Devils in Danger, page 1
Samantha Wheeler fell in love with animals when, at the age of six, she received a tortoise. She went on to study agriculture, work with dairy farmers and teach science, until writing her first children’s book, inspired by koalas, in 2011. Her books, which include Smooch & Rose, Spud & Charli, Mister Cassowary, Wombat Warriors, Turtle Trackers and Everything I’ve Never Said, have been shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards, the Readings Children’s Book Prize, The Wilderness Society’s Environment Award for Children’s Literature and the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales Whitley Awards. Samantha hopes her books will encourage everyone to make a difference.
www.samanthawheeler.com.au
Also by Samantha Wheeler
Smooch & Rose
Spud & Charli
Mister Cassowary
Wombat Warriors
Turtle Trackers
Everything I’ve Never Said
Once I Munched a Mango
To animal lovers, everywhere
Chapter 1
Mum and I were clearing the dinner table when a furious scream exploded through the air. It was quickly followed by another, even louder than the first.
We froze, clutching our plates in our hands.
‘Good grief, Killarney,’ Mum murmured, glancing worriedly towards the front door. ‘What on earth was that?’
Everything was silent now, except for my pounding heart and the humming of the fridge.
The deadlock was horizontal. Locked. I saw Mum relax for a second, then inhale sharply as another terrible screech ripped through the room.
‘Is it coming from next door, do you think?’ I whispered, pressing my nose against the kitchen window to peer into the dark. ‘Has something happened to Noah or Grannie Annie?’
Mum joined me at the window, tilting her head sideways to survey the street outside. A heavy fog had settled, and our lone streetlight flickered eerily in the thick air.
‘I’ll go get Dad,’ I said, hoping he’d finished in the shower. A life member of the Dodges Ferry football team, Dad was fit and strong, with wide shoulders. Unlike Mum and me, he was tall enough to tower over almost anyone. No-one messed with Dad.
Before I could move, another shriek pierced my eardrums. ‘We better call triple zero,’ I suggested.
Mum shook her head. ‘Wait here. I’ll go take a look.’
I tried to argue, telling Mum to wait for Dad, but she’d already grabbed her puffer jacket and mobile, and was unlocking the front door.
I held my breath. The urge to slam the door and keep myself safe was only slightly stronger than the urge to follow Mum outside. I settled for leaving a small crack in the doorway and nervously peeping out.
‘Be careful,’ I whispered, more to myself than anyone else as Mum seized the shovel by our front path and tiptoed towards our gate. I jiggled my knees. ‘Hurry, Mum!’ I hissed, but Mum didn’t hurry. She swung the shovel over her shoulder, like it was a baseball bat instead of a gardening implement. Then she padded along our front fence, looking right, then left, then right again.
Two more screams ricocheted through the house.
‘Mum!’ I cried.
Finally, Mum, silhouetted in the foggy darkness, turned and marched briskly back, the shovel still poised over her shoulder.
‘What was it?’ I asked.
‘Couldn’t see,’ she reported. ‘Everything’s too foggy.’
‘See what?’ Dad had joined us at the door, fresh from the shower and smelling like spicy cologne.
I explained what we’d heard while Mum shook her head. ‘It’s weird. No-one else in the street seems worried,’ she said, waving her hand towards the other houses. ‘Look, none of our neighbours are out.’
She was right. We were the only ones with our front light on, investigating the strange noises. ‘Maybe someone’s playing a prank?’ Dad suggested.
A gang of Grade Threes had been mucking around in the neighbourhood a few weeks ago. Maybe it was them?
‘Possibly a prank,’ Mum agreed, putting down the shovel. ‘I guess we’ll know more in the morning.’
I stepped away from the door, but not before propping the shovel beside it and double-checking the deadlock. It didn’t hurt to be careful.
Who knew what had made those dreadful noises?
It was raining the next morning as I ducked through the broken palings in the fence between our yard and our nearest neighbour’s, Noah and Grannie Annie. Dad was a builder, but hardly ever got around to fixing stuff at our house. The fence and some of the kitchen floorboards, for example, had been falling apart for years.
