Ruby Redfort Take Your Last Breath (25 page)

Ruby looked up at Bug and knew something was very wrong. She ran across the sand, hollering, “Del, get out of the water!”

Del stopped. “What? What is it?”

“I don’t know, just get out!”

“Give me a break,” said Del, moving forward again. She was up to her waist in water.

“Del!” hollered Ruby. “Quit arguing! Would you just listen
for once
?”

Del turned and shrugged. “OK, if you feel that strongly about it.” And she began to stomp back out of the surf.

The fur on Bug’s back relaxed, and he stopped barking. He ambled over to Del, licking the salt from her ankles.

“Cut it out, would ya?” said Del. “I have no idea what your problem is.”

“Neither do I, but he sure is upset about something.”

It turned out that Bug had done Del quite a favor — perhaps he had even saved her life, because the next morning after falling asleep on the beach they were woken by the screeching of seagulls. They were all tightly clustered together, making a sort of mound of birds, squawking and flapping. Elliot and Ruby climbed out of their sleeping bags and went to take a look.

“What is it?” called Mouse.

“You don’t wanna know,” shouted Elliot.

“Is it gruesome?” asked Clancy, scrambling to his feet.

“You could say that,” called Ruby.

“How gruesome?” asked Red.

“You’ll be glad you haven’t had your breakfast,” said Elliot.

“I have,” said Del.

“Well, prepare to see it again,” warned Ruby.

The four of them raced over to where Elliot and Ruby were standing.

As they approached, the gulls flew up in one screeching mass, and revealed the carcass of a killer whale.

THE AUTHORITIES WERE CALLED, OF COURSE,
and various experts came down to look at the giant mammal dead on the sand. No one could offer an explanation as to what might have killed it other than it had been attacked by something huge.

Crushed and then drowned.

Ruby got home much later than she’d intended, and there was no sign of Hitch anywhere in the house. She looked out of the window — her mom and dad were sitting poolside, drinking fruit punch.

“Hey, honey,” called her father. He was looking up, shielding his eyes from the sun. “You want to join us?”

“Ah, in a while maybe. I got some studying to do,” said Ruby.

“Oh. By the way, Ruby,” said her mother, “Elaine Lemon called earlier. She asked me if your skin condition had cleared up. I felt so terrible — as a mother I mean — I didn’t know you had a problem with your skin.”

“Oh,” said Ruby, “didn’t you?”

“No,” said her mother. “What kind of skin condition? Elaine said it was contagious.”

“No, it’s fine,” said Ruby.

“Contagious doesn’t sound fine,” said Sabina. Sabina believed that skin was the most important of all the body’s organs. She was very fond of saying, “
Without it, you’d be all over the place.
”

“Well, no need to worry anymore. My skin is all de-contagious again.”

“Oh . . . good,” said Sabina, unsure if the word
de-contagious
was a word or not.

“What subject you studying?” asked her father.

“Natural history,” Ruby replied.

“That’s a good subject,” said Brant. “One of the best.”

“I gotta go, Dad. Lots to read.”

“That’s our girl,” called Brant.

“It sure is,” said Sabina with a smile.

Her parents naturally put two and two together and figured that the studying must be schoolwork, but of course it wasn’t. It was far more important than that.

Ruby sat at her desk and took out her now very large piece of paper, several sheets stuck together with tape. The list of events and clues spiraled with some of the spirals connecting. She knew she was right about the treasure; she just knew it. Someone had gotten there first. The question now was where had these guys gone, what were they after next, and had they already found it?

Ruby glanced out of her window and noticed the stranger sitting on the wall on the opposite side of the street a couple of houses down.
What are you doing here?
He was wearing a hat and shades and by his feet was that same yellow carryall. From her vantage point she could make out a blurry blue shape printed on the yellow bag, a logo perhaps.

It was one thing to see him sitting outside the Full-O-Beans coffee shop and inside the Double Donut, not so strange to see him walking around town, but now he was in their street — waiting, but for what? Was he tailing her? Yes, had to be; this was no coincidence.
So what exactly do you want?
thought Ruby.

She would go and ask him, that’s what she would do.

Right now.

She opened the hatch to the laundry chute and fed herself in headfirst. She shot through it in just a few seconds, landing on the lower ground floor on top of a bundle of sheets. She crawled through the hatch, ran out of the back door and through the gate into the alley. By the time she had sprinted into Cedarwood Drive, barely one minute later, the street was deserted.

The man was gone.

That evening Ruby caught up with Hitch over a glass of banana milk and a cheese sandwich.

“That milk you drink taste any good?” he asked.

“Wanna slurp?” offered Ruby.

“No, I don’t think I’m ready for it yet.”

“You don’t know what you’re missing, man,” said Ruby. “So what are they saying over at Spectrum?”

“We have agents watching the Sibling waters, and yet nothing has been picked up: no strange whispers in the sea, no strangling, no pirate activity.”

“Any more Chime communications?” asked Ruby.

“I was coming to that,” replied Hitch. He took a brown envelope from his jacket. Ruby took a look — three cassette tapes, each one with a time scrawled on the label, each recorded that very day.

“So what do they say?” asked Ruby.

“Nothing,” replied Hitch.

“What do you mean nothing?” said Ruby.

“It’s just bursts of static, three of them — each one of exactly the same duration,” replied Hitch. “We’re guessing that all three recordings are the same piece of music, the same code. Looks like they had trouble broadcasting it — the code maker tried and failed to transmit the message three times. In the end, it seems he or she gave up, so we have nothing to go on.”

