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“Halloo!” A-Through-L called down the sand. He lay on his back under a canopy of palm and papaya and breadfruit trees, his wings stretched out lazily, one powerful leg crossed over the other, surrounded by a small mountain range of coconut shells and papaya skins and breadfruit crusts with jam still freshly oozing out of them.
“What time do you call this?” Blunderbuss growled. She meant it to sound endearingly mum-like, but wombat mums are very growly, so it came out rather ferociously. She didn’t notice anything the matter. To a wombat, a growl sounds like love. “We’ve got to keep moving, you two!”
September and Saturday clambered up the black sand beachhead. Neither Ell nor Blunderbuss got up to greet them, being very full of fruit and very caged in by the remains of their lunch. The scrap-yarn wombat stretched out, hoisting up one of Ell’s scarlet wings with her left forepaw to make a beach umbrella for herself. September kicked her way past the mounds of coconuts and fruit peels. She followed that long Wyvern tail until it became a Wyvern—a Wyvern wearing the most astonishing contraption on his familiar, friendly face.
“What … what are you wearing, Ell?” asked September, not wanting to offend if her friend had decided to try a new look.
The Wyverary had found two large pieces of sea glass and wrapped them all round with floatberry briars so that they would sit more or less straight on his muzzle. Leftover lengths of vine drooped down among his whiskers while the berries bobbed in the air at the ends of their curly stems like butterscotch-colored balloons. He’d also tied a length of brandybean vine round his waist like a bathrobe belt and hung a plump purple turnip from the thing. Ell peered over the rims of his new spectacles, looking entirely pleased with himself.
“It’s my pince-nez! All great detectives wear them, you know.” Ell grinned toothily. “Essential for Seeing Through Subterfuge and the Art of Observation!”
“It’s my turn, Ell,” yipped Blunderbuss. “Hand over the nosepincher and let me have a go! I’ve got a theory about that Oddson fellow. Top to bottom suspicious, wouldn’t you say, monsieur?”
“Indubitably, madame,” Ell replied gravely. He waggled his whiskers, curling them up like a waxed mustache. “But I think you’ll find I’ve got another ten minutes!”
“We can’t spare ten minutes,” Saturday said miserably. “We didn’t find anything at Mumkeep Reef. We’re no better off than when we started. I bet Charlie Crunchcrab’s got farther along than us by now.”
“You found a tattoo,” Blunderbuss chirped approvingly. She shook off the peels and shells and started stomping up the beach. “Nice!”
September squeezed a last bit of water out of her hair, running after the wombat. Ell thundered behind.
“Where are you going? We haven’t decided our next move!”
“Our next move is to move. Can’t stay in one place! Ell and I hashed it out while I had the pince-nez and we agree: next stop, the Worsted Wood. Where you got your wrench! That casket makes the Queen’s sword, stands to reason it’s necessary for becoming Queen. Maybe it’s a piece of the Heart of Fairyland! And if not, the spriggans might know. Ell says they have a university, and that’s where people keep their smarts.”
A-Through-L picked September up in one claw and twisted round to put her on his back. Then, he snatched up Saturday in the same fashion. “It’s far, but we can make up time if we don’t stop to sleep, or for anything else. From this minute, no stopping till spriggans! We saw Goldmouth run by with a bundle under his arm—we hid, because he is dreadful, and I think you would be upset if you came back and found us bleeding. Though we would win, of course, in a fight! But we would probably get very bruised.” His turnip banged against his knees as Ell ran.
September wrinkled her brow doubtfully. “Detectives? The Worsted Wood? What on earth are you two talking about?”
“We only left you for a few hours,” marveled Saturday.
“If that’s what you call ‘all day and all night and half the next day,’” Blunderbuss grumbled. “We had to slap up some sort of fun. And lucky for you we did!”
“We’ve been reading!” Ell whooped. He pointed his nose toward their luggage. A small blue book peeked out from beneath the lid. A mightily abused dust jacket clung on to the cover for dear life. It showed two men in blue uniforms looking very concerned about a lovely young lady lying on a blue sofa. Above their heads, September read:
THE MYSTERY OF THE BLUE TRAIN,
BY AGATHA CHRISTIE
Ell rattled on as they ran. “Well, I have, mainly.
