Chapter 11

After the other kids went to school, Caleb took Laura and me into town. We had to go to the school to take a placement test to find out if we had enough schooling to go into junior high. Caleb told them our cover story and that we had been home schooled our whole lives. He said that he could have continued it, but we wanted to go to regular school.

It took us 30 minutes to do the test. They said it should've taken at least an hour. We waited in the library while it was graded. An hour later the principal came out and asked if we minded taking the test again. We said no, it was fun the first time around.

Same thing happened, 30 minutes we were done. Hour later the principal came out and said we wouldn't be going to junior high school. Caleb asked him why and he said they were going to put us directly into high school. We got perfect scores on both tests. If it weren't for the fact that you have to have a high school diploma to go to college, he'd have sent us to the sate university in Reno or Las Vegas.

Caleb took us out for lunch to celebrate. Then he called dad when we got home. He wanted to know why dad didn't tell him that we were so smart. I guess dad's reply didn't sit to well with Caleb. He got this strange look on his face. Laura asked if she could talk to dad, so Caleb gave her the phone. Caleb asked me if I wanted to talk to him and I said no, I wanted to talk to Dean. I knew that wasn't gonna happen, so I asked Caleb about the cars outside.

Caleb told me that he wanted to fix them up so we could all have our own cars, but he never had time with all the training, homework, meals, and taking care of the horses. I asked him if I could work on them in my free time and he said I was more than welcome too, just don't blow up anything. That made me laugh.

After Lara got off the phone, Caleb asked us if we wanted to do some of the training like the other kids do. Laura said yes, she wanted to learn everything she could. She got this idea in her head that if we could show dad that we could handle ourselves on a hunt; he might come get us sooner. I went along with it because of Dean. He really liked doing it. I figured he and I could go out on our own when I got old enough.

Caleb grabbed the keys to the weapons shed and we went to the shooting range first. We'd never actually fired guns before, so he wanted to start there. He gave us each .45's and told us to fire them off at the targets. He was expecting us to ask him how to hold, aim them, and so on, but we didn't. Dean had told us how to do that already, so we just fired until the clips were empty. Caleb asked us if our dad taught us to shoot and we said no, our big brother did.

We spent the rest of the day doing stuff like that. Mostly with different hand guns, rifles, and shot guns. After we went through all the ones Caleb had, we went to bows. That was my favorite part. Caleb had to teach us to use them and there's about something bows that seemed more elegant to me at the time. Still does.

When the others got home we started the serious stuff. Run around the fence, pushups kinda stuff. Caleb said that we had to be able to run fast, dig graves, and use our brains if we were gonna be any good at the job. He ran us through all kinds of drills for about an hour. When that was done, the others went to do their homework while Laura and I helped make dinner.

After dinner, Caleb took us into his library. We each had to pick one book to read. He had everything from "The Key of Solomon the King" to "The Grimoire of Armadel." He figured having some of this stuff in our heads already would make it easier to do research on a case. Laura fell in love when she saw it all. We almost had to use a crowbar to pry her out of that room when it was time to go to bed.