Feel the Fear

  ‘Ah, no Mrs Digby, that’s Clance’s toast.’

  ‘What?’ hissed Clancy.

  ‘Yeah, you see, he’s looking to put on a little weight so he’s eating double.’

  ‘Darnedest thing,’ said Mrs Digby, ‘almost looks like there’s words on this toast.’

  Ruby raced into the kitchen and took the plate from the puzzled housekeeper.

  ‘Must be your cataracts Mrs Digby, I don’t see a thing.’

  The message read:

  REPORT TO HQ IMMEDIATELY.

  A half-hour later, Ruby was standing in the Spectrum lab looking at the evidence: a small card in a little plastic zip-lock bag.

  ‘This is it?’

  ‘Uh huh,’ said SJ. ‘We are just conducting one more test before it’s all yours.’

  ‘What are you testing for?’ asked Ruby.

  ‘Toxic substances,’ said SJ.

  ‘What? You think it’s poisoned or something?’ said Ruby.

  ‘I doubt it but you never know.’

  ‘I guess you don’t,’ said Ruby. ‘Mind if I take a look at the card before you run your tests?’

  ‘Sure,’ said SJ.

  Ruby took the card out of the zip-lock bag. One side was entirely blank. On the other side was some kind of touch code made up of dots, some were punched into the card, and some were punched out.

  ‘Any thoughts?’ said SJ when Ruby handed the card back.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Ruby. The dots meant something, but without more code and ideally something to give context, there was no way to crack them.

  ‘OK,’ said SJ. She put the card back in the bag. ‘I’ll see what I can find.’

  ‘I might go grab a drink while you do your thing,’ said Ruby. ‘I could use something sugary.’

  ‘You know, some people consider sugar to be a toxin?’ said the young technician.

  ‘Yeah, my mom for one,’ said Ruby, ‘but it sure does taste sorta good.’

  Ruby was a little weary and was thinking a pep-up soda might be just what she needed. Unfortunately, however, she ran straight into Froghorn by the drinks machine and got into a little altercation with him.

  ‘This machine doesn’t dispense bottled milk,’ he said.

  ‘Strange,’ said Ruby, ‘because it seems to attract babies.’

  ‘You are so childish,’ said Froghorn.

  ‘You started it,’ said Ruby.

  ‘I started it? Me? You lowered the maturity level the second you stepped into Spectrum back in March.’

  ‘Wow, I managed to get it below your level, who knew that was possible.’

  ‘Don’t you miss the other crèche kids?’ asked Froghorn.

  The sound of fingernails tapping on metal caused Ruby and Froghorn to stop their bickering and turn around. What they saw was LB standing right behind them, her fingers drumming on the side of the fridge. They hadn’t heard her arrive due to her bare feet and almost silent footsteps.

  ‘I seem to have stepped into some dreadful version of kindergarten,’ she said, her nose wrinkled. ‘I found preschool unbearable the first time around, do not make me suffer it again.’ This was both a demand and a warning.

  Froghorn’s cheeks coloured pink; he did not like getting caught out, especially not by LB, the very person he so hoped to impress. Without another word the Spectrum 8 boss turned and continued her silent way along the corridor.

  By the time Ruby made it back to the lab she was feeling flustered. She had wasted a whole twenty minutes on nothing at all and now she was about to examine a piece of evidence that also offered little in the way of help.

  The lab technician had gone, but the little white card had been placed on the counter top underneath a bright Anglepoise lamp. A powerful magnifier was sitting next to it so she could examine the card more closely, but as it turned out she didn’t need to. It was perfectly plain to see that the card was no longer blank. What had been a small area of plain white was now dissected by thin black lines forming a sort of grid.

  Ruby picked up the phone and dialled.

  ‘Blacker,’ came the voice down the line.

  ‘It’s me, get yourself down to the lab, something just came to light.’

  Chapter 23.

  TWO MINUTES LATER, BLACKER WAS STANDING NEXT TO HER – he looked more dishevelled than usual, perhaps due to the sprint from the upper floor.

  He looked over Ruby’s shoulder. ‘Well I’ll be. . .’

