by Lauren Child
Del’s expression turned from indignant to puzzled. ‘You think? But why now?’
‘Maybe he only just figured it out, perhaps he only just found out your name? I don’t know, maybe it was someone else entirely. Let’s face it, there are hundreds of mean-minded folks queuing up to give teenagers a bad rap.’
‘You really think that’s it?’
‘Yes, I do,’ said Ruby,
‘Oh,’ said Del.
‘Principal Levine asked me all about it and I said I had no recollection of what transpired due to a bump on the old noodle and smashed up glasses.’
‘What did he say?’ asked Del.
‘He didn’t like it, but there wasn’t much he could do. So could you just get it through your blockhead skull, I didn’t squeal?’
‘Got it,’ said Del. She stuck her hand out and Ruby shook it. ‘Thanks Rube, I appreciate it and sorry for doubting, you know.’
‘That’s OK, doubt is an important part of belief.’
After school, Mouse and Ruby started walking on over to Back-Spin to see if they could get a table. If Sal was on, their chances were good. Soon after they arrived, Elliot walked in.
‘How come you got a table?’ he asked. ‘I thought it was all booked out.’
‘Ruby’s got in with Sal, the bookings girl, they’re real tight.’
‘Nah, it’s Del who’s got all in with her,’ said Ruby. ‘She’s all, “Sal this and Sal that”.’
‘You think she thinks Sal’s cooler than you?’ said Elliot.
Ruby rolled her eyes. ‘What is this, third grade?’
‘You envious of her purple Dash sneakers, is that it?’
‘My mistake, we seem to be back in kindergarten.’
‘He’s trying to wind you up,’ said Mouse.
‘Well he’s succeeding,’ said Ruby.
‘So did you rat?’ asked Elliot.
‘What are you talking about?’ said Ruby.
‘Del,’ said Elliot, ‘did you rat on her?’
‘Not this again! Have I ever ratted on anyone?’ said Ruby.
Elliot didn’t need to think about it. ‘No, but did you?’
‘Course she didn’t bozo,’ said Mouse. ‘If it were you being interrogated then it’s a probable certainty, but Ruby would never give up an ally.’
‘But someone did, right?’ said Elliot.
‘Why would she take the punishment, miss the Explorer event, and then rat on Del?’ asked Mouse.
‘I was just testing,’ said Elliot. ‘It’s what the cops do; they just ask the same question over and over until the suspect is so worn down that they just admit the truth.’
Mouse clapped her hand to her forehead. ‘Jeepers Elliot.’
‘He’s right,’ said Ruby, ‘get ’em mad, get ’em confused, if they are lying then they get caught in their own tangled web. It’s easy to trip people up this way.’
‘It will be Vapona,’ said Mouse. ‘She wants to set you two against each other so she’s spreading this rumour that you told Principal Levine on Del when of course it was her.’
Ruby thought this highly unlikely.
‘Vapona would never do that. It’s a dangerous game to point the finger at an enemy when they can turn around and point the finger back. If Del goes down then Bugwart gets dragged down with her. Vapona’s a lot of things, but stupid ain’t one.’
‘I wonder who it was then,’ said Elliot.
As it turned out, they didn’t need to wait for an answer because Del walked in through the door of the table tennis cafe and told them straight out.
She was in no doubt as to who had got her in the dog house. It was not Vapona ‘Bugwart’ Begwell, it was not Mr Chester. ‘It’s Brenda Skelton,’ declared Del.
Actually there was no way of proving it was Brenda Skelton, since the call had been anonymous. It had been made to the principal himself, from someone who claimed to have seen Del fighting outside Sunny’s Diner. Actually, Principal Levine had told Mrs Lasco that the voice had sounded like it belonged to a young person, a teenager perhaps, but there was no way to confirm this either.
Mrs Lasco was no pushover and she knew exactly what was going on here.
‘You don’t want to cross my mom,’ said Del proudly, ‘she doesn’t suffer fools.’ Her mother, it seemed, had picked up the phone to Principal Levine and told him a thing or two about anonymous callers: ‘Either this person comes out of the woodwork and accuses my daughter to her face or they can mind their own darned beeswax.’
