The Mysteries of Brambly Hollow

pushing aside the perturbing question about how the front door came to be open during the night. She and Cal would have to have serious words about that.
    Preparing the boys their sandwiches on this, the last day of term, smugness spread over her face like the layer of butter she was slapping over the bread, as Meli silently commended herself for a battle well won. It was so rare these days that any of the kids paid any heed to what she said, so the fact that the boys were now eating them surely put her on the scale of achievements somewhere mid way between Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone and all the kings horses and all the kings men, putting Humpty Dumpty together again. She didn’t mind putting in extra treats now. Going to the larder, she took out a pack of wagon wheels. Holding it in her hands, she peered inside. There was only one there. She frowned. She used them in two’s, and she was sure she had only opened the packet on Monday. By her reckoning that meant there should have been at least eight. She searched the shelf, just in case the rest had fallen out. There was no sign of them. She even checked the bin for evidence of empty wrappings.
    There had to be a perfectly reasonable explanation for the door. She froze. There it was, that sneaky little voice infiltrating her mind again, catching her unawares. How could someone from outside turn the key that was on the inside? It just wasn’t possible. Were any of the children sleepwalking, she wondered? But even if they were it still wouldn’t explain the door, because it was often open during the day when the kids weren’t even home. She felt the beginnings of a headache just thinking about it. Maybe they should change the lock and see what happened? It was an old fashioned lock, with a huge dungeon size key. Placing the wagon wheel in George’s lunch box she failed to notice that there was no treat for David.
    “Come on kids,” she shouted up the stairs. “Time to go.” They were slacking today, probably just as tired as she was.
    “Cassie, what are you wearing?” Meli almost gagged on her own tongue when her daughter appeared in a tight black tee shirt, where the white faces of Westlife were like distorted reflections in a Hall of Mirrors as they stretched over her large boobs, the top tucked into the shortest red skirt Meli had ever seen. “Not exactly your school uniform?” She ran her eyes up and down Cassie. “I’ve got wider belts.”
    “It’s non uniform day,” Cassie reminded her sarcastically, her brittle, hazel eyes daring her mother to try and stop her going out in them.
    Meli shook her head. “Even so. It’s extremely short.” Almost non existent, she was thinking.
    “Yeah, it’s great isn’t it? All the girls will be wearing the same.” She sounded as though Meli was paying her a compliment, then registering the uncomplimentary look she added. “Don’t be such a prude.”
    Meli had been called many things, but rarely a prude. Resisting the urge to say ‘Lord help you if your father ever sees you in that’, she made a note to check out what all the other girls were wearing when she dropped Cassie at school. And if they weren’t all thighs and bums? Well, then Cass would really see who was a prude.
    Skirting the greeny-brown tyre tracks that chequered the drive, the family made their way to the car. The drive really needed hosing daily, Meli thought a trifle angrily that everyone else seemed prepared to just ignore this. Not only was it perilous: woe betide anyone who trod excrement in her car or into the house; it was beginning to look and stink like a cowshed. Apparently everyone else was under some inane impression that the poop collecting fairies (close relatives of the tooth fairies, only dressed in brown and bearing tiny silver buckets and poop scoopers) would arrive one night and say ‘oh how wonderful, what a find’, and then fill up their little buckets gleefully, scrub and polish the ground, before setting off for home.
    Sitting outside The Willows, Meli swung her eyes around her. Cass was right. Everywhere she looked were exposed thighs of all shapes and sizes, and near flashes of the mounds of young female backsides, almost peeking from beneath the hems of brightly coloured skirts. She was amazed that the school allowed it. Even on non uniform day they surely had some dress code. Surely?
    “I told you so,” was Cassie’s parting shot as she slipped from the car, revealing a long line of