13

Charlie, Ben, and I find some stuff and do a runner

I was eager to get going on our journey, so while Charlie tried unsuccessfully to clean the smoke stains off the kitchen wall with a toothbrush, Ben and I conducted a search of the boat to find some clothes. The little clock on the kitchen stove told us it was coming up on five in the morning. We needed to be gone by six at the latest to make sure nobody was about.

Ben looked through a tiny cupboard at the back of the boat while I started to look through some drawers. It was when I rifled through the bottom drawer that our journey took a serious turn for the unexpected.

I gasped.

Then I blinked.

Then I rubbed my eyes.

I think I might have done one more gasp and then I slammed the drawer shut.

“Everything alright, Fred?” Ben asked finally.

A funny little squeaky sound came out of my mouth. A noise I haven’t made before or since.

“You okay? What did you find?”

I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t think. My brain was trapped on one image. The image of that Fiona Bruce woman with the lovely set of teeth looking utterly dismayed on the Antiques Roadshow.

“Fred, you gone mute or something?” Ben opened the drawer to take a look. “Very nice but they’re not going to cover much up, are they?”

I managed to squeeze some words out. They were: “Ben, Ben, see? Uh-oh?”

Ben frowned.

Granted, they weren’t the most informative words, so I tried again. “Ben, do you know what these are?”

“Er, yeah. I’m not an idiot. They’re rings. Ugly ones at that.”

It was at this moment that everything got a little crazy. Charlie stumbled into the room doing a weird wobbly scream. His face was white and he was carrying something in his hand. “Guys, guuuuuys! I think you should see this.”

My eyes flew open so wide I thought my eyeballs might fall out.

“Good grief, Charlie! Where did you get that?” Ben shouted.

“In the right-hand cupboard under the sink, next to the fabric softener and in front of the dish soap.”

He was surprisingly precise given the circumstances.

“What’s a gun doing next to the dish soap?” I yelled.

“Put it down! It could be loaded,” Ben said.

Charlie placed the gun down on the bottom bunk, took a step back, and started to whimper. His legs buckled very slowly, and he sort of accordianed down onto the floor and began rocking back and forth.

Even though I was wearing practically nothing, I started to feel really hot. Like, volcano-hot. “Guys, we need to get out of here.”

“Fred, what’s going on?” Ben asked.

I held up two rather ugly but apparently priceless gold swan rings. “My dad was watching something about these on the news.”

“Fred, what are you talking about?”

“Guys, I think we may have broken into a boat owned by a jewel thief. A jewel thief who owns a gun!”

The information seemed to hang in the air for a moment before they fully took it in. Then Charlie began rocking faster and Ben ran around in tiny circles muttering unhelpful things like, “Oh my oh my oh my oh my. They’re going to kill us. I’m too young to die.”

All the rocking and running did not help my own stress levels, and when Ben grabbed hold of my arms and said, “Fred, what do we do? Think of something,” all I could think to say was, “Do you know a male swan is called a cob and a female swan is called a pen and mute swans have a top speed of fifty-five miles an hour?”

Charlie stopped rocking. Then he and Ben looked at me with these bewildered expressions until Ben said, “What the actual hell, Fred?”

“Sorry—I don’t know why I said that.”

“Well, let’s make like a swan and leave, like, now,” Ben said.

Charlie pulled himself to his feet and then said, “Hang on—in our underpants?”

“You want to wait for the owner of that gun to come back?”

Charlie shook his head.

“Didn’t think so. Come on, let’s go.”

We fled Llywelyn-the-Now-Slightly-Less-Great in our damp shoes and underpants, sprinting out of the broken front door into the gray morning light. I cleared the gap between the boat and the dock the first try. I think the extra injection of fear propelled me across the distance. We pounded along the dock with no clue where we were headed, just as long as we were away from the boat . . . and the gun.

We found ourselves back in the park. Ben stopped first and pulled me and Charlie behind this great big bush that, while providing excellent cover, was super prickly. The park was deserted—the stage was still there, but the booths were closed. People wouldn’t be arriving for the festival until around ten o’clock, when the scarecrow competition judging began.

“What are we going to do now?” Charlie asked. “Do you think we should go to the police? Tell them what we’ve found?”

Ben did not like that idea. “Can you imagine how much trouble we’d be in? We could end up with a criminal record. Or worse.”

“Do you mean prison?” I asked.

“I dunno, maybe. We did break and enter and Charlie’s also an arsonist, so it’s a possibility.”

“Okay, so no going to the police, agreed?” I looked at them both and they nodded.

“I think we need to get out of Barry,” Ben said.

Ben was absolutely right. I was ready to get as far away from Barry as possible, but there was a problem. “If we get on a bus in only our underwear, people will ask questions.”

“We need to find some clothes,” Charlie said.

“You think?” Ben snapped a little uncharitably. “Where are we going to get clothes at five in the morning?”

It was a good question.

Sometimes there are good questions that are easy to answer, like How many people live on Earth? (There’s around 7.8 billion, by the way.) Sometimes there are good questions that are tricky to answer, like Which animal would be the cutest if it was shrunk down to the size of a mouse? (I mean, how do you even start?) And then there are good questions that seem impossible to answer, but the solution sort of jumps out at you from nowhere. And this was that type of good question, because after Ben said, “Where are we going to get clothes at five in the morning?” I said, “From there.”