Principal Levine, on reflection, decided to drop the whole thing since he agreed he had: ‘no solid evidence other than one person’s word against another’s’ and he didn’t ‘make a habit of playing fast and loose with justice’.
Ruby had her own problems; unlike Del’s, there were no anonymous accusations, but she did have a feeling somewhere deep in her gut that someone, somewhere, wanted to see her fall. Why else would Hitch urge her to brush up on her kung fu kicks?
Wake up and smell the banana milk, Redfort, someone’s out to get you.
As a result, though her curfew had been lifted, she wasn’t exactly feeling in the right state of mind for freedom. More than anything, she needed to get home. She made her excuses and left Del chatting happily to Sal about the injustice which had almost befallen her.
As Ruby walked back down Amster, she felt increasingly uneasy. Was it simply paranoia brought on by the day’s events, or was someone watching her? She looked around but could see no one. Even so she broke into a run when she reached the green, and then a sprint, arriving on her doorstep out of breath, adrenaline pumping.
Slamming the door behind her, she went straight on up to her room – no snack, no chat with Mrs Digby – and picked up the bottle from her desk. As she did so she saw a note from Hitch. It said:
That thing you asked me? It’s a convenience store called the Little Seven, in downtown Twinford. That mean anything to you?
So she’d been right about the coordinates.
She hoped she was going to be right about this next bit too.
Carefully she peeled off the label and turned it over to properly examine the back. She’d known it reminded her of something … and now suddenly she knew what that was.
‘Where’s a road map?’ She was looking at Bug, but he had no idea what she was on about. ‘Mom’s car!’ She leapt to her feet, ready to sprint downstairs before realising her mother would have taken it to work. She tapped her fingers on the desk. ‘The downstairs bathroom!’ she shouted.
Bug began to wag his tail; he didn’t know what was going on, but Ruby seemed excited about something. She raced down the two flights of stairs. Bug followed close behind. When they arrived in the hall, he picked up his leash in his mouth and was confused when, rather than open the front door again, Ruby dodged into the small guest bathroom. Her mother had had it wallpapered with a scaled-up map of Twinford, showing all the road junctions. The tasteful of Twinford might doubt its success as a piece of interior decorating, but many a guest had found it a very practical way of planning their journey home.
Ruby scanned the walls, trying to find the part of the map she needed. It turned out it was above the toilet and Ruby had to stand on the seat to reach it. She studied the map, tracing the roads until she reached the concert hall where she’d encountered the goons.
It was when she held up the label printed with the strange logo that she saw it. The shape almost exactly mirrored the layout of the roads in the College Town district. The eight-pointed star at the logo’s centre was the exact same shape as that of Star Park.
This wasn’t simply a logo: this was a road map.
Chapter 40.
Tesseract
RUBY SPRINTED TO HER DAD’S STUDY AND GRABBED A PENCIL AND A PIECE OF PAPER. Then she headed back to the bathroom. Working quickly, she redrew the shape and then circled the concert hall.
There it was, at the intersection of four roads.
OK Redfort, think. If the logo is a map then what does i
t use for coordinates? She let her mind go empty, and just gazed at the label.
At the logo.
At the caption: FOUR GREAT TASTES SINCE 1922.
Four.
Tastes.
Four.
Four!
How could she have been so blind? For the final answer she’d drawn a tesseract – a 4-dimensional cube. To fake it, she’d had to draw its shadow in 3D. Actually a 2D picture of the 3D shadow! Now she sketched it again.
But if you turn a shape then its shadow changes. So what if she drew the shadow from a different angle? As she turned the shape in her mind she suddenly saw that by twisting the perspective you would end up with … the logo on the bottle.
It was the same thing. The same shape, rendered in different ways. The logo was a road map: but it was also a 4-dimensional cube.
Four dimensions meant four coordinates for each point. She drew the logo again – the 2-dimensional projection of the 4-dimensional cube – and sketched in the coordinates for each point.
