The Ondine Collection

by Ebony McKenna

  So really, it was their fault, not hers.

  The pub, so busy from dawn to dusk, lay eerily silent at this time of . . . whoa, her bedside clock said two forty-three in the morning. No wind howled outside, the only noise she heard came from a goods train down the line.

  And a weird squeak.

  At first, she thought it might be a tree branch rubbing against her window. But with no wind, the branch wouldn’t be moving itself.

  Then a heavy thump and a creak of wood.

  From above.

  This is the top floor. Why does it sound like someone is on the roof?

  Because someone was on the roof. There had to be. The more she listened, the more certain Ondine became that somebody – or maybe two somebodies – were on the roof.

  Pushing the covers back as quietly as she dared, Ondine stepped out of bed. Her feet froze on the floor, which made her wonder how anyone could survive the arctic conditions outside. Grabbing a dressing gown, she ran to her sister’s room. “Belle?” Ondine nudged her in the shoulder.

  No response, just the steady snorfle of a heavy sleeper.

  She walked out to the hall, towards the sound of a rattling tractor. She snuck her head in her parents’ room. There was Da, squished right over to the side, while Ma lay like a starfish, hogging the whole bed. Snoring just like Cybelle.

  “Ma, wake up.” Ma snored even louder. Ondine nudged her shoulder again but got nothing. Her mother was out for the count.

  She crept around to the other side and pulled out one of her dad’s earplugs. “Da, wake up. Something’s on the roof.”

  “Hmm,” he said, sticking his finger into his ear to block his wife’s snoring.

  “No, seriously, you’ve got to have a look. Please.”

  Nothing. Not even holding his eyelid open could rouse him. No trace of alcohol on his breath either, so he couldn’t have been at the plütz. Should she activate the smoke detectors? That would make too much noise and alert whoever was on the roof that they were on to them. In any case, they might have guests staying the night and they needed their sleep. Maybe Chef could help, but it didn’t feel right waking him up because he worked such insane hours. She’d have to try Belle again.

  It was a tough gig trying to run and stay deathly quiet so that she didn’t alert the people on the roof, but she did a pretty good job and raced back to the room she shared with Cybelle.

  By this stage, Belle had rolled on to her back and put her mother’s snoring to shame. Cold aches tugged Ondine’s heart. If only Hamish were here! He’d know what to do. At the very least, he’d be able to scarper up the drainpipe to see what was occurring on the roof.

  Then a new thought struck. Maybe the noise was Hamish; maybe he’d come back to her after all. Maybe he couldn’t find a way to sneak in? Yes, that had to be it. It had to be him.

  It must be him.

  She charged out to the garden, her feet becoming lumps of ice as she skidded to the shed to grab the ladder. The ladder was so heavy it nearly ripped the sockets out of her shoulders. But what did she care for discomfort when Hamish needed her?

  “I’m coming Hamish,” she said as she pulled the ladder back up the flights of stairs and dragged it through her parents’ room to their small balcony.

  If she’d been thinking straight, she would have wondered why the sound of someone dragging a ladder up the stairs and out to the balcony hadn’t roused her parents. In fact, she hadn’t roused anyone.

  Alas, she was beyond thinking straight when it came to Hamish.

  The old wooden ladder made a heavy clonk as she hooked the extension clips onto the top of the building. She couldn’t feel her feet or her hands as she climbed the steps.

  Her poor darling Hamish was up here, possibly freezing to death. A few more steps and she reached the last row of bricks that formed the parapet.

  She peered over the top.

  Instead of gazing into the eyes of her beloved, she found herself staring at Mrs. Howser.

  “Looking for your boyfriend?” she said.

  ​

  ​

  Chapter Twenty

  In her entire life, Ondine had never felt so cold as she held on to the ladder, staring at the old witch. Any thoughts of defecting to ‘the other side’ cracked like ice as the most horrible fear made her stomach churn. “W-what are you doing on our roof?” In the chill, she had to fight her jaw to get the words out properly.

