Читать книгу Forever and Ever - Amber Aitken - Страница 6

Coral arrived at Nicks’s house at 20 minutes past 12 o’clock, but that was only because her mum had insisted on popping into the chemist after the dentist. But that was OK; it had worked out for the best in the end. Coral had spent that time in the fancy-dress shop three doors down from the chemist.

“Hey, Nicks!” she hissed as she hopped excitedly from one foot to the other. “Is your mum around?”

“She’s upstairs, but she’s leaving soon.”

Coral grinned. “Perfect! Look what I have for us.” She rattled a paper carrier bag printed with the words FANCY PANTS.

“Erm, a pair of fancy pants?” replied Nicks nervously. Her best friend was known to have some wild ideas.

Coral frowned. Her best friend could be odd at times. “Nope. I got us a pair of wigs.” She opened the bag and removed one blonde and one curly reddish-brown wig. “They’re for us, so that we can conduct our research without being noticed.”

“Without being noticed by who?” wondered Nicks out loud.

“By your mum, of course! She must not know what we’re up to, remember? And Sunday Harbour is a small town. So these will be perfect.” She passed Nicks the wig that was long and blonde.

“They would be perfect, I guess,” replied Nicks, “except have you noticed one thing?” She put the wig on her head.

Coral stared and blinked at her friend, who did not look very different at all. Nicks’s own hair was long and blonde too. So she whipped the wig from her friend’s head and handed her the wig that was reddish-brown and curly and a surprisingly good match to her own hair instead.

Nicks pressed this wig firmly on to her head and stared silently at Coral for a few moments. “There, now you’ll look like me and I’ll look like you. That should trick my mum.”

Coral made a ‘humph’ sort of sound through her nostrils. Nicks wasn’t being as grateful as Coral had imagined she’d be. Perhaps she should have got her the blue beehive–that would have shown her! But there wasn’t any time to think any more about that now as suddenly Nicks’s mum appeared at the door to the kitchen.

“Hello, Coral, dear,” she chimed sweetly as she reached for her car keys hanging on a hook.

Coral shoved the blonde wig under her top. “Hi, Mrs Waterman,” she replied.

“I do wish you’d call me Maggie,” replied Nicks’s mum. “What’s that under your top, Coral?”

“Oh, this?” Coral patted her round soft belly. “Too many treats,” she chuckled.

Maggie Waterman raised an eyebrow and made a face like she suspected something was up. But she didn’t ask any further questions and simply kissed the tops of the girls’ heads instead. “All right then, you two, be good, and I’ll see you later.” And then she was gone.

“I bet she’s off to meet someone about that new job she’s after,” growled Coral like it was an unforgivable offence.

“Actually she’s off to the post office,” replied Nicks, who was still holding the wig she’d hidden behind her back. “Now, where do we start?”

Coral stared around the kitchen. “We might as well start in here,” she suggested.

Nicks deposited the reddish-brown wig on the countertop. They had to learn everything possible about her mum if they were going to find the perfect Mr Perfect. And the decorative bowl on top of the microwave seemed like a good place to start. It wasn’t long before she held her hand in the air victoriously.

“Ticket stubs for the Sea Life Aquarium!” she announced, smiling. It had been a great day out–her mum did love the ocean and dolphins.

Coral grinned. “Brilliant–maybe Mr Perfect also loves fish and stuff!” She returned to her own exploring and found the door to a large cupboard beneath the stairs. Inside was a lady’s bicycle with two flat tyres and cobwebbed spokes. There was also a tennis racket with broken strings and an abdominal exerciser with rusty hinges. These were excellent clues as to what Maggie Waterman did not enjoy. She turned to Nicks, who had her nose stuck in a book called Recipes for Every Day of the Year.

Her friend glanced up from her reading and nodded. “The pasta recipe pages show the most wear and tear. Mum does like pasta.”

Coral drummed her fingers on her chin and gave this some thought. “Pasta is Italian food. And Mr Selvaggio at Deli Antonia is Italian. He must be very lonely since Mrs Selvaggio passed away. So that’s another place for us to visit.”

“What is?” asked Nicks, who no longer had any idea what Coral was talking about.

“Deli Antonia! Now, shall we head upstairs?”

Nicks led the way to a bedroom that was decorated in white with a small gold chandelier and a large gilt-edged mirror over a dresser.

“This room is lovely,” ooh’d Coral. “It’s so girly and romantic.”

“My mum does enjoy decorating. She buys all the latest interior decorating magazines.”

“So that’s another thing then!” cheered Coral, who was really starting to enjoy this snooping…or investigating. “If there’s a kind, clever, funny, handsome, pasta-loving interior decorator in Sunday Harbour–we will find him!”

Nicks was finally beginning to believe that this research wasn’t such a bad idea after all. “Come on–I’ll get the photo albums out,” she said as she reached beneath the bed for a large box with a label that read FAMILY PHOTOS. Inside the box were three matching photo albums. Hoisting one out, she clambered on top of her mum’s white bedspread. “Now, what exactly are we looking for?”