She stared at the label again.
FOUR GREAT TASTES.
‘Four, great, tastes,’ she muttered. ‘Four, great, tastes.’
‘Taste!’ she shouted. Bug yelped.
Of course! thought Ruby. Because there were four tastes, weren’t there? Salt, bitter, sour, sweet. So if you wanted to lead someone to a point on the map … all you needed to do was put the right combination of tastes into the bottle – a 1 if the taste was there and a 0 if the taste wasn’t – and you could pinpoint a location.
She kept scribbling. What taste would correspond to what coordinate? The natural thing would be to order the tastes as they appeared on the tongue map. She sketched it out.
Then she circled the music school again, this time on the drawing with the coordinates.
(0,1,0,1) would correspond to … SOUR SWEET.
Bingo.
The first bottle had been sugar and lemon in water. Sweet and sour. Sour and sweet. Or, if you mapped it using binary, in four dimensions of taste …
(0,1,0,1)
It was clever. Fiendishly clever.
So where was the second bottle pointing to? Ruby cast her mind back to the lab, with SJ. Salt and sugar – that’s what the second bottle had contained. Salt and sweet. She circled the matching point on the shape.
Then she held it up next to the map of Twinford, looking for the corresponding place on the College Town district road map.
‘The Mirror,’ said Ruby. Bug looked up, ears alert, but ‘Mirror’ meant nothing to him.
‘That’s the Twinford Mirror building,’ she said. This time Bug didn’t lift his head. He was bored of this game. No treats, no walks.
The billboard had given her the first location, which was the Little Seven Grocers on Little Seven Street. The bottle bought from the Little Seven Grocers had announced where the next bottle could be found: the university music school, as it turned out. The third bottle would be located somewhere in the Twinford Mirror building on Gödel Avenue.
She was about to grab her coat and run right down there when a thought occurred to her. Who was to say the bottle would even be there right now? After all, the guy in the red hat hadn’t immediately scooted off to the music school the second he had tasted the contents of the bottle he had got from the Little Seven Grocers. In fact he hadn’t shown up there until four days later. So the question to ask was, how did he know when it would be there?
She wondered if she was too late already. It could be that if there was a bottle at the Twinford Mirror building and it hadn’t already been taken away by the man in the red hat, then it had been found by someone else – maybe a janitor had disposed of its partly drunk contents and it was sitting at the bottom of a garbage can.
How to know?
She picked up the bottle, turning it round and round, reading every word on the label before finally twisting the lid back on top and then …
Click.
She saw what she hadn’t seen before.
No! No, it would not be there, not now, not yet. She knew this for a certainty now. OK, not a certainty, but she would have staked the contents of her piggy bank on it. The drink she had tasted was just salt and sugar and water – it would last almost forever when the bottle was closed. So it was strange that the best before date stamped on the lid was tomorrow’s date.
There was something else unusual about the lid. Around its edge were twelve little dashes, all slanting in, reminding her of a clock face. One of the dashes was coloured red. What if it represented a time, in this case eleven? But did this mean eleven in the morning or eleven in the evening? She could see nothing else that might tell her. She flipped out the magnification glass from the Escape Watch and held it over the lid and there it was, very faint but just possible to see: the letters PM.
This was a breakthrough – this was something to tell Blacker.
She was about to radio him when there was a buzz from her watch. The message read:
>> MEET ME IN LUCELLO’S.
Chapter 41.
Best before
SHE LOCATED LUCELLO’S DELI EASILY ENOUGH. It was in the heart of the Village, sometimes referred to as Little Italy, a part of town known for its bohemian cafés, Italian shops and interesting residents. People travelled across town to purchase their squash tortellini and twenty-year-aged pecorino; during the Christmas season queues could be seen circling the block. It had become very up-market.
One of those interesting residents Ruby was surprised to see while walking to the deli was Sal from the Back-Spin. As Ruby crossed Constanza, she saw Sal walk up to an exclusive apartment building – formerly a tea warehouse – carrying bags of expensive-looking groceries. The doorman opened the door for her and she went in.
