“Leave it,” said Laura as Freddy risked multiple puncture wounds. “We’ll get him another one.”
“No!” wailed Sunshine. “It was the Christmas present to him. He’ll be really upsetted and he’ll hate me because I can’t throw straight-in-a-line because I’m a ming-mong.”
Sunshine was close to tears.
“You most certainly are not a ming-mong!” said Freddy, finally surfacing from the depths of the gorse bush, triumphantly waving the ball-on-a-rope. “Who on earth called you that?”
“That’s what Nicola Crow used to call me at school when I dropped the ball in rounders.”
“Well, Nicola Crow was an ignoramus and you, young lady, are dancing drome. And don’t you forget it.”
He handed her the toy, smoothing away the pain from her face. But a smile was still too much to hope for. Tired of rabbits and having missed all the drama, Carrot wandered back and sniffed at his toy. Then he licked Sunshine’s hand. The price of a smile.
As they walked on, Laura now holding Carrot’s toy for safekeeping and Freddy inspecting his wounds, Sunshine pounced on a small, shiny object trodden into the grass.
“Look,” she said, digging it out of the mud with her fingers.
“What is it?” Freddy took it from her and rubbed the dirt away. It was a brass key ring in the shape of a baby elephant.
“We should take it home,” said Sunshine. “We should write it a label and put it on the webside.”
“Don’t you think that we’ve got more than enough lost things already?” said Laura, picturing the study crammed with things still waiting on shelves or in boxes for their gold stars. But Freddy agreed with Sunshine.
“Listen, I’ve been thinking about how we get people interested in the website. Putting all the stuff on there is only half the job. Getting the right people to look at it is the other. Now, Anthony’s is a great story, and I’m sure we’ll be able to get the local press, maybe even radio and television, interested, but if we have some really recent things that have been lost and found as well as all the old stuff, I think it could really help.”
And what really helped Laura was that Freddy had said “we.” She was no longer facing Anthony’s daunting legacy alone; she had help. Help that she had been too proud or too afraid to ask for.
Back at Padua, Sunshine went straight to the study to find a label for the key ring. They had all been invited to tea by Sunshine’s mum and dad, but she was determined to have the label written and the key ring on a shelf or in a box before they left. Laura went upstairs to get changed and Freddy rubbed the worst of the mud from Carrot’s feet and legs with an old towel in the kitchen. On the way past, Laura tried the door handle of Therese’s room. It was still locked. Back in the kitchen, she wrote a label for the key ring under Sunshine’s watchful eye.
“Sunshine?”
“Um?” She was concentrating hard to make out what Laura was writing.
“You know the other day when you said that the Lady of the Flowers was upset?”
“Yep.”
Laura put the pen down and blew on the wet ink. As soon as she put the label down, Sunshine picked it up and blew on it some more. Just to be sure.
“Well, do you think that she’s upset with me?”
Sunshine adopted her how-can-you-be-so-stupid expression and stance, which involved rolling her eyes, huffing, and jamming her hands onto her hips.
“She’s not upsetted with just you”—the “of course” was understood—“she’s upsetted with everyone.”
That was not an answer that Laura was expecting. If she believed what Sunshine was saying (and the jury was still having a latte break on that one), then she was relieved not to be the sole target of Therese’s anger, but still absolutely none the wiser as to what she could do appease her.
“But why is she angry?”
Sunshine shrugged. She had lost interest in Therese for the moment and was looking forward to her tea. She studied her watch. She could do all of the “o’clocks” and most of the “half-pasts,” and anything in between became a “nearly.”
“It’s nearly four o’clock,” she said “and tea’s at four o’clock on the spot.”
She went and stood by the door.
“This morning I made fairy cakes, scones, the even lovelier mince pies, and prawn folly fonts. For our tea.”
Freddy grinned. “Which explains why you didn’t get here until nearly half-past eleven.” He winked at Laura and mouthed, Lucky for me.
“And Dad made sausage rollovers,” said Sunshine, pulling on her coat.
CHAPTER 33
Eunice
1991