I shook the raindrops from my hair, then removed my muddy shoes on their verandah, wondering whether Noah or his grandma had heard the strange noises too. Hopefully they had a reasonable explanation.
I pushed open the back door, but couldn’t see anyone. Bones, Noah’s honey-coloured retriever, leapt up to greet me, wagging her tail and practically bowling me over with her cute doggy hellos.
‘Yes, yes, good to see you too,’ I murmured, quickly patting the dog, then tripping over her towards the kitchen. Noah and Grannie Annie’s house always smelt like minestrone soup, probably from all the vegetables Grannie Annie grew. She loved planting, weeding and harvesting practically any vegetable in the community garden, and today she was washing zucchinis at the kitchen sink.
‘Morning,’ I said, giving her a sideways hug. ‘Hey, just wondering … you didn’t hear anything strange last night, did you?’
‘Strange?’ Grannie Annie repeated. Everyone called her Grannie Annie, even though Noah was her only grandchild. She always wore a scarf around her grey curly hair, whether she was gardening or not, and today’s was bright pink, spotted with yellow polkadots.
‘Mum and I heard these super screechy screams, just after eight o’clock.’ I pushed Bones aside so that I could sit next to Noah on the couch. Not that he noticed. He was too busy staring at the TV.
Grannie Annie tapped a green zucchini to her ear. ‘Nope. Didn’t hear a thing,’ she said. Her voice was always gruff, which was weird because she was not. ‘Always take my hearing aids off before I go to bed.’ She paused, using the zucchini to point to Noah, headphones over his ears. ‘And Sir Game-a-Lot over there was probably too busy fighting some virtual war.’
I sighed. Two years older than me, Noah spent his life playing video games. He hardly ever, practically never, went outside, so his roly-poly body was as white as a freshly caught fish.
Unlike me. With my skinny Daddy-long-leg legs and a fierce spray of freckles across my nose, I was always outdoors. I couldn’t help it. I loved living in Dodges Ferry. It had the longest beaches, the most awesome fishing spots and the cutest, rickety jetty for jumping off at high tide.
Not that Noah cared. His favourite place was the couch. Today he sat slumped in his fleecy pyjamas, his gaming contoller gripped in his hands. His face – no, his whole body! – was fixated on the game. ‘Hey, squirt,’ he muttered, lifting a finger off the controller.
‘What did they sound like?’ Grannie Annie went on. ‘These screams?’
I grimaced. ‘Awful. Blood-curdling. Like someone being murdered.’
Grannie Annie nodded, her lips twitching as she tried not to smile. ‘Goodness! Did you hear that, Noah? A murder in Dodges Ferry!’
Crime was pretty much non-existent in Dodges, but it was Easter time and the holiday-makers staying in the shacks along the beach could sometimes get up to mischief.
Noah paused his game and tugged down his headphones. ‘Wait, what? A murder?’
I shook my head. ‘Not really. Just these horrible screechy screams.’
‘Are you sure?’ said Noah while Grannie Annie chortled. ‘Have you checked for clues? You know, for like a weapon or a body?’
‘Noah! Quit it!’ I peered out at the rain. It couldn’t really have been a murder, could it? Not here in Dodges. No, there had to be a perfectly reasonable explanation. I just didn’t know what.
‘Argh!’ I cried as something fuzzy tickled my leg. I jumped backwards. But it was only Bones brushing past me as she dropped her ball at my feet. ‘Bones!’ I scolded. ‘You scared me.’
‘Jeesh!’ laughed Noah. ‘Someone’s all freaked out. Bones only wants to play.’
I opened my mouth to argue, but Noah was right. I was feeling edgy.
‘Poor Killarney,’ said Grannie Annie. ‘Noah, you throw the ball for your dog. I’m off to look for my scarf. You know the red-and-blue stripy one? It’s the third one I’ve lost this week.’
Noah grabbed Bones’s soggy tennis ball and tossed it, with surprisingly good aim, straight out the lounge room window. Bones knew exactly what to do. She raced around the couch, out the back door and into the rain after the ball. Grannie Annie had hoped a dog would encourage Noah to get off the couch, but Noah just worked his way around it, like most obstacles in his life.