Ruby picked up the envelope. “I’ll take a listen anyhow,” she said. “Just in case something got missed.”

Hitch had been called out — he didn’t say where — and so Ruby sat alone at the kitchen table listening to the static over and over on her tape machine, her headphones cushioning her ears and keeping all household sounds out. Reluctantly, she had to agree that Hitch was right: there was no message; some kind of error had prevented its transmission.

It was late in the evening, almost midnight, when her mother bustled into the kitchen. She and Brant had been entertaining the Pengroves, and they had just finished after-dinner drinks and were about to call it a night.

“Ruby, you’re still up! You’ve got school tomorrow and circles around your eyes as big as pandas.”

“Don’t you mean circles as big as
a
panda’s?”

“What?”

“Nothing,” said Ruby.

“Teenagers need their sleep — you should know that. It’s a fact of nature,” asserted her mother. This was one of the few facts that Sabina was both certain of and correct about.

“OK,” muttered Ruby. “I’ll go to my room if it makes you so happy.”

“That’s exactly the attitude that comes from not having enough sleep,” said Sabina.

“Yeah, yeah,” replied Ruby.

“There it is again,” said her mother.

“Ah, geez!” said Ruby. “I’m outta here.”

In her dreams that night, Ruby found herself back in the deep, but this time “the thing” didn’t appear in the indigo water. This time it only whispered to her — and the miniature diving man was not there at all.

She looked for the voice’s owner, but all she saw was indigo. She felt something breathing right next to her — hot, moist breath, strong in odor, with a smell that was oddly familiar.

She woke up.

Two eyes were looking into hers, two piercing blue eyes. “Hey, Bug.” She kissed him on the nose and he licked her on the cheek. “I get the impression you didn’t brush your teeth this morning.”

Relieved not to be drowning in the ocean, Ruby fumbled for her glasses and reached for the bedside light. She looked at her alarm clock — it was almost dawn, she might as well get up. She retrieved her notebook and sat down at her desk. She looked at the lists she had made, focusing on the one that was headed
Sea Sounds
.

There was something bothering Ruby. It had been niggling her since that first Spectrum briefing, but she couldn’t quite catch it; it just fluttered back and forth in the corridors of her brain.

It was something to do with the people who had heard the whispering. She put her head on her desk:
teenagers need their sleep.
Her mother’s words, her last muttered thought as she fell into oblivion. Words that seemed relevant somehow.

Minutes later, or so it seemed, something clunked down on the desktop, something that smelled good.

“Thought you could use an old-fashioned cup of tea — English style,” said Mrs. Digby. Mrs. Digby was very proud of her English heritage, even though her ancestors had left England a couple of hundred years previously.

Ruby slowly lifted her head from the desk and looked at the mug sitting just to the right of her nose. She felt terrible; there was a candy wrapper stuck to her cheek and her barrette was digging into her scalp. She had been sleeping like that for almost two hours.

“Thanks, Mrs. Digby. I could certainly use it.”

“I reckon so,” said the housekeeper, looking her up and down. “What are you doing sleeping out of your bed?”

“Bad dreams,” said Ruby.

“It’ll be the cheese,” said Mrs. Digby.

Ruby nodded, knowing that though this was not the reason, it wasn’t worth getting into a discussion over. Mrs. Digby had her theories, and she stuck to them like glue.

“Hitch around?” Ruby asked.

“Gone somewhere,” said Mrs. Digby. “And don’t ask me where ’cause I don’t know. Just saw his car was absent from the driveway early this morning.”

Ruby checked her watch — it was early, but still she would have to cut school. She pulled on her clothes and grabbed her satchel.

As she rode her bike to Desolate Cove, the same thought went around and around Ruby’s head: something to do with teenagers. But what? She hid her bike from view, crossed the pebble beach, and edged her way carefully around the cliff until she found the cove that the scuba-sub was hidden in. Would she be able to get it started?

How difficult can it be?

Pretty difficult, it turned out. Locating the key was no trouble at all. She used the rescue watch’s magnetic metal detector to find it. Working out how to
use
the key was the near impossible thing.

An hour later and she had figured it out. The sub was not the easiest thing to
pilot
either, but once she got the hang of it, it
was
what you might call thrilling. She had paid close attention during that first trip with Hitch and seen the way he had gained entrance to the rock. She got in without a problem, navigated through the water tunnel, and parked, if scuba-subs
could
be parked.

These days Ruby didn’t
need
to break into Spectrum, but she had no clearance for Sea Division, and she certainly didn’t have permission to revisit the lecture theater by herself. So she snuck back in through the tiny internal window, situated six feet above the floor. Not easy to reach, but Ruby was an excellent tree climber, and this stood her in great stead for most vertical challenges.

By standing on the drinking fountain, she managed to haul herself up and through the opening without great difficulty. The window accessed the little booth where the projector and audio equipment were kept. The carousel containing the slides from last week’s briefing was still sitting on the desk next to it. Ruby slotted the carousel in place, flicked the switch, and listened to the projector as the fan began to whir and the light beam caught the dust particles, which moved like plankton in and out of the darkness.

Ruby went through the slides slowly, pausing on each one, carefully studying them.

The swimming boy, Tommy Elson.

The smiling couple, Hallie Grier and Lyle Greene.

The surfer girl, Billie-May Vaughn.

The kid with the fishing rod, Danny Fink Junior.

Ruby wasn’t sure about Hallie and Lyle, but the others were most definitely pretty young. She took out the slide of the smiling couple. There was a label at the bottom which read: