Wilma Tenderfoot and the Case of the Frozen Hearts

Table of Contents

 

 

 

DIAL BOOKS FORYOUNG READERS

A division of PenguinYoung Readers Group
Published by The Penguin Group
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First published in the United States 2011 by Dial Books forYoung Readers
Published in Great Britain 2009 by Macmillan Children's Books

Text copyright © 2009 by Emma Kennedy

All rights reserved

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any
responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
S.A.

 

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kennedy, Emma.

Wilma Tenderfoot: the case of the frozen hearts / by Emma Kennedy.

p. cm.

Summary: Wilma Tenderfoot, a ten-year-old orphan who lives at Cooper Island's
Lowside Institute for Woeful Children, dreams of escape and of becoming the
apprentice of the world-famous detective Theodore P. Goodman, whose
every case she follows devotedly in the newspaper.

ISBN : 978-1-101-47544-7

[1. Orphans—Fiction. 2. England—Fiction. 3. Mystery and detective stories.]

I. Title.

PZ7.K3776Wi 2011

[Fic]—dc22 2009040050

W
ilma Tenderfoot wasn't quite sure how she'd managed it, but somehow she was hanging upside down from a meat hook in the pantry. In her hand was an empty toilet paper roll, which, although not quite as effective as a proper telescope, concentrated the mind whenever peered through with one eye. As she hung, gently swaying, Wilma was forced to conclude that maybe she didn't have this detective lark pinned down quite yet and made a mental note to remember in the future not to try to climb up a rack of hams in order to investigate a theft of Madam's sausages without first taking the appropriate precautions.

Her hero, Theodore P. Goodman, the island's greatest living detective, wouldn't have got himself into this predicament, thought Wilma, taking a bite out of a particularly delicious joint of beef as she swung toward it. No. He would have done things properly and wouldn't have slipped on a slab of greasy bacon, flown through the air, and ended up suspended from a hook by the back of his pants.

One day, dreamed Wilma as she rocked from side to side, she would be a great detective too and get to solve all manner of mysteries and conundrums, but for now she had an urgent problem to solve: how to get down from the rack of hams without being caught by Madam Skratch. Being an orphan at the Cooper Island Lowside Institute for Woeful Children was bad enough without being found upside down among the cold meats by the meanest matron who had ever lived.

Wilma could hear Madam Skratch's voice barking orders beyond the door. She didn't have a moment to lose. Straightening her dress and unbuttoning her pinafore pocket, Wilma pulled out a tatty heap of squashed and torn bits of paper attached by their corners to a large metal ring. Frantically thumbing through the scraps, Wilma found what she was looking for: an old folded newspaper clipping that had the words
Theodore P. Goodman's Escape from Giant Clock
scrawled on its exterior. Opening it out as fast as she could, she examined the diagram that showed her favorite detective tied to the bottom of a massive pendulum.

“That's it!” she whispered, tapping at the picture. “He used the pendulum to swing himself onto a ledge! If I can swing a bit harder on this ham hook, then maybe I can reach that can of peaches in syrup and then use the syrup to loosen up the hook and then ...” But before Wilma had reached the end of her brilliant plan, events had taken a turn. The fabric of her pinafore had given way, and with one ripping tear she landed headfirst in a basket of onions. The door to the pantry swung open.

“Wilma Tenderfoot!” yelled Madam Skratch, who looked like a vulture and smelled like cabbage. “My office! Now!”

Wilma looked up and spat a shallot out of her mouth. She was in trouble. Again.

 

Somewhere between England and France is an island with only one small hill that no one has ever bothered to discover. If you go and look at a map right now, you'll be able to see it. It's just there, above that bit. It should come as no surprise that the small and ordinary-looking Cooper Island has never been discovered. Exploring is, after all, no longer taught in schools, and curiosity, the mainstay of any discoverer, has been discouraged since the unfortunate news that it can kill cats.

Hundreds of years ago the island was almost discovered by an explorer called Marco Polo. You might have heard of him. He had a beard and discovered impressive things like China and First-Class Mail, so an island with one small hill somewhere between England and France was not at the top of his To Do list. It was a Tuesday, and Marco Polo had been hard at it. “I've been discovering nonstop for sixteen years,” he said, standing on his poop deck, “and in all that time I haven't had one day off. Not one.”

