13 Treasures (22 page)

“He must have seen us,” said Tanya.

“I don’t think so,” said Fabian. “If he had, he would have gone berserk. What I want to know is why he was skulking about out there in the storm.”

He continued to cut at the hair, which was now coming away easily.

“It’s working. Warwick certainly keeps this thing sharp.”

“It’s
Warwick’s
? You stole his knife? You really are a crook!”

“Just as well I am, for your sake!”

Minutes later Tanya’s hair was waist-length, and only slightly longer than it had been before the incident in the night.

“You’ll have to trim it,” said Fabian, apologetically. “It’s really uneven.”

“I will,” said Tanya. “But later.” She pulled her hair back from her face and secured it into a pony-tail. “There. No one will be able to tell when it’s like this. We’d better get downstairs before my grandmother flips.”

“And before Warwick notices his knife is missing,” said Fabian, not looking quite so brave now. He inspected the knife, ensuring that no telltale hair was snagged on the blade.

“What about the hair?” Tanya gestured to the floor. It was covered.

“Shove it under the bed for now,” said Fabian. “We’ll have to put it in some garbage bags after breakfast and figure out a way to get rid of it.”

On all fours, the two of them scrabbled around on the floor, stuffing the hair under the bed with great difficulty. It was very soft and slippery, and kept sliding out into sight.

“There’s so much of it!” said Tanya.

“It’s making me itch,” said Fabian. “Just push it under and pull the covers over the sides of the bed so it’s hidden. That’ll have to do for now. Come on.”

They raced downstairs, taking them two at a time, and bounded into the kitchen just as a fuming Florence was about to scrape their breakfasts into the garbage.

“Don’t!” Fabian yelped.

Florence froze, and did a double-take when she saw Tanya.

“I thought you were feeling unwell?”

“I was,” she answered, not daring to look her grandmother in the eye. “But I’m better now.” She sat at the table, and Fabian followed suit. Florence placed the plates in front of them.

“It’s probably cold now,” she said.

“That was a speedy recovery if ever I saw one,” Warwick remarked dryly. He was now vigorously buffing his boots to a shine.

Tanya did not answer, nor did she look at him. She knew that those icy blue eyes of his would be trained on her, unflinching and accusing. The thought made her skin prickle.

She tucked into her breakfast, which was still rather good, even lukewarm. She saw Fabian fidgeting on the other side of the table and guessed correctly that he was trying to maneuver the knife discreetly out of his sleeve and conceal it under the table while he ate.

“Still warm too,” he said happily, between gulps.

“Mine isn’t,” Tanya began, but then stopped as the hearthfay slipped out from underneath Fabian’s plate. It had warmed his food, and, for the first time, it remained still for a couple of seconds to bashfully bat its ugly little eyelids at him before scuttling off to hide again. Fabian tore off a chunk of bread and dunked it in his egg, oblivious to the hearthfay’s attentions. Tanya stared after it, bristling with indignation. And after
she’d
been the one to give the ungrateful little wretch a saucer of milk too!

“You’d let
mine
go cold, then?” she muttered under her breath, forgetting herself. “Floozy.”

“I beg your pardon?” Florence snapped, and Tanya looked up, alarmed. Fabian was looking at her strangely too.

“I said… I don’t mind if mine’s cold,” she said, thinking quickly. “I’m not choosy.”

“Hmm,” said Florence. She pursed her thin lips, then began loading laundry into the machine.

“Warwick, could you take a look at the guttering by Amos’s room at some point today?” she said. “I think it’s coming loose.”

Warwick grunted his acknowledgment.

Tanya wondered again how two such miserable people as her grandmother and Warwick had managed to live under the same roof for so long without killing each other.

“This house is falling to pieces,” said Florence, slamming the washing machine door.

“Then move somewhere smaller,” said Fabian, shoveling bacon into his mouth at an impressive speed.

Florence looked uncomfortable. “This house has been in the family for decades.” She poured herself some tea from the pot and sat down at the table.

“I think a nice little cottage would suit you,” Fabian continued, with a maddening grin. “One made of gingerbread.”

He was swiftly dealt Florence’s most withering look, while Tanya almost choked on a mouthful of eggy bread.

“Don’t get lippy,” Warwick growled.

Tanya felt a stab of annoyance. It seemed that the only time Warwick ever paid any kind of attention to Fabian was when he was scolding him. For the first time, it occurred to her that a substantial amount of Fabian’s behavior might simply be a device for gaining his father’s attention. His insistence of using Warwick’s name certainly demanded it—and also provided a means of lashing out at him.

A small whine came from under the table, and Tanya lifted the tablecloth and peered beneath. Oberon was sitting in front of her grandmother with his head on her knees.

“You like it here, don’t you?” Florence murmured, fondling the dog’s silky ears. Oberon gave a contented little groan. Florence smiled faintly and reached over to one of the drawers to remove a dog biscuit from a packet she had bought especially for him. Oberon gently took it and proceeded to crunch away happily from under the table. Tanya watched jealously. For some reason, Oberon plainly adored Florence.

“Finished,” Fabian announced. He let his cutlery fall to the plate with a clatter and got up from the table, his cheeks full with a huge mouthful of food.

“Oh, no you don’t,” said Florence. “For goodness’ sake, Fabian! You look like a hamster. Sit down until you’ve finished properly.”

