The Case of the Missing Dinosaur Egg Read online

  “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?”

  “Wow!” I caught the glimmer of excitement in Jack’s eyes and grinned at him. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  Sarah sniffed. “Yeah. And what if the world is really flat?”

  Ignoring Sarah’s put-down, I felt an electric buzz start in my fingertips, race up both arms then skip in a tingling rush through the rest of my body. Hey, Jack could be onto something big here.

  “What if Professor Goodenough is an egg smuggler?” he continued, his freckles dancing across his nose.

  “Or even a mad scientist who’s experimenting with animals,” I added.

  “What if he’s trying to clone a dinosaur by using the DNA of the fossilized egg?”

  “Double wow!”

  “Do you two know how crazy you sound?” Sarah coolly slipped the bottle of Vomit Orange into her jodhpurs’ pocket, picked up her suede riding-boots and stood up. “You saw a chicken hatching from an egg and now you’ve decided it’s a scene from Jurassic Park.”

  Her comment was like a bucket of ice water over the head. Sarah was right. Jack and I were being ridiculous. I rammed my notebook back into my pocket and felt a blush creep up my neck and spread across my cheeks. Grrrrrrrr! Anyone want a step-sister for free?

  Evidently satisfied with the way she’d broken up our meeting, Princess Sarah strolled to the tack room door on her newly painted feet.

  “I’m off,” she said in her I’m-so-cool voice. “Unless you uncover a real mystery—count me out. I don’t want to be grounded like Noah. I came here to ride and that’s what I’m going to do.”

  I watched Tayla get to her feet too. Gracefully, like one of those long-legged dancers from the ballet Mum had taken me to see for my twelfth birthday. I could tell Tayla agreed with Sarah because her eyes looked like Leroy’s when he’d been caught fossicking in the rubbish-bin.

  “Sorry, Cha,” she said sheepishly. “I love riding Angel and I’d just die if Kate grounded me.”

  Geez…what was it with Tayla and Sarah? How was I supposed to solve our latest mystery when two of my assistants had been so badly bitten by the horse-bug they’d turned into marshmallows?

  I lifted an eye-brow in the direction of my last hope. “Jack?”

  “I’m in.”

  Tayla fidgeted with the end of one shiny blonde curl. “Cha, if you keep on with this egg mystery stuff—be careful. Don’t let Noah find out or he’ll tell his mum just to get back at you. He’s spewing ’cos he’s not allowed to ride and blames you for everything.”

  Sarah’s head popped back around the doorway and caught the end of Tayla’s warning. She grinned her sly tiger-grin at me. “Talking about my sweet lovable cousin, you’d better hide, Cha. He’s mad as—”

  Noah came crashing into the tack-room, his face set in a screwed-up scowl.

  “Hey, you!” he yelled. “How am I supposed to teach you to ride if you don’t even show up for your lessons?”

  I gave Jack a mock-frown. “Do you think he means me?”

  “You? Nah. Wouldn’t talk to you like that. He must be talking to the wall.”

  Noah’s scowl deepened. “Ha. Ha. The joke’s on you, ’cos I’d rather teach the wall. Get your riding helmet on Chiana and let’s go.”

  That morning Noah had made me ride bareback. That’s right…no saddle. He’d lunged me on Shakespeare for half an hour of bone-grating, stomach-jolting, butt-banging torture. If you’ve ever bounced around on a horse with a backbone so hard, so sharp your rear feels like it’s on fire—you’ll know what I mean. If you haven’t—don’t go there.

  “Sorry Noah, I’m too tired. I’ll see how I feel tomorrow.”

  “Ooh no you don’t.” His scowl turned into a dragon-snarl as he stepped closer. “Wuss!”

  Noah was at it again. Calling me a wuss. If only Jack didn’t have a death-grip on my arm I’d stick my fingers down Noah’s throat, yank out his tongue and feed it to the stable cat.

