by June Whyte
What is he hiding?
Is he an egg smuggler?
Does he have a mean accomplice hidden somewhere nearby?
Why does the professor need a people-eating bull to keep trespassers away?
Do platypuses hatch looking like pink jellybeans?
Okay, most of these questions had been answered…sort of. But was I missing something? My gut feeling kept telling me the professor and his eggs weren’t as squeaky clean as he made out. Yet, his explanation made sense. Starting a native sanctuary by hatching the eggs was an environmentally friendly way to go.
Still deep in thought, I returned the notebook to the bag, picked up my riding helmet and crammed it on my head. Truth was—I didn’t really want to let go of the professor’s egg mystery. Deep down I didn’t want him to be a vet instead of a mad scientist.
How was I supposed to write another Rebecca Turnbull P.I. mystery when there was no mystery to solve?
*
Rebecca Turnbull tightened the belt on her pale peach trench coat. She slipped on a pair of soft leather gloves and strode out into the cold night-air, her fierce Doberman, Fang, panting at her heels.
She was bored.
Bored. Bored. Bored.
Her mobile phone wasn’t ringing. The police hadn’t contacted her for weeks. No convenient dead body had turned up on a park bench or in a cupboard or dropped from a tree.
Seriously, if she didn’t land a new case soon, she’d resort to buying a king-size container of double-chocolate-mud ice cream and sharing the tub with Fang…
*
I had three minutes to get ready for Kate’s group lesson. Taking extra care, I fastened Shakespeare’s tendon boots and stood up. Yesterday, one boot fell off as I trotted over the trot poles. Instead of blaming me, Kate blamed Noah for not showing me how to fasten the boots correctly. But it wasn’t Noah’s fault—he was a stickler for safety.
Funny thing, the more I had to do with Noah, the more I was able to put up with him. Okay he’d never be best friend material and was still Short Dark and Very Irritating, but he did have his good points. He was a mega-good teacher. So it beats me how the tendon boot just up and jumped off Shakespeare’s leg. Perhaps my mind had been on the professor’s eggs instead of on pressing all the Velcro straps down firmly.
Oh well, that wouldn’t happen again. My mind could now focus on the task of riding, because according to the professor, he was cleaner than a brand new pair of Billabong jeans. Although come to think of it…where had all his eggs come from in the first place? You can’t buy platypus eggs from the post-office—cockatoo eggs from the chemist—or lizard eggs from the library.
I still thought the professor was way weird.
But now it was time to surprise Kate with my new riding skills. Show her how much I’d improved since she’d first thrown me on Shakespeare and I’d fallen straight off the other side.
According to the notice on the communal bulletin board, today’s lesson was going to be all about ‘jumping into water’. Should be fun.
“Okay, let’s show everyone how to do it,” I told Shakespeare, kissing him on the softest, pinkest spot on his nose. His reply was to rub his head on the front of my shirt and then grab one of the buttons with his teeth.
“Hey, stop that!” Laughing, I pushed him away. I’d never seen Shakespeare looking so happy. Since he’d been out of retirement he was a different horse. I thought of Grandpa Ryan in the retirement home at Tanunda and swallowed a lump. Nothing to do—and all day to do it in. Lately, every time we visited him, Grandpa seemed older and more far-away.
With my helmet fastened under my chin, I led Shakespeare out of the stable block. First I tightened the girth one more hole, then, satisfied everything was secure, put my foot in the stirrup and swung up onto his back.
“Hi, Tayla.”
As my best friend rode toward me, I blinked. Her whiter than white, crisp cotton shirt and dazzlingly shiny riding boots had me squinting in the sun. Geez…a mere mortal like me definitely needed sunglasses around this girl.
When Tayla halted beside me I could see she wasn’t a happy little vegemite. Her face was the color of wet cement.
“You okay?”
“I’m going to be sick,” she moaned. “I am sooo scared.”
“Why?”
“What if I fall off in the water?”
“Come on, Tay, it’s no big deal. If you fall off, just shake the water out of your eyes and get back on again.” I grinned. “It’ll be cool.”