  ‘It must have been the heat,’ said Ruby. ‘It was left under this lamp and I think that’s what did it. Boy I could kiss Froghorn.’

  ‘You OK Ruby?’ Blacker was looking concerned. ‘You sound like you might need to lie down.’

  ‘It’s a figure of speech, not actually, nah, you know what I’m saying, it’s just if I hadn’t gotten into this fight with him then I wouldn’t have left the card under the lamp so long and then it might not have reacted with the heat. . .’ She was staring intently at the card. ‘So what does it look like to you?’

  Blacker didn’t say anything for a few minutes and then broke the silence by saying, ‘Well, on the one hand it looks like how one might draw a window, you know, the rectangle shape with one line down the middle and three cutting across it like glazing bars making six panes of glass.’

  ‘And?’ said Ruby.

  ‘On the other hand it looks a lot like a loyalty card.’

  ‘Exactly what I thought,’ said Ruby. ‘So what if it’s both? The window image is telling us it’s the calling card of the thief who comes in through the window, and the grid markings are also telling us how many things he’s going to take.’

  ‘So why are the boxes all empty?’

  ‘You got me,’ sighed Ruby.

  ‘Give me a minute,’ said Blacker, he walked to the intercom and paged the lab technician.

  Two minutes later, SJ was back.

  ‘Something happened?’ said SJ.

  Blacker pointed at the card.

  SJ peered at it first with her eyes and then through the magnifier.

  ‘Very interesting,’ she said. ‘It reacted to heat, so you are wondering what else it might react to?’

  ‘Yup,’ confirmed Blacker.

  SJ wasted no time and began setting up various tests using a number of liquids – mild acids, alkalis, various other substances. Drop by drop they fell onto the card, but revealed nothing.

  Black light revealed more nothing.

  X-rays revealed nothing too.

  Same when they took the card to a dark room and dunked it in a developing bath, as if it was photographic paper.

  Finally SJ took off her goggles, peeled off her gloves and sat down. ‘That’s all I’ve got,’ she said with resignation. ‘Not sure what else I can throw at it.’

  ‘Looks like that’s all folks,’ said Blacker. ‘Rube, go on home and put your head on a pillow, we can look at this again in the morning.’

  It was disappointing to make one breakthrough with the grid lines, only to get no further, but since they had hit a dead end, they decided they all might as well head on home.

  Once back at Cedarwood Drive, Ruby watched some TV but she couldn’t concentrate. Her book wasn’t holding her attention either.

  Finally she gave up and went to bed. But – and not for the first time – she found it difficult to sleep; she just couldn’t turn off that brain of hers. She pulled out her notebook from the doorjamb and wrote down a couple of questions that she really needed answers to.

  The first being:

  If we are right in our theory that the thief is leaving loyalty cards in place of stolen items, then why has the Okras’ card been left blank?

  If this robbery is connected to the shoe theft, then why no loyalty card there?

  No answers were popping into her exhausted brain so she went down to the kitchen to find herself a snack. She made herself a pastrami bagel and while she ate she flicked through an ancient copy of the Whispering Weekly which she found in a stack of old newspapers that Mrs Digby used to protect
the table when she was polishing the silver. The Whispering Weekly was not a very entertaining magazine, unless you were a person who particularly enjoyed reading about other people’s misery, both public and personal.

  In this particular issue there was a feature on famous people who had been spotted wearing hairpieces – not hairpieces worn to add to the celebrities’ general glamour but hairpieces to prevent men from looking bald.

  Geez, thought Ruby, why contaminate your mind with this junk. She stuffed the gossip mag back in the pile and went back to her room to find something better to occupy her brain. What she chose to read was one of her encoding books, in the vague hope that she might stumble across some clue as to what this whole mystery was about. She climbed into bed with a copy of Sherman Tree’s Unlock My Brain and read until she nodded off.

  It was 4 am when Ruby’s eyes suddenly blinked open and she sat bolt upright, feeling around for her glasses.

  Quite out of the blue she felt an urgent need to get hold of the latest issue of the Whispering Weekly.

