Philippa Fisher and the Dream-Maker's Daughter Page 16

  I checked my watch. Nearly six o’clock. “I’d better get going,” I said reluctantly. Mom had told me to be back for dinner. “See you in the morning?” I asked as I headed down the stairs.

  “Definitely! I’ll come over as soon as I’m up.”

  “Great.”

  I was about to turn to walk through the shop to go out when something moving across the floor caught my eye. A mouse! It ran across the shop floor and right over to my feet!

  I screamed and ran back to the stairs. The mouse followed me. I stumbled halfway up the stairs and the mouse tried to follow, but the steps were too steep and it kept falling back onto the floor.

  It stood at the bottom of the steps looking up at me with tiny green eyes.

  “I’ve never seen a mouse with green eyes,” Robyn said. She’d heard me scream and was looking down from the top of the stairs.

  “Me neither,” I replied, although at this moment, I didn’t care what color its eyes were; I just wanted it to stop chasing me.

  “It likes you,” Robyn said with a laugh.

  “Well, I don’t like it!” I replied. “Make it go away!”

  “Look, it’s got something in its mouth,” she said, bending down and reaching out toward it.

  “Don’t touch it!” I screamed. Just then, the mouse dropped whatever was in its mouth, looked up at me once again, and scampered away.

  I cautiously made my way down the steps as Robyn was examining what the mouse had left behind. It was a torn, crumpled-up piece of paper covered in mouse spit.

  “Nice,” I said.

  Robyn laughed. She dropped the paper into the trash as we headed through the shop. “See you in the morning,” she said at the door.

  “Can’t wait!” And with that, I waved to her and to her dad, who was busily chatting with a customer. And then I headed back to the house for an evening of moussaka and Monopoly with my parents.

  The next morning, Robyn was at the door before Mom and Dad had even woken up. Which isn’t that amazing, really. When Mom and Dad are on vacation, you don’t really get much more than snores and grunts out of them before lunchtime.

  “Come on, let’s go out,” Robyn said. I scrawled a quick note, propped it up on the kitchen table, and followed Robyn outside.

  We wandered around the village, talking and looking in shopwindows. We paused outside Potluck, the pottery shop owned by Robyn’s friend Annie. She used to be Robyn’s mom’s best friend, but Robyn’s mom had died just over a year ago, and Annie and Robyn’s dad hadn’t seen eye to eye since then. They’d made up last time we were here, though.

  “How are things?” I asked nervously.

  “Fine,” Robyn said with a smile. “She and Dad are totally cool now. She comes over for dinner every Friday, and I’m allowed to see her whenever I want. She and Dad even go out walking together on the weekends sometimes.”

  “I’m so glad,” I said. The shop was closed, but we stood looking at all the plates and bowls and animals in the window.

  I was admiring a particularly handsome dragon when someone suddenly barged into me out of nowhere, knocking me forward so hard, I almost bumped into the window.

  “Hey!” I spun around and came face-to-face with a woman staring into my eyes in a way that really creeped me out. She was hunched over, with an enormous multicolored shawl looped over her shoulders and over the top of her head, a tiny little face that you could hardly see because the shawl was spread halfway across it, and a pair of beady bright green eyes boring straight into mine.

  LIZ KESSLER is the author of the best-selling series about Emily Windsnap as well as the Philippa Fisher books. She decided she wanted to be a writer at the age of nine, when her first poem was published in the local newspaper. She has also worked as a teacher and a journalist. Liz Kessler lives in Cornwall, England.