NINE

Tayla sat cross-legged on the tack room floor. Her two-toned jodhpurs and yellow polo shirt looked like they’d just been removed from a store window. How did she do it? She could have been a model on a catwalk instead of a girl who’d been riding a hot sweaty horse less than fifteen minutes ago. Not even a smudge of dirt on her nose. Geez. I only had to look at a horse and I ended up with thick grey dribble all down the front of my shirt.

It was late Saturday afternoon. Jack’s team had won the footy finals and as soon as his father had driven him to Treehaven, I’d called a secret meeting—in the tack room—with the door closed. And a sign out front saying, ‘If you enter—prepare to die!’

The meeting wasn’t going well. I’d been yakking on for the last ten minutes, reading from my notes, explaining to the others about the professor, the bull and Pedro the Chihuahua and how I’d watched an egg hatch.

At last Tayla crinkled her nose in disbelief. “It couldn’t be a platypus, Cha. That’s too totally freaky to make sense.”

“Okay…what other creature is born with jellybean pink skin and looks like this?” I showed her a picture of a baby platypus in the book I’d borrowed from the Gawler public library that morning.

Sarah, her knees up round her chin, her suede boots arranged beside her, sat painting ten perfectly shaped toe-nails a glaringly hideous shade of Vomit Orange.

“Admit it, Cha,” she said her eyes never leaving her toes. “You made a mistake. After all, you said yourself the window was streaked with dirt. What you saw hatching was probably a baby chicken or a duckling. They’re both small and with wet feathers could look sort of pink.”

“But what if I didn’t make a mistake? We have to find out for sure.”

“No we don’t,” bleated Tayla nervously. “That crazy professor guy gives me the creeps. I’ll have nightmares tonight just thinking about his scary bull.”

Sarah shook her head. “It’s too risky, Cha. If we get caught, Aunt Kate will not only hit the roof, she’ll bring it down around our ears. And for what? Something you thought you saw through a dirty window.”

I sighed. Glanced around at the saddles, bridles and pieces of leather I couldn’t put a name to. Breathed in the smell of sweaty horse and stale manure. This new mystery seemed to be going down the toilet before it even started. But I couldn’t give up. No mystery to solve meant I had no story to write.

Scowling at Sarah and Tayla, I pulled my notebook from my pocket.

“Okay, here’s what we do,” I declared, chewing on the end of one of my favorite pink biros. “If what I saw wasn’t a platypus it might have been some alien species. So…we wait until the professor is out then we sneak in and check the eggs in his shed. See what’s really being hatched in there.”

Tayla hurled a damp saddle-cleaning sponge at my head. “Didn’t you hear a word I said? I am not going onto that scary guy’s property. Not even to rescue a baby platypus.”

“Which actually is a wet chicken,” added Sarah, finishing off her nails and screwing the lid back on the bottle.

I sighed again. Since I’d arrived at Treehaven that’s all I seemed to be doing. What was wrong with my P.I. assistants? Had they all gone soft on me?

“Hang on a minute,” said Jack, leaping to his feet and knocking down a large tin of horse-vitamins with his elbow. “What if the professor is an egg-thief? What if he was responsible for the theft of the dinosaur egg at the museum? What if we found the dinosaur egg in his shed?”

“Wow!” I caught the glimmer of excitement in Jack’s eyes and grinned at him. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

Sarah sniffed. “Yeah. And what if the world is really flat?”

Ignoring Sarah’s put-down, I felt an electric buzz start in my fingertips, race up both arms then skip in a tingling rush through the rest of my body. Hey, Jack could be onto something big here.

“What if Professor Goodenough is an egg smuggler?” he continued, his freckles dancing across his nose.

“Or even a mad scientist who’s experimenting with animals,” I added.

“What if he’s trying to clone a dinosaur by using the DNA of the fossilized egg?”

“Double wow!”

