Wilma Tenderfoot and the Case of the Frozen Hearts (2 page)

Every Wednesday at four, when Madam Skratch was eating cake in the turret room, and the rest of the Institute children were playing Lantha, a board game much favored by all Cooperans, Wilma would creep down to the matron's office and quietly pick out that week's discarded copy of
Boom!
Cooper Island's weekly magazine for ladies of a certain age. Taking great care, Wilma would tear out the pages filled with tales of Detective Goodman's solved cases and read them over and over so that they were practically committed to memory. By learning how Theodore P. Goodman solved the island's crimes, Wilma could learn the theories of detective work and, one day, find the answers to her past. If she was going to be a detective, she decided, she would have to start practicing, and she grabbed every opportunity to do so.

Once, when she was six, a large gristle pie had gone missing from the Institute's kitchen and Madam Skratch had demanded that the culprit be caught. Wilma, leaping at her first chance to have a crack at detecting, quietly decided that the pie thief had been none other than an unpredictable young lad named Thomas. His guilt, she concluded, was confirmed by the presence of flaky pastry trembling on his upper lip. But it turned out that Thomas hadn't been eating flaky pastry at all; he was experiencing a rather unpleasant attack of eczema, and as she stood having this oversight pointed out to her by a sneering Madam Skratch, Wilma discovered that hasty predictions can lead to severe embarrassments. Detection, it would appear, was a subtler art than Wilma was quite ready for.

When she was seven, Wilma, not deterred by her earlier setback, had taken it upon herself to solve another baffling mystery. Socks were vanishing in the orphanage. Not pairs of socks, just the left ones, and Wilma was convinced that a one-legged child named Melody Trimble was the only possible suspect. But it turned out (yet again) that Wilma's suspicions were ill-conceived. Melody Trimble, as Madam Skratch exasperatedly revealed, could not have been the culprit because her one foot was a right foot, not a left. And besides, the sock thief, who had already been caught, turned out to have been a local hand puppeteer who had fallen on hard times and run out of socks. Case closed. It was another failure for the would-be detective, and one that didn't make her terribly popular. All the same, Wilma was still determined.

Then there was the time, at the age of nine, when she had tried to get to the bottom of why she, of all the Institute's Woeful Children, never seemed to get sent to a new home. Children from the Lowside Institute for Woeful Children were, as a rule, farmed out to customers on the Farside of the island from the age of eight. But never Wilma. Being a curious creature, with detective-ish aspirations, she had decided to conduct a small investigation. However, because she was still not fully trained in the art of investigating, her methods were quite basic. So basic in fact that all she did was tug on Madam Skratch's sleeve and ask, “Why am I still here, please?” But Madam Skratch answered her with nothing more illuminating than a sharp pinch of the ear and a truckload of onions to peel, so Wilma, despite her best efforts, was none the wiser. The mystery remained just that.

But here she was, being sent out into the wider world of the island at last. She might even get a chance to do some proper detecting. The thought of it made Wilma as excited as a bottle of bees. But all that would have to wait; for now she was a Lowsider from the Institute for Woeful Children who had a battleaxe with cracked and crusty feet to meet.

In order to leave the Institute, Wilma had been furnished by the horrible matron with papers allowing her to pass from the island's Lowside to the more desirable Farside. She was allowed to take a bath, in cold water, and was handed a fresh pinafore and top shirt so that she would not “offend the eye” of anyone with the misfortune to catch sight of her. “Lowsiders are not welcome on the Farside of the island, and you will do well to remember it!” Madam Skratch told Wilma repeatedly, with a firm wag of her bony finger. But Wilma didn't need reminding. Every Lowsider knew that most Farsiders despised them. No one knew why. It was just the way things were.

Some children might have felt nervous and jelly-legged at the prospect of leaving the only place they had ever known, but not Wilma. She had spent too many hours staring out through the bars of the orphanage gates, wondering what the rest of Cooper Island was like and longing to visit all the places she had seen in Madam Skratch's magazines. At the age of four, as she was tied to a rope and lowered down the orphanage well to catch frogs for supper, she had daydreamed about the sugar-cane trees that lined the Avenue of the Cooperans. At the age of five, when she was given a large spoon and told to make a statue of Madam Skratch out of chicken fat, she was so busy imagining herself posing in front of the magnificent Poulet Palace that she inadvertently gave the matron three eyes and a wonky nose, and at the age of six and three-quarters, as she was shoved up the Institute's chimneys strapped to the end of a broom to shoo away the bats, her mind flitted off to the extravagant shows put on at the Valiant Vaudeville Theatre. But most of all Wilma thought about Theodore P. Goodman and how one day, if she was very determined, he would help her find out where she had come from. In short, Wilma really couldn't wait to leave.

Given that Wilma didn't have anything much to call her own, she was ready, hat in hand and good to go, in a matter of moments. “Tenderfoot!” yelled Madam Skratch, standing in the doorway to the dormitory. “Have you packed your things?”

“Yes, Madam Skratch, I have,” replied Wilma with a twinkle.

