Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children - BOOCarz

nerves. The quiet made me anxious.
I fetched the extra key from its hiding place in the
bushes. “Wait here.”
“Hell I am. Why?”
“Because you’re six-five and have green hair and
my grandfather doesn’t know you and owns lots of
guns.”
Ricky shrugged and stuck another wad of tobacco
in his cheek. He went to stretch himself on a lawn
chair as I unlocked the front door and stepped inside.
Even in the fading light I could tell the house was a
disaster; it looked like it’d been ransacked by thieves.
Bookshelves and cabinets had been emptied, the
knicknacks and large-print Reader’s Digests that had
filled them thrown across the floor. Couch cushions
and chairs were overturned. The fridge and freezer
doors hung open, their contents melting into sticky
puddles on the linoleum.
My heart sank. Grandpa Portman had really, finally
lost his mind. I called his name—but heard nothing.
I went from room to room, turning on lights and
looking anywhere a paranoid old man might hide from
monsters: behind furniture, in the attic crawlspace,
under the workbench in the garage. I even checked
inside his weapons cabinet, though of course it was
locked, the handle ringed by scratches where he’d
tried to pick it. Out on the lanai, a gallows of
unwatered ferns swung browning in the breeze; while
on my knees on the astroturfed floor I peered beneath
rattan benches, afraid what I might discover.
I saw a gleam of light from the backyard.
Running through the screen door, I found a flashlight
abandoned in the grass, its beam pointed at the
woods that edged my grandfather’s yard—a scrubby
wilderness of sawtoothed palmettos and trash palms
that ran for a mile between Circle Village and the next