Finding wonder, p.1
Finding Wonder, page 1
For my father, who gave me my dream horse, Morning Star,
For my mom, who showed me India, Greece and the Seychelles,
And for my sister Lisa, who keeps me believing that, for every question, nature has an answer …
Tell me, what is it that you plan to do with
Your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Map
Epigraph
Fearless Fire
1. Lottery
2. Red Coat
3. Forever Is A Long Time
4. Shortcut
5. End of the World
6. Pink Snow
7. Wishes & Horses
8. Talisman
9. Pie in the Sky
10. Night Flight
Wonder Boy
11. Starwood
12. Dream Horse
13. Backstage Pass
14. River Spirit
15. Crossroads
16. Bluebird
17. Murky Waters
18. Locked-Stable Mystery
19. Private Eyes
20. Cover Stories
21. Morning Star
22. Centaur
Magician
23. Skylar
24. Trick Horse
25. Person of Interest
26. Disappearing Act
27. Clueless
28. Red Herring
Drifter
29. Sea Change
30. Cowgirl Country
31. Dangerous Detour
32. Whiteout
33. Haunted Wood
34. Desperate Measures
Ghost Flight
35. Queen’s Reach
36. House of Cards
37. The Speed Gene
38. Race Day
39. Devil’s Bargain
40. Trojan Horse
41. The Art of Detection
Shamal
42. Castle in the Sky
43. Masquerade
44. Infinite Mystery
45. Trapped!
46. Saving Shamal
47. Seeing Double
48. Ticking Bomb
49. Leap of Faith
50. Hero’s Welcome
51. Reunion
52. Wild Gene
Wander Girl
53. Alchemy
54. Lost & Found
Author’s Note
Praise for Lauren St John
Also by the Author
Copyright
1.
Lottery
When death came to Roo Thorn’s door, it found her dreaming.
She knew it was a dream because she was at a pop concert with a friend, two treats that never entered Roo’s waking universe.
Her imaginary friend was yelling something and trying to tug her away, but Roo was having too much fun. She was mesmerised by the band’s drummer; by his wild, flying hair and blur of arms and sticks. His cymbals flashed like flames.
The singer gave up trying to make herself heard and flounced off the stage. The guitarist and keyboard player followed. Beneath the dazzling lights, the drummer thrashed on. The bass thudded in Roo’s chest like an extra heartbeat.
Now she really did want to escape but she was trapped. Hemmed in by the sweaty, dancing crowd, she began to panic. Where was her friend?
‘POLICE! OPEN THE DOOR!’ commanded a disembodied voice, shattering the dream like glass.
Roo struggled upright. Blue lights strobed her bedroom, uninterrupted by the frayed curtains. Somewhere in the night, a siren popped.
It didn’t surprise her that the cops were parked outside. Grimsby Grove was that sort of street. If it wasn’t a punch-up involving the boys at No. 8, it was the dodgy dealers at No. 33.
World-weary constables often knocked on the Thorns’ door, asking if Roo or her father had witnessed some incident or another, but never before had they knocked after midnight.
She wondered if an ambulance crew had the wrong house. Unlike some of their neighbours, the elderly couple next door were the sweetest people anywhere, but Mr Badawi had kidney problems and emergency services had been called out twice in the past week.
The pounding started again.
‘Dad!’ shouted Roo. ‘Dad, wake up, there’s someone at the door!’
To a regular person, that much would have been deafeningly obvious, but when it came to her father, Roo had learned not to take anything for granted.
Scrambling out of bed, she tripped over a line of model horses, sending them flying. Over the years, Roo had been told by everyone except her dad that she’d grow out of them.
Sometimes she felt guilty that, aged eleven and a half, she still staged whole Olympic events over the furniture in the flat, leaping upturned chairs, the old coffee table, and the tatty arm of the sofa, with Fearless Fire – the chestnut with the white blaze – clutched in her right hand.