“Well, hurry yourself! Mrs. Waldock will be waiting. Come here and let me look at you.” Wilma trotted toward the doorway and stiffened her back, ready to be inspected. Madam Skratch towered over her and stared, tutting as her eyes darted over her grubby charge. “You will never amount to anything,” she said, lifting Wilma's chin with a sharp finger. “Your eyes are too green, your nose is too small, your hair is too pale, and you have a mouth that is nothing but mischief. You have very little to commend you. Do as you are told, Wilma Tenderfoot, and you might have a passable life. Do not do what you are told, and your life will be a fraught and thorny misery. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Madam Skratch,” replied Wilma, tucking a wayward lock of hair behind her ear.

“And don't fidget!” snapped the matron, pursing her lipless mouth. “I can't bear a child that wriggles. Just like a maggot! Now pick up your things and go down to the courtyard. The cart will take you to Mrs. Waldock. And take this,” she added, handing Wilma a letter from her new employer outlining her instructions.

Wilma ran back to the thin and tiny bed where she had slept every night for the past ten years and picked up her small bundle of clothes. Taking care to keep her back to Madam Skratch, she reached under her mattress and pulled out her two most precious possessions: the luggage label of her birthright and a folded-up, tatty piece of paper that was now so faded it was almost wasted away. Quickly and quietly Wilma tied the label to her wrist and pressed the paper, a list of Detective Goodman's top tips for detecting, inside her bundle. She had no real need of it, of course, as she knew it by heart, and she whispered it to herself as she headed for the dorm door.

 

Wilma gave a small but determined sigh. She didn't quite know what all the words meant, but one day she too would become a great and serious detective, and nothing and nobody would stop her. She took a last look around the dormitory, turned, and ran toward the next chapter of her life.

M
ost grown-ups are never happier than when they have someone to look down on, and the Cooper Island Farsiders couldn't have been more delighted that they had the Cooper Lowsiders to despise. As long as the Farsiders had their immediate neighbors to oppress, they were saved the exacting inconvenience of recognizing their own shortcomings. Wilma had never been to the Farside of the island before, and as her cart pulled into the border station she was thrilled and frightened at the same time.

“Papers,” drawled a large, lazy-looking man in a booth. The border station was an imposing booth set between two towers. Behind it a vast wall with a huge gate in it stretched as far as Wilma could see. Everything on the Lowside seemed gray and depressed, but through the windows of the border gate Wilma was able to see green fields filled with poppies and, beyond that, in the distance, she could just make out the island's one small hill and the spires and peaks of Cooper's finest buildings. A trill of excitement fizzed through her.

As Wilma peered at the border-control buildings, she had an unnerving sense of being stared at, but by whom she couldn't tell. Jumping down from the back of the cart, she handed over the envelope from the Institute. “Work permit's in order,” muttered the border guard, who, Wilma noted from his name tag, was called Trevor. “Stand on the red cross.”

Wilma looked down and saw a large red cross on the floor. As she stepped onto it, a sudden scrape of metal sounded from the covered part of the booth in front of her. Startled, she looked up, and was even more surprised to see four sets of eyes peering back at her. Wilma didn't quite know what to do, so she just waved. On seeing this small, friendly gesture, one set of eyes blinked very hard and made a quick sideways glance. The metal grate slammed shut again. There then followed some intense muttering that Wilma couldn't make out, and Trevor was handed a note by a mystery arm that poked itself suddenly from the wall to Trevor's left. What a peculiar place this was, thought Wilma.

“No waving,” said Trevor, reading the note. “No waving on the cross allowed.”

But Wilma had more important things on her mind. “Why is it,” she began, giving Trevor an inquisitive stare, “that a person is not allowed to just go from one place to another? Why does everyone need papers?”

Trevor sat back in his chair and looked a bit panicked. Another note was thrust out with some urgency. “Humph,” coughed Trevor, scanning it anxiously. “Because this is the Farside. And you're from the Lowside. And there it is.”

“Hmmm,” said Wilma, thinking. “But the only difference between the two is that one side is there and the other side is here. Wouldn't it be easier to let people wander about as they pleased?”

Trevor let out a small explosive splutter. “No, no, no !” he insisted. “People must never be allowed to wander about. That would never do. Wander about? Goodness gracious! This is here and that is there. And that is how it is!” Another piece of paper shot out and was waved in a frantic manner. Trevor took it and read it.

“Permission to enter Farside granted, but you are being issued with an Impertinence Order.” Wilma just stared. She didn't know what an Impertinence Order was. “Waving AND questioning . . .” mumbled Trevor, stamping an official-looking document. “Dear me. Dear, dear me.”

Trevor then handed Wilma back her envelope of papers and passed down the stamped Impertinence Order. It was very official-looking and was in small scrawling handwriting, making it very hard to read. Wilma held it close to her face so as to get a better look at it.

Wilma looked up. “I see,” she said, tucking the Order into her pinafore pocket. “Well, that's that. Can I go now?”

“No. Now you have to wait for an appropriately long and unnecessary length of time. Read the sign,” said Trevor, pointing toward a poster. Wilma turned and looked at it. There it was. Item number four on the list of Border Control Procedures:
Lowsiders will be required to wait for a long and unnecessary length of time until such time as Border Control decides it has been long and unnecessary enough.