Edie Amelia and the Runcible River Fever Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  Symptom 1: A Dry Cough

  Mint Condition

  Hogmanay in a Tail Spin

  A Life-Altering Flan

  The Next Ship to Scotland

  Flannery Will Get You Nowhere

  A Proper Detective

  The Flan Plan versus Operation Blank Marauder

  The Fling’s the Thing

  V is for Valley

  Woodworms and Fisticuffs

  Hogmanay’s Bold Experiment

  Firing on All Cylinders

  The Fever Dog

  Things Alpacas Will Not Eat

  The Emergency Ward

  A Renewal of Vowels

  Sophie Lee has written two detective stories for children, Edie Amelia and the Monkey Shoe Mystery and Edie Amelia and the Runcible River Fever, as well as Alice in La La Land, a novel for grown-ups. She has also acted in many stage, television and film productions, including the films Muriel’s Wedding, The Castle and Holy Smoke. She lives in Sydney with her husband, three children, and two French bulldogs.

  www.sophielee.com.au

  Also by Sophie Lee and

  illustrated by Jonathon Oxlade

  Edie Amelia and the Monkey Shoe Mystery

  For my mother

  First published 2011 in Pan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  1 Market Street, Sydney

  Text copyright © Sophie Lee 2011

  Illustrations copyright © Jonathon Oxlade 2011

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Lee, Sophie, 1968–.

  Edie Amelia and the Runcible River Fever / Sophie Lee;

  illustrator, Jonathon Oxlade

  ISBN: 9780330425940 (pbk.)

  For primary school age.

  Healing – Juvenile fiction.

  Other Authors/Contributors: Oxlade, Jonathon

  A823.4

  Typeset in 13/18 pt Century Schoolbook by

  Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  These electronic editions published in 2011 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Edie Amelia and the Runcible River Fever

  Sophie Lee

  Adobe eReader format

  978-1-74262-726-7

  EPub format

  978-1-74262-728-1

  Online format

  978-1-74262-725-0

  Macmillan Digital Australia

  www.macmillandigital.com.au

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com.au to read more about all our books and to buy both print and ebooks online. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events.

  Acknowledgements

  My deepest thanks go to my father and to my mother.

  Thank you Melissa Firth, for helping to unlock it.

  To Julia Stiles and Brianne Collins—for your great wisdom.

  To Claire Craig and Anna MacFarlane, Tara Wynne, Matthew Scaife at Balloon Aloft, Ursula Dubosarsky, and to Kaye, Martine and Di for all your daily help and support.

  Thanks to my wonderful husband Anthony and to Edie, Tom and Jack—my real-life heroes.

  For Mr P and D . . . many hugs.

  Symptom 1: A Dry Cough

  Edie Amelia Sparks was sitting on an upturned milk crate in her tree house, observing the world through her binoculars. It was a fine, still morning and life had recently settled back to normal after Edie had solved an exciting puzzle involving a missing red monkey shoe, fortune cookies and a lot of notes on purple paper. She doodled in her notebook, counting idly as she watched over the town. Two seagulls fighting over a crust, one cat climbing a fence . . .

  Within a few minutes Edie had counted six of Runcible’s townsfolk hurrying past wearing brightly coloured jumpsuits. Their clothing was not what brought them to Edie’s attention—these jumpsuits were all the rage in Runcible and everyone was wearing them. What caught Edie’s eye was that all of them were coughing. Edie jotted down the time and a brief outline of this event in her notebook before popping it back into the detective kit in her satchel. (On an ordinary day her detective kit would probably contain binoculars, duct tape, a Swiss army knife, a magnifying glass, tweezers, evidence bags and a collection of pencils and pens.) With a small frown creasing her forehead, she swivelled around to check on things at home.

  In ‘The Pride of the Green’, her family’s lopsided two-storeyed house with the purple front door and creaky window shutters, her father, Michaelmas, an inventor, was on the back porch extinguishing a small explosion in a test tube. Her mother, Cinnamon, the author of several popular macrobiotic cookbooks, was stirring a tub of bubbling liquid in the kitchen and her French bulldog, Mister Pants, was chewing on the vacuum cleaner in the hall. Edie watched her family for a moment and frowned even harder. Unless she was imagining things, they, too, seemed to be coughing.

  She felt her Worries rising up and put her hand on her stomach in an attempt to push the fluttery feelings back down. It was a full-time job keeping her Worries in check. They seemed to have a driving force all of their own. Edie tried to be rational whenever possible to keep the Worries away. In her opinion, it was her methodical approach to problem-solving that made her a thoroughly dependable detective.

  Edie took a deep breath, yanked this morning’s copy of The Runcible Daily Bugle from the pocket of her satchel and turned to page two. There it was, under the headline Runcible River Fever! The Bare Truth. Symptom 1 was a dry cough, Symptom 2 a wet sneeze, and on it went until Symptom 8, which was listed rather alarmingly as: falling over and not being able to get back up.

