Sophie Lee has written two detective stories for children,
Edie Amelia and the Monkey Shoe Mystery
and
Edie Amelia and the Runcible River Fever
, as well as
Alice in La La Land
, a novel for grown-ups. She has also acted in many stage, television and film productions, including the films
Muriel's Wedding
,
The Castle
and
Holy Smoke
. She lives in Sydney with her husband, three children, and two French bulldogs.

www.sophielee.com.au

Also by Sophie Lee and
illustrated by Jonathon Oxlade

Edie Amelia and the Monkey Shoe Mystery

For my mother

First published 2011 in Pan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
1 Market Street, Sydney

Text copyright Â© Sophie Lee 2011
Illustrations copyright Â© Jonathon Oxlade 2011

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Lee, Sophie, 1968â.

Edie Amelia and the Runcible River Fever / Sophie Lee;
illustrator, Jonathon Oxlade

ISBN: 9780330425940 (pbk.)

For primary school age.

Healing â Juvenile fiction.

Other Authors/Contributors: Oxlade, Jonathon

A823.4

Typeset in 13/18 pt Century Schoolbook by
Midland Typesetters, Australia
Printed in Australia by McPherson's Printing Group

Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

These electronic editions published in 2011 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

Edie Amelia and the Runcible River Fever

Sophie Lee

Adobe eReader format	978-1-74262-726-7
EPub format	978-1-74262-728-1
Online format	978-1-74262-725-0

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Acknowledgements

My deepest thanks go to my father and to my mother.

Thank you Melissa Firth, for helping to unlock it.

To Julia Stiles and Brianne Collinsâfor your great wisdom.

To Claire Craig and Anna MacFarlane, Tara Wynne, Matthew Scaife at Balloon Aloft, Ursula Dubosarsky, and to Kaye, Martine and Di for all your daily help and support.

Thanks to my wonderful husband Anthony and to Edie, Tom and Jackâmy real-life heroes.

For Mr P and D .Â .Â . many hugs.

Symptom 1: A Dry Cough

E
die Amelia Sparks was sitting on an upturned milk crate in her tree house, observing the world through her binoculars. It was a fine, still morning and life had recently settled back to normal after Edie had solved an exciting puzzle involving a missing red monkey shoe, fortune cookies
and a lot of notes on purple paper. She doodled in her notebook, counting idly as she watched over the town. Two seagulls fighting over a crust, one cat climbing a fence .Â .Â .

Within a few minutes Edie had counted six of Runcible's townsfolk hurrying past wearing brightly coloured jumpsuits. Their clothing was not what brought them to Edie's attentionâthese jumpsuits were all the rage in Runcible and everyone was wearing them. What caught Edie's eye was that all of them were coughing. Edie jotted down the time and a brief outline of this event in her notebook before popping it back into the detective kit in her satchel. (On an ordinary day her detective kit would probably contain binoculars, duct tape, a Swiss army knife, a magnifying glass, tweezers, evidence bags and a collection of pencils and pens.) With a small frown creasing her forehead, she swivelled around to check on things at home.

In âThe Pride of the Green', her family's lopsided two-storeyed house with the purple front door and creaky window shutters, her father, Michaelmas, an inventor, was on the back porch extinguishing a small explosion in a test tube. Her mother, Cinnamon, the author of several popular macrobiotic cookbooks, was stirring a tub of bubbling liquid in the kitchen and her French bulldog, Mister Pants, was chewing on the vacuum cleaner in the hall. Edie watched her family for a moment and frowned even harder. Unless she was imagining things, they, too, seemed to be coughing.

She felt her Worries rising up and put her hand on her stomach in an attempt to push the fluttery feelings back down. It was a full-time job keeping her Worries in check. They seemed to have a driving force all of their own. Edie tried to be rational whenever possible to keep the Worries away. In her opinion, it was her methodical approach to problem-solving that made her a thoroughly dependable detective.

Edie took a deep breath, yanked this morning's copy of
The Runcible Daily Bugle
from the pocket of her satchel and turned to
page two. There it was, under the headline
Runcible River Fever! The Bare Truth
. Symptom 1 was a dry cough, Symptom 2 a wet sneeze, and on it went until Symptom 8, which was listed rather alarmingly as: falling over and not being able to get back up.

According to the
Bugle
, the Fever was a virus that had originated in an elusive dog (which is another way of saying the dog was hard to catch). The paper had code-named it the âFever Dog'. After all, said the
Bugle
, Swine Flu had begun with a lone pig (who became very unpopular in later life as a consequence), and the Black Plague was spread by ratsâand the fleas that lived upon them. The Fever Dog, it claimed, was just as great a menace: it had âmatted fur' and âred, bug-like eyes', and was still at large after biting a teacher, who was now in hospital suffering the effects of Symptom 4 (a rash). According to a group of Runcible Public School Year 3 students on an excursion, the Fever Dog had last been seen on the river bank devouring their picnic lunch, a flan
they had baked in their Food Technology class.

Edie scanned the top of the news item and made a careful note of the by-line, which credited the story to a journalist named Trudy Truelove. The accompanying photograph revealed her to be an attractive woman wearing a jumpsuit. Truelove concluded her article by saying that as yet there was no cure for the Fever and that the Health Department's investigation had gone nowhere, but that on a brighter note, the townsfolk had been able to take their minds off the Fever outbreak by focusing on the hot new trend for âpleather' jumpsuits.

Edie sighed and returned to her binoculars. Fear of the Fever had driven her up into the tree house in the first place, but she found she couldn't escape it there either. She watched and waited, sensing catastrophe was imminent, but at last her mother, her father and her dog stopped coughing and went back about their business as if nothing had happened. Edie resolved to keep them under observation to see if they displayed
symptoms 2 or 3 (sneezing and memory loss), but soon decided the triple coughing fit must have been either a response to the fumes wafting from the vat of black liquid on the stove or to the noxious gases from the test-tube explosion on the back porch. She stuffed
The Daily Bugle
into her satchel and went back to investigating the street.