Lauren Child - THE RUBY REDFORT COLLECTION - 1-3 - Look into My Eyes; Take Your Last Breath; Catch Your Death

Some several years later…

Chapter 1. Contents Cover Dedication Epigraph There was a girl called Ruby An Ordinary Kid Chapter 1. You can never be completely sure what might happen next Chapter 2. There’s a lot of truth in fiction Chapter 3. ‘Sounded like dessert’ Chapter 4. Full of nothing Chapter 5. More of nothing Chapter 6. Fifteen dollars and forty-nine cents Chapter 7. Don’t call us we’ll call you Chapter 8. Getting Lucky Chapter 9. A small dark space Chapter 10. The voice Chapter 11. The eyes followed the hands Chapter 12. The silent G Chapter 13. As good as gold Chapter 14. Don’t erase me Chapter 15. Strictly confidential Chapter 16. Don’t look now Chapter 17. Strange and uneasy Chapter 18. If in doubt, say nothing Chapter 19. One little lie Chapter 20. Unlikely but not impossible Chapter 21. The blink of an eye Chapter 22. Don’t breathe a word Chapter 23. Funny peculiar Chapter 24. A total yawn Chapter 25. Some likely suspects Chapter 26. The little brown box Chapter 27. A formula for murder Chapter 28. Secretly super Chapter 29. A Regular Girl Chapter 30. Room Service Chapter 31. When you’re out, you’re out Chapter 32. The advantage Chapter 33. Crisp and lean Chapter 34. ‘They could feed my toes to a pack of vultures but I would never blab’ Chapter 35. Nine Lives Chapter 36. A colony of vultures Chapter 37. Time waits for no man Chapter 38. The sands of time Chapter 39. Lucky twice Chapter 40. Look into my eyes Cat Woman Acknowledgments

You can never be completely sure what might happen next

RUBY REDFORT WAS PERCHED ON a high stool in front of the bathroom window, her binoculars trained on a cake delivery truck that had been parked on Cedarwood Drive for precisely twenty-one minutes. So far no one had emerged from the truck with so much as a blueberry muffin. Ruby gurgled down the last dregs of her banana milk and made a note in the little yellow notebook which lay in her lap. She had 622 of these yellow notebooks; all but one was stashed under her bedroom floorboards. Though she had taken up this hobby nine years ago, no one, not even her best friend Clancy, had read a single word she had written. Much of what Ruby observed seemed pretty mundane but EVEN THE MUNDANE CAN TELL A STORY{ RULE 16}.

Ruby also kept a vivid pink notebook, dog-eared and smelling of bubble gum, and it was in this that she listed her Ruby rules – there were seventy-nine so far.

RULE 1: YOU CAN NEVER BE COMPLETELY SURE WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN NEXT.A truth no one could argue with.

Ruby was a petite girl, small for her years – at first glance a very ordinary looking kid. There was nothing particular to mark her out – that is, nothing until you looked a little longer. Then you would begin to see that her eyes were ever so slightly different shades of green. When they looked at you it was somehow hard to remember the point you were arguing. And when she smiled she revealed small doll-like teeth which somehow made it impossible to consider her anything other than a cute kid. But the most striking thing about Ruby Redfort was that when you met her you felt a strong need for her to like you. The bathroom phone rang; lazily, Ruby reached out and groped for the receiver.

‘Brandy’s wig salon, hair today, gone tomorrow.’

‘Hi Rube,’ came back the voice on the other end; it was Clancy Crew.

‘So Clance, what gives?’

‘Not a whole lot actually.’

‘So to what do I owe the pleasure of this call?’

‘Boredom,’ yawned Clancy.

‘So why don’t you get yourself over here, bozo?’

‘Well, I would you know Rube but my dad wants me home – he’s got some kinda embassy type function and he wants us all smiling, you know what I mean?’

Clancy Crew’s father was an ambassador and there was always some function or other in progress. Ambassador Crew liked to have his children scrubbed and serving canapés to prove what a great family guy he was – though truth to tell he was usually too busy to even remember their birthdays.

‘Some people have all the fun,’ drawled Ruby.

‘Yeah, my life stinks,’ said Clancy.

‘So cheer yourself up why don’tcha. Scoot yourself over, watch a few toons and you’ll still be home in time to smile for the camera.’

‘OK Rube, you’ve talked me into it, see you in ten.’

Ruby put down the phone. It lived on a shelf with two others: one was in the shape of a conch shell, the other disguised as a bar of soap. She had a whole lot more of them in her bedroom. She had been collecting telephones since she was about five years old, all in different shapes and colours. The donut phone was her first – the latest, a cartoon squirrel sporting a tuxedo. Just about all of them had come from yard sales.

She was about to continue her bathroom-based surveillance when the intercom buzzed – Ruby’s parents had sensibly fitted them on each floor to keep shouting to a minimum.

She pressed the ‘speak’ button.

‘Hello, how may I be of assistance?’

‘Howdy,’ came the voice from the other end of the intercom. ‘This is Mrs Digby, your housekeeper, may I please remind you that your parents will be home from Switzerland in two and a quarter hours.’

‘I know, Mrs Digby, you told me that a half hour ago.’

‘Glad you remembered. May I also point out that they may be a little grief stricken to see the state of your bedroom.’

‘It’s my style Mrs Digby – “layered”– it’s very in vogue.’

‘Well may I continue to remind you that some magazine folks are coming to photograph this very house tomorrow and if your mother sees it in its “layered” state, you will be in what’s commonly referred to as “the dog house”.’

‘OK, OK,’ sighed Ruby, ‘I’ll take care of it.’

The Redfort house, dubbed the Green-Wood house, on account of its environmental features, had been designed in 1961 by famous architect Arno Fredricksonn. Even now, a decade or so later it was still considered very state of the art and was regularly featured in architectural journals.

Ruby returned to the bathroom, sat back down on her stool and continued to stare out of the window; the truck was still there but now there was a raccoon sitting on its roof. The bathroom door pushed open and in ambled a large husky dog, which sniffed around before settling down to chew the bathmat.

‘Bored, huh?’ said Ruby, slipping off her stool. She padded into her bedroom and surveyed the wreckage. It was not a pretty sight. Ruby wasn’t so much untidy as she was a spreader – she had a lot of stuff and when she was busy working on something the stuff had a habit of creeping from one surface to another and this was what her mother did not like.

Darn it! muttered Ruby. If the magazine people were coming, her mom would just about freak if this was what they saw. She could almost hear her father saying, ‘for the sake of your mother’s sanity – do something Ruby.’ So she set about slipping records back into their sleeves and pushing books onto shelves. Ruby had a lot of books; they were arranged floor to ceiling across one end of her room.

A FICTION SECTION:

both English and foreign titles.

FACTUAL:

comprising anything.

GRAPHIC NOVELS AND COMICS:

subject – largely crime and mystery.

Ruby and Mrs Digby had a shared enthusiasm for crime and thrillers: fact or fiction, whether in book form or on the screen. They would often settle down with a large bowl of blue corn chips and watch the quiz show What’s Your Poison? or when Ruby was several years younger, Mrs Digby would settle Ruby to sleep by reading one of her favourite Crime thrillers, The Claw at the Window .