The Case of the Missing Dinosaur Egg (6 page)

“Stop right there!” It was Kate and by the way her lips pressed together in a thin straight line and her eyes narrowed to slits—she wasn’t happy to see us.

“I’ve just got off the phone from speaking to Professor Goodenough.”

Uh! Oh!

Busted.

“He tells me two of my pupils trespassed on his property, upset his bull and almost wrecked his car.”

“How did he—” I began.

“Jodhpurs,” she responded.

Noah scowled at me. “If you hadn’t made me get in the car, old fossil-face wouldn’t have known I was there.”

“Made you?” I spluttered wishing I still had the bike in my hands. “Why you—”

“Enough!” roared Kate. “Inside. Both of you! We’ll discuss this after dinner. Meanwhile, there’s twenty pounds of potatoes waiting to be peeled in the kitchen. And I don’t want to hear any complaints from Mrs. Brown about either of you slacking off until the job’s finished.”

My mouth dropped somewhere down near my new riding boots.

Twenty pounds of potatoes?

I was tired. I was dirty. My hands were bleeding. And all I wanted to do was get as far away from
Short Dark and Irritating
as possible—preferably by sending him to another country—or better yet—another planet.

I sighed and followed Kate inside. A cold kitchen. A sharp knife. Twenty pounds of potatoes to peel. And a constantly whining Noah.

Not a good combination.

EIGHT

By the time I logged onto the computer in the Games Room an hour later, my fingers felt like they’d been run over by a tractor.
Geez.
I never knew peeling potatoes was such a complicated art-form. According to Mrs. Brown, the cook, potato peel an inch thick was waste and washing a potato and leaving the skin on was as bad as wearing muddy boots to a wedding. Perhaps she should start an elite Potato Peeling Course at the local high school!

I uploaded my Gmail address on Google and there, in my inbox, was an email from Jack. Yay! With Tayla dribbling horse-talk non-stop I couldn’t get any sense from her. Sarah, as usual, was too wrapped up in Sarah to be of use to anyone but Sarah. So…I couldn’t wait to bounce ideas off my only sane P.I. assistant, Jack.

Like—why was the professor’s shed full of eggs when there wasn’t a chicken in sight?

From:
[email protected]
To:
[email protected]

Subject:
EGGY BUSINESS

Hi Cha,

After we win the footy-match on Saturday (yep, it’s in the bag) Dad said he’d drive me straight to Treehaven. Is there a black stallion waiting 4 me there? I always fancied myself on a black stallion, called Devil.

Yesterday I sprung Leroy from the boarding-kennel 4 a day so we could snoop around the museum. While I grilled a couple of witnesses, Leroy searched 4 clues. He sniffed the front door, a wooden chair and the receptionist’s leg. We didn’t learn much. Seems like that museum curator who bumped into you, you know the one with the garlicky breath and greasy hair, wasn’t a curator at all. I described him to the receptionist and she just shook her head. Said no-one on the staff looked like that.

BTW Leroy sends his love and says to tell you he hates being on a diet and could he have at least half a Tim Tam a day.

Gotta go. It’s our last footy-training B4 the big match and Dingo and Salmon are waiting for me in the kitchen. If I don’t go now there’ll be no food left in the fridge.

C U Saturday.

Your two brilliant P.I. assistants,

Jack and Leroy.

I grinned, picturing my
‘
two brilliant P.I. assistants’ working together on the ‘Case of the Missing Dinosaur-egg’. This was way weird. I’d left an egg-mystery at home only to discover a new and totally baffling egg-mystery right up the road from the riding-school.

Just as I hit the reply button to answer Jack’s email, Sarah poked her head around the doorway. Naturally she was the bearer of bad news.

“Hey, Cha, Aunt Kate wants to see you in her office and she looks real snotty. You’d better not keep her waiting.”

What did I tell you?

Sarah clomped across the room and stood beside me. “You’re totally weird, Cha.”

Ready to bite her head off and feed it to the chooks, I looked up, opened my mouth to give her a blast, then shut it again. Strange. My step-sister wasn’t smirking. Or laughing. Or giving me her cat’s behind
I told you so
face.

“So,” she said. “What mess are you in now?”

What did she care?

“Nothing much.”