  Chapter 24.

  RUBY GOT OUT OF BED and pulled on the clothes that happened to be piled on her chair (her new jeans and a T-shirt announcing keep your distance.

  She crept downstairs, her satchel slung over her shoulder, tiptoed into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, took a quick slug of peach juice, called to Bug and then set off for Marty’s minimart.

  Ruby skateboarded along Cedarwood, Bug running along beside her, speeding together down Pecan until they reached the little store where four busy roads met. Sure enough, Marty’s had what she was looking for. Ruby paid for her copy of the Whispering Weekly along with one green apple and one blueberry slushy and some bone snacks for Bug, then she went and sat on the bench outside the store.

  Looking at the pictures of poor old Jessica Riley and the way the camera had revealed something the mere naked eye could never have seen, made Ruby believe in her theory all the more. But she was halfway through her slushy when tiredness took a hold of her – lack of sleep the night before had finally caught up. She placed the Whispering Weekly shock-horror journal under her head, curled up on the wooden seat and closed her eyes. Just a five-minute nap, she told herself. Her dog sat watching, never taking his eyes off her.

  She woke to the clank of Mrs Beesman’s shopping trolley. Today it was full of soup – cans and cans of the stuff – and two war-torn-looking cats.

  Bug’s fur stood on end, he was wary of one-eyed felines with chewed ears – they could be unpredictable: they had nothing to lose.

  Ruby rubbed her eyes and adjusted her glasses.

  ‘Hi Mrs Beesman, how are you this morning?’

  The dishevelled lady peered at her and grunted.

  Mrs Beesman had never said one friendly word to her, not that Ruby minded that. Today she appeared a little more cranky than usual, which might have something to do with the yellow paint sprayed in an arc across her shopping cart. There was even a little on the cat’s tail. It didn’t seem like the sort of thing she would have done herself, so Ruby figured it was vandals or bullies. Mrs Beesman tended to run into a lot of them.

  It was the first day of a new school year at Twinford Junior High, and Clancy was feeling sort of OK about it, not exactly eager for the new term but happy enough to put some distance between himself and recent past events of the summer break.

  As far as the happy stakes went, the summer had been a mixed bag. On the one hand, great weather, a few precious weeks with no school, and even more importantly, no Madame Loup, so that was good. It had been exciting solving a crime and saving an almost extinct wild animal from a miserable end, so yes, that had also been a plus.

  Less fun on the other hand was the being abducted and nearly murdered by psychopaths, which, combined with the almost being burnt alive by a ferocious forest fire, made the summer break far from idyllic and for obvious reasons it was this near-death experience that dominated Clancy’s impression of the vacation.

  He got to class a little early as he just about always did, sat down and cracked open his new graphic novel, Snoozer. The stories were ridiculous but very entertaining and Clancy felt an affinity with the main character, who was a bit of an underdog.

  Clancy wasn’t surprised when the school bell rang and still there was no sign of his friend. She would never be entered for any punctuality contest, and if she was, well then she would doubtless miss the start.

  Ruby finally strolled into her form room just as Mrs Drisco called, ‘Redfort?’

  ‘Present,’ Ruby called back, as she slid into her seat.

  ‘Barely,’ muttered Mrs Drisco, pen hovering over the absent box.

  But Mrs Drisco wasn’t in the mood to have a long drawn out back-and-forth with Ruby Redfort. It was the first day of a new school year and she didn’t want to start it on a losing streak.

  When the bell went for class the students spilled out of their form rooms into the corridor.

  ‘You look awful tired,’ said Clancy. ‘Something keep you awake?’

  ‘You could say that,’ yawned Ruby. ‘I’m trying to figure out something, something to do with the window thief.’

  ‘There are clues?’ asked Clancy.

  ‘There are always clues,’ said Ruby, ‘it’s just a matter of spotting them and then putting them together. I had a kinda brainwave at four o’clock this morning.’

  ‘This morning?’ said Clancy. ‘Before school?’

  ‘Impressive huh?’

  ‘For you, yeah,’ said Clancy, ‘morning isn’t really your time of day.’