Buss wanted to eat it, which I have tried to tell her is a completely wrongheaded way to go about literature-ing. She said I was being culturally insensitive and a complete dunce. But one of her favorite dunces, so that’s nice.”
The scrap-yarn wombat hid her face in a heap of papaya. “Aw, don’t be sore, Ell. I’m only rude to my nearest and nearest. Anyway, I should’ve remembered. Wombats start with W. You gotta learn our p’s and q’s the slow way.”
“We agreed the fairest fix was for me to read aloud. After all, if Buss did it her way, there wouldn’t be any story leftover for me. So I did and we loved it so much I read it all through again and then we had a long discussion over our fourth dinner about the themes and imagery and metaphors—”
“Don’t trust metaphors,” the wombat snorted. “If you let things start claiming to mean other things, there’s no limit on how many things they can mean! Madness! I am a stonking big knitted wombat, Ell is part Wyvern and part Library, and that’s that. We don’t mean anything but us and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise!”
“I mean lots of things, thank you kindly,” the Wyverary said, without the littlest spot of anger in his voice. They had clearly got their teeth into that argument many times in the night. “Anyhow, the point is, we’ve talked it over, and we’ve decided to become detectives.”
Blunderbuss nodded her woolly head enthusiastically. “We’re on the case! The Case of the Hijacked Heart!”
“So you don’t have to worry anymore! We’ve learned so much I feel dizzy! We are much more interesting beasts than when you left us. Now we know all about Mysteries, Deduction, Motives, Mistaken Identities, Jewel Thieves, Belgian People, Steam Trains, Red Herrings, Heiresses, Chloroform, Ballerinas, Cigarettes, Rubies, England, Femme Fatales, and Boy Femme Fatales Though There Doesn’t Seem to Be a Word for That but There Should Be. Honestly, September, you never told me half of what your world gets up to! I told you all about mine, but you kept all this fantastic stuff in your back pocket. It’s not fair. But it’s amazing! I want to know more! Do all human men have splendid mustaches, or is it only Monsieur Poirot?” And he gave her a jaunty smile, curling his whiskers once more into a perfect, bright orange petit handlebar mustache.
September bit her lip. “Ell … did you steal that book from the Great Grand Library?”
The Wyverary let his whisker-mustache drop instantly. His eyes filled up with hurt. “How can you ask me that? September! I would never steal a book! I wouldn’t even take a book from a cabinet marked Free Books unless I could track down the owner and make sure I was really allowed to. I would especially never steal a book from my Gigi!” Ell blushed. It went all the way up his cheeks and over the top of his head, turning him cantaloupe-colored as it went. “She said I could call her that,” he whispered. “It stands for Great Grandmother. I know I ought to have come as soon as I heard Greenwich Mean Time sounding off at you, but I couldn’t stop looking at the Human section. So many books I’d never heard of! So many titles I couldn’t understand? What’s a Wuthering? Why is it Important to Be Earnest? I am always earnest. Why would anyone not be? I tried to skim a few of them even though I know they’re Special Collections and I oughtn’t go grubbing them up without a librarian present, but I was so excited, and I was very careful, and claws aren’t nearly so grubby as fingers and I just wanted to find out about the House of Mirth so badly, because it sounds like a wonderful place. And just as I was about to find out what was so great about Mr. Gatsby, a great huge candlestick with no candles in it leaned over and rested itself against my shoulder in just the gentlest way. Like when you lean your head against my shin sometimes. And the Great Grand Library whispered to me, because that’s any library’s favorite way of talking. She said…” A-Through-L had to stop for a moment. Turquoise tears swam up in his eyes. “She said I was a good librarian. She said my father would be so proud of me if he could have seen my alphabetizing and my powerful shhh and the size of my tail. She said I could visit her anytime I wanted and call her Gigi and next time she would make me cookies and let me use the Old Stamp. That’s the first one Gigi ever had. Christopher Wren made it for her out of mushroom. It’s her way of saying she trusts me, you see. The Old Stamp is very delicate. And I am very big.” Blunderbuss sopped up his tears with her paw. She understood all about this sort of thing. She wanted the boy who made her to be proud of her, too. Ell made a sound between a laugh and a hiccup. “And then she said that as she’d missed all my birthdays, I could take one book to be my very own. My book. I’ve never owned a book before. A library’s books belong to the library, not the librarian. She said I could have any one I wanted except The Canterbury Tales, as that one’s her favorite.”