  “Taking back what’s ours,” Mrs. Howser said. She at least had come prepared for the cold night, wearing a fur-lined coat with matching hat. [250]

  “Here it is!” Ondine heard another voice say. A male voice. She could have sworn it sounded just like –

  Lord Vincent.

  He’d come prepared for the elements, with heavy shoes and a thick fur-lined long-coat. Saturn’s rings! Mrs. Howser must have got to him. He didn’t look out-of-it like the last time she’d seen him. ​

  The confident expression he wore told Ondine he knew exactly what he was doing, which was even more frightening. The two of them had to be hatching some kind of plan against Anathea. Although what it had to do with the pub roof was completely beyond her.

  Lord Vincent climbed down from the top of the chimney with a large shoebox in his arms.

  Their stares locked.

  “It’s all perfectly above board. My grandfather hid them here for safekeeping. He used to frequent the pub in the old days.”

  “They’re stolen.” Ondine said.

  “You can’t prove that. Now, get out of my way!”

  Mrs. Howser’s claw-like hands dug into Ondine’s shoulders to pull her up.

  Desperate to get away. Ondine gripped the sides of the ladder and lifted her feet away from the rungs. She slid all the way down to the balcony below. Screaming non-stop.

  Thump! She landed on the balcony in a smacking rush, knocking the wind out of her. Surely her caterwauling would wake everyone? Hobbling to a standing position, she looked up to see Mrs. Howser climbing down the ladder towards her.

  Head first like a spider crawling down her web to her prey.

  Sick with fear, Ondine ran into her parents’ room, slammed the door and locked it. Her parents didn’t budge.

  “Wake up!” she screamed.

  Nothing.

  “Sorry Da.” She pulled the covers back, rolled his flannel pyjama top to expose his rounded belly to the early morning air . . .

  And stabbed her frozen left foot on his warm skin.

  “Aaaarrrrggghhh!” Da screamed himself upright.

  “Mrs. Howser’s on the roof with Lord Vincent and they’re stealing something.” She looked through the glass door to the balcony. Bold as you like, Mrs. Howser stood there, one eyebrow raised.

  Da rubbed his eyes. “She’ll catch her death of cold out there.” He rose from the bed to open the door and let her in.

  “No Da!” Ondine pulled him back. “You have to call the police! She and Vincent were up there and they’ve taken something from inside the chimney.”

  Da tried to get up but lost his balance and fell back into bed.

  He closed his eyes and drifted back to sleep.

  “See you later.” Mrs. Howser gave a finger wave from outside, then, with a swoosh of her hand, she created a slide made from ice which she and Vincent glided down.

  “Fine, I’ll call the plods.” Ondine left her dazed father and snoring mother where they lay and ran to the kitchen.

  When she picked up the phone, she heard Mrs. Howser on the other end. “Don’t worry dear; your telephone will be working again soon. No need to make a fuss, we’re merely taking back what’s ours. Now go back to bed and forget everything you saw tonight. I do wish you’d had some tea, then I could have spared you the trouble.”

  Tea? A quick look at the drying racks by the sink showed a dozen washed teapots, all resting upside down. The witch must have read everyone’s leaves and added something to the drink.

  Well I’ll be! Throwing a fit of the sulks helped me
dodge a bullet.

  If she could just work out what Mrs. Howser meant by ‘Taking back what’s ours,’ she’d have the whole thing figured out. Taking back what? The small glance she’d had of Vincent only showed he had some kind of box. He’d said his grandfather had left it for safekeeping. Which didn’t surprise Ondine, because they kept money in a safe under the kitchen floorboards, on account of Brugel’s banking system being so unreliable.

  But why had a Duke needed to use the roof of a pub to keep things safe?

  Unless it was Vincent’s other grandfather, on his crazy mother’s side? That could make more sense.

  Think, girl, think!

  But all her selfish brain could come up with, as she stood there on the kitchen tiles, stomping her feet in a futile attempt to get the circulation going, was, Why does all this craziness keep happening to me?