“Do you two know how crazy you sound?” Sarah coolly slipped the bottle of Vomit Orange into her jodhpurs’ pocket, picked up her suede riding-boots and stood up. “You saw a chicken hatching from an egg and now you’ve decided it’s a scene from Jurassic Park.”

Her comment was like a bucket of ice water over the head. Sarah was right. Jack and I were being ridiculous. I rammed my notebook back into my pocket and felt a blush creep up my neck and spread across my cheeks. Grrrrrrrr! Anyone want a step-sister for free?

Evidently satisfied with the way she’d broken up our meeting, Princess Sarah strolled to the tack room door on her newly painted feet.

“I’m off,” she said in her I’m-so-cool voice. “Unless you uncover a real mystery—count me out. I don’t want to be grounded like Noah. I came here to ride and that’s what I’m going to do.”

I watched Tayla get to her feet too. Gracefully, like one of those long-legged dancers from the ballet Mum had taken me to see for my twelfth birthday. I could tell Tayla agreed with Sarah because her eyes looked like Leroy’s when he’d been caught fossicking in the rubbish-bin.

“Sorry, Cha,” she said sheepishly. “I love riding Angel and I’d just die if Kate grounded me.”

Geez…what was it with Tayla and Sarah? How was I supposed to solve our latest mystery when two of my assistants had been so badly bitten by the horse-bug they’d turned into marshmallows?

I lifted an eye-brow in the direction of my last hope. “Jack?”

“I’m in.”

Tayla fidgeted with the end of one shiny blonde curl. “Cha, if you keep on with this egg mystery stuff—be careful. Don’t let Noah find out or he’ll tell his mum just to get back at you. He’s spewing ’cos he’s not allowed to ride and blames you for everything.”

Sarah’s head popped back around the doorway and caught the end of Tayla’s warning. She grinned her sly tiger-grin at me. “Talking about my sweet lovable cousin, you’d better hide, Cha. He’s mad as—”

Noah came crashing into the tack-room, his face set in a screwed-up scowl.

“Hey, you!” he yelled. “How am I supposed to teach you to ride if you don’t even show up for your lessons?”

I gave Jack a mock-frown. “Do you think he means me?”

“You? Nah. Wouldn’t talk to you like that. He must be talking to the wall.”

Noah’s scowl deepened. “Ha. Ha. The joke’s on you, ’cos I’d rather teach the wall. Get your riding helmet on Chiana and let’s go.”

That morning Noah had made me ride bareback. That’s right…no saddle. He’d lunged me on Shakespeare for half an hour of bone-grating, stomach-jolting, butt-banging torture. If you’ve ever bounced around on a horse with a backbone so hard, so sharp your rear feels like it’s on fire—you’ll know what I mean. If you haven’t—don’t go there.

“Sorry Noah, I’m too tired. I’ll see how I feel tomorrow.”

“Ooh no you don’t.” His scowl turned into a dragon-snarl as he stepped closer. “Wuss!”

Noah was at it again. Calling me a wuss. If only Jack didn’t have a death-grip on my arm I’d stick my fingers down Noah’s throat, yank out his tongue and feed it to the stable cat.

“Mum says you have to ride in our Cross-country event next week,” Noah went on, his teeth clenched so tightly I half expected a couple to snap off. “So I’m going to make sure you’re ready for that—even if it kills you!”

Of course. Noah couldn’t compete in the Junior Show jumping Championships if he didn’t have me riding well by the end of next week. I squinted, screwed up my nose and stuck out my tongue.

“Okay,” I said pushing myself off the pile of horse rugs and standing on legs that felt like mushy oatmeal.

His words, ‘even if it kills you’ echoed around in my head. If this afternoon’s lesson was half as bad as this morning’s I wanted the theme song from ‘Titanic’ to be played at my funeral.

Even if I survived, I thought, as I followed Short Dark and Irritating outside, I’d be sitting on a feather-cushion. Too tired to eat. Too tired to talk. And too tired to think about the new egg mystery.

I bet no other private investigator in the whole universe was ever made to ride a horse without a saddle in the middle of solving a mystery.