It was at this point that a small man named Angelo Pizza, whose daughter would invent the snack of the same name, shouted down from the ship's crow's nest. “Ahoy!” he called. “I can see an island with one small hill on it!”

Marco Polo had sighed at this news and thought about how his job as a discoverer of new lands and efficient postal systems was interfering with his enjoyment of life. If you know many adults, I expect you've heard them moaning about their jobs. Well, Marco Polo was just the same. Marco Polo didn't want to go to work that day. He wanted to lie in a hammock, eat a fresh, crisp apple, and have his face painted to look like a tiger. “I can't be bothered!” he shouted up to Angelo Pizza. “Do me a favor and just pretend you didn't see it.”

“All right!” shouted down Angelo Pizza, who carried on looking out, though he was careful not to look out again in the direction of the island with the one small hill.

It might seem strange that no one has tried to discover Cooper Island since. But most discoverers are only interested in impressive things like the tallest mountain or the longest river. So Cooper Island, which didn't have anything that was tallest or longest or deepest, was overlooked and forgotten about, and the people who lived there were left to get on with things and mind their own business. You would think that a place ignored by the world would be a haven of calm and happiness, but you'd be wrong. Even small, insignificant islands can be hotbeds of trouble and bother, and this story is about one trouble so terrible that if you have a nervous disposition I would advise you to put this book down immediately.

 

Wilma had been packing for five minutes. She had been ordered to do so by Madam Skratch after being dragged from the pantry by one ear and then yelled at for thirty-seven minutes, at the end of which the screaming matron had pulled a crumpled letter from her pocket, waved it under Wilma's nose, and spluttered, “That's it! I give up! Your tomfoolery and nonsense have tested me for the last time! You're leaving! Today!” Wilma had been surprised but quietly thrilled, an emotion that was to prove woefully misplaced. The letter was from a dried-up misery of a woman named Mrs. Waldock, who had written in requesting a “servant, one not too hungry nor too quarrelsome.” The unlucky wretch would go to live on the Farside of the island, where he or she would be expected to do chores like grating the dead skin off the bottom of Mrs. Waldock's feet and climbing down drains to clear blockages. It would not only be Wilma's first job, but it would be the first time in ten years that she had stepped outside the Lowside Institute for Woeful Children's front gates to go anywhere other than the obligatory Tuesday-afternoon school classes, where, as well as the usual reading and writing, Wilma and the other unfortunates learned essential woeful life skills like Scraping and Scrubbing.

Wilma, who was the smallest and scrawniest of the Institute's ten-year-olds, had lived at the orphanage all her life. She didn't know much about where she had come from, only that she had been left in a shabby cardboard box at the Institute's gates during a storm so fierce that the orphanage's only tree had been split clean in two. She had been wrapped in muslin and abandoned with no further clues as to her background other than one small luggage tag tied around her neck that had three words written on it:
because they gone.
She didn't know who had left her there or to whom the luggage tag referred. It was a mystery as deep as the seas. But one day, Wilma had decided long ago, she would find out. She may have been small, but she was very determined.

 

In the ten years that Wilma had lived at the Institute for Woeful Children she had made few if any friends. She had had a best friend once, when she was four, but it had all ended rather badly when the poor unfortunate had fallen into a furnace and been accidentally melted down and turned into a batch of wrenches. Wilma quickly realized that, if she was to minimize pain and anguish in such a revolting environment, it was probably best not to get to like anyone. Instead she found her comfort in books, secreted out of the Institute's meager library, and magazines, stolen from Madam Skratch's waste-paper basket, both filled with the to-ings and fro-ings of life on the Farside and, in particular, the adventures and triumphs of the island's greatest detective, Theodore P. Goodman. When she was young, it was the pictures of his great adventures that caught her imagination, but as soon as she could read and piece together his methods and advice, Wilma was well and truly hooked. Not only was he the island's greatest detective, he was the finest, most upstanding man that Wilma could ever imagine meeting. His noble deeds and intentions lifted Wilma from the drudgery of her everyday existence. How she longed to be a detective like him!