A Talent for Trouble

by Natasha Farrant

  She smiled. “It’s so obvious.”

  “Then, where’s your dad?” Jesse, still barefoot, was limping around the edges of the courtyard, peering into the fissures and hollows of the stone battlements, as if at any moment they might reveal a father.

  They had to face the evidence. Barney was not here, and they were too late. They had no hope of getting out before the Leopard caught up with them.

  “I’ll go back down,” said Alice dully. “I mean it, Jesse. I’ll go and I’ll wait for the Leopard, and I’ll give her the carving, and then we’ll go back to the boat and—”

  “The boat won’t be there,” Jesse said. “It had to leave before the tide. And I don’t know if I can even walk anymore. Alice—I don’t think I can do it.”

  He closed his eyes, feeling utterly defeated, and Alice could have wept for having done this to her friend.

  “We’ll be fine,” she whispered. “You’ll think of something. We’ll manage, together! Jesse, you’re a great explorer!”

  “I’m not,” he whispered back. “I think maybe I’m just a kid.”

  There’s no such thing as just a kid, she wanted to say, and You can be a kid and an explorer at the same time, and also just Thank you. But as she struggled to find the words, a great cry went up from the castle’s battlements.

  “Alice! Alice, up here!”

  She looked up, and felt a lurch of vertigo at the sight of Fergus waving from the embankment, silhouetted against the sky.

  “Alice, you idiot, come and see!”

  Breath by breath, she climbed the battlement. Crawling, she approached the edge of the embankment. With a whimper, she dragged herself up to kneeling, to peer over the edge . . .

  Fergus jumped.

  Alice screamed, then laughed.

  There was land on the other side. Flat land, flowers, a wide grassy path sloping gently, manageably, toward a low cliff, and clear, dark blue water beyond.

  “Jump!” shouted Fergus.

  She jumped and followed him carefully to the edge of the cliff. A cove began to appear, and . . .

  “A boat?”

  “Not only a boat—look! You have to look straight down!”

  She held tightly to his hand. Driven into the top of the cliff was a spike, and tied to the spike was a rope, and at the bottom of the rope, on the bright white sand . . .

  “Dad’s arrived!” Alice yelled. “Dad! DAD!”

  The wind danced away her voice.

  “MR. MISTLETHWAITE!”

  Barney jumped as a stone, thrown by Fergus, landed with a splash beside him.

  He looked up. Alice waved, clinging to Fergus.

  “Dad! Dad, we’re here too! We all made it!”

  Barney whooped and waved back, then ran to the rope and began to climb.

  Forty

  The Actor

  Alice flew into her father’s arms. For a while, there was nothing else in the world. No unanswered emails or canceled visits, no Leopard woman or Chinese figurine—no questions. Only Barney, and his arms holding her tight, and the wonderful, familiar smell of lemon and leather, and a warm glow as he said, “You found it! You clever girl, you found it!”

  But they were in danger, and the moment was short-lived. As Fergus glared from a short distance away and Jesse dragged himself over the battlement to join them, Alice gabbled, “Dad, we have to go!” just as Barney, a little wildly, said, “There are three of you!”

  He wasn’t pleased. Fergus and Jesse saw it immediately, even if Alice didn’t, and exchanged worried glances. Fergus stepped in closer, protectively. Jesse, his ankle throbbing, sat on the ground and contemplated their next move.

  “These are my friends!” Alice said breathlessly. “Fergus and Jesse. They’re amazing, Dad! They . . .”

  Jesse stopped listening. Something wasn’t right. It wasn’t just Barney’s reaction to him and Fergus—that was almost to be expected, given the circumstances of the carving. No, it was more than that . . . He looked down at the beach, Barney’s boat, the little cove . . . He frowned.

  The entrance to the cove was guarded by stacks similar to the pillars of the arch they had just climbed to get away from the Leopard, which meant . . .

  “Can you only sail in and out at high tide?” Jesse asked.

  “Excuse me?” Barney sounded impatient, but Jesse persevered.

  “This is a secret cove, like in pirate stories,” he said. “There’s only one way in. But if it’s like the other side, that must mean that at low tide there’s no way out.”

