Ruby Redfort Take Your Last Breath

by Lauren Child

  “He was a terrific breath-hold diver,” said Sabina. “Too bad about what happened to him.”

  “Yes, too bad — he knew more about ocean life than just about anyone around,” added Brant.

  “Why, what happened to him?” said Ruby. “Did he die?”

  “Professionally, I guess,” said her dad.

  “Meaning what?” asked Ruby.

  “It happened in Twinford, actually. We’d seen him a couple of times. We went on . . . um . . . a sailing trip with him. Then he started jabbering on about something he’d seen, some weird creature, couldn’t stop going on about it. He got laughed out of the ocean by a bunch of marine-life experts. They all said he had gone crazy, swallowed too much saltwater or something,” said Brant. “It was too bad; he just sort of disappeared after that.”

  “Anyway,” said Sabina excitedly, “I just wish he’d been there when we saw the worrying thing in the water. He might have been able to identify it.”

  “What worrying thing in the water?” asked Ruby. This was a new detail — they hadn’t mentioned the worrying thing in the water before.

  “Well,” said her mother, “there we were, just swimming around the Sibling Islands, trying to find fresh water — which you might think impossible.”

  “Fortunately for us, it wasn’t,” said her father. “There was a natural stream that ran down the north side of the north rock into the ocean; we found an old plastic bottle that we filled to the very brim, and that’s what saved our lives.”

  “Terrible how people litter,” said her mother. “Although we were very grateful for it at the time. Without it we might have perished of thirst.”

  “But what about the thing?” asked Ruby, impatient for them to get to the point.

  “Oh, yes, there was definitely a thing in the water,” said her father. “Pookie heard it — you know what a dog’s hearing is like.”

  “Very sensitive,” agreed Sabina.

  “But what was it?” asked Ruby.

  “We didn’t exactly see it,” said her mother.

  “I felt its vibrations,” said her father. “Like it was moving toward us. Our chances were looking really quite deathly, and then something really strange happened. This sort of indigo cloud — like dye — kind of appeared in the water.”

  “Like squid ink?” asked Ruby.

  “Well, sort of, but not,” said Brant. “It was like no squid ink I ever saw before. And blue, not black.”

  “It got all over Pookie, and he didn’t like it one bit,” said her mother. “Kept trying to lick it off, and the more he licked, the more he yapped.”

  “Boy, did that dog yap,” agreed Brant.

  “Though thank goodness he did,” said Sabina. “Because the Runklehorns heard it — they were sailing past the far side of the islands, and the next thing we heard was Eadie Runklehorn’s voice calling, ‘Ahoy there, Redforts! Just the people we were looking for. We need a couple to make up a bridge four! We’re getting very bored playing Snap on our own.’”

  Brant was laughing at the very memory of it. “You know Eadie,” he said. “Such an original sense of humor — there we are, clinging to a suitcase, practically drowning, and she makes a joke!”

  Ruby was looking at them wondering if too much sun and saltwater had made them insane. Not many drowning people would see the funny side, but she guessed this was the old Redfort survival instinct kicking in; keep laughing and nothing can ever be as bad as it seems. She had read about this in the SAS/Marine Survival Handbook. It said there that the trick to surviving a life-and-death situation was ninety percent attitude — same as her Rule 20.

  “So then what?” asked Ruby.

  “And then, ta-da, they rescued us!” Sabina said this last part with a flourish of her powder brush, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to be rescued from a sea monster.

  “Yes, and back in time for cocktail hour,” said Brant.

  “So if you got rescued at four p.m. on Friday, how come you didn’t make it back here until lunchtime the following Wednesday?” asked Ruby.

  “Oh honey, you know what the Runklehorns are like,” said her father. “Wouldn’t put us ashore until we’d played a dozen rounds of deck quoits and several hands of bridge. Then, of course, we remembered the pirates.”

  “You forgot them?” said Ruby.

  “Well, it was all so exciting bumping into the Runklehorns like that,” said Sabina. “The pirates clear went out of my mind. Anyway, we all decided we had better sail the long way around since we didn’t want to get captured again, and that’s when that nice fellow with the helicopter showed up.”

