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The Copycat House
(formatted to Marketplace specifications; tested and approved by 3 Middle-School children)

Suspects:

Henry
Harriet
Jim
Bo's friends

One day, my neighbor Nana Rose telephoned to say she needed to talk to me. I hung up the phone and skated down to her house. Even though she's a 72 year-old proper, Southern lady, and I'm a shaggy-haired skateboarding dude in middle school, Nana and I are pretty good friends.

"There's my skateboarding friend," Nana Rose smiled when she answered the door. "My son Henry wanted a skateboard so badly when he was young. I guess I was just too afraid he might hurt himself."

"So, what's the problem, Nana?"

"Well, Bo, it seems my house is 'copycatting' my dollhouse," she said, as I came inside.

"What do you mean by...." my voice trailed off about the same time that my nose caught a whiff of something screaming, "I'm delicious!" It's not my fault, you know. When my nose smells food, it begins talking to my stomach. Then, my stomach and my nose start talking to my brain, asking it to go find the source.

Nana must have noticed the business meeting going on between the various voices in my mind, because the next awareness of reality I had was the reality of Nana handing me a plate of chocolate chip cookies, along with a tall, cold glass of milk.

After a few cookies, I was able to concentrate. We walked into the parlor to look at her dollhouse, a gift from her father. The cool thing about the dollhouse was that it was an exact replica of Nana's house: everything in the dollhouse had an identical twin in Nana's real house.

"Why is the tiny light fixture over the breakfast table broken?"

"Well, actually, that fixture is the first thing that went wrong. I noticed it for the first time one morning last week. My son Henry has always been able to fix any major repairs on the dollhouse, so it didn't really concern me. But then, I went into the kitchen for coffee, and the fixture over the real breakfast table was broken!"

"Whoa, dude....I mean, Nana! That must have totally freaked you out!"

"Not really, 'dude'," Nana smiled, "When you're as old as me, there's not much left that you haven't seen. Coincidences happen."

Nana saw me playing with a miniature skateboard in the dollhouse. Pointing to a real skateboard propped in the corner, Nana Rose said, "I actually saw that one first, when my foot hit it at the bottom of the stairs yesterday. It would have been a nasty fall if I hadn't been paying attention. I came in here to sit down for a minute, just

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