The Mum Mystery

by Gwyneth Rees

  She looked at me scornfully. ‘You told Nevada about the school sign – and she told me. And I actually saw Matthew and his mate painting Uncle’s Frank car. I mean, how dumb is that? At least when I did it I made sure nobody was about! And I used paint that would wash off.’

  ‘But . . . but why?’ Matthew blurted.

  ‘Why do you think?’ she hissed.

  And of course it was obvious then – at least it was to me.

  ‘Because I don’t like being used and tossed away like some piece of garbage,’ Carys told him angrily. ‘You asked me out on that date just so that you could make your old girlfriend jealous. Nevada told me all about your little plan afterwards.’ She glowered at me then. ‘I hear you had quite a lot to do with it too.’

  I blushed. Nevada had said that Carys would get over my brother dropping her – but clearly she was wrong. ‘It was Nevada’s idea, not mine!’ I protested, but Dad gave me a sharp look and I quickly stared at my shoes.

  ‘Matthew,’ Dad said sternly. ‘Explain, please.’

  ‘Well . . . it . . . it’s true that I did want to make Jennifer jealous . . .’ He was flushing guiltily. ‘But I didn’t think Carys would mind so much.’

  ‘You didn’t think I’d mind?’ Carys snarled. ‘What are you? Some kind of moron?’

  ‘That’s still no excuse for doing what you did, Carys,’ Mr Stevens put in quickly. He turned to Dad. ‘The two of them are as bad as each other, wouldn’t you say?’

  Dad ignored him and asked Carys a few more questions. Apparently she’d taken the red paint from Mr Stevens’s garden shed, and I was right about her having planted the paint pot and brush in our garage to incriminate Matthew.

  ‘I haven’t heard you apologize yet, Carys,’ Mr Stevens told her. ‘That’s what we came here for, in case you’ve forgotten.’

  ‘Yeah, well I haven’t heard him apologize yet either,’ Carys retorted, glaring at my brother.

  Matthew looked angry. ‘I don’t see why I should – you’ve done worse than me.’

  ‘Well you started it! You know I really enjoyed it when your dad brought you over to our place and made you apologize. You looked so ashamed of yourself – quite right too. It’s a good job your dad’s so strict with you, because you obviously need it.’

  ‘You can talk!’ Matthew exclaimed indignantly.

  ‘OK – that’s enough, both of you!’ Dad said sharply, and Mr Stevens clearly thought so too, because he hastily suggested that it was time he and Carys left.

  As Dad showed them out, Carys was the last to leave the room, and on her way to the door she paused to pull an envelope out of her pocket. ‘Here,’ she said, tossing it to me. ‘It’s from Nevada. She had paint on her hands when you saw her because she was trying to grab the paint pot off me. She’s pretty mad at you for thinking she did it.’

  ‘Tell her I’m sorry,’ I mumbled.

  ‘Tell her yourself. She might even still want to be friends with you. She’s pretty weird that way.’

  Luckily Matthew was fuming too much to bother to ask what was in the envelope, and I had stuffed it unopened into my pocket by the time Dad came back into the room.

  ‘It’s not fair, Dad,’ Matthew burst out immediately. ‘She’s the one who did something wrong and I’m the one everyone’s having a go at.’

  Dad looked exasperated. ‘What she did was wrong, Matthew – but quite frankly I can see why she wanted to get her own back. I mean, do you really think that’s the right way to treat girls?’

  ‘See what I mean? Now I’m the one in trouble! It’s not fair!’

  ‘Look, calm down and just listen, will you?’ Dad said firmly, and I could tell he was getting all geared up for a major father-and-son talk.

  I decided now would be a good time to leave them to it. Besides, I still had to open Nevada’s letter.

  I felt incredibly nervous as I sat on my bed and undid the envelope. There was a sheet of paper inside, with something written on it in Nevada’s neat handwriting. It said: Your mum wants to meet you at the end of the pier in Brighton on 21st November – that’s what the message means. But you can’t tell anyone or she won’t be there.