“I have,” Fabian insisted, his eyes bulging as he swallowed painfully. “See?” He moved toward the back door, and Tanya’s own food got stuck in her throat as she saw what he was about to do. In plain view, Fabian began rummaging through the coats hanging on the kitchen door. He frowned as he took his father’s coat off one peg and transferred it to another, but in the process he knocked several coats—Warwick’s included—to the floor.

“What are you doing now?” Florence snapped.

“I can’t find my jacket,” Fabian said. “The gray one. I thought it might be hanging up here.”

“It’s in the closet under the stairs, where you always leave it,” said Florence, clearly puzzled. “I saw it yesterday. What do you want a jacket for in this weather anyway? Really, Fabian. I don’t know what’s got into you this morning.”

“Neither do I.” Warwick stood up, boots in hand. Suspicion was all over his face.

“Nothing.” Fabian replaced the coats back on the door and skipped back to the breakfast table. Tanya saw his face and relaxed. Fabian had succeeded. She caught his eye and the two of them shared a look; it was the kind of look children wear when they know they’ve gotten away with something.

At the same moment, Warwick and Florence also shared a look. Theirs was the kind of look adults wear when they know that somehow they have been well and truly hoodwinked, but are clueless as to the how and why, and know only that there’s absolutely nothing they can do about it.

The summer thunderstorm had cleared the air, and the day was bright and warm, but still scented with the rain that had fallen so heavily the night before. Soon after breakfast, Tanya and Fabian filled six garbage bags with hair and hid them beneath the bed once more.

Already, Tanya was concerned about how she would go about disposing of it without it being discovered. Tanya’s instinct was to burn it in the fireplace in her room, while Fabian had suggested throwing it into one of the catacombs where it would never be found. Both presented problems. Burning the hair would be time-consuming and risky. If smoke was seen coming from the chimney in the middle of summer it would no doubt raise Florence’s and Warwick’s suspicions. And to get back into the woods was proving difficult enough as it was, let alone without the added problem of carrying six heavy sacks of hair. In the end she decided that burning the hair was her best option—and that once again, the cover of night would be needed for such a task.

It was early afternoon by the time Tanya was finally alone. After much talk of Mad Morag’s curses on various townsfolk, Fabian shut himself away in his room, music blaring from the other side of the door. When he had gone, Tanya sketched a detailed plan of the house on a scrap of paper. Beneath the diagram she scrawled a short message:

MY ROOM, ANY TIME AFTER MIDNIGHT. I WILL HAVE THE THINGS YOU ASKED FOR, AND I WANT WHAT WAS PROMISED IN YOUR PART OF THE BARGAIN.

She folded the note twice and pocketed it. She would slip it through the secret door behind the bookcase, along with another supply of food and water for Red to find.

She lifted the loose floorboard beneath the carpet and retrieved the list Red had given her. She scanned through it, mentally calculating the cost of each item. Unfortunately, she had little or no idea about the price of many of the things on the list.

Her eyes wandered to a small wooden box on the dressing table. It contained the twenty-pound note that had been dropped by the man on the bus who had tried to buy the compass. She had stuffed it inside the box as soon as she’d gotten home that day, and it had remained there ever since, untouched.

It took three attempts for Tanya to pry the lid off the little wooden box to retrieve the money. When she did, she discovered not a crisp twenty-pound note bearing the Queen’s face, but rather a large brown leaf curled tightly into a roll in much the way money does after it has been wedged in someone’s pocket. Other than that, however, the box was empty.

A heady fragrance of shampoo filled the air as Red emerged from the bathroom, a towel wrapped around her head. With her freshly scrubbed face and gleaming green eyes, she looked like an entirely different person from the grubby miscreant whom Tanya had encountered only a few nights earlier. Now, in the warmth of the softly lit room she appeared almost wholesome and decent, and even closer in age to herself than Tanya had originally thought.

“Is the baby all right?” she asked, peering anxiously at the child sleeping peacefully on Tanya’s bed. “He didn’t wake up, did he?”

Tanya glanced at the changeling, watching his tiny chest rise and fall with each breath. His cheeks had but the merest hint of color, which had only become apparent once the two girls had bathed him carefully and quickly, washing away several days’ worth of dirt.

He had allowed them to wash him without complaint, all the while watching them solemnly with his huge black eyes. Afterward he had fed hungrily upon the warm milk that Tanya had smuggled up to her room in a flask, then fallen into a deep, exhaustive slumber almost immediately, not stirring since.

“He’s asleep,” she said.

Red sat down on the bed, pulling Tanya’s bathrobe around her more tightly. “I’d almost forgotten what a hot shower feels like.”

Tanya handed her a tote bag full of items. She had spent most of her afternoon buying them in Tickey End using the money she had found in the pocket of her raincoat. “Here are the things you asked for… well, most of them. I didn’t have enough money for everything on the list.”

Red poked through the contents of the bag with her long, delicate fingers.

“That doesn’t matter. I can see you got what was most important.”

From the bag she withdrew two items, a cheap toothbrush and a box of hair dye. Quickly she skimmed the instructions, then glanced at the shade Tanya had selected. It was mousy and dull, somewhere between dark blond and light brown.

“Bland, average, and forgettable. Perfect.”

She ripped the box open and removed the contents, then pulled on two thin plastic gloves. Next, she connected the dye to the bottle of developer and shook the bottle until the fluids mixed, slowly becoming grayish in color.

“I see you managed to get ahold of some newspapers,” she said, eyeing a pile on the dressing table. “How far back do they go?”