Durinda's Dangers Read online

  The Sisters Eight Book 2

  Durinda's Dangers

  Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  * * *

  With Greg Logsted & Jackie Logsted

  Illustrated by Lisa K. Weber

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT

  BOSTON 2008

  * * *

  Text copyright © 2008 by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  Illustrations copyright © 2008 by Lisa K. Weber.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Sandpiper,

  an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,

  Boston, Massachusetts.

  For information about permission to reproduce

  selections from this book, write to Permissions,

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,

  215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  SANDPIPER and SANDPIPER logo are trademarks of

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  The text of this book is set in Youbee.

  Book design by Carol Chu.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Baratz-Logsted, Lauren.

  Durinda's dangers / by Lauren Baratz-Logsted ; with Greg

  Logsted and Jackie Logsted.

  p. cm.—(The sisters eight ; bk. 2)

  Summary: One month after their parents' disappearance,

  the third-grade Huit octuplets deal with a malfunctioning

  refrigerator and try to win the love of the only boy in

  their class at Valentine's Day, while Durinda discovers

  her special power and gift.

  ISBN 978-0-547-13347-8 (hardcover edition)

  ISBN 978-0-547-05339-4 (pbk. edition)

  [1. Sisters—Fiction. 2. Abandoned children—Fiction. 3.

  Valentine's Day—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction. 5. Refrigerators—

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

  PZ7.B22966Dur 2008

  [Fic]—dc22

  2008013305

  Printed in the United States of America

  MP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  * * *

  For Merie Kirshner & Jackie's class

  at the Wooster School

  Thank you for so enthusiastically

  listening to book one. We hope you enjoy

  book two even more.

  * * *

  PROLOGUE

  The story always begins the same ... until it changes.

  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.

  On New Year's Eve 2007, their parents disappeared, or died. Their mother went into the kitchen for eggnog, their father went out to the woodshed for firewood, and neither returned.

  Now the Eights must figure out what happened to their parents while keeping the outside world from discovering that eight little girls are home alone.

  At the beginning of their first adventure, also known as The Sisters Eight, Book 1: Annie's Adventures, the girls became aware of the disappearance of their parents, and they found a note hidden behind a loose stone in the wall of the drawing room of their magnificent home. The note read:

  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 your parents, and these you must also discover for yourselves. In fact, you must each discover both your power and your gift in order to reveal what happened to your parents. Have you got all that?

  The note was unsigned.

  During the course of Annie's Adventures, Annie discovered her power: the ability to be as smart as an adult when needed. She also discovered her gift: a lovely ring with a purple gemstone in it.

  And what did happen 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 continuation...

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was the first week in February, and it wasn't like our lives were getting any easier.

  Our parents, having disappeared on New Year's Eve when Mommy went to the kitchen to get eggnog and Daddy went out to the woodshed for more firewood, were still missing. Or dead.

  We still hadn't found a way to get into the home of our evil neighbor the Wicket so we could find out what she had stolen from Mommy's Top Secret folder.

  And we were still in the third grade at the Whistle Stop, a private school running from kindergarten through twelfth grade, where we were forced to wear ugly yellow plaid uniforms.

  We were at the Whistle Stop that morning. Our only classmates were Will Simms, a towheaded boy we liked, and Mandy Stenko, a redheaded girl we didn't. Our teacher, Mrs. McGillicuddy, known to us Eights as the McG, was going on and on about something.

  The McG was a tall blonde with a long nose, on the bridge of which perched horn-rimmed glasses. On this particular morning, the thing she was going on and on about was hearts.

  "The heart," the McG said, "is the organ that pumps blood through your body."

  "I'm pretty sure we knew that already," Georgia said.

  "Is there going to be a test on this?" Petal wanted to know.

  The McG ignored us.

  "The heart," the McG went on, "is also one of four symbols on playing cards, the other three being the club, the diamond, and the spade."

  "Does this have anything to do with your giving Will soccer trading cards for his birthday last month?" Durinda asked.

  "Will doesn't even like soccer," Rebecca pointed out, forgetting how Annie had encouraged us to pretend he did on the day the McG had given Will the cards.

  The McG glared at us.

  "Sorry," Jackie said with a peacemaking shrug. "We thought you'd want to know."

  The McG ignored us some more.

  "There are several holidays in the month of February," the McG went on. "Some are national, like Presidents' Day; one has to do with predicting the weather for the next six weeks; and the third is of a far more important nature. Does anyone know the most important holiday in February?"

  "Groundhog Day?" Marcia suggested. Then she observed, "It should be. The weather is very important to farmers, not that we know any farmers."