  “Mum says you have to ride in our Cross-country event next week,” Noah went on, his teeth clenched so tightly I half expected a couple to snap off. “So I’m going to make sure you’re ready for that—even if it kills you!”

  Of course. Noah couldn’t compete in the Junior Show jumping Championships if he didn’t have me riding well by the end of next week. I squinted, screwed up my nose and stuck out my tongue.

  “Okay,” I said pushing myself off the pile of horse rugs and standing on legs that felt like mushy oatmeal.

  His words, ‘even if it kills you’ echoed around in my head. If this afternoon’s lesson was half as bad as this morning’s I wanted the theme song from ‘Titanic’ to be played at my funeral.

  Even if I survived, I thought, as I followed Short Dark and Irritating outside, I’d be sitting on a feather-cushion. Too tired to eat. Too tired to talk. And too tired to think about the new egg mystery.

  I bet no other private investigator in the whole universe was ever made to ride a horse without a saddle in the middle of solving a mystery.

  TEN

  With only five days to C day (Cross-Country day), it hurt to sit on a wooden chair or use my legs for anything other than holding up my body. Three lessons a day, two with Noah and a group lesson with Kate, also meant I couldn’t get the smell of horse from my skin, my hair, my clothes, my mouth and even my eyelashes.

  After finishing our group lesson for the day, Kate decided it was time to build the Cross-Country course. She gave Jack and me the job of building jumps along the fence-line next to Professor Goodenough’s property.

  Which of course led to Jack and I discussing the egg-mystery.

  “We can’t just break into the shed. That’s against the law,” I protested when Jack suggested we sneak out at night dressed all in black and try the keys from his ‘special’ key-ring to open the shed door.

  Jack had been collecting different shaped keys from the age of six and now owned close to two hundred.

  “Well, how else can we find out what the professor’s up to?”

  I shook my head. “We need a workable plan.”

  “What you got in mind?”

  “It’s a bit complicated. If we wait until t
he professor goes out then sneak in—that’s trespassing. If we ring and ask his permission—he’ll tell us to get lost.”

  We trudged along the path in silence for several more minutes. Me, pushing a rusty wheelbarrow full of paint tins, brushes, hammers, nails, buckets, a shovel and a broken toolbox. Jack, humping an elephant sized back-pack.

  “What if we dress up as meter-readers?” I suggested.

  I could picture myself in an official meter-reading coat, a grey wig and coke-bottle glasses. To make the picture complete I’d carry a clipboard in one hand and a mobile phone in the other.

  “And do what?”

  “Well, while you distract the professor by explaining how he could cut down on his electricity bill, I could see if the shed was unlocked.”

  Jack’s cheeky grin set his freckles dancing. “Or what about pretending to be the Avon Lady? You could keep the Prof. at the door by selling him wrinkle cream, while I did the Sherlock Holmes bit in the shed.”

  I shook my head. “Sherlock Holmes smokes a pipe. One puff and you’d choke.”

  We rounded the corner and came to the site of the first of the jumps along the fence-line. “This must be the hole Noah dug yesterday,” I said, smirking at the thought of Noah getting all hot and sweaty for a change. “Kate wants us to fill the hole with water.”

  “I’ll do that,” offered Jack tossing the back-pack on the ground and hunting in the wheelbarrow. “Kate says horses hate jumping into water.” He pulled a face. “So I guess this is where most of us will fall off.”

  The newly dug pit was about fifty centimeters deep, ten meters long and lined with blue plastic to stop the water from soaking into the ground. In front of the pit Noah had rolled a largish log. The idea was to jump the log into the water and trot out the other side. I shuddered at the thought. I could see myself falling off over the log and sitting in the water—wet, muddy and horseless. That’s if I made it this far.

  “I’ll go look for a tap while you wire the jump number to the log.” Jack unfastened the straps on his back-pack and drew out a white square with a bright red number eight painted across the middle. I took the number then handed Jack two plastic buckets from the wheel-barrow.