CHAPTER TWO
‘Are you nervous?’ George placed Fleck’s strong latte on the table and they both looked out the cafe window. Alice slept peacefully in her pusher.
Fleck wrapped her hands around the glass, as if to anchor herself. ‘I want to say I’m not nervous. I want to say I’ve got this. But I’ve got no idea what I’m doing. I’m definitely making this up as I go along.’
‘Ah, you can come and join the club with the rest of us.’ George picked a newspaper off a nearby table. ‘Do you want to do the quiz while we’re waiting?’
‘Yes. Definitely.’
George stood at the table, flipping through the pages. Fleck loved the quiz. She loved every sort of brainteaser, from daily Wordles and Waffles, to the Friday cryptic in The Age. The challenge of puzzles soothed her brain and untangled her thoughts. In theory, she loved physical jigsaws too, even though her lifestyle didn’t currently support them (Alice would surely eat the pieces). But her favourite puzzle of all was a real-life mystery.
Fleck opened her ‘everything book’. On the outside, it was a very unassuming A5 exercise book; but Fleck’s everything book contained all of her drafts for greeting card messages, meal plans, to-do lists and now, her detective notes. She flipped open to the page with the sticky bookmark: the Mystery of the Purple Tags.
The paint had been her first clue. Fleck had pocketed a pebble that had been covered in the paint that had been used to graffiti George’s cafe. The tag, ‘TACO’, had been…
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