PEARL BUTTON'S ADVENTURE HOUSE Middle grade fiction, for readers age 8 and up. 316 pages. 53,005 words. Twelve-year-old Pearl Button's life is going just fine, until her father buys them a house in the middle of nowhere, sight unseen. Now Pearl has to try to make new friends in a small town where people think the house she lives in is haunted, she's a witch, and her black cat is possessed. And when the annoyingly perky real estate lady who sold them the house shows up, offering to help, Pearl wonders what she's really up to. CHAPTER 1 M y dad’s name is Bennet Button. Not to be confused with Benjamin Button, the guy in the movie who was born old and grew younger as the years went by—though my dad sometimes says it would be nice if life worked that way. My dad’s an architect. He designs new things and redesigns old things. Houses, office buildings, small libraries. Stuff like that. Says it’s what he was born to do. There are a couple of mini-malls in our city he helped sketch the plans for. Every time we drive by one of them, he points and says, “That’s mine.” They’re not really his, and I’ve said that to him almost as many times as he’s claimed they are. I finally gave up. He can say they’re his if he wants. He smiles when he says it, and I like seeing him smile. I had a great-grandmother named Pearl Justice who lived in Kentucky way back when. That’s how my mom always used to say it. Way back when. But she never told me when when was. I guess she meant it was a long time ago. Great-Grandma Pearl made her living a bunch of different ways. When she was young, she worked in the fields, harvesting crops for the local farmers. When her sore knees kept her from doing that any longer, she became a seamstress, mending torn coats and replacing buttons on shirts and patching worn-out blue jeans for the kids who lived on her side of the mountain. Later in life, she baked. Cookies and pies and all kinds of desserts that she sold at church bazaars and flea markets and a roadside stand in front of her house. Great-Grandma Pearl helped raise my mom, teaching her how to farm and how to sew and all about the important things in life, like family and friends and connecting with nature. She even shared her prize-winning cookie recipe with her. My mom loved her grandma Pearl so much, she named her first and only daughter after her. That’s me. I’m Pearl. Pearl Button. So I guess when you want to honor a loved one’s memory, you have someone else carry on their name. It’s sort of a way of keeping them around. So I named my cat Cloe. After my mom. She’s been gone two years now. My mom had a problem with her heart. The doctors said it was something she was born with, and two years ago, shortly after my tenth birthday, it just stopped working. My dad says the real problem with my mom’s heart was that it was too big. That she loved everyone until they gave her a reason not to. Sometimes even after that. And she wanted to adopt every stray cat she saw, but she was allergic, so we couldn’t take in any animals. About a month after the funeral, a black cat showed up on our doorstep. She sat there for the longest time, looking at the house. Not scratching. Not meowing. Just looking. When my dad opened the door, she paraded right in and curled up on the living room rug, right at my feet, like she owned the place. I pleaded with my dad for an hour to let me keep her. “You know she can’t stay, Pearl-girl,” my dad kept saying. He calls me that sometimes. Pearl-girl. Mostly when he’s trying to win an argument. Sometimes for fun, because it rhymes. I can’t always tell which way he’s using it. “We don’t allow cats in this house.” “Please, Dad,” I said. “I promise to take good care of her. She won’t be any bother to you at all.” “We don’t need a cat,” he said. “I do. For company when you’re away. And look at her. She's so beautiful. I love her already.”