  "Do we get presents on Groundhog Day?" Zinnia asked, her eyes lighting up.

  We could be wrong about this, but we were pretty certain the McG was getting frustrated with us.

  "No, of course it's not Groundhog Day!" the McG practically shouted. "How could it—?" She shook her head, as though refusing to travel down a particular conversational road with us for fear of what it might do to her brain. She forced a sweet smile. "Anyone else have any ideas?"

  Mandy Stenko raised her hand eagerly. You'd think she had to go to the bathroom or something.

  That was Mandy all over. The rest of us never bothered raising our hands before saying what was on our minds.

  Mandy squirmed in her chair until we all started thinking she really did have to go to the bathroom. But the McG finally called on her and Mandy stopped squirming.

  "Yes, Mandy?"

  "Valentine's Day!" Mandy burst out. And once the cork had been taken out of the Mandy bottle, there was no stopping her. "Valentine's Day," she
continued breathlessly, "is the holiday that occurs each year on February fourteenth. My mother says it's a day when people should give other people flowers or candy or gifts. My father says it was invented by the greeting-card companies and that it is a poor trick to play on husbands who shouldn't be expected to know the exact right gift without someone telling them first."

  "That's a rather... novel interpretation," the McG said. "But you left out one important thing in your recitation."

  Mandy looked at the McG, puzzled.

  Okay, we'll admit it: we were all puzzled.

  "You left out romance," the McG said, a wistful expression overtaking her usually stern face. "You left out Love."

  What was the McG talking about?

  Romance?

  Love?

  Had Principal Freud's forcing her to be our teacher since last September caused the McG to lose whatever was left of her tiny little mind?

  "The heart of something," the McG said, "can be said to be the center of that thing. And the heart itself, that organ that beats in your chest at the average rate of seventy-two beats per minute, can be said to be the center of love." She removed her glasses. Then she wiped a tear from her eye, replaced her glasses on her nose, and went on. "When you give your red folders to your parents this week, be sure they look at them very carefully."

  Every Tuesday, red folders containing Important Papers were sent home. It was Annie's job, since it was her power to be as smart as an adult when she had to be, to go through the red folders. Now that our parents were gone, she made sure that everything was done as it should be and nothing aroused the suspicions of the People in Authority.

  We may not have had parents anymore, at least not anywhere we could see them, but we did have Annie.

  We were confident Annie would never make a mistake that would land us in the stew.

  "This week's red folders," the McG went on, which we thought was silly since she'd just told us to have our parents look at them very carefully, "will contain special information about our upcoming celebration of Valentine's Day, the holiday of love. It is critical that all instructions be followed to a T."

  "Why do people always say 'to a T'?" Will asked.

  Eight heads, ours, swiveled to look at Will.

  "I mean," Will went on, amiable as always, "I don't want to be difficult, but why isn't the phrase 'to an A'? Or 'to a D' or 'to a G' or 'to a J' or 'to an M' or 'to a P' or 'to an R' or 'to a Z'? It just seems to me that every time one of you educators or parents uses that 'to a T' phrase, you run the risk of making all the other letters in the alphabet feel bad."

  We suppose we should have paid more attention to the McG's Special Instructions Regarding Valentine's Day.

  We definitely should have read the contents of the folder more carefully. The two-sheet printout, stapled together at the top, said: "Valentines: You will need to make or buy one for each of the following classmates so that it will be fair and everyone will have a good time. Please keep this handy checklist with you when you do your shopping and fill out your valentines because it is critical that no one feel Left out (but of course don't make one for yourself because that would be silly, also it would look like you perhaps like yourself a bit too much):

  Annie Huit

  Durinda Huit

  Georgia Huit

  Jackie Huit

  Marcia Huit

  Petal Huit

  Rebecca Huit

  Zinnia Huit

  Will Simms

  Mandy Stenko

  P.S. For valentine-making purposes, your teacher's name is spelled Mrs. McGillicuddy."

  We blame Annie for what happened later. It was her job to see that all the Important Papers in the Tuesday red folders got read. Or perhaps we should blame the school secretary, for double-spacing between our names when single-spacing would have worked just fine—we are not, after all, stupid—meaning that the last few lines ran onto a second page, which we never saw.

  Or maybe the real culprit was Love.

  For during Will's speech about how people shouldn't favor the letter T and leave other letters out of things, eight hearts had gone sproing! in eight chests, and our eyes had filled with something as we looked at him.

  And that something was love.

  ***

  It was on the long bus ride home that we came up with our plan.

