October (12 page)

‘What is it?’ Boges asked.

‘Not sure,’ I said, slowly walking into the
living
area. ‘I can smell Mum’s perfume, I think.’ I spotted some familiar cushions and a rug from our old house. ‘Maybe it’s just Mum’s stuff.’

The scent of perfume got to me. It was making my chest ache, reminding me of happy, easy times. Times when I felt safe.

‘Sorry, what did you say?’ I asked, realising Boges had asked me something, twice.

‘Is that the smell you remembered catching a whiff of?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The scent you caught a whiff of before you were attacked at the funeral parlour—you said it was a familiar smell.’

‘No,’ I said, firmly.

Boges didn’t look convinced. What was he
trying
to say?

‘It wasn’t this smell, OK?’

‘OK. So where should we start? Here in the kitchen?’

‘Yep, you give that a go. Remember to check above the fridge, and I’ll try over here,’ I said, moving further into the living area and squatting in front of the low cupboards that ran along the wall, underneath the TV and sound system. ‘Keep a lookout for any unusual documents and any plastic storage bins with red lids, like the one we found in the mausoleum back in January.’

We worked silently and methodically, carefully going through every shelf at floor level, then standing and searching the mid-section of each room, before reaching up and tackling the high cupboards.

We moved through the ground floor, room by
room, including the study where I’d first seen that phrase scribbled in my uncle’s handwriting: ‘The Ormond Riddle?’ There’d been a big clean-up in the study since last time. The drafting board and shelf tops were bare.

In the small, windowless room down the back of the hall, which had mostly been used to store gardening stuff, I found three of Rafe’s red-lidded containers, all on top of each other.

I closed the door, switched on the light, sat down and pulled the containers towards me. I lifted the lid off the first one and began going through it.

I don’t know what I was hoping to find, exactly, but I was disappointed when nothing sparked my interest. The files inside mostly contained diagrams of complex protein and carbohydrate chains, botanical and chemistry notes—stuff I’d seen back in January. Other than that, there were a few wads of old receipts and tax returns. Nothing to do with the DMO.

The door behind me opened and I looked up to see Boges’s expectant face.

‘Nothing,’ I said, closing the containers and pushing them back into their original positions. ‘You?’

‘Nope. Nothing. I think we’ve covered the ground floor,’ said Boges. ‘Upstairs?’

At the top of the stairs Boges went one way, and I went the other. The first room I approached was Gabbi’s. I stood in the doorway and slowly took everything in.

Boges had told me, a while ago, that Rafe had converted two rooms into one—an entire wall had been taken out—so that Gab’s medical equipment could easily fit when they brought her home for care. But now, without the hospital stuff taking up space, it looked like Gab had herself the
bedroom
of her dreams.

She had a new big four-poster bed with one of those canopy things on top, with soft, white fabric falling down from it—the kind of bed you’d see in a story about a princess. In one corner stood a floor lamp that looked over a pink
bean-bag
and a mountain of cushions, next to a long bookshelf filled with her favourite stories, and a small desk. A plush rug sat in the middle of the room, and on the wall opposite her bed was a wide wardrobe and an ornate, white dressing table with a frameless mirror and matching chair tucked in front.

A million memories seethed through my mind as I noticed more and more familiar things. The well-loved teddy bears and dolls on Gabbi’s bed reminded me of a hundred stories.

Stuck on the mirror above her dressing table,
I found the funny cat cartoon I’d drawn and flown through her window. Impulsively I grabbed a black texta from a pencil case on her desk and added a top hat and curly moustache to the cat’s face. That would make her laugh.

‘Cal,’ called out Boges. ‘Check this out.’

I followed Boges’s voice down to the far end of the hallway. ‘What is it?’

‘Look around you,’ he said, shining his torch over the room we were in.

I did as he said and my jaw dropped.

It was my old room! It wasn’t exactly my old room, because we weren’t in Richmond anymore, but it was like my room had been picked up and carried here exactly as it had been. Suddenly I had this massive urge to just run and dive into my bed, wrap my old quilt around me, hug my
pillow
and shut my eyes.

Boges grabbed my shoulder, stopping me. ‘No, dude. We don’t want them to know we were here. Don’t touch anything. Just remember what we’re here for. You can’t take anything from this room, OK?’