  I stared at the note, starting to feel my spine tingle. The twenty-first of November was this Saturday – three days away. But my mother couldn’t really be there to meet me – that was just crazy. I mean, OK, so Nevada was clearly talking about her spirit form – but that was still impossible.

  Or was it? I looked at my mother’s photograph and I could almost swear that her eyes were smiling at me just a tiny bit more than usual. Of course, I was probably just imagining it, but still . . .

  I was convinced that everything was going to be fine as soon as Dad phoned Lizzie – but it turned out that it wasn’t.

  When he eventually managed to call her, Lizzie wasn’t at home, so he tried her mobile. She answered that, and he found out that she had gone to stay with a friend for a few days.

  ‘But what about her job?’ I asked when Dad told us.

  ‘I think she’s taken some leave.’

  ‘Pulled a sicky you mean,’ Matthew quipped.

  ‘I don’t know about that, but she won’t be back until the weekend. Then she says she’s got something to tell us.’

  ‘What?’ I asked, getting a sudden tight feeling in my chest.

  ‘I hope she’s not going to dump you, Dad,’ Matty said, sounding worried, ‘though I guess if she was, she wouldn’t say she had something to tell all of us, would she?’

  ‘She might,’ I said, frowning. Lizzie is a lot more sensitive than Dad, so she’d probably realize that by dumping him she’d really be dumping Matty and me as well.

  ‘Yes, well, let’s try not to speculate too much at this stage, shall we, guys?’ Dad said drily.

  But I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and the more I thought, the more worried I became. On Friday when I got home from school (our school doesn’t do detention on Fridays, so Matty was home too), I went to the cupboard and my gaze fell on a fresh packet of loose-leaf China tea. Lizzie’s the only one in our house who drinks anything other than tea bags, so I guessed it must be hers.

  That was what gave me the idea, and before I had time to change my mind, I was opening the packet of tea and getting out a suitable cup. My tea-leaf reading had proved true before, hadn’t it? So maybe if I did it again it would tell me what was happening with Lizzie.

  I put a spoonful of the loose leaves into my cup and, when the kettle had boiled, I poured the water on. I drank it slowly, until only about a teaspoonful of liquid was left, then I held it in my left hand and moved it in a circle three times in an anticlockwise direction. And while I was doing that I concentrated as hard as I could on my question.

  When I reckoned I had waited long enough, I turned the cup over on to the saucer and left it there for a few minutes to let the liquid drain away. Finally I took hold of the cup’s handle with my right hand, turned it upright again and peered down at the pattern the tea leaves had made.

  I stared at them for a long time. There were two main areas on the cup where the leaves had settled, but I couldn’t make out a picture in either one of them.

  If only Nevada was here, I thought.

  I found myself going over to our front window, still holding the teacup. I could see lights on in the Stevens’s house. Mr Stevens’s car wasn’t in the drive, so I figured now might be a good time to go over there and apologize to Nevada. Of course, she might not want to speak to me, but it was worth a try. After all, she had sent me that message via her sister, so it was possible that she wasn’t as angry with me as I thought, even though we had been avoiding each other at school.

  I sneaked out of the house without telling Matthew where I was going, and rang the Stevens’s front doorbell, clutching the teacup in my right hand. (I had been careful not to transfer it to my left one in case that ruined the reading.)

  Carys answered the door. ‘Oh, it’s you.’

  ‘I need to speak to Nevada, please
. Is she in?’

  ‘Yeah, but I’m not sure she’ll want to speak to you. NEVADA!’ she yelled up the stairs. Then she disappeared into the living room and slammed the door.

  Nevada came to the top of the stairs and peered down at me.

  ‘Nevada, I’ve come to say I’m sorry I accused you of painting that police car,’ I said at once. ‘And I don’t think you and your mum are frauds. And . . . and I wondered if you could help me read these tea leaves.’ I held up the cup so she could see it.

  ‘You’re doing another reading?’ She sounded surprised.

  ‘Yes, but I can’t make anything out.’