In those moments Fearless Fire was as real to her as the chestnut showjumper on the poster on her bedroom wall. Wonder Boy, owned by teenage star Rhianna Cooper, was Roo’s dream horse.
‘If I had a horse like Wonder Boy, I’d be the happiest person on earth,’ she’d told her dad. ‘He’s perfect in every way. I hope Rhianna knows how lucky she is. Perfect talent, perfect home, and a perfect horse.’
‘Ruby Roo, perfect plus perfect plus perfect doesn’t always add up to happy or lucky,’ her father had chided. ‘Life is not arithmetic. It’s messy and complicated. Joy comes in unexpected packages, and when you’re least expecting her. Sometimes you find Joy in the last place you look.’
And then he was off again, reminiscing about the time he’d collided, quite literally, with Joy, Roo’s mum, as he’d rounded a corner on a London street, him on shore leave from the navy, and her walking on air after graduating from the Royal College of Nursing.
Ironically, thinking about Joy tended to make Roo’s dad sad. Very soon, he’d remember that he had to nip out on some urgent errand or job-seeking mission (usually involving the Hare & Tortoise pub) and be gone for hours and hours. A couple of times, he’d been gone all night.
‘When I win the lottery, everything will be different,’ he was always saying. ‘We’ll get our lives back on track again. I’ll buy you your dream horse.’
When I win the lottery was the soundtrack to their days.
Flicking on lights and picking up speed in response to a fresh bout of hammering, Roo banged on her dad’s bedroom door.
Silence. No surprise there.
She was about to barge in and shake him awake when the knocking started again.
‘I’m coming, I’m coming,’ Roo shouted to the invisible visitor, breaking into a trot along the passage, her mind already whirling with excuses.
I’m so sorry but my dad has a migraine/bad back/has flu. No, he can’t be disturbed.
Out of habit, she did a sweep of the living room, scooping up a pizza box and a couple of cans and tossing them out of sight behind the sofa. For ages she’d prided herself on keeping a spotless home the way her mum had but, recently, she’d been letting things slide.
That’s what grown-ups never understood. Kids got tired too.
Deep breath. Best smile.
Roo unlocked the door.
A policewoman, truncheon raised to rap once more, seemed startled to see a child. She blinked, peering past Roo in her too-small pyjamas.
‘Where’s Mum, sweetheart?’
The blue light of the squad car swirled like a lighthouse beam, warning of deadly currents and jagged rocks ahead.
Inside the vehicle, another officer was spelling out her address on his radio. ‘Thirty-two Grimsby – Golf, Romeo, India, Mike, Sierra, Bravo, Yankee … Grove – Golf, Romeo, Oscar, Victor, Echo …’
The chill that rippled through Roo had nothing to do with the arctic wind or grubby January snow. It was as if she knew what was going to happen before it happened.
A gaunt young man scurried from the shadows. ‘Apologies, Officer Pooran. I came as quickly as I could.’
It was Roo’s new social worker. The one who didn’t believe her father’s excuses about her frequent absences from school. The one who kept trying to catch Roo out. Only now, his fox face looked pale and anxious.
‘Ruby lost her mother a couple of years ago,’ he told the policewoman. ‘It was just the two of them, Roo and her dad.’
Was.
The past tense slammed into Roo’s chest like a cannonball.
Before they could stop her, she took off running down the passage. Her dad’s silent bedroom was empty, the bed neatly made.
His last words returned to her as clearly as if he were standing right in front of her. Still smiling.
Still breathing.
Ruby Roo, you go on to bed. I’m going to nip out to buy a lottery ticket. Back in five minutes. You never know, it might just be our lucky day.
2.
Red Coat
Was he coming or going?
Roo’s eyes were dry, as they had been since Officer Pooran and Iain, the social worker, had sat her down and carefully explained, as if she were hard of hearing, that her father had dropped dead outside No. 16, exactly halfway between the Thorns’ flat and the corner shop.