  He looked down at Barney’s boat. He saw now that there was a rucksack in the boat. Like Alice, he had assumed that Barney had just arrived. But if that were the case, his shoes, or at least the bottom of his trousers, would be wet from pulling the boat ashore—wouldn’t they? And then there was this spike driven into the cliff, this rope . . . Had they been here a while, set up by previous visitors to the castle rock? Or had Barney brought them?

  Jesse wriggled closer. The rope looked new, the spike shiny and unweathered. Which meant, probably, that Barney had driven it in, which in turn meant that he had not just arrived, which therefore meant . . .

  “Were you actually leaving, Mr. Mistlethwaite?”

  “I . . .” Barney hesitated. Three pairs of eyes were trained on him—the boys’ hostile, Alice’s wide and uncomprehending. “I . . . The thing is . . . Alicat, my letter, the date . . . I was expecting you yesterday!”

  Watching Barney squirm, Fergus felt his rage return. Was this the man Alice hero-worshipped and protected? “Th-there was a s-storm,” she was stammering—as if she needed to make excuses, when the whole world knew there had been a storm.

  “Never mind all that.” Jesse, once again, took control. “We just have to leave, now. On Barney’s boat. We can explain everything later.”

  “Oh, I’m not going anywhere,” said Fergus.

  “Fergus, there’s no time for this!” cried Jesse. “The tide! The flipping Leopard!”

  Barney went pale. “The Leopard?”

  “Oh, didn’t we say?” snarled Fergus. “She shot us . . .”

  “. . . and she’s trying to get here,” finished Jesse. “So, Fergus, SHUT UP and—”

  “I am not going anywhere,” Fergus repeated, surprised at his own determination. “Not until he tells us about the carving.”

  And there it was.

  Relationships change, all the time. Mostly, you don’t see the change until it’s happened. But sometimes, if you pay attention, you recognize moments after which nothing is ever the same—an apology unspoken, a handshake ignored, a lie discovered . . .

  A trust, broken.

  Barney went very still, then turned to Alice.

  “You opened it?”

  “Yes.”

  She couldn’t tell if he looked sad or guilty or disappointed or angry, or a combination of all four.

  Until now, Alice had secretly still been clinging to the hope of a mistake. In a story, an evil villain would have tricked Barney into sending the carving—or this boy and dragon would be a fake—or Barney would have been blackmailed, or working for the secret service, or . . .

  This was not a story. And Barney’s “You opened it?” confirmed all that Alice had feared.

  She had been standing near her father. Now, almost unconsciously, she edged away from him toward Jesse, still watching the sea on the edge of the cliff.

  “I think Alice deserves to know why you sent her that thing,” said Fergus coldly. “Also, why you made her bring it here. I mean, what sort of person does that? What sort of useless parent . . .”

  “All right, all right!” Barney threw up his hands. Fergus grunted and went to sit beside Alice. Jesse, sighing, felt inside his jacket pocket for a very damp map of the island. Alice, her throat a painful lump, shuffled right up to him as she watched her father.

  “There’s this guy called Nero,” Barney said. “He’s Signor Grimaldi’s son. I met him years ago when I was touring in Italy.”

  Fe
rgus, at the mention of theatrical touring, snorted. Alice shushed him anxiously.

  “I met him at a card game—a small thing, just Sunday-afternoon café stuff—I don’t play big stakes at cards.” Barney shot a concerned look at Alice, as if trying to reassure her. Again, Fergus snorted. Barney sighed. “Well, Nero does love gambling. A few weeks ago, he met this Canadian guy who plays for big money. And Nero lost—a lot. And it turns out . . .”

  Barney paused. Fergus, despite himself, leaned forward.

  “What?”

  “It turns out Canadians aren’t all as nice as they seem. This one threatened to go to Signor Grimaldi when Nero said he couldn’t pay what he owed. And Nero really didn’t want that, because the last time his dad paid off his debts, he warned him he wouldn’t do it again. So that’s why Nero took the carving.”

  “He stole it from his own father?” Fergus sounded fascinated now rather than cross, and Alice’s feelings were all over the place—relief that Barney hadn’t actually stolen the boy and dragon, but also an unsettling sense that he was enjoying this far too much—as if, rather than making a confession, he were putting on a show.

