Page 48 of Summer at Harbour View House
The bird wasn’t in the kitchen, where they now left her overnight. Natasha had a quick check upstairs, then went out to the shed where they had kept her before bringing her indoors, but the door was unlatched, swinging open. She tried to remember where she had been when she went out, and thought she had been in her coop in the front garden. When she went out to the patio, however, she found the little coop door sitting open, the latch she had screwed on broken off.
‘Charlie?’ she called, aware it was fruitless. The chicken, being a chicken, wouldn’t answer to her call, of course.
She began to panic, pacing around the garden in ever widening circles, the irony of the proverbial headless chicken act not lost on her. She looked under bushes, inside sheds, behind flowerbeds, over walls, hoping that Charlie hadn’t gone too far, but it soon became apparent that the chicken’s former propensity to wander had returned. Had it followed a postman, perhaps, or a paperboy, or just wandered off after a bunch of tourists—
‘The beach,’ Natasha said to herself. During the morning, most people walking up St. Juliot Lane would have been going to Winter Vale Beach.
She went down the steps and headed that way, checking in the hedgerow as she went, in case the bird had found some little nook into which to jam itself. The beach had a scattering of people, a dozen or so families sitting behind colourful windbreakers, a pair of children playing a Velcro catch game, a handful splashing in the sea. Albert had his easel set up near the shore and was painting some mess of red and blue that seemed nothing to do with anything in front of him, while Ben stood nearby, teaching a couple of young boys how to hold a cricket bat.
She looked around, hoping to spot Charlie somewhere among the rocks on the foreshore, but there was no sign. She climbed up onto the sloping slate sections near the cliff, wondering if Charlie had gone up that way, but she was beginning to despair. The bird could be anywhere. She could be sitting in a roasting tray in Eddie’s oven for all Natasha knew.
‘Doing a bit of rock pooling?’
Natasha turned, slipping as she did so, one foot splashing into a triangular rock pool in a narrow crevice. She grimaced as her shoe went under, wishing she’d worn sandals or at least taken them off. Ben, standing on the sand below her, lifted an eyebrow.
Natasha sighed. ‘I’ve lost something,’ she said. ‘A … chicken.’
Ben frowned. ‘You don’t mean … Hannah’s Charlie?’
‘Hannah’s Charlie.’ Natasha rolled her eyes. ‘Yep. That’s the one. He—I mean, she—got out. I have literally no idea where she might have gone, but considering she followed us all the way from your dad’s farm, I suppose she might have followed someone down on to the beach.’
‘That’s a good bit of detective work there,’ Ben said. ‘I’ll see what I can do to help. Hang on a minute.’
He walked over to the lifeguard hut and went inside. Natasha took off her shoe and sock, squeezing the water out. She was about to put it back on when she thought screw it, and took off the other shoe, stuffing the sock inside and leaving them both on the rock.
Ben reappeared, a megaphone in his hands. He smiled up at Natasha, then lifted it to his lips. ‘Can I have everyone’s attention please? Attention, please. We have a bit of an emergency situation here.’ All across the beach, people stopped what they were doing and turned towards him. ‘We’re looking for a chicken that might have wandered onto the beach. I repeat, a chicken. It looks like … well, a chicken. If you spot it, please come to the lifeguard hut and let me know. Thank you.’
Ben took the loud speaker back into the lifeguard hut as Natasha climbed down. ‘Thank you,’ she told him as he came back out.
Ben shrugged. ‘Someone might have seen him. If he’s still missing when I get off, I’ll come and help you look—’
‘Over here!’ came a faint shout from out near the shore. ‘The chicken! He’s over here!’
‘That was quick,’ Ben said.
Natasha smiled. ‘It’s a girl.’
‘We’ll have her safe in no time.’
Ebony, dressed like an extra from Bladerunner, was standing near the shore, the water lapping at her long, PVC boots. As Natasha and Ben reached her, she pointed.
‘He’s out on that rock,’ she said.
‘It’s a girl,’ Ben said.
‘What’s he doing out there?’ Albert said, coming up behind them. ‘Hang on, I need to paint this.’
‘That’s the jumping rock,’ Ben said. ‘I think she’s going to jump.’
Charlie had managed to get up the path and now sat on top of the rock, poking at the ground, just a couple of steps from plummeting into the water.
‘I saw something circling out there earlier,’ Ebony said. ‘It looked like a small shark.’
‘I’ll go out there and get him back,’ Ben said.
A group of people had gathered round, and others were coming over to see what all the fuss was about.
‘We probably shouldn’t get him wet,’ someone said.