Coral joined her friend on the bed and nestled in close. Reaching over, she turned to the first page of the photo album. There were snaps of Nick’s mum when she was younger, taking part in various stage productions. Coral jabbed a finger at one of the photographs.

“Look–see, your mum obviously loves the theatre.”

Nicks seemed surprised. She’d really had no idea. Her mum had always kept very busy…well, just being her mum.

“So maybe Mr Perfect could be a member of Sunday Harbour’s amateur dramatics society?” suggested Coral as she turned the pages of the photo album.

The next set of photographs consisted of beach shots that were so old they were black and white. These would have been taken way before Maggie Waterman’s time. The women in the pictures wore swimming costumes that had skirts attached and the men walked about in straw hats. Coral didn’t like to imagine a world without colour and was about to turn the page when one particular photo caught her eye. It showed a row of beach huts that looked remarkably similar to Sunday Harbour’s own row of beach huts. Coral paused and peered closely. Sand dunes rose up in the background. There was a promenade. And a sign beneath a lamppost that advised: PEDESTRIANS AND BICYCLES ONLY. Sunday Harbour’s promenade had an identical sign, in exactly the same place!

Coral’s nose was now practically touching the album as she scanned the rest of the photographs closely. One photograph three down and two across suddenly seemed to jump out at her. It was mounted with a narrow cardboard edging and somebody had written an inscription in capitals along the bottom of the cardboard mount. OUR LOVELY BEACH HUT, it said. This particular photo showed a close up of the front of a beach hut with two young girls standing on the hut’s deck, smiling and holding hands. Like the beach bathers in the other black and white photographs, they also wore old-fashioned swimming costumes and had heads of matching corkscrew curls decorated with large droopy bows. The girls were probably about twelve years old, although the bows made them look a little younger. Coral chuckled. She was twelve years old and couldn’t imagine wearing big old bows in her hair!

And then she noticed two more details. The first was that both girls had shiny, heart-shaped pendants on silver chains around their necks. And secondly, there was a number five nailed to the wood directly above the beach hut’s doors. The tail of the number five–which was supposed to curve like a half-O shape–was cut short. It was missing. Well, the end bit of it was missing. Coral gasped. She’d seen that half-missing number five a trillion times before. They were looking at an ancient photograph of Coral Hut!

“What’s the matter?” asked Nicks.

Coral tapped the photograph with her finger and made strange gurgling noises. Try as she might, she couldn’t get any words out.

Nicks followed Coral’s finger and stared closely at the photograph for a few moments. “Hey, I think that’s Coral Hut!” she cried out.

“I know!” Finally Coral could talk.

Nicks peered even closer. “Wowzers–imagine that. I wonder who those two girls are?”

Coral nodded excitedly. “Me too. But just as importantly–why does your mum have an old photograph of Coral Hut?”

“It probably wasn’t called Coral Hut back then,” suggested Nicks in her usual rational sort of way.

Coral did not think that this was relevant. “This is an album of family photographs, right?” she said instead. “So could this…do you think this means that someone in your family owned Coral Hut once upon a time?”

Nicks raised an eyebrow and smiled. “Imagine that,” she cooed and tapped her chin. “In that case, maybe Coral Hut was once called Nicks’s Hut? Or Nicola Hut, even. It is a family name, you know.”

Coral swiftly shook the suggestion from her head. “I doubt it. And it doesn’t really matter anyway. It won’t help us to find Mr Perfect.” She was about to turn the album page, but Nicks wasn’t quite ready to move on just yet.

“I think we should find out. It would be really interesting. I mean–imagine if my ancestors spent their summers at our hut too.”

“We really should be focusing on Mr Perfect,” Coral said gruffly.

“I know. But we could do both. Maybe my mum will know. After all, she’s interested in family trees and stuff.”

“You can’t ask your mum!” Coral bleated. “If she suspects anything she’ll be on her guard and it will make getting her to fall in love even more difficult.”

Nicks frowned. Coral did have a point. Perhaps it was better to play things safe. “I know–we’ll ask your mum instead. After all, you must have received some sort of ownership documents when you inherited the hut from your Great-Aunt Coral.”

“I guess,” admitted Coral, who was still not madly keen on the idea of Coral Hut being known as anything other than Coral Hut. Ever. “OK–we’ll ask my mum,” she finally agreed. “But for now we should focus on finishing our investigation.”

Nicks nodded eagerly and reached for the notebook and pen on her mum’s bedside table. And then she began scribbling. She was making a list of all the leads they had for Mr Perfect. There was the aquarium…and Mr Selvaggio at Deli Antonia…and the local theatre…maybe an interior decorator…

Coral leaned over and peered at the list. And then she smiled. Finally they had some sort of plan. Now all they had to do was find Mr Perfect and get Cupid to take careful aim. And then Nicks would never leave Sunday Harbour. Now how difficult could that really be?