‘The owners at No. 16 are away and the cousin who’s housesitting didn’t know where your dad lived,’ the policewoman explained. ‘She rang for an ambulance, and they called us. It was a couple of hours before a neighbour was able to point us in the direction of your flat. Dad had no ID on h
‘Was he coming or going?’ Roo asked again.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Was he on his way to the corner shop or heading home? He only went out to get a lottery ticket. He thought it might be his lucky day.’
Roo felt as if a porcupine was lodged in her chest. It hurt too much to cry. ‘Our lucky day.’
Officer Pooran and Iain exchanged glances.
‘Life can be cruel like that,’ sympathised the policewoman. ‘Sadly, the paramedics suspect that your dad may have had a microscopic heart muscle defect he didn’t know about. Strikes without warning and can affect anyone at any age. Twenty-three-year-old footballers even. It was a heart attack waiting to happen.’
A heart attack waiting to happen.
The words scrolled through Roo’s brain on a loop. Ever since her mum had been struck dead cycling to work, Roo had lived in fear of another bad-news knock at the door. Now the worst had happened.
‘Oh,’ was all she could manage.
‘Ruby, you’ve had a huge shock and must be exhausted,’ said Iain, looking at the clock, now ticking towards 1.30 a.m. ‘We need to get you to a safe space. Somewhere you can be with family or friends. It says on your file that your only next of kin is an aunt, your mum’s sister. Are you happy for me to call her? Do the two of you get on?’
Roo had a vivid memory of a screaming match between her father and her aunt a year earlier. Six months after Roo’s mum died, Joni Jackson had shown up unannounced to find Roo not at school and her dad asleep on the sofa in the middle of the day.
Her views on childcare had not gone down well.
‘Don’t you dare lecture me on responsible parenting when you’ve never had a child and don’t know the first thing about raising one,’ Roo’s father had shouted. ‘When did you last have a proper job? Go away and don’t come back until you’ve taken a long hard look in the mirror. Anyway, Roo’s very happy, aren’t you, Roo?’
‘Very,’ Roo agreed defiantly. ‘Dad’s the best dad in the whole world.’
She’d watched through a slit in her bedroom curtains as Joni’s orange VW camper, decorated with flowers, butterflies, and a grinning surfer cresting a wave, lurched away down the street. The Thorns hadn’t seen her since.
Iain was waiting for Roo to respond. ‘Your Aunt Joni, is she nice?’ he pressed. ‘Do you enjoy visiting her?’
Roo was not about to inform him that she was more familiar with the postcards her aunt had mailed from New Zealand, Greece, and the Himalayas than she was with Joni herself.
As to where her aunt lived now, Roo had no clue. A surfing grotto in Devon? A yurt in Pembrokeshire? A garret for starving artists in Paris?
What did Joni even do? That much had never been clear.
It didn’t matter. Roo’s choices were stark. Either her aunt took her in, or she’d be deposited in a care home, where she’d wait in vain for someone to adopt her.
‘Joni’s the best aunt in the world,’ lied Roo.
***
‘That’s not my aunt.’
Roo’s voice was husky with tiredness and despair. Unsurprisingly, Joni Jackson had proven tough to track down. She’d changed her number and moved several times. When her new contact details were finally unearthed, her phone was switched off, and had stayed that way for most of the day.
Consequently, it was after dark and nearly nineteen hours after the police knocked on the Thorns’ door when headlights swung into the driveway of the foster home where Roo had spent the day.
Her aunt had told Rayleen, the social worker who’d taken over from Iain at the end of his shift, that she’d be arriving at ‘eight on the dot’ and here was a visitor, at eight on the dot.
Roo peered between the blinds. She’d been expecting the orange camper, not a Porsche SUV with blacked-out windows.
The driver’s door opened. Elegant legs encased in knee-length black boots stepped into the mashed-up snow. A slender figure in a red coat and scarf, woolly hat pulled down low, strode briskly up the path.