  Which was, by a circuitous route, exactly the kind of thought she needed to have. Because strange things did keep happening to her and she refused to believe they were the result of coincidence. It simply could not be coincidence that everything bad in her life had happened after she ran away to home, from Psychic Summercamp, all those months ago.

  She made a hot chocolate to warm her from the inside and help her think. Chocolate made everything better. She also filled a soup pot with warm water and placed it on the floor, then stood in it. The heat flayed her skin and prickled her nerves. Slowly – painfully slowly – she wiggled her toes. The next sip of chocolate reminded her of Draguta Matice, the rail-thin laundry master from the Autumn Palace. Which reminded her of Draguta’s teddy bear stuffed with trinkets. Then her mind tripped her back to the box of jewels they’d found under the dining room floorboards way back in summer. The same box Lord Vincent had tried to steal.

  Mrs. Howser had said she was taking back what was hers. No, not hers, ‘ours’.

  Thoughts churned like cream into butter, until, to Ondine’s utter surprise, one thought became more solid.

  Mrs. Howser.

  She was helping Vincent. Or using him. It didn’t matter which; it only mattered that every event kept coming back to her. Mrs. Howser had to be in on everything.

  Even the times when it seemed like Vincent was acting on his own, he had to have had help, and that help had to have come from Mrs. Howser.

  Nothing else made sense.

  The more Ondine thought about it, the more she became convinced Mrs. Howser and Vincent had been (or maybe still were) using the deGroot family pub as a personal bank. That had to be why they kept coming here.

  Every visit one of them had made would have coincided with some kind of jewellery or cash deposit, secreted somewhere about their pub.

  The private banking details she and Hamish had found in Duchess Kerala’s private rooms in the Autumn Palace immediately came to mind. But now that Ondine thought about it, the banking couldn’t have been for Kerala’s future; but for Vincent’s.

  Meanwhile, the present Duchess, Anathea, had to save her pennies and use Ondine and Hamish as her private – and unpaid – public relations company because the royal family was broke. Well, they weren’t really broke, it was simply that Kerala, Vincent and Mrs. Howser had siphoned so much away, there was nothing left.

  Mrs. Howser had come to Margi and Thomas’s engagement party, back in summer, but she’d retired early. At the time Ondine hadn’t paid much attention to that fact, but she’d bet her next hot meal Mrs. Howser must have been snooping around for jewellery and other goodies while everyone else was distracted.

  Great Pluto’s Ghost, I have to tell everyone, right now!

  Slap, slap, slide. Her wet feet splashed on the floorboards as she raced down the hall, all the while wondering what Mrs. Howser had been looking for – more jewels? Probably. Cash? It must have been in the chimney for decades because her parents had never mentioned it. They probably never knew anything about it.

  She took the stairs two at a time and charged back to her parents’ room, where they were both snoring.

  “Get up! Mrs. Howser’s drugged you!”

  Nothing.

  “The money!” she yelled, ripping the covers off their bed and exposing them to the cold night air. Ma and Da flinched and wailed and, yes, yes! Eventually they came round! “Mrs. Howser and Vincent have the money. It’s why Anathea is broke, and it’s why they kept coming here, why things kept happening to us. Because they used this building for all their stolen jewels and cash!”

  “Coffee,” Da groaned.

  Ma reached for the duvet to pull it back over her, but Ondine ripped it away.

  “The old coot drugged the tea so she could burgle us. She and Vincent were on the roof.”

  THREE BLISTERING CUPS of wake-up-juice later, Ondine’s parents were finally catching on to the enormity of the situation as they sat in the kitchen.

  “It all makes sense,” Ma said. “Ondine I’m so sorry. We should have seen this coming. Howser must have planned it for so long. I was ever so grateful that she had a spot for you at Summercamp. But it seems . . .”

  They all took a sip from their respective cups. Now was not the time for Ondine to admit she’d entertained thoughts of joining Mrs. Howser. Thank goodness she hadn’t!

  “ . . . She set us up from the start.” Ondine rubbed her temple. “On the plus side, maybe now you’ll believe me when I say I’m not psychic?”