  We didn't love riding the school bus. What we used to love was having Mommy drive us to school in the great big purple Hummer that she, being a scientist and also an outstanding inventor, had doctored so it was an environmentally sound vehicle. But Mommy was no longer around, and even though Annie had tricked Pete the mechanic into teaching her how to drive, she couldn't drive us to school every day, not even if she wore her Daddy disguise that she wore from time to time, because if she did then the People in Authority might catch on.

  And that would be very bad.

  But not everything in our lives was very bad, because now we were hatching a plan.

  "I'm going to make Will the best valentine he's ever seen," Durinda announced.

  "No, I am," said Annie.

  "No, I am," said Georgia.

  "No, I am," said Jackie.

  "No, I am," said Marcia.

  "No, I am," said Petal.

  "No, I am," said Rebecca.

  "No, I am," said Zinnia. Then she added, "Do you think he'll give us stupendous presents in return?"

  We all glared at one another.

  "Speaking of presents," Jackie suggested, "in addition to making valentines for Will, perhaps we should each buy him a special present too?"

  But Durinda pointed out that Annie was the only one of us who knew how to use the checkbook and credit cards and forge Daddy's name in order to get money to pay for things.

  "It wouldn't be fair," Durinda said. "Annie might only give each of us, say, five dollars to spend, while allowing herself far more. And how would we ever know?"

  We all glared at Annie.

  "No," Durinda said, "for this to be fair, we need to limit ourselves to each using her talents to create the best possible valentine for Will."

  So that was our plan.

  We were going to have a competition to see who could make the best valentine for Will.

  So we could discover which one of us he loved best.

  Once and for all.

  CHAPTER TWO

  We arrived home expecting to start on our valentines for Will right away.

  What we hadn't planned on was arriving home to disaster.

  "There's something wrong with the talking refrigerator!" Durinda called out to us from the kitchen, where she had gone with Jackie to make us a snack. Since Mommy had disappeared, it was Durinda's job to prepare our food.

  We all raced in to see what she was talking about.

  "Those look like drops of some sort of clear liquid. They've made a puddle on the floor in front of the talking refrigerator," Marcia observed. "There are so many of them!"

  The talking refrigerator was one of Mommy's inventions. It told us when we were getting low on necessary food items, or even luxury food items, and it always encouraged us to eat more.

  Durinda crouched in front of the talking refrigerator. Then she put one of her fingers into the puddle and raised that finger toward her tongue.

  "Don't do it!" Zinnia shouted.

  "It could have been left there by the ax murderer!" Petal shouted.

  "Are you crazy?" Georgia wondered.

  "It's her funeral." Rebecca harrumphed.

  But it didn't matter what any of us shouted, wondered, or harrumphed, for Durinda at last touched her finger to her tongue. Then she tilted her head back, thinking.

  "Tears," she decided at last. "These drops are salty. They taste like tears."

  "Salty could be good right around now," Annie said. "I rather fancy a salty snack, if you could come up with a healthy one."

  "Well, let's see what we've got," Durinda said, pulling open the door.

  But when the door was fully opene
d, rather than seeing the lovely array of food we were accustomed to, we saw...

  "Eek!" Durinda shouted. "Everything is melting!"

  It was true.

  All our food had little droplets of water on it, like you get when you take a cold peach from the crisper and put it somewhere warmer, like the counter.

  And we smelled something foul right away too: the milk was starting to spoil.

  "What is going on?" Durinda demanded. "And why isn't the refrigerator talking to us?"

  She had a point.

  Usually, by this time, the refrigerator would have said lots of things to us. But now? Nothing.

  The talking refrigerator had gone silent.

  Then we noticed more liquid dripping from the top freezer, and Durinda yanked open that door.

  The freezer was melting.

  And it wasn't just melting. When Durinda opened the door, a river of melted ice came flooding out at us.

  We eight stood there, soaked, too shocked to say anything.

  Even Georgia and Rebecca were shut up by this.

  And then, into our stunned silence, entered a sound.

  It was the sound of someone—or some thing— sobbing.

  "I'm me-e-e-elting!" the talking refrigerator gasped out between sobs.

  "What do you think is wrong with it?" Jackie asked, concerned.

  "I'm not sure," Marcia said, "but it sounds depressed."

  "What's wrong?" Durinda asked the talking refrigerator directly.

  Since the kitchen was Durinda's province, the rest of us were content to let her take over the refrigeration interrogation.

  "Carl is heartbroken!" the talking refrigerator said.

  "Who is Carl?" Durinda asked, perplexed.

  "Carl is ... is... me!" the talking refrigerator cried.

  We all looked at one another: Carl?

  "Carl?" Jackie voiced all of our thoughts. "But I always thought the talking refrigerator was a girl!"

  It was true. We had all thought that.

  We shrugged our shoulders. Who knew?