  According to the Bugle, the Fever was a virus that had originated in an elusive dog (which is another way of saying the dog was hard to catch). The paper had code-named it the ‘Fever Dog’. After all, said the Bugle, Swine Flu had begun with a lone pig (who became very unpopular in later life as a consequence), and the Black Plague was spread by rats—and the fleas that lived upon them. The Fever Dog, it claimed, was just as great a menace: it had ‘matted fur’ and ‘red, bug-like eyes’, and was still at large after biting a teacher, who was now in hospital suffering the effects of Symptom 4 (a rash). According to a group of Runcible Public School Year 3 students on an excursion, the Fever Dog had last been seen on the river bank devouring their picnic lunch, a flan they had baked in their Food Technology class.

  Edie scanned the top of the news item and made a careful note of the by-line, which credited the story to a
journalist named Trudy Truelove. The accompanying photograph revealed her to be an attractive woman wearing a jumpsuit. Truelove concluded her article by saying that as yet there was no cure for the Fever and that the Health Department’s investigation had gone nowhere, but that on a brighter note, the townsfolk had been able to take their minds off the Fever outbreak by focusing on the hot new trend for ‘pleather’ jumpsuits.

  Edie sighed and returned to her binoculars. Fear of the Fever had driven her up into the tree house in the first place, but she found she couldn’t escape it there either. She watched and waited, sensing catastrophe was imminent, but at last her mother, her father and her dog stopped coughing and went back about their business as if nothing had happened. Edie resolved to keep them under observation to see if they displayed symptoms 2 or 3 (sneezing and memory loss), but soon decided the triple coughing fit must have been either a response to the fumes wafting from the vat of black liquid on the stove or to the noxious gases from the test-tube explosion on the back porch. She stuffed The Daily Bugle into her satchel and went back to investigating the street.

  Mint Condition

  When Edie noticed her next-door neighbour, the Blank Marauder, calling to her father from the side fence, she pulled her satchel over her shoulder and scrambled down the rough steps nailed to the side of the tree. ‘The Blank Marauder’ was a curious nickname her father had come up with, and which Edie supposed had something to do with her neighbour’s unnerving stare and his impressive collection of junk. The Blank Marauder used to be rather hostile, but his cold heart had melted since Edie had both tidied his shed for him and invited him to attend her ninth birthday party two weeks previously. Edie crouched out of sight but within earshot behind her mother’s juniper bush, curious to hear his news.

  ‘Genuine pleather,’ the Blank Marauder was saying as he held up an all-in-one leather pants suit much like the ones everyone in Runcible seemed to be wearing.

  ‘What’s pleather?’ Edie couldn’t help but ask in spite of her efforts at covert surveillance.

  ‘Ah,’ said her dad, who was apparently not in the least bit startled by his daughter’s head suddenly emerging from behind juniper bushes. ‘Well, it’s a leather substitute that was developed over forty years ago. No plants or animals were harmed in its manufacture so it was a great favourite with the vegans and animal lovers of those times. It fell out of usage for a while there—I can’t remember why . . .’

  ‘This garment may be forty years old,’ the Blank Marauder said, ‘but it’s in mint condition. Here, Michaelmas, feel the quality.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Michaelmas, running his hand over the material.

  ‘I’ll let you in on a little secret,’ said the Marauder. ‘I happened to come by a whole container of these at Runcible Dock. Can you believe I’ve offloaded nine boxes already? You’ve probably noticed a lot of people wearing pleather jumpsuits around Runcible.’ Michaelmas nodded. ‘Now there’s only one box left and I may already have a buyer, but I really wanted to give one to Edie, as thanks for her help tidying my shed.’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Michaelmas. ‘Cinnamon is not a fan of substitute fabrics.’

  ‘Please,’ said the Blank Marauder. ‘I’ve had a terrible morning, and this would help cheer me up.’

  ‘Please, Dad?’ said Edie.

  ‘Well, alright. Thank you, dear boy, very kind,’ said Michaelmas.

  ‘Hold on,’ said the Blank Marauder, and dashed off towards his shed.

  When he returned, wheeling an enormous box on a trolley, Edie saw that the pleather jumpsuits came in all the colours of the rainbow.

  ‘Which one appeals to you, madam?’ he said.

  Edie sifted through the multitude of suits before settling on a bright red one, size nine. It would match her monkey shoes.

  ‘What are those, dear boy?’ said Michaelmas, pointing at a jumble of fabric snippets in a plastic sack inside the box.

  ‘These? Pleather off-cuts,’ said the Marauder.

  ‘May I take just one specimen?’ said Michaelmas. ‘It’s an extraordinary textile.’

  ‘Of course,’ said the Marauder, handing him a swatch of black pleather.

  ‘What are you going to do with it, Dad?’ asked Edie.

  ‘Indulge my natural curiosity,’ he said, smiling.