I looked around at my things and frowned. A photo of me—my last school photo—sat on top of my pillow like a sad reminder. Every little thing I could see helped make up the pieces of me that were missing. The pieces of who I used to be.

But Boges was right. I couldn’t even take some fresh clothes out of my drawers.

‘I’m going to head for Rafe’s room,’ I said to Boges, as I walked away. I had to stay focused.

The place had changed a lot since I’d been
snooping through it way back in January. I found where Mum must have been sleeping—previously a spare room—recognising her hair brush and perfume bottle next to a messy pile of letters on the dressing table near the door. But the room looked strangely uninhabited, as if rarely used.

I flicked through the letters—mostly old ones from Dad, sent from his work travels overseas—and found an airline ticket near the bottom. It turned out to be Dad’s return ticket to Ireland, I realised, noticing the surname and last year’s date. Because of his illness, he’d been flown home as a medical emergency, and then hadn’t used the return fare paid for by his company—who were clearly expecting him to recover—because he
never
recovered.

Before I could think too much about it, I shoved it in one of the side pockets of my backpack, figuring no-one would know. It was some small link to Dad, and I wanted it.

Beside Mum’s perfume bottle stood another with a typed label on it, as if from a pharmacy. From what I could make out it was some kind of herbal tonic.

Lastly, Boges and I focused on Rafe’s room. Quietly we searched through drawers and
cupboards
, but our efforts weren’t producing anything worth noting.

Just before leaving Rafe’s room, I checked under the bed and found something that hadn’t been there before. I pulled the green suitcase out and opened it. It was jammed with endless botany notes. I sighed.

I lifted out a few of the folders and glanced through them. I was faced with more pages of diagrams about linked toxin proteins in different classes of bracken ferns. Nothing about the Riddle or the Jewel. Nothing about my family. I unfolded a faded piece of drafting paper that was almost stuck to the bottom of the case, and flattened it out on the bed.

It was a house plan. Across the top, in typed letters, the plan read: ‘Requested by: Tom and Winifred Ormond’, and over the top of that was a stamp that read ‘SALE APPROVED’.

Sale approved? I didn’t recognise the house—it definitely wasn’t our home in Richmond. My eyes scanned for some sort of familiar detail, but all that caught my eye was a red cross in one of the upstairs bedrooms.

I wasn’t there to look at house designs, so I folded it back up and returned it to the suitcase, then pushed it back under the bed.

It was then that I noticed something else under there, on the floor on the other side, near the bedside table. Mum’s beaded slippers.

Mum’s slippers?

I stood up, confused, and turned to Boges.
Suddenly
Mum’s old blue dressing gown came into focus, hanging on the back of the bedroom door.

‘Are you OK?’ asked Boges, staring at me as I shone my torch on Mum’s beaded slippers. ‘You—um—noticed the slippers and the dressing-gown?’ he said awkwardly.

‘She can’t be sleeping in here,’ I said in
disbelief
. ‘She can’t be. Right?’

‘I’m afraid it looks that way,’ Boges replied, frankly.

My mum was sleeping in the same bed as Rafe? It couldn’t be true. I was suddenly dizzy. I didn’t want to think about it.

‘We’ve wasted our time. There’s nothing here,’ I said. I realised Boges was clutching a small card in his hand. ‘What’s that?’

‘I found this in the rubbish bin downstairs. In Rafe’s office. It was right down the bottom with a whole lot of other stuff on top of it.’

He handed it to me. It was Ryan Spencer’s bus pass, the one I’d written ‘Who am I?’ on, and left in the letterbox.

Had Rafe found it in the mail and chucked it? Or had Mum thrown it away?

‘Better put it back where you found it,’ I said, handing it to him, but not before noticing that
Ryan’s birthday was next month. I heard
something
outside and tensed up.

‘What is it?’ asked Boges.

‘I heard someone pulling up in a car on the road outside,’ I said. ‘I’m going to take a look.’

I went down the hall and looked out into the front garden from upstairs.

I ran back to Boges. ‘A car with its headlights off has just pulled up in the street outside.’

‘They must have seen our torchlight. Let’s get out of here.’

We raced downstairs, knowing we would have to leave by the back entrance to avoid anyone coming in the front. Could it be Rafe, Mum and Gabbi coming home early? But why the stealthy approach, without lights?

