The Sasquatch Escape (The Imaginary Veterinary) (14 page)

“We need to get out of here.” Pearl looked up at the sasquatch. “We’re going to take you home,” she told it. “Do you—?”

“Don’t ask it questions,” Ben reminded her.

“Right.” She broke off another chocolate chunk. “We can avoid the streets and sidewalks by cutting through the forest.” She handed the chunk to the sasquatch. It popped the chunk into its mouth. “Let’s go.”

S
ometimes I ride my bike back here,” Pearl explained as she led the way down an overgrown trail. “This path will take us straight to the factory.”

To Ben, a boy who had spent most of his life in the city and on the beach, the forest felt like an eerie place. The sun trickled through the leaves, casting weird shadows. Strange sounds rustled among the treetops. Dr. Woo’s guidebook had said that sasquatches live in the forest, and Ben could see why. If the sasquatch stood still, it would
probably look like a tree trunk and blend right in. But because it was following a girl who was feeding it chunks of chocolate, it didn’t blend in at all.

“Go easy on the chocolate,” Ben told Pearl. “We can’t run out before we get there.”

“I know, I know,” Pearl said as she handed the sasquatch another piece. The creature seemed perfectly happy stomping along, collecting the offerings. Ben was starting to get used to its nasty scent, the same way he’d gotten used to the scent of hamster droppings.

“You know what I don’t understand?” Ben said. “If this thing lives in the Imaginary World, then how did it get here? And where, exactly, is the Imaginary World?”

“When we meet Dr. Woo, let’s ask her,” Pearl said.

“You think we’ll get to meet her?”

“Sure. We’ve rescued the sasquatch. The least she can do is thank us. Maybe she’ll give us a cool reward.”

Pearl stopped walking. The sasquatch stopped
walking. Ben, who was trying to imagine what kind of reward might come from the mysterious Dr. Woo, bumped right into the sasquatch’s leg. “What—?”

“Shhhhh,” Pearl hissed, a finger to her lips.

The sasquatch put a finger to its lips and repeated, “Shhhhh.”

They’d reached the edge of the forest. The wrought-iron fence was across the street, and just beyond the fence stood the old factory.

“Oh no,” Ben said when he spotted the red wagon and the two people in their red overalls and red baseball caps. “It’s that lady and her daughter.”

“Mrs. Mulberry and Victoria Mulberry,” Pearl said through clenched teeth.

The Mulberrys peered between the bars of the locked gate. A wrapped present waited in the back of the welcome wagon, its glossy red bow sparkling in the sunshine. While Victoria yawned, Mrs. Mulberry glanced at her watch and paced. “Someone is sure to come in or out,” she told her daughter. “I want to meet this Doctor…Doctor…”

“Woo,” Victoria said, pointing to the sign that hung from the gate.

“I want to meet this Dr. Woo before anyone else meets this Dr. Woo,” Mrs. Mulberry said. “As president of the Welcome Wagon, it’s my job to know everything before anyone else knows anything.”

“She’s a worm doctor,” Victoria said, pointing to the sign again.

“I
know
she’s a worm doctor,” Mrs. Mulberry snapped. “I can read that she’s a
worm doctor
. What I want to know is, where did she come from? How long will she be staying? And, most importantly, what are her secrets? I must know her
deepest
secrets.”

“You are the best at finding out secrets,” Victoria said. “No one else in Buttonville can find out secrets the way you can.”

“It’s true, it’s true,” Mrs. Mulberry said. She stuck her thumbs under her overall straps and pushed out her chest. “I can smell a secret a mile away.”

“Drat,” Pearl said as she peered over a huckleberry bush. “If Mrs. Mulberry sees the sasquatch,
then she’ll tell the whole town. She’s the biggest gossip on the planet. How are we going to get past her?”

“I’m not sure,” Ben said from behind the same bush. “There’s no way we can sneak around them. I wish we had another fog bomb.”

Just as he said that, the sasquatch swatted at a fly, breaking a branch in the process. Victoria Mulberry spun around and looked through her superthick lenses toward the forest.

“Uh-oh,” Ben said. “I think she saw us.” Both he and Pearl grabbed the sasquatch’s arm and pulled it behind a tree. As they did so, the sasquatch snatched the last piece of chocolate from Pearl’s hand and ate it, wrapper and all.

“Mom, did you hear that?”

“Do not bother me, Victoria. I’m watching the front door.” Mrs. Mulberry squinted through a pair of binoculars.

“But something’s up there in the forest,” Victoria said.

“What?”

“I don’t know. But it looked big and hairy.”

“Is it Dr. Woo?” Mrs. Mulberry dropped her binoculars and called, “Yoo-hoo! Dr. Woo? Is that you?”

“And I think I saw Pearl Petal,” Victoria said.

“Pearl Petal?” Mrs. Mulberry yanked her baseball cap off her head. Her frizzy hair shot toward the sky. “We can’t let that troublemaking Pearl Petal learn Dr. Woo’s secrets before we learn Dr. Woo’s secrets!”

Pearl peered around the tree. “Here they come. What else do we have in that kit? What about the tranquilizer dart?”

“We can’t use that on a person,” Ben said. They couldn’t, could they? “Besides, we only have one dart, and there are two of them. All that’s left is the net.”

Pearl smiled wickedly. “Net?”

Ben set the Sasquatch Catching Kit on the forest floor and opened it. After pulling out the net, he read its instruction label.

It sounded easy. But Mrs. Mulberry and Victoria Mulberry were people, not sasquatches. “Uh, Pearl, I’m not so sure we should do this. What if Mrs. Mulberry gets mad?”

“Of course she’ll get mad,” Pearl said. “But that isn’t important. We have a sasquatch to save, remember?”

They both looked up at the sasquatch. It had found Dr. Woo’s guidebook in the kit and was thumbing through the pages. It grunted and pointed to a drawing.

“Yeah, that looks like you,” Pearl told it. The sasquatch grunted again. Chocolate specks glistened on its yellow teeth as it smiled. Pearl whispered to Ben, “It’s kinda like a big teddy bear.”

“Uh, it’s
nothing
like a big teddy bear,” Ben said, thinking that the last thing he’d want decorating his bed was a creature with greasy, moss-covered fur and itchy foot fungus.

Pearl reached up and freed a trapped beetle from the sasquatch’s chest fur. Then she cooed in a baby voice. “You’re a nice sasquatch. Yes you are.
You’re a very nice sasquatch. We won’t let those mean Mulberrys get you. No we won’t.” Ben rolled his eyes.

“Yoo-hoo!”

Ben clutched the net and took a long, deep breath. When his parents found out that he’d trapped the president of the Buttonville Welcome Wagon and her daughter in a net, they’d explode. But saving a sasquatch seemed a million times more important than anything else at that moment. So Ben reached around the tree and threw the net onto the ground. Holding tight to the cord, he held his breath as Mrs. Mulberry and Victoria hurried down the path.

I
t smells bad in here,” Victoria said. She pinched her nose as she hurried up the path.

“Do you see Dr. Woo?” Mrs. Mulberry cupped her hands around her mouth. “
Yoo-hoo!
We have a welcome present for you, Dr. Woo!”