Dawn Stewardson Read Online Free Page B

sorted out.”
    “No,” Sully said firmly. “It’s me who has to sort it out, not you, so you’re leaving on Saturday as planned. I’ll bet your relatives have a ton of things organized for your visit.”
    “Well…you’re probably right,” Otis admitted. “They usually do.”
    “Exactly. And you both need a break from here. So you’ll go and have a good time, and by the time you get back, I’ll have other funding lined up.”
    “Sully…what if that doesn’t turn out to be easy?”
    He shrugged, trying to look as if that possibility wasn’t worrying him at all. “You know the answer as well as I do. If we don’t have funding, the authorities will shut us down just as fast as they can find new placements for the kids. But that’s not going to happen. It’s just a matter of figuring out…” He paused, hearing a noise on the other side of the door.
    “Sully?” Billy the Kid called a second later. “Okay if I let Roxy in there? I think she wants a drink or somethin’.”
    “Yeah, sure,” he absently called back.
    The door swung open from the lodge’s main lounge—which these days served as a family room—and Roxy lumbered in. At a hundred-and-twenty pounds, with a rottweiler mother and a Saint Bernard father, she wasn’t a dog who normally moved very fast.
    “Is dinner gonna be soon, Mrs. Plavsic?” Billy asked politely.
    She nodded. “Half an hour or so. Can you last till then, or would you like an apple?”
    “No, I’m okay, thanks.”
     

    A FTER B ILLY HAD BACKED out of the kitchen and shut the door again, he realized he was shaking. He was almost afraid to believe they hadn’t known he’d been standing there listening. Sully was always suspicious about stuff like that.
    Turning to the rest of the kids, he whispered, “That was close. I told you not to make any noise. They mighta caught me.”
    “So what was they sayin’?” Freckles asked. “What happened in New York?”
    Billy nodded his head in the direction of the bedrooms. If they stood here talking, they’d get caught for sure. He started off across the lounge, glancing back to make sure the others were following. They were, of course. He’d been at Eagles Roost the longest, so that kinda made him the leader.
    Besides, he was twelve, so he was oldest. Freckles was eleven. And the terrible twins, Tony and Terry, were only ten. And Hoops…well, Hoops was twelve, too, but he never said much unless it was about basketball. So when something was happening, it was Billy the Kid everybody mostly listened to.
    And they were really listening to him about this, ’cuz if he hadn’t been practicing up on his detective stuff they wouldn’t know nothing ’bout what was going on. But after he’d snuck into Sully’s office the other day and read that letter, he’d told the rest of them that the rich lady wasn’t giving the chief eagle any more money to run Eagles Roost.
    He led the others into the room he and Hoops shared, and plopped down on his bed. Hoops grabbed his basketball and started slapping it back and forth between his hands, but the rest of them just stood waiting.
    “So?” Freckles asked. “What’d they say?”
    Billy shrugged. “The chief eagle said he couldn’t make her change her mind. She just ain’t goin’ to give him no more money.”
    The twins looked at each other, then Tony said, “So what’s gonna happen to us?”
    “We’ll hafta go someplace else,” Freckles muttered. “That’s what’ll happen to us.”
    Terry looked like he was going to start crying, but Tony gave him a sharp jab in the ribs that kept him quiet.
    “I don’t wanna go no place else,” Hoops said.
    His dark face almost never showed what he was feeling, but right now Billy could tell Hoops was scared. It made the flip-flopping in his own stomach even worse. He was scared, too, but he couldn’t let the rest of them know. Leaders weren’t supposed to get scared.
    “We don’t wanna go no place else, either,” Tony said.