Once on the ground floor, Boges tinkered with the security system—setting it up to restart in five minutes. We ducked out the back way, and returned the key to where Gabbi had hidden it. Keeping close to the wall, Boges and I slid around the corner.

Nothing stirred. No car followed. Maybe I’d overreacted.

24 OCTOBER

69 days to go …

 cal + boges, meet me at the clock tower, asap! winter.

I saw Winter before she saw me. Her wild hair was blowing in the wind and although she didn’t seem to wear so many drifty, floaty things these days, her boots and her way of walking made her stand out. She saw me and ran over to me, the locket—the one I’d helped her get back from her thieving ex-friend—jiggling on its chain.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked. ‘You look wrecked.’

‘Big night last night,’ I said, and quickly filled her in on the raid on Rafe’s house and the search through Mum’s stuff. Then I noticed Winter’s eyes, and how anxious and fearful she was
looking
. ‘What’s wrong
with you?
’

‘Boges will be here any second,’ she said. I could read in her face that she was dying to tell me something. ‘We may as well wait for him.’ Right on cue, Boges appeared at the top of the clock tower stairs. ‘There he is,’ she said, waving to him.

Once the three of us had huddled together in a quiet spot, Winter began to explain the urgent meeting. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I can’t give you much information just yet, but something really big is going down. With Sligo and his crew.’

‘You think he has the Riddle and the Jewel?’ I asked.

‘I’m not sure about that,’ she said, ‘but
something
’s
happened to change him. He’s racing around organising this big, last-minute meeting—a business banquet. He’s really on edge. I have to be very,
very
careful around him. Anyway, he’s never organised anything like this before. Something’s up.’

‘Maybe he wants to make a big splash—announce what
he has?
’ Boges suggested. ‘Get his name in the papers—in the social pages?’

Winter considered this for a few moments. The three of us were leaning across the parapet that ran chest high around the lookout.

‘Apparently he’s been on the phone practically non-stop, talking to people, organising the event.
From what I’ve overheard I have the impression that he’s trying to establish a connection between himself and Oriana de la Force.’

‘Oriana? But they hate each other,’ I said, frowning, remembering the way he’d spat on the ground at the mention of her, the first time I met him. ‘Why?’

She shook her head. ‘Maybe he wants to do a deal with her.’

‘Yeah,’ agreed Boges. ‘If he has the Jewel and the Riddle, he might want to get together with her so that the two of them can work on the Ormond Singularity. He already knows she’s his rival in this investigation, and there are little more than two months left. Or maybe he wants to team up with her so that they can both go after their
common
enemy.’

I pushed off the parapet and turned to Boges. ‘Common enemy, meaning me?’

‘Meaning you.’

My friends’ faces were very serious. ‘You really do seem to stand in the way of what they want,’ said Winter. ‘It’s quite clear that you’re the heir to some mysterious inheritance. For them to take it, you need to be eliminated.’

I swung round and looked out to sea.

Winter kicked some leaves away from the ground and sat down, cross-legged. ‘After you
two left last night I went over there,’ she said, ‘for a “swim”. I heard him ordering all this food from a caterer—entrees and mains, chocolate mousse puddings, wine and liqueurs—the whole works. When he got off the phone I asked him what the big occasion was, but all he said was that it was a very important meeting between two very important parties. Then I made a joke about him becoming a society hostess, and that’s when he involved me—he asked me to act as a kind of co-host to help him with it all.’

‘Wow, he must really trust you,’ I said, ‘to ask you for help with something like this.’

‘Guess so,’ she said, staring at her boots. Did she feel guilty because he trusted her?

‘He might want to make Oriana an offer,’ I suggested. ‘Find out just how badly she wants to get the Riddle and the Jewel back. How much she’s willing to pay for them.’

‘Sligo would never offer them to Oriana. He’s determined to crack the truth about the Ormond Singularity. That’s his
mission
. It has to be because of something else.’ She looked at me and I could see fear in her pale face.

She probably had fair reason to be fearful. Oriana was a beast, capable of unimaginable terror. But did Oriana know that the Jewel and Riddle—the contents we stole from her safety
deposit box—were fakes? If so, she’d be thinking that Sligo had just stolen them from her. But if Sligo had the
real
Riddle and Jewel, he must have intercepted them—stolen them—back at the funeral parlour.

