Queen of Disguises by Melanie Jackson

Author:Melanie Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: JUV000000, book
Publisher: Orca Book Publishers
Published: 2010-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

The Mysterious Madame Sosostris

The woman with the plump, painted, papier-mâché hens smiled at me. “Are you lost?” she asked sympathetically. “The Salt Spring market is so sprawling—so many twists and turns.”

I looked back, past the throngs of marketgoers admiring jewelry or wood sculptures, or sniffing at exotic spices, or spreading umpteen toppings of jam on huge, hot rounds of bread. Mrs. Cuthbert and Cornwall were studying some paintings of local scenery and wildlife.

“I feel lost,” I admitted to the woman with the hens. “I don’t know anything anymore.”

I chose a red-polka-dot-on-white hen for Mother. “A friend of mine got hit by a falling rock yesterday, and now she’s at Mrs. Cuthbert’s, resting, on doctor’s orders.” Feeling close to tears, I chomped my lower lip. “And she was the only friend I had around here too.”

“Oh dear,” the woman clucked, much like a real hen. She bundled the red-polka-dot hen up in lots of sparkly, star-decorated tissue paper.

“The rock grazed the back of her head, as opposed to thumping it squarely on top. The doctor says those few inches of difference made the accident an injury as opposed to a fatality.

“But I don’t think it was an accident,” I said. “I think Beak—I think someone threw the rock down the mountain slope, intending it for my skull, not Angela’s.”

From the display of paintings, Mrs. Cuthbert glanced past the milling crowd, checking on me. She was worried and drawn. Everyone else—doctor, police—thought the falling rock had been an accident. In this drought, the soil had dried up so much that rocks were loosening from slopes. I insisted otherwise, which meant that once more I was Mrs. Cuthbert’s problem guest.

“Oh dear,” the hen woman said again. She was the plump, comforting type, with short brown hair and glasses that flashed in the sun like beacons.

At the moment my vision of the beacons was blurring. “You mustn’t cry,” the hen woman clucked. She pressed the wrapped-up hen into my hands and patted my shoulder comfortingly.

“Angela pushed me out of the way,” I said. “I think she saw someone throwing the rock. But now she’s too weak and too medicated to remember. Her mother’s with her, and the doctor. They won’t let me question her. Mrs. Cuthbert says if I do, I’ll have to go home.”

My tears plopped on the tissue paper. At one point the day before, in exasperation, Mrs. Cuthbert had demanded, “Why can’t you cooperate, Dinah? Beak-Nose hasn’t been seen anywhere on Salt Spring. It’s hard enough dealing with what’s happened to Angela without your imaginings.”

I tore off some tissue paper to wipe at my eyes. I heaved a big shaky breath and managed a wan smile back at the kindly hen woman.

We were attracting glances. Passersby glanced from teary me to the hen woman, lifted their eyebrows and shied away from the hen stall.

“Here,” the hen woman said, hurriedly placing a wrapped peppermint stick on top of the hen. “There’s nothing like a bit of sugar to take the sting out of life.

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