AllFreeNovel
Share Us
the season grows old,
the deuce is revealed –
there lies the gold.
‘What does that mean?’ asked Jaide.
‘If only we knew! There are fields on the estate, and lots of paths, too. The rest, though, is a bit of a mystery.’
‘How big was this cloth again?’
Kyle held up his ruler. ‘About the same width as this, only half as long.’
‘Sounds like a bookmark,’ said Tara. ‘A bookmark of velvet with gold embroidery.’
‘Where did your dad find it?’ asked Jack, who had overheard and come over.
‘Just on the ground near the new menagerie cages, outside the lodge. Around the time Young Master Rourke moved there.’
‘Did he ask Young Master Rourke about it?’
Kyle put his ruler back under his desk and mumbled something that sounded like, ‘Finders keepers.’
Jaide leaned back, frowning. The bookmark must have fallen out of one of Young Master Rourke’s old paperbacks, and it certainly sounded like a clue to something. But if the groundskeeper of the estate hadn’t worked out the landmarks, how would she and Jack possibly do it?
‘What’s a deuce?’ asked Tara.
None of them knew.
The school’s ancient dictionary proved to be of some use, unlike the last time Jaide had used it. There were two definitions for the word deuce. The first was ‘an expression of annoyance or frustration’. She could see how that could come in handy at that moment, but it didn’t help. The second was all about sports and games. Deuce was when two tennis players were tied at the end of a game. It was when someone rolled two in a game of dice. A deuce was also ‘a playing card with two pips’.
Jaide blinked. Suddenly, she knew. She knew what the path between fields was, and what it meant when the rhyme talked about the season growing old. That and inter-world doorways being rectangular! It had been staring them in the face all along.
Before she could whisper what she’d figured out to Jack, a commotion on the other side of the class distracted her. Fingers pointed and a cluster formed around the windows, oohing and aahing.
‘Isn’t he just adorable?’ exclaimed Miralda King. ‘I think he wants to come in.’
‘Don’t open the window,’ said Mr Carver hastily. ‘He could be dangerous. They carry parasites, you know. And just look at that beak!’
Kyle and Tara hurried to see. So did the twins. There was a large, blue bird pacing up and down outside the window, craning to see past the faces peering out at it.
‘Oh no, not again,’ said Jack. ‘What’s she doing here?’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Hidden in Plain Sight
ON SEEING JACK, CORNELIA BEGAN to pace more quickly, rolling her head from side to side.
‘Rourke! Rourke!’
‘She’s a she, not a he,’ said Jack, feeling defensive of Cornelia despite everything, ‘and she doesn’t have parasites.’
‘You know this bird?’ asked Mr Carver.
‘You could say that. But I don’t know what she’s doing here.’
He pushed through to the front of the throng.
‘Go home, Cornelia,’ he said, waving his hands at her through the glass. ‘Go on! Get out of here!’
The bird just watched him with a quizzical expression, as though he had gone mad.
‘Rourke?’
‘Is that all she says?’ asked Miralda. ‘I thought parrots were supposed to be intelligent.’
‘She is intelligent,’ said Jaide. ‘We just can’t understand her.’
‘Rourke!’ Cornelia tilted her head and bit at the window frame, pulling free a chunk of wood. Spitting it aside, she began digging again, widening the hole with her sharp beak.
‘Shoo!’ said Mr Carver, flapping at the window with an open book. ‘That’s town property!’
‘Rourke!’
She kept on digging.
With a sinking feeling, Jack realised that Cornelia was his responsibility. She thought he was her friend, even if he didn’t feel the same way in return anymore. If he didn’t do something about her, she would only get into more trouble.
‘I’ll take her away,’ he said. ‘If I can be excused . . . ?’
‘Yes, yes, do what you need to get rid of that feathered vandal.’ Mr Carver was normally a fervent advocate of animal rights, but not for anything that disrupted his school, it seemed. He gathered up Jack and practically pushed him out the door. ‘Don’t come back until it’s safely locked up!’
Jack came around the side of the school, acutely conscious of everyone watching him. Cornelia stopped digging at the wood the moment he appeared and waddled over to him.
‘All aboard,’ she said. ‘All aboard.’
‘What? Cornelia, I can’t understand what you’re saying.’
She opened her wings, flapped mightily, and launched herself onto Jack’s shoulder.
He almost fell over backwards in surprise. Cornelia rocked from side to side, her powerful claws digging into his shirt and not letting go.
‘What are you doing?’ Jack asked her.
‘Shake a leg,’ she said, folding her wings and doing an odd and slightly painful dance on his shoulder.
‘You want me to take you somewhere?’
‘Rourke!’
‘I’m not allowed to take you to the estate. I’m at school.’
But her dance got only weirder – she shuffled from foot to foot and pushed one knobbly leg into his face.
‘Everyone is watching, Cornelia. Wait . . . is that what you’re talking about?’
Jack had forgotten the tiny metal ring attached to Cornelia’s left ankle. She was waving it under his nose, trying to get him to look at it.
Jack gingerly took her leg in his hands. She didn’t protest, and she kept her claws carefully away from the palm of his hand so she wouldn’t scratch him.
There was a piece of very thin paper tucked into the ring. He pulled it out and delicate
ly unfolded it, expecting a note or even – his heart pounded – another clue, perhaps more of the treasure poem Kyle had recited.
Instead, it was a page from a dictionary, with a hole in one corner where Cornelia’s beak had gripped it.
‘Did you take this from Rodeo Dave’s shop?’ he asked her.
‘Rourke!’ She tapped the page with her beak.
‘Rennie must have folded it for you. Which means you’re trying to tell us something again.’
He scanned the page. It came from the T section of the dictionary. The word twister leaped out at him.
‘Hey,’ he said, ‘that’s a secret. You’re not supposed to tell people.’
‘Rourke!’ She tapped the page again. ‘Rourke!’
‘I know, but what does that have to do with anything?’
She tapped so hard that her beak slashed the page and almost cut Jack’s thumb, making him drop the paper onto the ground. She threw up her wings and squawked in frustration.
Jack sympathised. It was frustrating, constantly banging up against this block in communication. Cornelia mainly talked in nautical phrases, probably picked up from the captain of a whaling ship long ago. It was lucky, he supposed, that she wasn’t singing rude sea shanties. Maybe it was caused by some kind of trauma – a throwback to an earlier phase of life, brought on by what she had seen the night Young Master Rourke died – which would be understandable but was not terribly helpful.
‘I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me,’ he said, ‘but I know my dad had nothing to do with what happened to your old master. He just couldn’t have. Still, I don’t think you’re lying or trying to trick us – and you’re definitely not Evil. Just a bit destructive sometimes.’
He picked up the torn piece of paper and put it in his pocket.
‘One of us is wrong.’
Cornelia headbutted him on the nose. The message this time was unmistakable.
You are.
‘We have to figure this out, Cornelia,’ Jack said, ‘but I’m supposed to be at school. If I don’t go back in, I’ll get into trouble. Why don’t you go home and we’ll try again later?’