  The Blank Marauder stuffed the rest of the jumpsuits and the fabric snippets back into the box and sealed the top with tape. ‘In case we get another buyer,’ he said with a cough. ‘They’ll never know there’s one missing. There are nine hundred and ninety-nine others! Goodbye now.’ The Blank Marauder, who was a tall and wiry man, doffed his cap, displaying his kelp-like hair, and disappeared back into his shed.

  ‘Fascinating,’ said Michaelmas, staring intently at the fabric. He sniffed, coughed, then checked his watch. ‘I need to get back to my work. I’m trying to prove a theory. With little success, I might add.’

  ‘Another theory, Dad?’ said Edie.

  But Michaelmas seemed too engrossed in the pleather off-cut to hear Edie as he wandered back into the house.

  Edie bolted inside, up the spiral staircase and into her room, changed into her jumpsuit and popped on her monkey shoes for good luck. The sensation of synthetic fabric next to her skin was a new one to Edie. What a relief it was not to be wearing a smock fashioned from recycled hessian, even if pleather was a little hot. She gathered up her detective kit and bounded back downstairs, sending the crimson tassels on the toes of her shoes flying, out the back door and down to the gully at the bottom of the garden. When she reached the foot of the big tree she pulled out her copy of the Bugle and reread the article about the Runcible River Fever. As she reached the last paragraph, she noticed something she’d missed before. ‘Aha,’ she said, reading aloud. ‘A reward! For any persons who capture the Fever Dog alive!’

  ‘You know they say talking to yourself is the first sign of madness, Sparks,’ said a girl with long black plaits who was wearing a kilt.

  Edie spun around and came face to face with Charisma Chompster. Cheesy, as Edie preferred to call her because of her healthy appetite for cauliflower cheese, was an opinionated Glaswegian girl (that is, she came from Glasgow and didn’t like people disagreeing with her). She also had a firecracker temper, disliked sport and was allergic to more than half a dozen things ranging from mock cream to Bandaids.

  ‘I’m on a new case,’ said Edie, ‘just going over the facts.’

  ‘Ridiculous,’ Cheesy spluttered through a mouthful of crumbs whose origin must have been the adzuki-bean flan Cinnamon had been perfecting that morning. Edie’s mother’s pastry, being devoid of butter, made for cleggy mouthfuls. Cheesy was always keen to sample Cinnamon’s world-renowned macrobiotic cooking, since it was so utterly different from the food served in her own home, which was more likely to be bread fried in lard or silverside with white sauce than juniper cutlets or mung-bean casserole. But it seemed on this occasion that even Cinnamon’s cooking was incapable of putting Cheesy in a more agreeable mood.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Edie asked.

  ‘Absolutely nothing,’ said Cheesy testily. ‘Except that my dad has officially gone bonkers.’

  Hogmanay in a Tail Spin

  In general, Edie had respect for her elders, so at first she said nothing. Cheesy’s father, Hogmanay Chompster, was an unusual man who hummed when he chewed, had a large auburn beard and who wore orange overalls. These overalls were the company uniform for Runcible Flights of Fancy, the hot-air balloon enterprise that Hogmanay part-owned.

  ‘What do you mean when you say “bonkers”?’ Edie asked.

  ‘Dad has hardly stopped crying since his balloon was wrecked when he crash-landed in Chinatown,’ blurted Cheesy. ‘He keeps going on and on about this being the year he was supposed to fly solo, raise money for charity and break a world record, but now the balloon’s shredded, his reputation’s in tatters and life’s not worth living.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Edie.

  ‘Anyway
, he says that there’s no way he can afford a proper polyurethane replacement that would be accredited by a balloon inspector. He’s gone at odd times every day, or if he’s at home he disappears into the basement for hours with only Mum’s old sewing machine to keep him company, and he won’t let us in. He says he’s working on a pet project and he’s not to be disturbed. Then he comes back up and says it’s no use, we may as well move back to Glasgow.’

  This really did sound serious. Edie shook her head. The girls’ friendship had got off to a rocky start, but since the events surrounding Edie’s mysteriously disappearing monkey shoe, Edie couldn’t imagine life in Runcible without Cheesy. She listened carefully.

  According to Cheesy, her mother, Beltane, was in a pitiful state and had made Runcible River Fever the focus of her anxiety. Beltane had been complaining that of all the places to move they had chosen one imperilled by a pandemic, and not only that but now her husband had gone and got himself involved in solving the town’s problems, as if they didn’t have enough of their own. It was her belief they should leave town as soon as possible.

  Edie’s thoughts returned to the perplexing Fever outbreak and her Worries started multiplying. If grown-ups were thinking of leaving town because of the Fever then the situation really was serious. What if her family caught it? What if it made some of them very sick . . . or worse? And what if Mister Pants came into contact with the disease-spreading dog and couldn’t match it in a fight?

  ‘I think your dad will see sense . . .’ Edie began half-heartedly.

  ‘You don’t get it, Sparks. He’s a very determined person. Want one?’ Cheesy pulled a packet of salted caramels out from under her kilt. She often pocketed snacks high in saturated fats for emergency occasions such as this, when a gluten-free lima-bean muffin just would not do.