Fiasili's Legacy

By Gail Luck

FIASILI’S LEGACY
...for such a tiny baby, Fiasili leaves a huge legacy.

Sisters Kate and Cassie get more than they bargained for when their grandmere’s birthday gift of a trip to Samoa turns into a nightmare.

While Kate has eyes only for Tavita, Cassie finds herself getting deeper and deeper into a mystery involving Atelina, whose fear of her surly cousin, Rata,
seems out of all proportion. Add political intrigue, the kidnapping of tiny Fiasili, a creepy old uncle and the plot thickens...

• Language: English
• Publisher: CUSTOM BOOK PUBLICATIONS
• Release date: Oct 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311134189

Book preview

FIASILI'S LEGACY

…for such a tiny baby, Fiasili leaves a huge legacy.

Sisters Kate and Cassie get more than they bargained for when their grandmere's birthday gift of a trip to Samoa turns into a nightmare.

While Kate has eyes only for Tavita, Cassie finds herself getting deeper and deeper into a mystery involving Atelina, whose fear of her surly cousin, Rata,

seems out of all proportion. Add political intrigue,the kidnapping of tiny Fiasili, a creepy old uncle and the plot thickens…

Copyright © 2015 Gail Esdale Luck

All the characters are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

FIASILI'S LEGACY

One of a series of Short Stories by Gail Luck

CHAPTER ONE

Kate saw the box on Thursday. That box! The one that changed all our perceptions about life. I think that was where all our troubles started. And ended, too, to tell the truth. It was sitting dead square in front of mum's fussy little antique desk, which was sitting exactly in the centre against the wall at the back of the entrance foyer, just inside the front door. Trust mum! Dead square! We both saw it at the same time, but Kate got there first. She turned it over and over. With great difficulty, I admit. It was a fairly large box. She snorted in disgust. Kate's a great snorter.

'I'll have to wait until tomorrow now.'

She sounds disgusted. Her birthday isn't until Friday and there's no list of contents on the box. No indication of what's inside. Just an ordinary box – inconspicuous from any other, really. But that is the only thing that is ordinary about it. We both know that. Why? Of course, you're going to ask me that. Well, the return address is Grandmere's.

Dad's mother isn't French. She just didn't want to be called boring old grandma, so she told us to call her grandmere. Of course, mum didn't like it. In fact, she hated it. Still does. She likes things to follow patterns, and she likes grandmothers to be called grandma. But I have to admit, grandma doesn't suit our grandmere.

She is the kind of granny who wears in-your-face jumpers. Hand knitted. She doesn't care if there is a dropped stitch here or there.

It's the effect she is after. Dazzling!

Sometimes grandmere's jumper is cyclamen, with stripes; knitted in a lime green so acidy you can taste it. Or it might be an egg-yellow cardigan with orange polka dots as big as tennis balls. Her hair is a spiky silver nest and she has a quicksilver kind of mind, as well.

She is not the kind of granny you see at the supermarket in elastic stockings, clumping along in those foot trouble-bowling kind of shoes.

She has a favourite saying, 'It's the illusion that counts.'

'That's right!' I can hear my mum say tartly. 'Near enough is good enough.'

But that is why we're sure there's something wild in that box.

Kate's got a whole day to think about what's in there. She keeps poking at it, but the cardboard's tough and she can't budge it.

'Interesting stamps,' dad says, coming in from work. We all peer at them in the half-light of the hall. Tropical looking stamps, with palm trees or some other kind of greenery.

'Independent Samoa!' Kate snorts again. 'I wonder what on earth she has sent me from there.'

'Obviously, grandmere's off on safari again,' dad says, laughing. 'Maybe she has sent you a grass skirt.'

'How can you have a skirt made out of grass?' asks Annabel.

Kate doesn't answer. She just snorts. Again. She is probably trying to imagine where grandmere's fertile imagination might have taken her. She knows it can't be a skateboard, although the box is certainly big enough! But Kate already has a skateboard – grandmere sent her one for Christmas. When Kate took the board outside on Christmas morning to try it out, grandmere was sitting on the low wall at the back of the garden, waiting to show her how to use it. She had flown in from Darwin that morning to surprise Kate. And what was even more surprising – she brought her own skateboard. And, man! Could she ride it. She tore down the driveway to the street and flipped the board up and landed facing back down the drive again. Zipping into the backyard, she grinned at Kate and signalled her to follow.

Down the drive again she whizzed, cornered neatly, missing Zeegag, the neighbours' cat, by centimetres, flipped up the gutter and shot across the road and into Pete's driveway. 'Lucky this is a quiet street,' Kate told me she thought, as she tried hard to imitate grandmere's style.

Pete's dad had been cleaning his car in the driveway. His eyes had popped, his mouth had gaped in surprise, but then he saw it was grandmere.

'Oh, it's you, Lyn,' he had said in a kind of flat voice, as if nothing would surprise him when it involved my grandmother. Pete's mum and dad knew grandmere very well. It was her house we were living in and she had lived in that house for thirty years.

When we were little kids – knee high to a grasshopper, as grandmere tells it – she said to my dad, 'Now that your father's gone, there's nothing to keep me here and I have always wanted to travel. You can all live in my house for as long as I'm gone.' So mum and dad and the three of us kids had moved in the next week and grandmere had started on her new adventurous lifestyle.

Mum doesn't like her. She calls her a 'loose cannon' and 'an accident waiting to happen'. My mum's a control freak and she has her life well and truly in order.

Unfortunately, that means our lives are strictly controlled, also. But, the one thing in her life she cannot control, or rather, the one person, is grandmere. Dad's mother is a freak of nature – a grandmother with an active mind, an active body and a personality to match. She lives her life with flair! And she wants us in her life.

Whenever grandmere went away, she always wanted to take us kids with her on her travels, but mum wouldn't let us go. So she brought back lots of adventure stories when she visited – between trips to Borneo, where she trekked through virgin forest and lived with a tribe of tattooed men with holes in their ear lobes and very fancy earrings, and Turkey, where she stayed with a family in a village of rock houses with funny chimneys which were a bit of a freak of nature, like her, and other exciting and exotic places.

She usually brought back souvenirs, too. Carved wooden beads with mystical designs incised into their polished shapes and clay water jars with richly coloured bodies, terracotta and rust, slashed with black. Once there was a carpet, thick and lush, with ruby and emerald stained-glass patterns woven through it. At grandmere's insistence, we all took off our shoes and sank our toes into the silky pile. But we still badly wanted to experience these adventures instead of just hearing about them.

*****

CHAPTER TWO

When I wake up on Friday morning, it's late. I've got just enough time to pop some toast and run for the bus, dripping butter down the front path. Kate follows, with her hair flying behind her. Kate's the beautiful sister, with hair as black as a bird's wing and so fine that it swings as she walks. She usually pulls it into a high ponytail, but this morning, she hasn't time so it's down her back, almost to her waist. How I envy her that hair!

My sister Kate doesn't know she is beautiful and examines her pale oval face in the mirror tentatively every morning, as if overnight something might have changed it or made it more beautiful. As if! How could it be more beautiful? Her wide blue Irish eyes look out on the world with gentleness and smiles.

'Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday', mum calls as we fly down the steps, and Annabel blows kisses, leaning out of her bedroom window. Embarrassing, but I guess she can be excused, she is only nine.

The box sits in front of the desk, near the front door, and we all keep looking at it curiously. It isn't particularly interesting looking, wrapped in brown paper and stuck together with shiny brown packing tape. It has Kate's name in big red letters above the address. We'll have to wait until late in the afternoon now, to find out what's in it. That is if Kate lets us watch her opening it! She is getting very secretive, since she has reached her teens. I know she has got a diary but she keeps it hidden and, although I search carefully at least once a week, I still haven't been able to find it.

Kate and I are both dressed in our disgusting school uniform. Maroon! Does it suit anyone? The ugliest skirts in maroon serge, with pale blue blouses, that wash out even the clearest skins. It suits Kate, of course. Anything would suit Kate. She could wear a green garbage bag and still look good. But not many other girls can get away with the skirt, which makes all but the thinnest look heavy and wide or the blouse, which never stays tucked in. Certainly not me – carroty red hair and pink, pink skin splashed with freckles don't seem to go with anything much but certainly not maroon. We're running to the bus stop. We need to be quick or we'll miss the second bus and I'll also miss my daily chat with my friend, Pete, from across the way.

Pete and I have been friends since the very first day we moved into grandmere's house. We met when he started chucking gravel at me through the gaps in the hedge. I didn't have any gravel to throw and I was looking around for something I could use when the thought entered my head that I could probably make a new friend here, if I handled things the right way. So I didn't chuck anything but stuck my hand through one of the gaps, with half a sandwich gripped tightly in it. Pete took the sandwich and that was that. Friends for life!

Lately, though, Pete wants to talk about football. The local team, the Galahs …well, that is what it sounds like to me. It's probably the Gladiators or something like that are in top form and expected to win this season's competition and Pete knows every player's strengths and weaknesses, how many injuries they had during the season and how each one is playing. It's starting to get on my nerves. At twelve years old, I'm like many girls, losing some of my enthusiasm for sport and beginning to find other interests. Anyway, I want to tell him about Kate's box and spend some time speculating about what's inside. I hope Pete might come up with some ideas I haven't even imagined.

When I hop on the school bus, Pete isn't there. That is a bad start to the day. Then I sit on some fresh chewing gum, probably left by Badmouth Bennett, the cheekiest kid on the bus. The third blow to my already unbalanced day sends my heart to the pit of my stomach with a huge whammo! Mademoiselle Dupont, my breezy young French teacher, is missing from her place at the front of the class. Mademoiselle, whose lips pout deliciously as she demonstrates each difficult French word, is my ideal. Her 'bonjour!' every Friday is tres merveilleuse, the high point of my day. I love French. I love the language and I find the culture curiously interesting. I mean, imagine having croissants for breakfast, instead of cereal and toast. …And I love Mademoiselle. But instead of her smiling face we get Ackroyd's sourpuss. Ackroyd's a relief teacher we've had once before. He's a bad-tempered, old grouch with pants halfway up his legs and fluffbally white socks poking out the bottoms. For some reason, he always picks on me. I think he just hates girls with red hair!

The day drags on, with no relief in sight, until lunchtime. We all run screaming into the playground, with the duty teacher's threats of detention ringing in our ears. And there's Pete! My friend and partner in many an adventure is standing uncertainly at the edge of the playground, obviously wondering whether to head for the classroom or wait for break. We exchange grins and he punches me playfully on the arm.

'Where were you this morning?' I rub my arm.'

'Had to do something for Dad.'

'But what about school? Won't you get detention, for coming three hours late?'

Pete shrugs. His floppy brown hair is, as usual, too long and falls over his face and into his eyes as his shoulders move, so that he has to flick it back with