thunder that shook the walls.

"Wow! That was close."

"A little too close." Her mom sounded worried. "Stella, you check over there."

"What's it look like?"

"It's usually just a small metal cabinet." Her mom scanned the clutter with her light. "Mounted on a wall somewhere." Lightning flickered through the dusty windows followed by waves of rumbling thunder. The rain was pouring down.

"Look at all this stuff." Stella's flashlight panned across a complicated collage of rusty garden tools, lawn furniture, old bikes, bait buckets, fishing poles, landing nets and tackle boxes. A large boat on a trailer took up all of the space in the middle, a green canvas canoe hung from ropes tied to the rafters, and deflated beach balls, air mattresses and animal-shaped swim toys were corralled in a corneryou in a few months," Torvald said as an afterthought, but George couldn't hear him; he was rowing out of Brilliant Bay and was already too far away.

# Flashes and Glints

The first thing Stella saw when she opened her eyes that morning was a pileated woodpecker hanging upside down from the roof eave. It was almost as big as a crow and had a red flame-top crest of feathers like a real punk-rock bird, and a long dagger-shaped beak perfect for drilling dead trees when it was hunting for beetles and grubs and other tasty treats. It kept switching the position of its head, jerking from side to side, looking at Stella with one eye and then the other, left, right, left, right, as if it couldn't quite