  “Excuse me,” Jesse said. “The tide . . .”

  They ignored him.

  “It’s not really stealing,” Barney argued. “More like an advance on Nero’s inheritance. And it’s not like anyone was actually hurt. So anyway, Nero disabled the CCTV and took the carving, then advised his dad to offer a reward, no questions asked. And that’s where I come in—the Englishman unconnected to any of this, who just ‘happened’ upon the statue, and an actor! It was all going great, until that idiot Nero panicked, said he’d been attacked, and tried to pin the theft on the Leopard. That changed everything. She’s been trying to find the carving ever since the police let her go, and when her spies discovered I had it, she came after me. That’s why I got the idea of sending it to your school—I figured no one would go looking for it there. I was going to pick it up when I came to visit, but then I heard the Leopard was in the UK, and decided I couldn’t risk it.”

  He turned to Alice. “I wish I could have come to your school, sweetheart. Then all of this could have been avoided.”

  And, perhaps, that was the biggest betrayal of all.

  A painful lump was forming in Alice’s throat. All this, she thought—giving him a final chance, tricking school, all this! Fergus’s illness, the storm, his head wound, Jesse’s ankle, the Orienteering Challenge—her promise to the major! Wanting to believe he wanted to show her the island! It did not seem to have occurred to Barney how much danger he had put them in.

  She looked at him more closely, and something shifted, as if she were seeing a different Barney—almost the same as ever, but unshaven, the smell of lemon overlaid with sweat, dark rings beneath the bright blue eyes . . . He had betrayed her, and all the trust she had ever put in him, because she had been too afraid to look the truth in the face—that Barney could never be trusted and would never be there when she needed him.

  “What happened next?” Fergus was still riveted.

  “Well, now that Alice has brought the carving—you have got it, Alicat, haven’t you?—once everything has calmed down a bit, I’ll shimmy on back to Italy, we’ll get the money, Nero’ll pay his debts, and hey presto! Daddy’s rich!” He grinned. “Clever, no?”

  “For heaven’s sake!” Jesse yelled. “Am I literally the only one here who has been watching the tide?”

  “The tide?” Fergus, jolted suddenly from Barney’s story back to reality, looked dazed.

  “It’s going out! And another thing—has it not occurred to anyone else that the Leopard must have a boat?” He laid out his map, ignoring the others’ baffled panic. “She might be here”—he pointed—“at the beach where we landed, in which case until the tide goes down enough she’s cut off from it. But she could also have landed here”—more pointing—“or even here, on this side of the cutoff, in which case she could already be on her way. So we need to go now.”

  Alice stared blankly as Jesse started issuing orders. “Mr. Mistlethwaite,” he said, “you should go first to show us how it’s done. Alice, you’ll go next—don’t worry, I’ll talk you down—then me, so Fergus can help with my ankle. You’ll have to lower the packs too. Is that OK? Great. Then let’s get our rucksacks from the castle, and LET’S GO!”

  Really, thank goodness for Jesse.

  Fergus ran for the packs. Barney grabbed the rope and bounced down the cliff.

  Alice did not move.

  She was thinking of a story.

  A story that needed an ending.

  Forty-One

  And the Sky Exploded

  Once upon a time, there was a house in a garden full of cherry trees, and the little girl who lived in that house was the happiest girl in the world. In summer she could pick cherries straight off the tree outside her bedroom window, and one spring night, when the tree was a cloud of pink flowers, she tried to sleep in it because it was just how she imagined a princess’s castle . . .

  Jesse and Fergus watched, concerned. “What’s she doing?” Jesse asked. “Why is she just sitting there?”

  “I think . . .” Fergus narrowed his eyes. Alice sat staring into space, absolutely still except for . . . her left hand, gently twitching. “I think she’s writing.”

  The little girl’s mother wouldn’t let her sleep in the tree, and ordered her back inside. But secretly, she hoped her daughter would always be

  Alice stood up, her chin set at its most stubborn angle.

  She knew the story’s ending.

  “Now what?” Jesse whispered.

