Читать книгу Take Your Last Breath - Lauren Child - Страница 9

WHEN RUBY REDFORT WAS FOUR, she noticed something unnoticeable while reading the back of the Choco Puffle packet. What looked like a word-search game to every other breakfast-eating kid, she could see at a glance was in fact some kind of message – a code.

It took Ruby five days and seven helpings of Choco Puffles to puzzle it out, and when she had, this is what she read.

Fill in this coupon and win a lifetime supply of Choco Puffles. Entry address can be found somewhere on this packet. Warning: you will have to search long and hard to find it.

Ruby found the address in thirty-two seconds, cut out the coupon on the side of the box, filled in her name and address, popped it in an envelope and asked her father to mail it.

He forgot.

Ruby discovered this thirteen and three-quarter months later when she was searching her dad’s pockets for confiscated Hubble-Yum bubblegum. There, in his grey suit jacket, was the slightly battered envelope, addressed in her handwriting, stamp in the top right-hand corner. The deadline for entering the competition had long passed.

Ruby took the letter up to her room and slipped it into the secret hiding place she had made within the doorframe of her bedroom. It was a shame about the lifetime supply of Choco Puffles; they were, after all, her favourite breakfast cereal.

Some several years later…