Huh, Ruby thought. Either Back-Spin pays ten times the minimum wage or Sal does have a rich ma and pa after all. She couldn’t wait to tell Del. I knew she was a phoney! A moment later – about the time it would take to go up in an elevator – a light came on in a topfloor window.
Penthouse, thought Ruby. Scratch that – filthy rich ma and pa; super phoney.
She continued on her way to Lucello’s.
Hitch was standing at the counter sipping espresso.
He spotted Ruby’s arrival in the mirror. ‘You eaten kid?’
‘A snack,’ said Ruby, ‘but the apple donuts look good.’
‘We’ll take a donut, Paulie,’ said Hitch, handing the man a few bills, ‘better make that two.’
Ruby looked around her. ‘So where’s the door?’
‘Same place,’ said Hitch. ‘I only told you Lucello’s because the coffee’s good.’ He pulled on his raincoat, turning up the collar against the cold, and they headed out into the wind and drizzle. Newly fallen leaves and hotdog wrappers chased each other along the sidewalk and into the shadows. Ruby and Hitch crossed the street, turning left until they reached Broker Avenue.
‘So you had a breakthrough kid?’
‘How dya know?’ said Ruby. ‘You got me bugged or something?’
‘No,’ said Hitch, ‘I’ve just got confidence in you.’
‘That’s good,’ said Ruby. ‘I get the feeling you might be alone in that.’
‘If that was a fact then you wouldn’t be working here,’ he said. ‘So you finally cracked something?’
‘I have no idea what any of it means, but I’ve cracked the code,’ said Ruby.
Hitch raised an eyebrow. ‘Sounds complicated.’
‘So who wants to see me?’ she looked at him. ‘Oh, don’t tell me, Dr Selgood wants a chat?’
‘Worse than that kid, your boss wants to see you – alone,’ he added.
‘Why?’ said Ruby.
Hitch shrugged. ‘Maybe she wants to tell you how great you are, how should I know?’
When they arrived, they shook of the rain and walked over to where Buzz sat.
‘Agent Redfort, you can go right on in,’ said Buzz.
Ruby turned to Hitch. ‘You sure you’re not coming?�
�� she asked.
‘You’re on your own kid.’
Perfect, muttered Ruby.
Chapter 42.
The truth but not the whole truth
RUBY KNOCKED AND WAITED FOR LB’S ‘COME IN’ before she opened the door and stepped inside.
‘Sit,’ said LB.
Ruby sat and LB opened the file that lay on her desk.
‘I regret I couldn’t meet with you when you were last in.’ She looked down at the file. ‘Hitch has brought me up to speed on what you say you witnessed at the music school.’
Ruby noted LB’s use of words – like she was not 100% sure Ruby was telling the truth.
‘He informed me that you believe there may be a connection back to the Australian.’ Again LB read from the file. ‘So this man you followed in Harker Square. The man in the red hat. You say he works for her?’
‘Yes, he was on the way to meet a couple of beefcakes at the university music school.’
LB looked at her, one eyebrow raised.
‘Goons for hire, you know, leg breakers?’ said Ruby.
Her boss’s expression morphed into one of irritation.
‘Assassins?’ said Ruby.
LB nodded. ‘Yes, the assassins, they are both locked up downtown and undergoing police questioning.’
‘Has either one of them squealed?’ asked Ruby.
LB looked at her impatiently. ‘This is not an episode of Crazy Cops, Redfort. Could you please refrain from using this appalling TV slang.’
‘Sorry, I mean, are they talking? Did they say anything? Anything we don’t already know?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ said LB, ‘though it’s not unusual for hard nuts …’ LB corrected herself, ‘criminals for hire, to keep their silence. No doubt talking to us would bring about “consequences” – none of them very pleasant, I’m sure.’
‘So we don’t know who this Aussie woman … I mean Australian woman is and who she is working for?’
‘No, not yet,’ said LB, ‘though what interests me is that you are the only one to have seen her.’