‘That’s not my aunt,’ Roo repeated, recoiling slightly. The Joni she remembered had been cuddle-shaped and wearing a tie-dye T-shirt and flares with leopard-print patches on the knees.
‘What do you mean, that’s not your aunt?’
Rayleen, a stolid person with a no-nonsense attitude, moved with speed to the hallway. There were raised voices outside as the social worker demanded photo ID.
Next, the stranger in the red coat burst into the room.
‘Oh, Roo, what a thing to happen,’ she cried. ‘What a terrible, terrible thing. I’m so sorry.’
Before Roo could object, she was enveloped in scarlet cashmere and breathing in orange blossom perfume and hair that smelled of coconut. She’d been cold all day, but now a wave of heat flooded her veins.
‘Madam, stop! We need to sort out this question of your identity,’ railed Rayleen. ‘Ruby, do you know this person? Is she your aunt?’
Roo tugged away awkwardly. This Joni dressed nothing like the old Joni, but the warmth of her, the concern in her hazel eyes, was the same.
She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
Joni squared up to Rayleen. ‘I’d appreciate it if we could get the formalities over as quickly as possible. I’d like to get Roo home.’
3.
Forever Is A Long Time
The drive ‘home’ passed in a tear-streaked blur of city lights. Roo couldn’t take in anything Joni was saying. Something about a new partner, Gary; a new job at a spa in Chelsea; and a new apartment: Gary’s.
‘It’ll be a squeeze, but we’ll adapt. And Gary will adore you, you’ll see. He’s away on business. Back late tonight. You’ll meet him in the morning. The main thing I want you to know is, I’m here for you and always will be. You can count on me.’
Roo didn’t answer. She was tired to the bone. Words were just words. What grown-ups promised and what they did were two different things.
When I win the lottery …
She sank into a daze, stirring when Joni pulled into an underground car park. A spotless lift whisked them up to a penthouse overlooking the Thames.
The lift doors opened to a vision of white and chrome and acres of polished wooden floor. The bathrooms were so large and shiny that Roo was afraid to wash her hands.
Despite being four times the size of the Thorns’ council flat, the penthouse had just two bedrooms, one of which was being used as Gary’s study.
‘He won’t mind,’ said Joni, pulling out a sofa bed and wrestling a duvet into a cover.
The room was so small that, once in bed, Roo was sandwiched between a printer and more electronics than an air traffic control tower. When Joni handed her a mug of malted milk, Roo’s nervous hands tipped half of it on to a white rug.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ Roo panicked, tears searing her eyes again.
But Joni could not have minded less. ‘Roo, it’s my fault for making it too hot,’ she said with a smile. ‘Don’t give it another thought.’
Roo must have fallen into a coma sleep after that, because next, she was roused by hushed voices – her aunt’s and a man’s. Gary, she assumed.
‘I didn’t even know you had a niece,’ he was saying. ‘Poor kid. Tragic to be orphaned at such a young age.’
‘Yes, it’s utterly devastating. She’s asleep in your study. It’ll take a bit of juggling at first, but we’ll find a way to make it work.’
‘’Course, ’course. No problem at all, babe. She’s welcome. Only … uh, how long’s she staying?’
‘Roo’s lost both her parents, Gary.’ There was a sliver of steel in Joni’s tone. ‘I’m – we’re – her family now. She’s staying forever.’
There was a loaded silence.
‘Forever is a long time, Joni.’
As their footsteps faded away, Roo clung to her namesake, a floppy-eared kangaroo, a long-ago gift from her mum.
Beneath her pillow was Fearless Fire. The other nine horses, a small bag of clothes, and a framed photo of her parents laughing in happier times were her only possessions.
The picture had been taken at her old riding school, a falling-down, held-together-with-love-and-string place in East London. When her mum was alive, Roo had had lessons there every school holiday from when she was five. These days, the only fences she soared over were in her imagination.