  “Supper was the only disappointment,” said her father. “The chef had been having trouble trying to catch a single fish. We ended up eating canned tuna.”

  “I guess something was scaring the fishes,” said her mother.

  Water, water everywhere and not a fish to eat, thought Ruby. She remembered the other week when Mrs. Digby had threatened her with cod-liver oil because the fish store was out of fish. Weirder and weirder still.

  The doorbell chimed.

  “Oh, that will be the Runklehorns,” said Sabina. “Go put on that nice yellow number, would you, honey?”

  Ruby opened her mouth to protest, but before she could say anything, caught sight of herself in the mirror. The T-shirt she was wearing was printed with the word duh. She would make her mother’s day perfect and go change.

  THE DINNER CONVERSATION WAS OF COURSE LIMITED to the subject of pirates, rescue, and lost treasure.

  “What gets me is why the coast guard didn’t pick up my Mayday call,” said Sabina.

  “Yes, that is a mystery,” agreed Brant.

  “And Bernie sent message after message when our engine went kaput, but no one responded,” said Eadie.

  “It was pure chance that we got rescued. The guy in the chopper just happened to be flying by,” said Bernie.

  “Shame, it was a lovely spot,” said Brant. “We were really having a high old time, weren’t we, darling?”

  “Oh, yes,” replied Sabina. “A swell time.”

  While her parents and the Runklehorns laughed, Ruby was beginning to put things together in her head. She was sure that the pirates had to be responsible for the lost Mayday calls: it made sense; this way they could rob and hijack vessels without being disturbed. But how were they doing it? From her mother’s description, they didn’t sound like the most sophisticated villains at sea, and surely, if they were going to all the trouble of blocking Mayday calls, they must have a bigger target in mind than cruise boats and cash.

  Like Blacker said, it wasn’t like many pleasure boats sailed in those waters.

  “Sabina was so heroic.” Brant gripped her hand and smiled. “You should have seen her out there, quite an inspiration.”

  Her mother’s family had always had confidence, but what they were famous for was their guts, the kind of courage that inspired awe — after all, there were legends about it. No one could be sure that these weren’t just tales told by drunken sailors, but Ruby chose to sort of believe them; they sounded just far-fetched enough to be true. And it wasn’t impossible that her mother’s relative had also survived a pirate attack, though when she looked across at Eliza’s great-great-great-granddaughter, sitting there in her cerise Marco Perella evening dress, it did seem unlikely. However, though Sabina Redfort might not have inherited her great-great-grandmother Martha’s brains, she had certainly inherited her courage. Sabina Redfort was no wuss, no siree.

  Later, when dinner was over and Ruby’s parents were sitting chatting with the Runklehorns, she went upstairs to her room and pulled out the list and the spider map. It seemed likely that the dead couple, the couple who turned out not to be Ruby’s parents, were also the victims of the pirates, judging by the state of their yacht, the Swift, which had been ransacked. They too had been thrown to the waves, but they were not such able swimmers, and with no ambassadorial luggage to cling to, drowning was their fate.

&
nbsp; Ruby added them under the heading pirate attacks.

  The facts on the piece of paper were growing, and things were beginning to add up. Though she still wasn’t sure to what.

  Ruby fell asleep without difficulty and slept soundly until an hour before dawn, when her dream took a puzzling turn.

  She found herself in her music class. Clancy was tapping out a message with a drumstick. Ruby was frustrated: she knew Morse code well, but she couldn’t decipher this, it just made no sense. What are you trying to tell me, Clance? He was just looking at her like she was super dumb and continued to tap. Was it nonsense, or was she not as smart as she thought?

  She woke up, but the dream continued . . . or at least the tapping did. It was coming from the bathroom. Ruby fumbled for her glasses, got up, and switched on the light. It was the faucet, not quite turned off, and a steady drip was drumming onto a plastic cup that was upside down in the sink. Ruby switched on the radio, which was still tuned to Chime Melody, and a reassuring old tune wafted out of the set, the kind of golden oldie that Mrs. Digby adored.