She glanced at Jack’s email. “More trouble?”

“Nothing you’d be interested in.”

Sarah’s face went from sugar to lemons. She gave an
okay-don’t-tell-me-then
shrug and mumbled, “Thought things were different now,” sniffed loudly, and stormed off.

I jumped to my feet.

“Sarah, come back. I’m sorry,” I called out, but by the time I’d reached the door she was nowhere in sight.

Sheesh…how could I ever work that girl out? One minute she acted like I had chicken-pox—next she was getting all huffy because I wasn’t confiding in her.

Throwing myself down at the computer again, I sighed. And on top of that Kate was waiting to chew me out. I may as well be spending my holidays at some crappy military-school. Perhaps when Jack arrived on Saturday we’d start having fun. Perhaps I could even get him to challenge
Short Dark and Irritating
to an arm-wrestling contest.

Loser (Noah) gets buried in the manure pit.

From:
[email protected]
To:
[email protected]

Subject:
EGGY BUSINESS

Hi Jack,

Will you hurry up and win that footy-game? I need a brilliant P.I. assistant desperately. You’re not going to believe this but today I stumbled across another egg-mystery. Tell you about it when you get here.

Just one question: What’s got pink skin, no fur and dark lumps for eyes? No. It’s not a riddle. About an hour ago I saw it hatching out of an egg. Not getting much help from Tayla or Sarah, so pack your magnifying glass, trench-coat and notebook. I need you.

This is secret stuff. I’m deleting this message as soon as I send it. Advise you to do the same at your end.

Chiana Ryan (P.I. Extraordinaire)

p.s. Tell Leroy I’ve saved some black jelly-beans for him as a special treat when I get home.

I watched Jack’s email go off into cyber-space, then shut down the computer, stood up and let out a sigh. The sigh ended way down deep in the heels of my socks. It was time to face the lioness in her den.

I glanced down at my scruffy, tree-climbing, barbed-wire-fighting clothes. No time to change, so I quickly ripped the ruined jumper off over my head and scrubbed at the dirt and grass stains on my jodhpurs with a glob of spit. Using the computer screen as a mirror, I checked my reflection. A witch looked back at me. Why hadn’t Sarah told me I had half a gum tree stuck in my hair?

Three minutes later I knocked on the door of Kick-ass Kate’s office.

“Enter.”

Enter? Geez…this was as bad as going to the Principal’s office at school.

I turned the handle and inched open the door. Come on, I argued with myself, this is only Sarah’s Aunt Kate. She’s not a scary Dementor from a Harry Potter movie—waiting to suck the life-force from me as soon as I walked into the room. What was the worst Kate could do? Send me home to an empty house? Make me ride twenty horses a day?

Ride twenty horses a day?
I almost threw up all over her pale green carpet at such a terrifying thought.

“Sit down please, Chiana.”

My shaky legs were happy to slump onto a comfortable brown sofa next to a wall covered in framed photos. Awesome photos of a much younger Kate riding the most beautiful dappled grey horse I’d ever seen. They were flying over jumps the size of large buildings.

“I have something to show you,” said Kate.

“You do?” My voice came out as a squeak. I cleared my throat and looked down at the boot-shaped mud pattern I’d left on her pale green floor.

Kate handed me a box. “I thought you might find this interesting. I found it under Noah’s bed.”

If she thought a box under her kid’s bed was interesting, what would she think of the fake handcuffs, fake blood and fake beard under mine?

“See what it is?”

It was an old cardboard box. The same old cardboard box Noah had shoved under my nose in Shakespeare’s stable. The same old cardboard box I’d been tricked into taking a double dare from. I blinked up at Kate, confused. What did she want me to do? Pick another dare? Praise Noah’s scratchy handwriting? Place the box over my head?

“Why don’t you take a look at the other dares inside the box?”

I dipped my hand in the box and pulled out a piece of screwed up paper. After flattening it out I read, “I double-dare you to tie six red balloons to one of Professor Goodenough’s trees.”

What?

“Try another one,” suggested Kate, sitting on the top of her desk and giving me a conspirator’s smirk.

I grabbed another piece of screwed up paper. “I double-dare you to tie six red balloons to one of Professor Goodenough’s trees.”