  She was descending the stairs now, with a smug expression on her face. ‘I thought you didn’t believe in psychic stuff any more.’

  ‘I just got a bit freaked out by everything, I guess. But there’s something going on with Lizzie and I really want to know what it is.’

  She reached the bottom of the stairs and told me to twist the cup round for her to have a look inside. ‘There are two connected pictures,’ she told me after she’d stared at the tea leaves for a minute or two. ‘There’s a horse’s head there, see – and that black clump behind it is a carriage. And over here you can see lots of shapes that represent people. And there’s a long rectangle – that always means a coffin.’

  ‘A coffin?’ I was horrified.

  ‘Yes – one picture is a hearse and the other is a funeral.’

  ‘That can’t be right!’ But as I stared into the cup, I started to see what she meant.

  At that moment the front door opened and Nevada’s aunt walked into the hall – and before she had time to ask me what I was doing there, I rushed past her and out of the house.

  As soon as I got home I held the cup under the kitchen tap until all the tea leaves had rinsed away. But I still felt terrible. Lizzie couldn’t be going to die! And suddenly I had a truly awful thought. What if that was the thing that Lizzie was about to tell us? I mean, what if she had just found out that she had a terminal illness or something?

  I quickly told myself that couldn’t be true. If Lizzie was ill then she’d be losing weight or going to lots of hospital appointments or something. The hearse and the funeral must mean something else.

  Just then the phone rang and I picked it up straight away, guessing it might be Nevada.

  I was right. ‘You’ve got to go to Brighton on November the twenty-first, Esmie. That’s what that reading means. It’s your mother’s spirit letting you know that if you don’t go, something terrible will happen.’

  ‘But November the twenty-first is tomorrow,’ I said.

  ‘You have to go.’ She lowered her voice. ‘I’ll come with you if you like – I can tell my aunt and uncle I’m going over to your place for the day.’

  My hand was shaking when I finally put down the phone. I knew how to get to Brighton because Dad had taken Matthew and me there lots of times before, but still . . . only a mad person would agree to what Nevada had just suggested.

  The next day was a Saturday, and luckily Dad was working, which meant that Matthew was looking after me.

  ‘I don’t mind if you want to see Jennifer today,’ I told my brother as soon as Dad had left. ‘I’ll stay in and watch TV and I won’t tell Dad you went out, I promise.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s a bit risky. Maybe I should just get Jennifer to come round here for a bit.’

  ‘Why don’t you go round to hers? Her dad works on a Saturday, doesn’t he? Then I can ask Holly to come over, and we won’t all be fighting about what to watch on TV.’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘Go on, Matty. The two of you are always hanging out here. You don’t want her to get bored with you again, do you?’

  That seemed to do the trick. ‘Well, I suppose you’d know where I was if anything happened. And I guess Dad wouldn’t find out if I took her tenpin bowling before she goes to work this afternoon, would he? She’s been going on about wanting to do that.’

  ‘Why don’t you go round there now? You can spend the whole day with her if you like. I don’t mind.’

  I waited until he had left, then I wrote him a note telling him I’d be back by the time Dad got home, because I guessed he might return to the house before I did and panic when he found me missing. Then I put on my warmest coat, scarf, hat and gloves, and headed for Nevada’s house. She must have been looking out for me, because she opened the front door as soon as I got there.

  ‘I’ve told Aunt Ruth we’re going to the park and then going back to your place,’ she said. ‘Have you got your mobile with you?’

  I nodded. ‘But I’m switching it off in case Matty tries to ring.’

  ‘Carys has been asking a lot of questions. I think she knows something’s up, so we’d better hurry.’

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘I know a short cut to the station.’

  Dad had taken Matty and me to Brighton by train on a number of occasions because it was so convenient. You can travel from our local station to London Victoria in just under an hour, and then get another train directly to Brighton. You can also buy a ticket for the whole journey at our local ticket office, which means that when you arrive in London, all you have to do is look at the Departures board and find out which platform the Brighton train is leaving from.