  As Ruby listened, she began to think about the recent interruptions, the strange un-music-like music playing on the radio, music more suited to the classical radio channel Cerebral Sounds. The kind of music that had no business being played on Chime. Suddenly Ruby froze, and she felt those tiny hairs on the back of her neck prick up. She could see it now, this thing that had sounded like a jumble of notes, a mess of sounds; she had heard it with her own ears, but failed to understand.

  She ran to the wall of books that covered one side of her room and pulled at the quarterly code magazines that dated back several years. She remembered reading an article about something, something that might help her chase down the thought she couldn’t catch. She spread them out across the floor until she caught sight of the one she wanted. In this old edition was an article on musicians who had encrypted music and so passed secrets across the airwaves without anyone ever suspecting that these tunes were not just tunes. One of the most famous was a composer called Arvo Pärt, but there were many others: the highly successful composer and double agent Sarå H. Stein, and Roberto Bowerbeck and Tristan Delaware to name a handful. At the back of the magazine was a seven-inch plastic record: low quality, but it should still play.

  Ruby put the record on the turntable and the needle automatically lowered itself onto the disc. The piece was by I. Zac-Gardner: Preamble in Three Equally Divided Halves.

  It sounded very much like the kind of thing Chime had been playing — music without melody.

  Ruby pulled on her sweatshirt and ran down the stairs right to the bottom of the house. She moved lightly and almost soundlessly, and only Bug heard a footstep.

  She tapped lightly on Hitch’s door. She heard him put something down on the table, a cup or a glass.

  “Ruby?” he said quietly. “That you?”

  She opened the door; he was still dressed from the night before, or maybe he was freshly dressed for the coming day. He looked only mildly surprised to see her.

  “Hey, kid,” he said. “What got you up before dawn?”

  Ruby sat down in one of the two easy chairs that furnished the compact yet stylish apartment.

  “I figured something out,” she said. “At least, I think I figured something out. I just got to prove it is all.”

  “I’m all ears, kid.” He sat down in the opposite chair.

  “This Chime Melody thing I’ve been working on for Froghorn — I suddenly get it. It’s not interference, it’s not someone disrupting the airwaves — it’s more than that.”

  “More how?” asked Hitch.

  “Well, old Froghorn dumped me with the job of studying each tape, each piece of music, trying to listen for a voice masked by the music, but that’s not what’s going on here.”

  “It isn’t?” said Hitch.

  “No,” said Ruby. “The music isn’t covering up the communication, the music is the communication. It’s a code.”

  “You know this?” said Hitch.

  Ruby shook her head.

  “But you’re pretty sure?”

  “Eighty percent. I figure each note is a letter. Could be more complicated though. You know, like when a note lasts for two beats, you skip a letter, or it changes into a number, or something.”

  “I don’t know,” said Hitch. “But if you say so, I believe you.”

  “So I gotta listen to the tapes so I can figure out how it works.”

  “That all? You can go in and listen to them any day you like.”

  “I mean I want to bring them home; it would give me more time.”

  He paused, considering the request; it wasn’t strictly protocol, but it was practical. He took a deep breath. “I can get them.”

  “What about Froghorn? Is he gonna make trouble?”

  “No, leave Froghorn to me. I can handle anything he cares to throw.”

  “And maybe . . .” said Ruby, “don’t let’s say anything until I’ve got proof. I’d hate to give him the pleasure of knowing I’d got it wrong.”

  “I’ll keep it zipped, kid. You can count on it.”

  They went up to the kitchen and sat there for a while drinking tea and talking things over until they were interrupted.

  “Well, knock me down with a feather!” Mrs. Digby said. “This child is up before the sun — I must be dreaming.”

  RED DROPPED BY JUST AS RUBY was about to leave the house on Thursday morning. “I thought I’d come by and see how you were doing. I tried calling, but you didn’t pick up.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that,” said Ruby. “It all got kinda busy, you know.”

  Red nodded. “You must be so relieved. I mean, how dreadful thinking you’d never see your mom and your dad again, neither one of them.”