‘I read a book about Chicago gangsters,’ began Boges. ‘They used to pretend to reconcile with their rivals and then they’d organise a big
celebration
dinner for them. Just when everyone was relaxing, eating and drinking, the machine guns would start going off! Maybe Sligo’s setting her up to get rid of her.’

Winter shook her head. ‘If Sligo was going to get rid of Oriana, he’d do it quietly. Why chuck a party and make a great big song and dance about it in his own home, with all those witnesses? No way. That’s not his style at all …’

Boges and I exchanged curious looks. Again Winter looked like she had more to say but was holding back.

She caught us glancing at each other. ‘Look, I’ve always known Sligo’s a bad guy, but
sometimes
you hope so bad for things to be different that you almost make it happen in your head. Anyway, a visit to the car yard overnight quickly demolished my stupid dream of Sligo ever really changing.’

‘What happened?’ Boges and I asked.

Winter sighed before speaking. ‘After I left Sligo’s I made my way to the yard. I was sneaking in when I saw Zombie Two pacing up and down, on the phone to Sligo. I could tell because he was all “yes boss”, “no boss”, “anything-you-say boss”. Then, after he hung up the phone he went over to the oil tank …’

‘
The
oil tank?’ I repeated.

‘Let her talk,’ said Boges. ‘Go on, Winter.’

‘He unscrewed the lid, reached in … and after a bit of fumbling … he dragged out a body.’

We were stunned into silence.

‘It shouldn’t come as a surprise to me
or
you,’ she said to both of us. ‘It could have been you, Cal, who he was fishing out. We all know what Sligo’s capable of, which makes the idea of him getting together with Oriana really scary. I’m worried about what might happen at that dinner. I mean, anything could happen and I don’t want to get caught up in it. Being there makes me part of it, and I do not want to be part of it.’

If Winter Frey was admitting she was scared, she must have meant it.

‘But then,’ she said after a pause, ‘being there could give me a chance to gather information—I’m sure I’ll overhear something that will help us with the DMO.’

‘So you’re going to do it?’ I asked, surprised.

‘Yes. I’ll do it for two reasons. One I’ve just told you—the intelligence gathering exercise.’

‘And the second one?’

‘The more I cooperate with him, the easier it is for me to get along with him. The easier it is for me to get along with him, the easier it is for me to keep looking for the evidence
I
need.’

‘Evidence?’ asked Boges.

‘I want to go back to the car yard, find my parents’ car again and thoroughly check it over. I also want to accept that my parents had good reasons for leaving so much of their wealth to Sligo, and for leaving
me
with him. I need to see their wills for myself. There’s this part of me that can’t believe they’d cut me out like that. But then again, Vulkan can be really charming when he wants to—and they could have believed he would be the best guardian for me.’

She sat close beside me, her head down,
fiddling
with her locket.

‘I was hoping,’ she continued, ‘that sometime during the banquet, when Sligo’s busy “
entertaining
” his guests, I might get a chance to go through his office—see if I can find copies of my parents’ wills.’

‘If you’re co-hosting,’ I said, ‘it’s going to be hard to slip away without anyone noticing.’

‘I know,’ she sighed. ‘Oh, that’ll be Miss Sparks,’
she said as her phone vibrated in her pocket. ‘Back in a sec.’

She wandered away to take the call and I quickly turned to Boges. ‘I have an idea,’ I
whispered
to him.

He shuffled along the ground, closer to me. ‘Let’s hear it.’

‘We’ve bugged Oriana’s office before, and we could do something similar at this banquet.’

‘With Winter’s help?’ he asked. ‘Is that what you’re saying—set her up with a wire?’

I nodded silently to my friend. He thought about it for a second, then he slowly nodded, too. ‘We can do better than that. How about if we could see as well as hear? How about we use a spycam? We could fix it somewhere hidden—they’re only small. I reckon I could fit it into her locket,’ he said slowly, looking over to where Winter was standing, still on the phone. ‘If I can get one of the new really tiny spycams.’

I saw the two worry lines on Boges’s forehead flatten out and his eyes get rounder as he caught hold of the idea and ran with it. ‘Dude, it’s all possible! We can sneak pictures as well as audio so that we see and hear everything that goes on. Just so long as Winter stays in the room.’