The Mystery of the Cupboard

“How do you know?” said Gillon with a bit of jeer in his voice.

“It’s a longhouse,” said Omri mysteriously. ‘And - LB.”

“What?”

“Someone with the initials LB built this house.”

“Big deal. So what?”

“LBs are lucky for me,” said Omri quietly.

2 (#ulink_27c8061d-d6c0-512b-be41-5c76b068b45e)

Kitsa Goes Missing (#ulink_27c8061d-d6c0-512b-be41-5c76b068b45e)

They moved in in August.

It hadn’t been so hard, after all, to leave the old house in Hovel Road. Omri had secretly been quite glad to, in the end. After all, his room had been totally wrecked by the Big Storm. For months he’d slept on a mattress on the floor, and done his homework at an ordinary old table, and thought about all his things that the storm had demolished or blown away. His market-bought chest had been destroyed, along with his Japanese table, his desk, his collections, and all his other stuff, his links with childhood. It was time for a new start.

“Dad,” he asked at one stage when they were packing up, “will you have the same bank?”

“A different branch, but yes,” said his father, puzzled. But then he understood. “Ah, your mysterious package that you asked me to have them put in their vaults. Don’t worry, Omri. They’ll keep it safe.”

“But will they move it to the bank near our new house?” Omri persisted anxiously.

“I’ll make sure they do,” said his father.

Omri wrote to Patrick, his friend and the sharer of his greatest secret, on the day before moving day.

Dear Patrick,

We’re moving to the country tomorrow. Wish it was near you but it’s the other way. We’ll be further apart than ever. I’ll write the new address at the end. Keep in touch.

Dad says IT will come to the new place with us, to the new bank. I hope you’re keeping Boone safe. I’m taking Little Bull and Twin Stars with me, and Matron and Fickits. I mean I’m carrying them. I’ll find somewhere safe for them in my new room. I just wanted you to know. I’m taking all my other plastic figures too. Not that we’ll do anything about them.

Hope you’re okay and that your mum has planted a new orchard after the storm. You must come and visit us in the new house. It’s quite fun, lots of old barns and stuff, and there’s hens that the last owner (he died, he was very old, Mum says he was my removed cousin or something) left. Their eggs have very orange yolks, like almost red. A neighbour’s been looking after them and Dad wants to keep them. And there’s a wood and a river and the sea quite close. And Mum says we might have a pony!!

Bye. Omri.

P.S. I’m dreading starting at a new school. It’s the local comp, of course. I went to meet the head, it’s a woman. Her name’s Mrs Everest. She wears a wig that looks just like a big tea cosy.

Two days after the move — two frantic, chaotic days, which followed a frantic, chaotic fortnight packing up — Omri was standing out in the lane that ran alongside their longhouse.

Both his parents and his brothers were indoors trying to make some kind of order in the various rooms, which were still so jammed with a mass of unsorted furniture and crates that you could hardly move around.

The reason Omri wasn’t with them was because he was desperately hunting for Kitsa.

She had come from London in the moving van, in a cat basket. Too near to this (as it turned out) had been a large silk lampshade. When they arrived, the lampshade was found to be in shreds, ripped by Kitsa’s resentful claws, reached through the bars of the cat basket.

The moment Omri had let her out, Omri’s mother, who was at the end of her rope, shouted at her, “You wicked animal, you’ve ruined my best lamp!” and made a swipe at her. Kitsa had fled, and Omri hadn’t seen her since.

“She’ll be back,” his mother — who, when things calmed down, felt awful about her — tried to comfort him. But he was frantic with worry. How could she find her way back when she didn’t know this was now her home?

He had already searched the whole property: the henhouse, the pigsty, the workshop, the barn, as well as the paddock and the wood, which ran down to a little river. He’d called her till he was hoarse.

He was miserable, absolutely miserable. Nobody could cheer him up, though even Gillon tried.

“She’ll come back,” he said. “She’s just giving us a hammering because we moved her.”

Now as Omri stood in the lane and called her, without much hope, up the lane came, not Kitsa, alas, but a red postal van, which stopped at their gate. The postman leant out.

“Mistle Hay Farmhouse?” he asked.

Omri said it was.

“Long time since there were any post for here,” he said. “You moved in, I’spect, bin empty a good while and the old man never got no letters to speak of, real recluse he was. Well, this be for you by looks of it, kid’s writin’.” And he handed Omri a letter. It was addressed to him, and it was from Patrick. Omri read it at once, standing in the lane.

Dear Omri,

Thanks for the letter. I looked on the map. Blimey, you’re a long way off. Too bad. Don’t know when we’ll get a chance to meet. I’ll work on my mum to go on holiday near you but I bet she won’t, she likes going over to Calais on the ferry to shop every chance she gets. Dead boring except the boat trip. She spends every minute in the French supermarket buying stuff we can easily get in Safeway at home. Crazy.

I’ve been thinking. I wish you hadn’t put IT in the bank. I know why you did, but still. Every time I look at Boone, I get lonely for him and wonder how he’s getting on. I sometimes imagine I’m in Texas, or that Boone comes back here and I talk to him. Don’t laugh, YOU PILLOCK. I bet you feel the same about Little Bull.

Guess what, my aunt came to visit and brought Emma. (Tamsin was at summer ski-camp - yeah!) It was great. We talked and talked about Them. She’d brought Ruby Lou and we played with them and pretended they were alive, only we had to stop cos Em started crying. She’s okay though really. She said the same as me, that she wished you hadn’t put IT in the bank. She said you should have asked us first.

You couldn’t change your mind, could you?

Good luck with your new school and the Tea Cosy. Maybe she’s bald underneath it. You’ll have to try to make it fall off and see. My school’s a real toilet. See ya.

Patrick.

P.S. Em and Tamsin are still at the old school. Em told me Mr Johnson fell off his bicycle into some prickly bushes. She says he’s never been the same since the day of the storm. Keeps talking to himself, there’s a rumour he’s gone a bit irregular.

This letter at least took Omri’s mind off Kitsa for a while. After reading it, he went up to his room.

He’d chosen one of the ‘inner’ bedrooms so that he would be the one who had to pass through Gillon’s room to get to the stairs, and not the other way round. It was not a perfect arrangement, but better than Gillon having right-of-way through his room. He’d made Gillon - who had been desperate for the outside bedroom - promise always to knock, if he did need to come in, which was unlikely. Omri was a very private person. He planned to put a bolt on the door, like his old room had.

His new bed was up, and his new desk. They were both pinewood. He’d decided to put up loads of shelves, or rather ask his dad to. His dad, however, was overwhelmed with work.

“Time you learned to put up shelves for yourself,” he’d said shortly, on Day One.

“Okay! Can I borrow your drill?”

“No.”

“So how can I—”

“Oh, I’ll do it eventually! Give me a chance, I’m up to my neck!”