July (7 page)

8 JULY

177 days to go
…

Approaching the address Boges had given me, I found myself in an industrial area with the occasional block of apartments between warehouses and bulk storage buildings.

I didn’t recognise Boges immediately. As I came closer, he pushed himself away from the wall where he’d been leaning, dangling a key. He was wearing mirrored sunglasses and white overalls. Beside him were his bag and some paint tins.

‘Uncle Sammy has a storage unit here,’ he said, grinning. ‘It’s pretty big. He asked me to drop off these paint tins. Saves me drawing any attention to the mansion by visiting you there. Quick, chuck this on,’ he said, throwing me a pair of white overalls like his. ‘Better make it look like we both mean business.’

I glanced around, making sure no-one was looking, then stepped into the overalls.

Boges unlocked the security grille at the front of the block, and we wandered down to his uncle’s unit. He unlocked the garage door, rolled it up and we stepped inside. Then he flicked a light switch on and pulled the roller door back down.

The room was fairly empty, aside from a
couple
of industrial vacuum cleaners, crates and other boxes.

‘You’ll need this. It’s clean,’ said Boges,
handing
me another phone from his pocket, along with a piece of paper with the number written on it. ‘Only you and I know the number. Keep it that way.’ He gave me a look from under his
sunglasses
and pulled a couple of crates towards us to sit on. ‘The cops can sometimes pinpoint where a mobile is being used, but they need your number first. I’m afraid there’s only one person who could have double-crossed you…’

‘Winter risked everything to help us get the Jewel,’ I said, defensively.

‘Whether or not she was involved,’ he said impatiently, ‘the fact is that Sligo’s getting awfully close to you. Dude, I hate to say it, but I think he wants to rub you out before your
sixteenth
birthday.’

I nodded, knowing what he was saying was probably true, before moving the conversation away from that grim idea. ‘I phoned Eric Blair,’ I said. ‘He said he’d call me back—it was only his first day back in the office.’

‘What do you mean, he’s going to
call you?
’

‘He was flat out, so I gave him my—oh crap,’ I said, remembering that Winter clearly wasn’t the only person I’d given my number to. ‘But my phone wasn’t even working—I didn’t think he’d be able to call me.’

Boges shook his head. He looked angry. He stood up and started pacing around the room. ‘What are you doing, giving him your number? As far as he knows you’ve tried to murder your own family! Yeah, he was mates with your dad, but you don’t have a clue yet whether you can trust him. He could have gone straight to the cops! What if he sent the skull message?’

Boges stopped pacing. He put his hands on his hips and took a deep breath. ‘Dude,’ he said, calmly, ‘you have to be more careful. Seriously. You can’t trust anyone. OK?’

He was right. It was a stupid thing to do. ‘You’re right,’ I finally agreed. ‘Anyway, he doesn’t have the right number anymore. Thanks for this,’ I said, pocketing the mobile. ‘I want to get out of here—the city. I’ve gotta find Millicent.
Bartholomew thought she might have helpful information. It’s weird, she’s my great-aunt but I barely know anything about her.’

‘Weird, yes,’ Boges agreed. ‘So you’re going to visit her?’ he asked, taking off the sunglasses and cocking his eyebrow. ‘And
how
exactly?’

I was stumped.

‘How about this then?’ Boges pulled a sheet of folded paper out of his little black book, triumphantly slapping it down in my hand.

It was a directory webpage print-out, with a couple of lines highlighted in yellow.

‘I searched for “Millicent Ormond” in an online country phone directory,’ said Boges. ‘And there she was! Finally something simple and
straightforward
. Kind of.’

Beside my great-aunt’s name, fully printed out as ‘Millicent Butler Ormond’ was the address ‘Manresa’, Redcliffe.

‘She must live on a property like “Kilkenny”,’ I said, thinking of Great-uncle Bartholomew’s homestead that was now nothing more than charred ruins. ‘All I have to do is find Redcliffe and then ask around for “Manresa”.’

Boges pulled out his laptop and turned it to face me. ‘Here’s Redcliffe,’ he said, pointing to a state map. ‘It’s way up there—in the north. A long way past Mount Helicon. About one hundred
kilometres inland from Paradise Beach. It’s going to be a long trip for you.’

‘Boges, this is unreal. Thanks heaps.’

‘No problem.’

Jumping trains, hitching rides, walking
endless
kilometres. One day, I promised myself, all this running would be over. But until then, and until I’d searched out the huge secret that Dad had partly unearthed, I had to stay on the road, stay alive, keep ahead of my enemies.
Three hundred and sixty-five days
, the crazy guy from New Year’s Eve had warned. The
mysterious
Ormond Singularity was supposed to end on December 31st too. I was more than halfway through the year now, and I couldn’t wait for the day when I could clear my name and be safe at home with my family. Mum, Gabbi and me.

‘How are they?’ I asked, straightening up. ‘Mum and Gabbi? I’ve been wanting to call, but…’

‘Gabbi appears to be showing signs of life, but she’s still in the coma. Your mum and Rafe latch onto every flicker of her eyelids, every
movement
in her body, believing that one day she’ll come around. Your mum is looking after her now at Rafe’s place—apparently he’s hired a full-time specialist nurse for her. He even tore the wall down between two of his upstairs rooms to make one big room for Gab, one that fits her bed, the
hospital machinery and monitors. The doctors still say there is every chance of a full recovery. It’s just an extremely slow process.’

