she finally said. "I think we should have some eggnog and think."

  "You get the eggnog," Annie instructed Durinda and Jackie, "while I stoke the fire." At that last, she removed a log shed hidden in her coat while we were all out at the woodshed. She'd taken it without us noticing—we were that worried about Mommy and Daddy—although we had noticed she looked rather larger. And we were thankful of course that she'd thought to bring the log. The fire was nearly dead.

  Once we were all gathered back in the drawing room, the fire nicely stoked, our eggnogs finally in hand, it was time to worry again.

  "What do you think happened to them?" Petal asked.

  "Maybe it's all a surprise," Zinnia said excitedly. "Maybe all this time they've been getting our presents, arranging them on a flying sleigh or something, and any moment now they're going to land on the roof, and—"

  "I think they've just disappeared," Georgia said flatly.

  "Or else they're dead," Rebecca put in.

  "I wish you would all stop—" Jackie started to say, but she never got a chance to finish because right then Marcia screamed.

  "That stone on the wall!"

  "What?" Durinda asked, concerned, acting just like Mommy would.

  Marcia pointed. "That stone in the wall! It wasn't like that when we were in the room before! It's never been like that! It's sticking out!"

  We all thought that Marcia had gone crazy from all the stress. But Durinda, still acting like Mommy, followed the direction of Marcia's finger to the offending stone. Where Durinda looked, we all looked, and that's when we saw: one of the stones had been disturbed!

  Annie made her cautious way over to it, spear in hand. We all followed close behind her. We may have been scared but we were curious too.

  Annie pried the stone the rest of the way out, revealing a secret hiding spot none of us had known about before. And in the hiding spot was the note that would change our lives. You may have seen this note already—in fact, we're sure you have—but it was a pretty important event in our lives and we hope you won't mind if we reprint it here and now: