‘But she should help,’ Pod agonised. ‘It’s not fair on everyone else.’
‘What would she help with?’ Will said. ‘She doesn’t know how to sail or fish or do anything useful.’
‘She could learn,’ Essie pointed out.
‘Eventually she’s going to get bored,’ Annalie said. ‘Maybe we can find her something to do then.’
But Blossom showed no sign of getting bored enough for that.
Despite all the dire reports they’d read about the Outer Ocean, its many dangers and its horrible weather, the first part of their journey was trouble-free, except for one thing. Things began to go missing.
First it was a seashell Annalie kept in her cabin. It wasn’t valuable, but Spinner had given it to her, and she liked it. One day it was there, the next day it wasn’t. Annalie thought it might have fallen on the floor, but a search of the cabin failed to turn it up. It seemed like one of those annoying things that happened: innocent. Accidental.
Next thing to go was a little mug shaped like a dog. It had been given to Will when he was a little boy, and because it was indestructible, it remained part of the galley crockery—until it wasn’t.
Then Will discovered a spare reflector panel for the biggest solar cell was missing. This was a more serious problem; although the component was small, it was important, because if the panel failed and could not be replaced, it meant their biggest solar cell was out of action. Will knew for a fact that they had had a spare when they left Gantua; he’d checked it before they went on their last supply run. Now it too was missing from the locker where it was kept.
No one thought to connect these annoying absences until Essie’s shell went missing. Essie turned the cabin inside out looking for it. Then she checked the boys’ cabin and every locker in the saloon. The shell was nowhere to be found. She asked everybody in turn if they’d seen it, even Graham. But no one had.
‘What could have happened to it?’ Essie asked, almost in tears. ‘It’s nowhere!’
‘It has to be somewhere,’ Will said. ‘There’s nowhere it could have gone.’
‘Then why can’t we find it?’ Essie wailed.
‘Something weird’s going on,’ Will said. ‘These things going missing. The reflector. Your shell.’
A thought occurred to him then, and it occurred to the rest of them at more or less the same time. Pod turned bright red. Then he went and stuck his head under Blossom’s curtain. ‘Blossom, are you sure you don’t know where Essie’s shell is? It’s very important that we find it.’
Blossom looked back at him with an expression of consummate innocence. ‘No. I don’t know where it is.’
At that moment, all of them became convinced that Blossom had been stealing from them. And none of them had the faintest idea what to do about it.
Annalie beckoned to the others and moved them all upstairs.
Graham said what everybody was thinking. ‘Thief!’
‘We don’t know she is,’ Annalie said, striving for fairness.
‘Easy enough to find out,’ Will said. ‘We go down there and see what she’s hiding under that curtain.’
‘We can’t!’ Essie said.
‘You’re okay with letting her keep your shell?’
Essie was not. ‘We need to find a way to do it without embarrassing her,’ she said. ‘We’ve got a long journey ahead of us.’
‘Bugger that,’ Will said. ‘If she’s stealing from us, she’s got bigger problems than being embarrassed.’
‘Let me do it,’ Pod said. He was mortified by his sister’s behaviour. ‘I brought her on board. I’ll fix this.’
He went downstairs again, anger and embarrassment competing for the upper hand. How could she do this? To his friends? To him? Who had she become in the years they’d been apart? He didn’t recognise the girl who’d returned from the cruise ship. And he had no idea how to handle her now.
Will would have gone in all guns blazing and started rifling through her things. But Pod had a feeling that such a thing, once done, would be hard to undo. So he knelt down at the edge of the curtain and said, ‘Blossom? Can I come in?’
She peeped out at him, like some bright-eyed, rather bitey creature peering from its burrow. ‘Why?’
‘I need to talk to you.’
Not taking no for an answer, he eased in under the curtain.
‘You need to give it back,’ he said, trying to sound calm.
‘I don’t have it.’
‘Yes, you do.’
She was silent for a moment, assessing him. Then she opened the locker that had been emptied for her and took out Essie’s shell.
Inside, many objects had been carefully arranged on what he realised was the pillowcase she’d brought with her from the Blue Water Duchess. He saw the dog mug, the solar reflector and another shiny spare part they hadn’t yet realised was missing. There were more things too, some of it cheap junk (a plastic jewel, a tiny notebook with a pink pen attached by a chain), some of it clearly very valuable (a personal electronic music player, an expensive-looking ring with real stones in it). He realised these must have been stolen from the cruise ship. Then he noticed there was a little girl’s doll, with a bright mane of hair and huge blue-green eyes, a tiny waist and impossibly long legs, standing at the centre of all these treasures. At once he understood what he was looking at: it was a shrine to the Lucky Lady.
‘Where did you get all this stuff?’ he asked.
‘I found it.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes,’ Blossom said savagely. ‘Rich people leave stuff behind all the time. They have so much, they don’t even notice it’s missing.’
‘You took this from the guests? Wouldn’t you have gotten into big trouble for that?’
‘Only if you got caught,’ Blossom said with a glint in her eye. ‘But I didn’t steal it. I found it.’
Pod didn’t really believe her, but he suspected she half-believed it herself, or had said it to herself enough times that it had begun to seem
