DAY 20: Thursday (later)
My skims: 15
Wriggler’s skims: 0
Tearley’s skims: 8
Mr Black’s skims: 8 (!)
Money made for tinnie or Tearley: $0
Am going to have to ring Uncle Scott and see if he’ll wait a bit longer.
When I woke up everyone was out. I lay there, half awake, half asleep, wondering what had made that scratching noise under the floor in the deserted house.
Every time I closed my eyes I could hear it again … scrape, scrape, scrape. I thought I was dreaming. Then I realised I was actually hearing scraping. One of Dad’s chickens was scratching the dirt outside my window.
Someone knocked on the front door. It was Tearley.
‘We’re not going back to that house,’ I said.
I told her about the noise coming from under the trapdoor.
‘Maybe it was Mr-Black-the-ghost getting dressed to go out,’ she said.
She wasn’t taking me seriously at all.
‘Shut up, Tearley,’ I said. ‘There is someone trapped in that cellar and they’re trying to get out. And I’m not going back there.’
‘Then how will we ever know if the camera worked? You’ll have scared yourself for nothing,’ she said. ‘You need to harden up, Dribbler. Let’s get Wrigs and go down there.’
I really hate it when she calls me Dribbler.
We walked around the corner to Wrigs’ place. Wrigs was in the front yard.
When I told him about the scraping noise I’d heard, he went inside for a minute or two. When he came back out, he was wearing a bright red bandana around his forehead.
He went to his Mum’s rose bed and rubbed his good hand in the dirt. Then he smeared the dirt over his face like some kind of commando soldier.
He looked ridiculous. Like a ranga Rambo.
‘What’s that for?’ I said.
‘It’s what the SAS do. It’s camouflage, and it’ll scare anyone off because they’ll think I’m armed and dangerous.’
‘You mean, it’ll give us a chance to run away while they laugh at you?’ said Tearley.
When we got to the river, Wrigs set himself up in the bushes as the lookout. He would have been camouflaged except for the bright red hair popping out over the bright red bandana.
Tearley and I crept down the path through the bushes towards the house. I grabbed the milk crate from its hiding place. My heart was racing.
When we got to the old doorway Tearley called out, ‘Hello,’ but no one answered.
When we got to the kitchen, I climbed up on top of the milk crate and took the memory card out of the camera.
We went back outside into the vacant lot. We sat down on the retaining wall facing the river and Tearley fired up her laptop. She put the memory card in. A page popped up on the screen saying ‘Ready to download images?’ Tearley clicked ‘Yes’.
The first photo was of me standing looking at the camera. The time said: 04.35.38. The next couple of photos showed me doing star jumps. The next showed me staring at the floor, looking shocked. In the one after that, I was running out of the room. The pictures were good. But luckily not so good you could see how scared I was.
Just then, there was a noise. I looked behind us and spotted Mr Black striding out of the bushes towards us. Tearley snapped her laptop shut.
‘Hey kid, you’ve got something to hide, yeah?’ Mr Black said to her. He was dressed in his usual black suit and carrying his black briefcase, but he was also holding a small hessian bag.
Tearley went bright red.
‘Just a school project,’ she said.
‘No worries, kid. I’m not your parents, yeah,’ he smiled.
You could see he had a gold tooth. He didn’t look like the kind of person who smiled often. It was the kind of smile that looked like he was going to vivisect you, and enjoy it.
‘You like it down here, yeah?’ he said to me. ‘I see you throwing pebbles sometimes.’
‘Yeah,’ I croaked, ‘we’re trying to break the world record for rock skimming.’
Mr Black’s eyes were so dark I couldn’t tell what part was the pupil and what part was the coloured bit surrounding it.
‘Cool,’ Mr Black said, but he didn’t look like the kind of person who said ‘cool’ often, unless he was holding you down in freezing water waiting for you to pass out.
‘I like it down here, too,’ Mr Black said. He ran his hand up his forehead and through his hair. There wasn’t much of it left.
‘I come here to think, yeah. To get away from the hustle and bustle of the city.’ He didn’t look like the kind of person who had a lot to think about, unless it was to work out which type of crowbar is best for smashing kneecaps.
‘It’s a nice place, yeah. Can I have a go?’ He picked up one of our rocks, and pegged it out across the water. It bounced eight times.