  ‘Which is why I zonked out on the bench outside Marty’s.’

  ‘You were sleeping rough?’

  ‘Clance, falling asleep on a bench for two hours does not constitute sleeping rough.’

  ‘You feel like hanging out later?’ asked Clancy.

  ‘Yeah but nah, I have to get into Spectrum, work on my theory.’

  ‘So what’s the theory?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when I prove myself right,’ said Ruby. ‘Let’s just say it came to me in a flash.’

  Clancy was in a good mood all morning – he had so far been assigned all his favourite teachers and no Madame Loup. He felt there was something about this year that was going to be good – better than the last one anyway. At lunchtime, he queued up in the canteen and managed to get the very last slice of pecan pie. Yes, there was no doubt that this was going to be a good year for him.

  He took his tray of food outside to one of the wooden tables arranged under the trees.

  ‘Hey,’ said Del, ‘I haven’t seen you in a while. You been away?’

  ‘Nah,’ said Clancy, ‘just laying low.’

  ‘You need to lay low?’ asked Red. ‘Are you in trouble?’

  ‘No, nothing like that – more of a lifestyle choice,’ replied Clancy.

  Mouse looked at him. ‘I thought your dad didn’t approve of laying low.’

  ‘Or choices for that matter,’ said Del.

  ‘Yeah, well, normally no, but he felt I deserved some downtime since I passed my French exam and rescued those Wichitino kids from the forest fire.’

  ‘Quite the little hero,’ said Del, ‘did you get a medal?’

  ‘No, but my dad got me a bell for my bicycle,’ said Clancy. ‘He even had it engraved.’

  ‘Boy, he must have been really proud!’ she said. ‘What do you think he would have given you if you had saved a bunch of puppies as well as just those kids?’

  ‘Probably one of those little windmill things that you can attach to the handle bars,’ said Clancy.

  ‘Hey, you never said what you were doing out there in the first place,’ said Mouse.

  Clancy was knocked off his guard for only a second before he came back with a convincing enough answer. ‘Ah, it was just a coincidence really. I was mad at my dad and so I biked out to Little Bear Mountain, I was going to camp out, get some space to myself – I have five sisters, you know what I’m saying, but then the fire hit.’ It was part of the
truth but not the whole truth, yet they all swallowed it, because why not?

  Ruby and Elliot arrived, sat down and the six of them chatted on about vacations and heat-waves and anything else that came up.

  ‘So we should check out some of these film festival movies, huh?’ said Ruby.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Clancy. ‘I wanna see the Claw again, I mean it’s a classic, right.’

  ‘I think it’s lame,’ said Elliot. ‘The Sea of Fish Devils is the one to catch.’

  ‘Are you crazy, man?’ said Del.

  This was a conversation they’d all had over and over since the Twinford Film Festival programme had been announced. In fact, they were still in this exact same conversation as they approached the school gates at the end of the day when something quite unexpected happened. Elliot watched Clancy Crew’s face change from relaxed and kind of cheery to a mask of something approaching horror. He followed his friend’s gaze and instantly knew what the problem was. His eyes flicked back from the object of Clancy’s concern to Clancy. Neither of them said anything and no one else saw, not even Ruby who was busy rootling in her satchel.

  ‘You know what guys,’ said Clancy, ‘go ahead without me, I think I must have left my table-tennis bat in my locker.’

  ‘You’re holding it duhbrain,’ said Del.

  ‘Ah, no, not this one, my good one, I mean I thought I had picked up my good one but this is not it.’ Clancy was beginning to sweat. ‘See you tomorrow,’ he called as he ran back towards the school.

  ‘That is one seriously mixed-up kid,’ said Del.

  Ruby registered precisely none of this; she was far more concerned about making it back to Spectrum so she could test out her new theory.

  Chapter 25.

  WHEN CLANCY FINALLY DARED TO WALK OUT OF THE TWINFORD JUNIOR HIGH GATES, everyone had long gone. He took the bus back home and went straight up to his room. He sat down on his bed and took a deep, deep breath. What are you going to do about this Clance?