  Fergus shrugged. “I don’t know!”

  Alice, steely-voiced, said, “Show me how I get down.”

  “Whatever you do, do not just slide down the rope, or you’ll burn your hands.” Jesse peppered Alice with instructions as she prepared to go over the top of the cliff. “One hand over the other, and keep your legs braced. It’s not too high, so if you fall, you might break a leg, but you’re unlikely to die. Oh, and don’t look down.”

  Alice had intended to be fearless. She didn’t feel it now. The drop beneath her made her want to howl. Or hide. Or be sick. Or all three together.

  And this wasn’t even the most frightening thing she had to confront.

  “Way to help, Jesse,” said Fergus. “She’s gone green.”

  “That’s not helping either,” Jesse said reprovingly. “Alice, you OK?”

  She gripped the rope with both hands and slid over the edge of the cliff.

  “To be fearless,” she informed them, in a barely shaking voice, “you have to confront your fears.”

  Confronting fears, Alice decided, was horrible. Her stomach flipped into her mouth, then lurched to her guts before settling to spin uncontrollably somewhere near her lungs. Her palms grew so damp she thought they could never grip the rope. A hundred miles beneath her, the cove was a blurred mess of white and blue.

  “Eyes straight ahead,” said Jesse, somewhere on a different planet. “One hand over the other. You can do it.”

  Step by excruciating step, she inched toward the cove. Jesse, lying on the grass with his face and shoulders hanging over the edge of the cliff, grew smaller, his encouragements fainter. The crash of the waves grew louder. Her blood began to dance, her fingers and toes to tingle. This was easy. It was almost fun. All she had to do, to reach the bottom, was . . .

  “There’s a boat!” Fergus’s shout broke into her concentration. She glanced up, saw that he had climbed to the top of the highest battlement, Jesse’s binoculars clamped to his eyes.

  Alice’s world grew fuzzy again.

  “Alice!” Barney’s shout floated up from miles below, urgent. “You have to hurry!”

  “Don’t push her!” Jesse yelled. “She’s scared of heights!”

  Surely, Alice thought with sudden clarity, Barney knew that?

  Something was shifting again in Alice’s mind. The vertigo, which she had always thought started when M
um died—it hadn’t started immediately, but weeks after the funeral, when Alice had climbed up her favorite tree because Dad had gone away, and refused to come down until he came back, and then panicked, and froze . . . In the end, Aunt Patience had had to call the fire brigade. Everyone knew that story.

  She saw it now. It wasn’t Mum’s death that had made her fearful, it was Barney. Barney, who could charm a furious boy with a well-told story . . . Barney with his snow angels and escapades . . .

  Barney, who could always make her do exactly what he wanted . . . whom she was always looking for in her dreams, running down empty hallways . . .

  “It’s not the Leopard!” Fergus yelled. “The boat! It’s the coast guard! The coast guard! They’re . . . NO! They’re heading to the landing jetty! They haven’t seen us! Over here! Over here! Come back!”

  “Alice!” Barney was panicking now. “Alice, please!”

  Slowly but steadily, she resumed her descent. One hand over the other, step by step, but when she reached the bottom of the cliff, she held on to the rope.

  “Alice, hurry!” He was waving her over, already pushing the boat toward the sea. Alice didn’t move. She wondered if he would even wait for the others.

  “Where will you go?” she shouted.

  “What?”

  “When you have the money? Where will you go?”

  He was walking over, still half turned toward the boat. “Can we talk about this later?”

  “No,” she said. “I want to talk about it now.”

  He ran his hands through his hair, so that it stuck up all over his head. Alice used to love it when he did that. Sometimes, he did it on purpose to make her laugh, crossing his eyes and pulling his shirt sideways until he was a disheveled mess, and Alice a writhing, giggling heap, until Patience would invariably say, “For heaven’s sake, Barney, grow up!”

  But that was the thing, she realized. He was supposed to be the grown-up. He was the one who should be telling them what to do—not a twelve-year-old boy like Jesse with a twisted ankle, still hanging anxiously over the cliff. And it wasn’t Alice’s fault that they were here—not entirely. It was his. She saw that now.