The color of her face didn’t change—evidently she didn’t get my pun. “I love riding Angel,” she said, her voice small, “but jumping’s way too scary.”
For someone who was terrified of spiders, bugs and seeing dead people, this didn’t surprise me.
It was weird, but I was actually looking forward to Cross-Country day. As well as riding bareback to strengthen my seat, Noah had shown me how to stand with a soccer ball between my legs. The trick was to keep squeezing the ball until you couldn’t squeeze any more. His theory was that the exercise strengthened the calves and thighs. Whatever. As long as it stopped me from falling off so much.
By the time Tayla and I rode across to the working arena, the other ten riders had straggled into a wavy line. Like a sergeant major Kate stood in front, legs apart, hands behind her back, fair hair covered by a battered old Akubra hat.
“Okay, class,” she said, lifting a ‘you’re late!’ eyebrow at Tayla and me. “Line up in your groups.”
We’d been divided into three teams on the first day of our holidays. Jack, Tayla, Sarah and I were the Super-heroes. The other two teams were the Sparticans and the Poppets. One led by Tim Mathers, a real cute fourteen-year old who looked like Leonardo de Caprio’s kid brother, and the other by Mandy Standish, a long-legged smiley girl who encouraged her team-mates like a cheer-leader, by yelling, ‘Hop! Hop! Poppets are on top!’.
Kate waited until we lined up behind our group leaders before continuing.
“Today you’re going to jump the water-jump,’ she told us. “But to get the horses warmed up, we’ll play a game first. I want every member of each team, one at a time, to canter slowly toward the other end of the paddock. When you hear me fire my starter gun, spin on the spot and gallop back here as fast as you can. First back gets ten points for his or her team. Right? Leaders first, then we’ll go down the line until everyone’s had a turn. The game’s called, ‘Bang and go Back!’ Any questions?”
“What if your horse breaks into a trot on the way out?” asked Mandy.
“You’re disqualified.”
“Why?”
Sarah, eyes rolling, butted in. “Because trotting is slower than cantering. If you’re trotting when the gun goes bang you’d be closer to the finish when we spin and that would be cheating.”
After an hilarious half hour spent yelling encouragement to our team members, cantering so slowly most of us got disqualified for breaking back into a trot, then spinning when the starter gun went bang and pretending we were jockeys galloping to the finishing line, we stopped for a break.
“Right,” said Kate after a ten minute rest. “Back on your horses everyone and walk quietly over to the Cross-Country course. I’ll meet you in front of jump number eight.”
The time had come to either jump or sit in the water-jump.
Kate instructed us to jump obstacles six and seven first before tackling number eight. “Don’t worry about the water jump,” she said. “It’s easy. Just use lots of leg, keep your pony straight, then pop over the log and trot out through the water on the other side. Simple as eating a Mars bar.”
Of course our team had to go first. I could see Sarah looking edgy. Probably couldn’t wait to show us what a star she was. Tayla’s eyes were glazed over like she was pretending she was at home reading a self-help book instead of sitting on a horse. Jack’s freckles stood out like beacons on a light-house. Me…I’d worked out a sure-fire plan. Close my eyes and leave everything to Shakespeare. I figured at
twenty four, he’d been around a lot longer than me, so if he didn’t know how to jump the log and splash through the water, I may as well go change into flippers now.
Naturally, Sarah made it look easy. She jumped six and seven as though they were poles on the ground, cantered up to the log, popped over into the water and trotted out again.
Grrrrrrrrr!
Fair dinkum, if Sarah didn’t lose that smug smirk in the next minute and a half, I’d be forced to secretly scrub the toilet bowl with her toothbrush.
I could see Tayla’s hands shaking on the reins as she walked Angel out of the line. Her eyes were huge. Her face had lost its wet-cement grey color but was now almost as white as her shirt.
“You can do it, Tayla,” I whispered. “Just hang on and let Angel do the work.”
Her jumping was shaky. It was scrambly. It was mega-slow. But at the end of three agonizing minutes, Tayla trotted back to the line, her smile wider than the Sydney Harbour Bridge. She’d made it around safely.