‘She’s at Rafe’s place?’ I said, surprised.

‘Yep. They think being in a home
environment
might help her wake up.’

‘Has she spoken or anything yet?’

Boges scrunched up his face and shook his head.

‘And Mum?’ I asked. ‘Is she any better?’

Boges hesitated. ‘I would say she’s doing fine. Your mum and Rafe—well—they seem to be
getting
along fine.’

My stomach muscles tightened at the way he said ‘fine’.

‘Fine?’ I asked.

My friend squirmed uncomfortably, and then started scratching his head.

‘How fine?’ I repeated, bothered by the look on his face.

He turned away, clearly uncomfortable with my question. And that was answer enough. I didn’t want to think about Mum and Rafe getting along. I was happy he was around to help her, to do all those awesome things to make Mum and Gab comfortable, like altering the house, but I just wanted everything to go back to how it was before. The fact that Rafe looked so much like Dad—he was his identical twin—made everything
worse. It was like a parallel universe, where Dad had died and been replaced by a slightly
different
version of himself.

When Boges spoke again, his expression had changed.

‘Let’s get down to business. Come on, dude. Show it to me. At last I get to see this infamous Jewel.’

I pulled my backpack off and carefully pulled out the Ormond Jewel.

I held it out to him; it was as big as the palm of my hand, the oval emerald glowing.

Slowly, Boges picked it up and studied it as he turned it over in his hands. The rubies flashed like fire as he lifted the catch and opened it. Inside was the painted portrait of a woman with red-gold hair, a jewelled crown and necklace.

‘Elizabeth the First of England,’ said Boges.

He closed the heavy gold locket and put it down, but couldn’t take his eyes off it. I couldn’t either. It was mesmerising, filled with power. There was something about it that drew me to it, like a magnetic aura. It was like some sort of medieval transmitting device, pulsing out a huge, hidden secret, waiting hundreds of years to be joined with the old poem, and then decoded by just the right person.

‘I’ll tell you what I know,’ I said. ‘Great-uncle Bartholomew knew about it, but believed it had
vanished long ago—broken up and sold. He had an old book that described it exactly, although it was written in old-fashioned language. He also said that the Ormond Riddle and the Ormond
Jewel
are
the two halves of the double-key code.’

‘Yes, so all we have to do is solve the Riddle, and crack the code, by putting it all together, somehow, with this awesome Jewel. Then we’ll understand the Ormond Singularity. Mmmm,’ said Boges. ‘Sounds like you need yourself a genius,’ he grinned, pulling at the tops of his overalls, hinting that he was the man for the job.

‘That’s right. Any ideas on where we can find us a genius?’

Boges laughed and started sorting through his bag. ‘All families have secrets,’ he said, ‘but it must be a big one if it has all these barriers around it, protecting it.’

‘And everyone trying to get their hands on it.’

Boges placed copies of the photos from Dad’s memory stick on the concrete floor in front of me. ‘I printed these out for you. Let’s put the two halves of this double-key code together and see what we have.’

I pulled the drawings out, laying them in a row next to the Ormond Jewel. Then I laid the Riddle beside the shining Jewel.

‘So what do we have so far?’ I said, half asking
myself. ‘The Angel images led us to the Piers Ormond memorial. We have the drawing that told us we were looking for something that could be worn—and that turned out to be a message telling us to find the Jewel. There’s a connection between the drawing of the boy and the rose, and the rose on the back of the Jewel. There’s the
Sphinx
—which could have been pointing to the Riddle, but I’m still not exactly sure about the Roman bust.’ I tapped the drawing of the butler with the
blackjack
. ‘Here I think Dad was trying to tell us about Black Tom Butler. The Queen gave this Jewel to Black Tom, the tenth Earl of Ormond.’

‘Man,’ said Boges, looking up from the Jewel to me. ‘Old Black Tom, eh? I feel like I’m handling a piece of history.’

‘You are.’ I felt a shiver of dangerous
excitement
. ‘Everything here in front of us is trying to tell us what the secret is. Boges, it’s all here.’ I thought of the missing final lines of the Riddle. ‘Almost all here,’ I corrected.

I stood up and walked around the room. I was starting to get edgy. I remembered my dad’s eyes and the desperation in them as they followed me around his hospice room, after he returned from Ireland, sick. He had so much to tell me, but I just wasn’t getting it.

Dad, help me.

I re-arranged some of the drawings.

‘Look,’ said Boges, ‘there’s a “5” in your dad’s drawing, and a “5” on the gate in his Ireland photos.’ He leaned closer to the images and shifted a few more pages around. ‘And your dad drew some sort of door, which could have been an attempt to send us to this wardrobe!’ he said, pointing to the photo of the ornate piece of
furniture
that was also taken in Ireland. ‘Hey, what happened to your hands?’ asked Boges, suddenly noticing the fading cuts and scratches that were all over me from being netted and dumped on the deck of the
Star of Mykonos
.