I grabbed another…and another…and another.

All the same!

“Why that—”

“Yep,” broke in Kate. “You were set up by a rat passing himself off as a boy.”

“That creep!”

“I agree.”

“A total piece of dog’s poop.”

Kate stood up. “My darling son is outside cleaning stables. After that he’ll be cleaning toilets, saddles, the manure heap, the pigeon loft, the goats’ shed and the pig pens. He’s also been banned from riding for a week. Instead, it’s
his
job to teach
you
to ride. In fact, if you’re not riding well enough to compete in our Cross-Country event on the last day of your holiday, Noah’s riding ban will continue for a month. That means he’ll miss the Junior Show jumping Championships, an event he’s been training for since he won the finals last year.”

Wow! And I thought
my
mother was an alien!

I checked Kate’s eyes to see if they were spinning around in her head—all clear—so I grinned and stood up, ready to leave.

The sight of Noah cleaning toilets was too good a show to miss.

NINE

Tayla sat cross-legged on the tack room floor. Her two-toned jodhpurs and yellow polo shirt looked like they’d just been removed from a store window. How did she do it? She could have been a model on a catwalk instead of a girl who’d been riding a hot sweaty horse less than fifteen minutes ago. Not even a smudge of dirt on her nose.
Geez
. I only had to look at a horse and I ended up with thick grey dribble all down the front of my shirt.

It was late Saturday afternoon. Jack’s team had won the footy finals and as soon as his father had driven him to
Treehaven
, I’d called a secret meeting—in the tack room—with the door closed. And a sign out front saying, ‘If you enter—prepare to die!’

The meeting wasn’t going well. I’d been yakking on for the last ten minutes, reading from my notes, explaining to the others about the professor, the bull and Pedro the Chihuahua and how I’d watched an egg hatch.

At last Tayla crinkled her nose in disbelief. “It couldn’t be a platypus, Cha. That’s too totally freaky to make sense.”

“Okay…what other creature is born with jellybean pink skin and looks like this?” I showed her a picture of a baby platypus in the book I’d borrowed from the Gawler public library that morning.

Sarah, her knees up round her chin, her suede boots arranged beside her, sat painting ten perfectly shaped toe-nails a glaringly hideous shade of
Vomit Orange
.

“Admit it, Cha,” she said her eyes never leaving her toes. “You made a mistake. After all, you said yourself the window was streaked with dirt. What you saw hatching was probably a baby chicken or a duckling. They’re both small and with wet feathers could look sort of pink.”

“But what if I didn’t make a mistake? We have to find out for sure.”

“No we don’t,” bleated Tayla nervously. “That crazy professor guy gives me the creeps. I’ll have nightmares tonight just thinking about his scary bull.”

Sarah shook her head. “It’s too risky, Cha. If we get caught, Aunt Kate will not only hit the roof, she’ll bring it down around our ears. And for what? Something you
thought
you saw through a dirty window.”

I sighed. Glanced around at the saddles, bridles and pieces of leather I couldn’t put a name to. Breathed in the smell of sweaty horse and stale manure. This new mystery seemed to be going down the toilet before it even started. But I couldn’t give up. No mystery to solve meant I had no story to write.

Scowling at Sarah and Tayla, I pulled my notebook from my pocket.

“Okay, here’s what we do,” I declared, chewing on the end of one of my favorite pink biros. “If what I saw wasn’t a platypus it might have been some alien species. So…we wait until the professor is out then we sneak in and check the eggs in his shed. See what’s
really
being hatched in there.”

Tayla hurled a damp saddle-cleaning sponge at my head. “Didn’t you hear a word I said? I am
not
going onto that scary guy’s property. Not even to rescue a baby platypus.”

“Which actually is a wet chicken,” added Sarah, finishing off her nails and screwing the lid back on the bottle.

I sighed again. Since I’d arrived at
Treehaven
that’s all I seemed to be doing. What was wrong with my P.I. assistants? Had they all gone soft on me?

“Hang on a minute,” said Jack, leaping to his feet and knocking down a large tin of horse-vitamins with his elbow. “What if the professor is an egg-thief? What if he was responsible for the theft of the dinosaur egg at the museum? What if we found the dinosaur egg in his shed?”