  Red’s own dad had gone missing one day, just up and left, and she had never laid eyes on him since, so she knew what she was talking about.

  “It was pretty bad,” said Ruby. “Kinda the worst day of my life, you know?”

  Red nodded again. “So you wanna grab some breakfast at the Donut?”

  “Sure, why not,” said Ruby. “Might as well celebrate.”

  It was nice to join her friends for breakfast, just like always.

  “So,” said Clancy, “my record is unblemished. I told you I had a hunch your folks were alive, and I was right.”

  “Yeah Clance, I’ll give you that — you were right,” said Ruby.

  “As always,” said Clancy.

  “As always,” agreed Ruby.

  Yes, life was good. The specter of death having receded for now, far into the future. Laughing and yacking like worries were a thing of yesterday, which they sort of were. . . . Well, except for the ruthless pirates and the weird shark action, dead divers, and ransacked pleasure cruisers — apart from those things, everything was rosy.

  The trees looked greener, the sun felt warmer, school seemed a tad more fascinating, and Vapona Begwell . . . well, she was as objectionable as ever.

  “So, Redridingfort, I hear your parents almost got chomped by sharks,” she hollered across the cafeteria.

  Ruby decided not to tell Bugwart where to stick it, it was too nice a day, but as it happened, Del stepped in, and then things got kind of ugly anyway.

  Del’s food fight with Bugwart sort of escalated. At one point Ruby saw several chicken wings fly across the dining hall. These were followed by a considerable number of pizza slices — and resulted in several detentions for a number of students; the ringleaders spent the afternoon cleaning the school cafeteria.

  Apart from that, nothing much truly happened school-wise.

  Ruby had to drop her plan of hanging out with Clancy at Del’s house, but as it turned out, that was just as well. The Bradley Baker rescue watch flashed green in music class, and that meant no hanging out with anyone. Ruby made a promise to Clancy that she would catch up with him on Friday, and as soon as the school bell rang, made her way back to the pool, back to Spectrum.

  She ro
de swiftly, shortcutting through quiet residential streets, zigzagging through back roads. When she got to the main square, she saw the stranger again.

  This guy is starting to bug me, Ruby thought.

  He was sitting reading what looked like a map, a large yellow carryall at his feet. Where had she seen a yellow bag like that before? By the time she made it to the Twinford City pool, she had it: Little Bay Beach; this guy was a diver. Was it relevant to anything? Why should it be? It was just that she had this feeling. She slipped through the door of the maintenance room, making sure it clunked shut behind her, and took the elevator down to HQ.

  On arrival, Buzz informed Ruby that LB wanted a word, and she was to wait outside her office. Ruby stared at the huge optical painting that hung on the wall in the waiting area. She didn’t hear the soft padding of her boss’s bare feet, not even when they were just two steps away.

  “Pleased to hear your parents aren’t dead, Redfort.” And that was about as touchy-feely as the head of Spectrum 8 was ever going to get. LB moved right along as if personal talk was in some way distasteful.

  “It’s my thinking that this case is about a whole lot more than confused shipping and pirates and pleasure boats. Would you agree?”

  Ruby nodded. LB was looking at her in that LB way as if she expected Ruby to produce the name and address of the person responsible. The Spectrum 8 boss paused for a second and then said, “We have a list as long as a clown’s arm of strange ocean occurrences, but what does it all add up to?”

  Ruby didn’t have an answer; she felt like she was thinking through molasses.

  “You’re going to need to step it up, Redfort. Stop paddling around, and start using that brain of yours. Get involved.”

  Ruby nodded dumbly. “Sure,” she said. “I mean, I will. I am. I’m working on something actually.”

  “One would hope so,” said LB. “Spectrum doesn’t employ you to sit on your behind twiddling your thumbs.” She walked to the elevator and pressed the button, then turned and said, “Oh, and by the way, a fisherman was found drowned in his own rowboat, how’s that for a puzzle? The report’s on my desk, you might want to read it.” The elevator door slid closed, and she was gone.