Jack’s plan must have been ‘the faster you gallop the sooner you finish’. I held my breath and watched him hurtle over the first two jumps then gallop toward the water jump as though chased by a sheriff’s posse. And then, at the last moment, his plan backfired. Ferret, his horse, screeched to a halt and dug its hooves into the ground, as though to say, ‘no way’, while Jack kept going—over the log and into the water. It was like a tidal wave hitting the shore.
Ka-splash
Okay…I’d learned from watching Tayla and Jack. Not too slow and not too fast. Somewhere in between. Teeth clenched, heart bumping like a car on a rough road, I headed Shakespeare for jump six, a fence made from old car tires.
Shakespeare broke into a comfortable rocking-horse canter and the jump was so smooth I hardly felt the lift before we were on the other side and heading for the wooden bridge and the little jump made out of forty-four gallon drums.
Back to a brisk trot for the bridge. As we clip-clopped across, I imagined the big bad troll dripping water as he poked his head over the railing and growled, “Who’s that tripping over my bridge?”
Of course I’d tell him it was only the Little Billy-goat Gruff and if he hung around for a little longer, there’d be lots more big fat tasty goats following me.
Once on the other side, Shakespeare cleared the drums with a kick and an arrogant flick of his tail.
Hey, this was fun…
Back into that lovely rocking-horse canter, I gathered up my reins and aimed him at the water jump.
Time to close my eyes and leave it to the horse.
It was like sitting on an active volcano. Shakespeare bunched himself beneath me and exploded into the air. Kaapow! Was it a bird or a plane or a Super-Cha? Okay, I lost both stirrups, clung on like a burr with my soccer-ball strengthened legs and wrapped both arms around Shakespeare’s outstretched neck to keep from falling off—but hey, what a feeling!
Opening one eye, I glanced down at the water far below. Not content with popping over the log into the water, Shakespeare jumped the log and the water in one bound. He landed like a cat, a good two meters on the other side, and slowed to an ambling trot, then to a shuffling walk and with a smug, Sarah-like-smirk, strolled back to his gob-smacked fans.
Kate was the first to recover.
“Oh you beautiful boy! You clever beautiful boy!”
While I slid my feet back into the stirrups, Kate threw her arms around Shakespeare’s neck. I could see tears trickling down her cheeks.
“You haven’t forgotten, have you?” Kate’s voice sounded scratchy. “Just like when you took me over that horrific water jump at the World Cup Show jumping finals in Switzerland.”
And then it hit me…
All those pictures lining the walls in Kate’s office of a beautiful dark grey horse called, ‘The Tempest’ leaping over huge fences with a young and pretty Kate aboard…
That was Shakespeare.
Grumpy, bony old Shakespeare was ‘The Tempest’.
THIRTEEN
That night I had a bad dream.
Or should I say a horrible freaky nightmare. You know, where everything that’s happening seems so real. Where your heart slams and crashes around like a trapped animal and threatens to burst through your chest. Where you try to call out for your mum but the only thing that comes out of your mouth is a skinny grey rat that gives you the evil eye then scuttles away to its hole.
Anyway…this dream started where I was cantering along on Shakespeare and we were both smelling the flowers and enjoying the sunshine. Everything was perfect—until we came across Professor Goodenough’s egg shed. For no reason at all, Shakespeare snorted in fright then took off in one of his huge sky-scraper leaps.
At the height of the jump, I looked down. It was totally weird. I could see through the roof of the shed to where all the professor’s eggs had suddenly sprouted wings. And there was Pedro, yapping like a squeaky wheel and having a great time running around on his cotton-reel legs playing chasy with the flying eggs.
Suddenly, from who-knows-where, this gigantic egg appeared. It split open with a bang and out stepped a baby dinosaur. Thick leathery wings. Fire hiccupping from its mouth. Smell like a rubbish bin. Then—in the time it took for Pedro to blink in surprise—the creature ballooned to the size of an elephant.
“Don’t touch Pedro, you great bully!” I screamed.
But it was too late. Like a giant vacuum cleaner, the dinosaur sucked the little dog down its throat.
My pulse racing and bucking in fear, I watched the monster lick his bloated lips and ever so slowly turn bloodshot eyes and dribbling grin toward me.