With Bones gone, Noah’s attention slid back to the TV. ‘Hawks play Eagles tomorrow,’ he said, his fingers creeping to the headphones around his neck. ‘You gonna watch the game?’
I wrinkled my nose. ‘As if.’ Dad was the one who loved footy in our family. Like Noah, the Hawks were his favourite team. He’d been looking forward to the game all week – he loved to spend Sunday arvos roaring insults at the umpires.
But not me. I had a mystery to solve. What if there had been a crime last n
‘You want to help?’ I asked. ‘You know … to look for clues?’
Too late. Noah’s hand was closing over his controller. ‘Nah, probably give it a miss. Thanks, anyway.’
I should’ve known. Of course Noah didn’t want to go outside. That would be a miracle on a sunny day, let alone a rainy one.
‘But knock yourself out,’ he added just as Bones raced back inside, drool dangling like spaghetti from her mouth. ‘Let me know what you find, okay?’ He bent to grab the ball. ‘Here. Last time. Fetch!’
Bones took off after the ball, galloping through the drizzling rain to duck through the broken fence palings between our two houses. I expected her to return any minute, the soggy ball in her mouth, but instead I heard her barking from over in our yard.
‘Oh, great,’ I groaned. Mum ran an at-home hairdressing salon from our enclosed verandah and took pride in her clients receiving a relaxing experience while having their hair done. Which meant she often had to disguise neighbourhood noises by playing soothing music. Personally, I wasn’t sure that harps and cellos did that much to hide the racket.
Especially with Bones barking all the time.
Leaving Noah to finish his game and Grannie Annie to search for her scarf, I raced back to our place. ‘Bones! Come back here!’ I yelled.
Bones stopped barking when she saw me, but instead of coming over so I could catch her, she started zooming all over our garden, sniffing like she was vacuuming the ground. ‘Bones!’ I shouted. The naughty dog raised her head for a second, wagged her tail, then fired off another round of excited barks, before going straight back to sniffing. ‘Bones!’ I tried lunging for the dog, but she darted away before I could catch her, leaving me sprawled across the wet grass. The cold seeped through my clothes. That dog!
I gritted my teeth and struggled onto my side. Which is when I saw them: small cat-like paw prints pressed firmly into the mud. They weren’t from Bones – her prints were bigger. And they weren’t cat prints either. We saw cat prints all the time in Dodges, but these were different. Very different.
I blinked raindrops from my lashes.
First screams. Now unusual paw prints. What was going on?
Chapter 2
Whatever had visited our yard must have rounded our Hills Hoist because, right underneath it, I found a long dropping, full of wiry white hair and tiny fragments of bone.
‘Hey, Noah. Take a look at this!’ I called.
Predictably, Noah didn’t answer. I grabbed a nearby stick and prised the hair-embedded poo apart. I called again, this time raising my voice. ‘Noah! Seriously. Come see!’
‘See what?’ he replied. He’d sidled out to Grannie’s verandah, his arms wrapped protectively around his belly. I couldn’t resist a small smile. The verandah was better than nothing. I was impressed he’d made it that far.
‘It’s some sort of strange-looking … poo.’
There was a brief silence then: ‘Gross. I’m not coming over there to look at poo.’
‘It’s not from a dog or cat,’ I said. ‘It’s … it’s kind of weird.’
‘You’re weird,’ Noah retorted before heading back inside.
The soothing music from Mum’s salon kicked up a notch as Bones started making a high-pitched whining sound somewhere near our side door.
Mum would lose it if I couldn’t control that dog. I shot a dirty look towards Noah’s place. Bones was his dog, not mine. But then I sighed and ditched my poo-prodding stick. I had to catch Bones.
I tried a new tactic, tiptoeing up behind her. Then I stopped. I’d heard a sound. Like claws scratching against timber. I turned sharply, just in time to catch a scurrying movement near the back fence. Unlike our house and Grannie Annie’s, our back neighbour’s place was new, with a new wooden fence to match. No broken palings there. The only way from our yard into theirs was under or over the fence. And judging by the way Bones had wriggled past my legs and shoved her nose into the soil below the palings, whatever it was had gone under. ‘Bones!’ I yelled as she took to barking manically while scratching at the dirt. ‘Be quiet!’
