1st 5 Pages Nov Workshop - Telford

Name: Pat Telford
Genre: Young Adult mystery
Title: Sky Lanterns Over Nether Ides : A Redferne Family Mystery

1 - Orphans

Faraday

I think my sniffer is broken. It's not that I can't smell anything, it's that the smells are stripped of emotion, and don't seem to register anywhere in the range from offensive to delightful. I'm more like our dog, Disco, than a proper human. We would both sniff a dead badger, a fallen slate roof shingle basking in summer sunshine, or the blooms of a lavender bush with enthusiasm, but without any real reaction. She might even get more emotional about a smell than I do. I guess you smell with your mind, not your nose, so maybe it's just another sign that whoever put my brain in my cranium gave it a quarter turn before insertion.

But the springtime when my sister Higgs unmasked the Knights of the Drowned Cabal, I wasn't really worrying about my broken sniffing powers. She was only 16, so I had to keep an eye on her. But I was also striving to figure out what the sky lanterns had to do with the explosion at the Ryder mansion, and why everyone was craving Fish and ‘Snips, all while trying to stop obsessing about what happened to our parents. I didn't think I could do all of that and prevent myself from breaking completely. Maybe I ended up both stronger and more broken, but you will have to judge that for yourself, because it’s hard for me to distinguish between broken and working.

In Middle Ides, a town hurled like a damp towel at the base of the hills and then forgotten by the main roads and rail lines of northern England, my older brother Newton, my younger sister Higgs, and I were accepted but always treated as a little odd. Up until their deaths last year, a few months apart, my parents kept us connected to the fabric of the town; Middle Ides was big enough that they weren’t part of the public consciousness, but they had a wide circle of friends and were woven into events ranging from the polo club to the fundraisers for the upkeep of the Ides Giant – a looming limestone outline of a primitive figure cut by some inspired but unknown ancients into the rising hills overlooking the town. It was undoubtedly the social connections of our parents that brought a thousand little kindnesses as we worked through the chaos, forced first into a single-parent family, and then to a home with only us nearly-children, aged 16, 18, and 22.

The three of us started out oddly, so maybe it makes sense that we continued a little oddly. Newton came crying into the darkened and nearly silent maternity ward during the big power failure of 1995. Higgs was born three weeks early, and made her entrance in the staff room at the Feynman Nanotechnology Centre, where our mother was chief scientist but snowed in like everyone else on the campus that day. And I arrived battered and bruised; I apparently seemed like I wanted to be born but then changed my mind and required considerable coaxing, a few incisions, and some use of forceps that my mother said more closely resembled fishing than medicine. I looked as alarmed and gangly at the moment of my birth as I do most of the time now, and I was so silent for the first few months that my parents worried something was seriously wrong with me.

Naming us after famous scientists didn’t help us blend in while growing up, either. Newton is maybe forgivable – it sounds like a proper first name, and he often just gets called Newt. But Higgs? And Faraday? That I am named after the pioneer of electromagnetism didn’t really strike my teenaged classmates as a good reason to stop making fun of me. My father told me that a name is just something that lets people refer to something or someone, but the real person behind the name is what matters. My name does not tell anyone what I truly am. He told me that 174 times. I counted. But I guess that’s one thing I can stop counting now.

When I tell you everything that happened, you will probably see that it’s the combination of our quirks and the way our parents prepared us that let us dig, and join, and chase our way into figuring out how the strange events around Middle Ides were like vines choking an ancient oak.

Disco

Humans are such idiots sometimes. Yes, I know you aren’t going to place much value in an insulting opinion from a scrawny whippet. Especially one with snaggly teeth. And one unregulated eyeball that tends to get bored with what the other eye is observing and rove off to find its own superior view. I’m not even the smartest dog in the neighbourhood. There’s a French bulldog that lives just around the corner. She has a comical underbite and only one ear pointing up. She looks dumber than a sheep, but she somehow outsmarts me every time. But dogs are rarely wrong about the basics. We don’t overthink things. We never let analysis get in the way of instinct.

Check out that human that kept coming around with Higgs after school. He was always chatting and getting a bit closer than she seemed to like. I don’t know his name. Just like I don’t know pretty much everyone else’s name. He smelled like raspberry leaves, talcum powder, and faintly of frying bacon. That guy. I knew he was hiding something, from Higgs and from everyone else. I didn’t have any reason to think that, but I knew it. It was my mission to find out what he was hiding. If only I could get the kids to take me to the right spots to properly investigate.

Newton

It’s only because of my father that I joined the police as a detective. During the day, I’m officially Detective Constable Newton Redferne, but I still feel like I should be working at a coffee shop or a grocery store. When he arranged for me to get the job, he probably thought that it was a safe place for me to start – how much detective work could a place like Middle Ides really need? And the first few months were indeed pretty quiet – I spent a lot of time in over-warm rooms sitting on uncomfortable plastic chairs, in training sessions and learning police operational procedures.