“Go Shakespeare!” I yelled flapping my legs on his sides.
Once again—I was too late.
I could hear Pedro’s frantic yapping as the dinosaur opened his mouth wide and sucked Shakespeare and me inside. The little dog wouldn’t stop yapping. He was racing up and down, banging into the dinosaur’s ribs and head-butting his liver…
And that’s when I woke up.
Not on my bed, but thrashing around on the floor, sheets twisted around both legs, pillow damp with sweat.
After untangling the sheets, I decided the nightmare must mean Pedro was in danger. Perhaps the professor was using him in some weird experiment. Perhaps he’d replaced the dog’s injured leg with a robotic one. Whatever…it was time to pay the professor another visit.
However, before I could check up on Pedro, I had my lesson with Noah to get through.
Strangely, this morning’s lesson went well. Noah kept giving me the thumbs up sign. Even yelled ‘Great!’ and ‘Good!’ a couple of times which almost made me fall off my horse in surprise. I guess his good mood had something to do with Kate lifting the ban on his riding after I’d managed to stay on Shakespeare over the water jump.
As soon as the lesson finished I went hunting for Jack. No way was I going anywhere near the egg-shed by myself. I needed my No.1 assistant to help scare away the nightmare.
But Jack had gone for a ride to Gawler River with his new mate, Tim Mathers.
Okay, my No. 2 assistant would have to come with me.
I found Tayla in our room putting the finishing touches to a hat she was making for Angel. She’d cut two holes in an old straw hat for the pony’s ears, added ribbon and plastic daisies to the crown, then glued purple sprinkles around the brim.
I dug up my sweetest smile and sat on the bed beside her. “That’s way cool,” I gushed. “Angel will love it.”
“You don’t think it’s too over the top for her do you?”
“Nah. The purple sprinkle stuff will definitely bring out the color of her eyes.” I widened my smile and cracked my fingers—then changed the subject. “You know how little Pedro hurt his leg?”
Tayla’s look was wary. “Pedro? The professor’s dog?”
“Yeah. Poor little guy.”
“What about him?”
“I think he might be in trouble.”
“And?”
&
nbsp; “I need to go see if he’s okay.” I grabbed her hand. “Please, Tay, come with me.”
Tayla pulled away and jumped off the bed so quickly, I had to hold onto the headboard to stop from bouncing onto the floor.
“No way! I’m not going anywhere near that crazy old man. And don’t try talking me into it, Chiana. Nothing you say will change my mind.”
“We’ll only stay for five minutes. Come on Tayla. It’s important. I really need to check on little Pedro.”
Tayla backed away as though I’d suddenly come down with rabies. “Watch my lips, Cha. N. O. You’d have to tie me up and drag me all the way to get me to come with you.”
She must have sensed I was considering her suggestion because she dropped onto the bed as though her legs wouldn’t hold her up any more.
“Come on, Tayla,” I persisted before deciding to change tactics. After all, I was desperate. “You owe me one.”
“Owe you? What for?”
“If my mum and Ken hadn’t gone on their honeymoon, where would you be right now?’
“Huh?” Tayla’s eyes seemed to glaze over in confusion.
“You’d be at home. Bored out of your brain. That’s where you’d be. Probably listening to your latest CD for the seven hundredth time.”
Tayla twisted Angel’s straw hat until one of the daisies fell off onto the floor.
“Instead of that,’ I continued, giving her my best hurt-friend look. “You’ve spent these holidays riding the sweetest pony at Treehaven.”
Ahaa…hit a nerve there.
“I’m right, aren’t I?” I continued relentlessly. “Admit it. So the least you can do in return is come with me while I take some black jellybeans to poor little Pedro and make sure he’s okay. Five minutes of your time. That’s not too much to ask of a friend, is it?”
“But—”
“And as for being afraid of the professor—why, he’s just a sweet old man who’s setting up a sanctuary for orphaned animals.”
“Er…well…”
Mission accomplished.
However, ten minutes later, when Tayla sighted the rolls of razor wire and realized I expected her to wriggle underneath, I had an even bigger battle on my hands.