  Our plan was to spend a couple of hours in Brighton – during which time we would visit the pier. Then we would catch the train back, and with any luck be home by the time Dad got in at six. Nevada had told her aunt that she was staying at mine all day, so hopefully nobody would come looking for her.

  The first thing that went wrong happened before we’d even set off. We had bought our tickets (I had spent all the money I’d been saving up for Christmas) and I had left Nevada on the platform while I went to use the Ladies’ Room.

  But when I came back afterwards, Carys was there.

  ‘She followed us from the house,’ Nevada explained crossly when I joined them. ‘I’ve told her we’re only going a couple of stops on the train and that we’re visiting one of your friends, but she’s kicking up a big fuss about it.’

  ‘You told Aunt Ruth you were going to the park. You can’t just take off somewhere completely different.’ Carys was glaring at her sister. ‘She’s already upset enough with me as it is, and if you do this, she might change her mind about letting us stay. And there’s no way I’m going to live in Saudi Arabia.’

  ‘Esmie, maybe we should leave it for today,’ Nevada said apologetically.

  ‘But I can’t,’ I said, surprised by how strongly I felt about it. ‘Anyway we’ve already got the tickets. Look, I’ll go on my own and I’ll let you know what happens.’

  Nevada looked shocked – as if she hadn’t expected me to want to go to Brighton without her – but I knew that for me there was no going back.

  I must have been in a sort of daze for most of the journey, because I can hardly remember any of it now. But I do remember how I felt when I finally walked out of the station in Brighton. I felt very scared and very cold.

  It was really windy, especially when I got to the seafront, and it was a much longer walk to the pier than I remembered. Last time I’d been there it had been summer, and Dad had bought us ice creams, which we’d eaten sitting on deckchairs looking out to sea. Today I had my duffel coat buttoned up to my neck and woolly tights on under my jeans, and I was still freezing.

  When I finally got to the pier, I stood at the entrance, thinking how different it must have looked when my mother was a girl. There were a few people outside on the pier walkway, though I guessed most were inside enjoying all the amusements. Slowly I started to walk along the promenade towards the far end of the pier, and as I passed the section where most of the rides were I remembered the last time I’d been there when I’d had a go on the big helter-skelter and the dodgems. I passed a shop selling ice creams and went in and bought a Mr Whippy with strawberry sauce. It was windy and the ice cream soon started to drip all over me.

  There was no one at the ver
y end of the pier when I got there, although there was a seagull perched on the railing, and for a creepy moment I let myself imagine that the seagull was my mum – or at least her spirit come back to visit me in bird form. But several more seagulls soon appeared, all of them shrieking and flapping their wings, and I soon went off that idea.

  I had brought the message my mother had written and now I took it out of my pocket, clutching it tightly to make sure it didn’t blow away. It seemed to me that I had done everything correctly. It was the twenty-first of November (the special date), I was on the pier (the special place) and I was holding a whirly ice cream (the secret sign). Plus my own name was the secret password.

  I stood there, facing out to sea, with the wind whipping round me, letting the ice cream run down on to my hand. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine my mother as she looks in the photographs we have of her at home. Maybe if I concentrated really hard on visualizing her face, something would happen.

  But the only thing that happened was that I started to feel an incredibly achy longing-for-someone-who-isn’t-there sort of feeling, almost as if my mother had only just died.

  I waited at the end of the pier for a whole hour, and by that time I had given up hope that anything out of the ordinary was going to occur. In fact I was starting to feel really stupid, and home felt like a very long way away. I looked at my watch and realized I would have to leave soon if I wanted to have any chance of being back before Dad.

  And that’s when something really weird happened.

  A dog came running towards me, barking. It was a brown spaniel and someone was calling after it, ‘RUSTY! Come here!’ Then a lady in a bright red headscarf appeared, and the dog turned and ran back to her, and they both walked away along the pier together.

  I stared after them. Rusty was the name of the dog in the Mysterious Four Club.

  It was then that I heard someone calling my name. At first I thought I was just imagining it, but then I heard it again. It was a female voice – difficult to hear clearly above the wind, but it was definitely real.