‘Not bad for a first timer, yeah?’ He smiled again. ‘Good luck with your world record. I’ll see you soon, yeah.’
At that moment Wrigs came tumbling down the pathway.
‘Hey, w’sup, Digger?’ he said. ‘You guys were only meant to be a couple of min——’ He trailed off when he saw Mr Black standing next to us.
Mr Black said to him, ‘Hey, kid, you’ve been to a fancy dress party, yeah? Nice outfit.’
Then he turned and walked off, back up the path.
‘How weird was that?’ I said when he was gone.
‘He didn’t seem too bad,’ said Tearley.
‘He’s a gangster,’ said Wrigs.
‘A gangster? Did you see his shoes?’ said Tearley. ‘He was wearing an old pair of black sandshoes. Gangsters don’t wear twenty-dollar sandshoes. He just looks like he wants to be a gangster.’
‘Did you see the hessian bag he was carrying?’ Wrigs said. ‘It was moving.’
‘No way,’ said Tearley.
‘Shut up, Wrigs. You’re imagining things again,’ I said. ‘And by the way, you were meant to be the lookout. Why didn’t you warn us Mr Black was coming?’
‘I … I … I …’ stammered Wrigs.
He looked at his wrist. ‘Is that the time? I gotta go.’
He ran off.
We knew he was lying because he didn’t have a watch on.
That night, about eight o’clock, Tearley knocked on my front door.
She marched into the lounge room with her laptop under her arm.
‘Hi, Mrs Field, Mr Field, is Dribbler home?’
Mum didn’t look surprised that:
(a) Tearley had come around to talk to me, or
(b) she called me Dribbler.
We went outside to the front verandah and Tearley turned on her computer.
‘We didn’t see the rest of the photos,’ she said.
‘There’s more?’ I said.
Tearley opened up the file with the photos taken by the camera. There were no more pictures of me, but there were some with Mr Black in them. The first photo showed him walking into the kitchen of the deserted house, with a torch in one hand and the hessian bag in the other. The bottom corner of the photo showed the time it was taken: 04.42.14.
‘That’s like three minutes after I left,’ I said. ‘If I hadn’t bolted up View Street so fast, I would have run into him.’
The next photo showed Mr Black opening the manhole. He pulled up the trapdoor and, at 04.42.45, lowered himself in. Then there was a break when he was in the hole and the camera mustn’t have been able to see any movement. Then, at 05.06.55, he came out again, still holding the bag. Now it looked floppy. The last photo showed him leaving the kitchen.
‘What’s he got down there?’ Tearley said. ‘See the bag … it’s full when he goes down the manhole but empty when he comes out.’
‘Maybe he’s a kidnapper and he’s got people down there and he’s delivering food to them.’
Tearley thought for a moment. Then she said, ‘You heard a scraping sound, didn’t you?’
‘Yeah. Someone was trying to get out.’
‘People wouldn’t scrape, they’d shout out or knock on the manhole or move around.’
‘Maybe they’re tied up,’ I said.
‘Then how would they scrape?’ Tearley said. ‘Besides, Mr Black would have to be taking them water and fresh food all the time to keep them alive. We put the camera in on Monday, and it didn’t take a picture of him until this morning. So we know he hasn’t been to the house for three days, at least. And he couldn’t have had much water or food in that bag.’
I hate the way Tearley can be so logical.
‘So what’s he taking down? It’s not like he could fit much stolen stuff in the bag either.’
‘There’s lots of small things that can be worth a lot of money, Digger. Jewellery. Guns. Drugs.’
‘Drugs?’ I said. ‘Do you really think he’s a drug dealer?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Tearley. ‘But I don’t know how a load of drugs would make a scratching noise on the trapdoor.’
Just then Mum came out and said, ‘Hey, Cindy, you probably should go home. Your mum’ll be getting worried about you, and it’s time Dribbler went to bed.’
Dribbler?
When I got to my room, Dean was lounging on his bed, reading a surfing magazine.
‘Got a girlfriend, have you?’
Dean is such a dumbnut. He’s got no idea how much pressure I’m under, trying to catch a criminal, buy a tinnie and break a world record. Why would I waste time with a girlfriend?