  “There is that,” Ma said.

  A quiet ‘hooray’ sounded in the back of her mind, but she’d celebrate this personal victory later, when things weren’t so crazy. At this point, her parents believed her. That would have to be enough for now. “Mrs. Howser and Vincent must be panicking that Anathea is becoming too popular. We need Aunt Col. And we’ll have to tell Duchess Anathea because she needs to know what’s going on.”

  “You sound like a field marshal,” Ma said.

  Ondine beamed at the compliment, and then acknowledged that the coffee had made her more talkative than usual.

  “I’m calling the police,” Da said.

  “If the phone’s working.” Ondine remembered what happened earlier.

  “Hooray for small mercies, I have a dial tone.” Da put the receiver to his ear.

  “Ma? Once we get through all this, maybe we can find a way to help Hamish?”

  A patronising smile crossed Ma’s face and she patted Ondine on the head. “Dear girl. I know you miss him, but in time you will move on.”

  Ondine slapped her mother’s hand away. “Don’t say that!” Heartache burned afresh. “I love Hamish with all my heart.”

  “But you’re so young.”

  “You’re one to talk! You were already married by my age!

  Tense silence filled the room as they stared at each other in mute shock. She could hear her father’s voice as he spoke to the police, reporting the thieves on the roof who stole a deposit box from the chimney.

  Finally Ma said, “I’m sorry love. I was about to say, ‘Things were different then,’ but that would have set you right off.”

  Ondine muttered, “Got that right.”

  Ma moved in for a hug and Ondine gladly accepted it. It was a warm, squishy, rocking-back-and-forth hug offering comfort and a big dollop of nostalgia. How many times had her mother cuddled and rocked her as a baby, as a little girl, as a big girl? Even now she still needed hugs to make everything right again.

  “Thanks Ma. Your hugs are better than magic.”

  Ma sniffed and kissed the top of her head. “Thank you, love.”

  The hug chased away just about everything bad that had ever happened, if only for a moment. “Magic’s stupid. Hugs are better.”

  Ma kissed the top of her head again as Da finished his phone call.

  “The police will be here in a few hours, so we can make our statements. It might save time if we write them down beforehand.” He looked at his watch. “Maybe we should try and get some sleep before breakfast?”

  “I’m wide awake,” Ondine said.

  A few minutes later, Chef and Cyb
elle walked in with drag-along shopping trolleys in preparation for heading to the markets.

  Cybelle said, “You’re up early. What’s going on?”

  “We had a break-in during the night,” Da said. He relayed the events of the past hours.

  “You can’t let the cops in!” Cybelle looked to Henrik with panic in her eyes. “They’ll find the keyboard covers.”

  “Then you’d better shove them somewhere the police won’t see them,” Da said.

  Ondine buried her face in her hands. This was going to be the longest day ever.

  ​

  ​

  ​

  Chapter Twenty-One

  It would have been much easier on everyone if the police had come the next morning. Or even the day after that. To Ondine’s continuing frustration, they took three days to arrive, turning up in the midst of lunch service, which threw the family into panic.

  Not Ondine, of course, who in her misery of missing Hamish, nothing much panicked her. Nothing cheered her up either, but as she had to pull herself together and get on with it, she did just that.

  Henrik and Cybelle had moved the rolls of cling film into the kitchen, hidden in plain sight. Ondine and Da took the police to the surprisingly-spacious-now-the-wedding-was-over private room out the back for the statements.

  “You saw what they stole?” one of the officers asked.

  The answers had to be to the point. No “I’m not sures” or “I think sos” allowed.

  “Correct,” she said. “I saw Vincent taking a box from inside the chimney. A small chest, a bit bigger than the size of a shoe box. I’m positive it’s full of money from his mother Kerala’s secret stash. She was hiding money from the Late Duke, you know. How’s the investigation going into that by the way?”

  “Er, we’re not involved in that,” the officer said as he looked to his partner for backup.

  More note taking from the officers before one of them asked, “This box was a shoe box?”

  “About that size, yes.”