But it was too late.
The side door flung open.
‘Killarney!’ Mum shouted. ‘What on earth’s going on?’
Bones drew back and, without even looking at Mum, tucked her tail between her legs and slunk back over to Noah’s. I didn’t blame her. I knew that tone.
‘Hurry up and come inside,’ Mum said. ‘And stop encouraging that dog!’
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the sight of the client in Mum’s salon chair made me clench my jaw. Not because it was Mrs Dwyer. But because she’d brought along her youngest son. Five-year-old Josh Dwyer, the worst of the nine Dwyer boys, was torpedoing around our kitchen with Mum’s best saucepan on his head.
The Dwyers lived on a sheep property just outside Dodges Ferry, where Mrs Dwyer buried herself in her favourite hobby: spinning, dying and knitting wool. She permanently carried knitting needles with her and was always knitting something. Like the blue vest with a white sailing ship on the front Josh was wearing and the loosely woven shawl peeking out from under Mrs Dwyer’s hairdressing cape.
Mrs Dwyer’s needles were loaded with bright orange wool today and were clacking away merrily as she chatted about everything from the weather to the price of petrol to the problems of shearing sheep.
Josh began banging on his saucepan hat with a wooden spoon.
‘Killarney!’ Mum hissed, her lips thin and her eyebrows high. I knew that look. It was Mum-code for ‘Keep Josh out the way.’
I sighed and gave Mum a look of my own. A squinty-eyed look, Killarney-code for ‘You owe me. Big time.’
Meanwhile, Josh had dropped onto all fours and was scurrying towards the bedrooms, barking like a dog. Our house was typical of the weatherboards in Dodges. Small and square, it had a kitchen and living area in the front with two tiny bedrooms at the back: one for me, and one for Mum and Dad. Plus the closed-in verandah where Mum did people’s hair.
There was no real hallway – everything just led straight off the kitchen–living room, which was kind of nice when we wanted to call out to each other from whichever room we were in, but wasn’t so great when Mum had customers and their five-year-old sons wanted to race around and play.
‘Ruff ruff,’ yapped Josh as he jumped onto my bed. I lunged towards him when he snatched one of my most precious possessions: my soft plush toy turtle, Shelley. ‘Grrr, gruff!’ he growled, biting Shelley and shaking her ferociously.
I held my hands out. ‘Good doggy. Drop, doggy,’ I soothed, trying to keep calm.
Josh thought it was all part of a game to let me grab the turtle from him. Maybe he thought, like Bones, we’d play a game of fetch. As if! Nanna had sent Shelley all the way from North Queensland, where turtles nested on the beach. We always planned to visit, but never made it before Nanna died.
There was no way I was going to let Josh ruin my keepsake. So, as he jumped and lunged, trying to grab Shelley’s flippers, I stretched higher and higher, until I was able to tuck Shelley safely up onto the top shelf with the rest of my plush toy collection.
‘Here, choose a picture. We’ll do it together.’ I pulled out my old colouring books, but Josh sat up on his knees and curled his hands like paws in front of his chest. ‘Woof woof, doggy hungry,’ he whined, his bottom lip curling into a pout.
I sighed. We couldn’t go back to the kitchen. Mum might accidentally snip a chunk from Mrs Dwyer’s fringe.
I searched my room for inspiration. My Easter eggs from last Sunday were stashed in the top drawer of my desk, hidden from Dad who gobbled up sweet things like seagulls gobbled hot chips.
‘Egg hunt?’ I suggested, grabbing a handful.
Josh’s eyes lit up.
I’d only use the Turkish delight ones and the coffee ones I didn’t like. ‘I hide, you find,’ I instructed. ‘But you can’t be a dog anymore. Dogs are allergic to chocolate.’ My shoulders relaxed as Josh dropped his paw hands and obediently followed me outside. Dark clouds still hovered low in the sky, but the rain had finally stopped.
