Read Online Island of Thieves by Josh Lacey - Free Book Online

glass, either, so I don’t know what woke me first, the sunlight or the noise of chickens cackling and scuffling in the dust outside. My hip ached. My legs, too. That’s what happens when you spend the whole night sleeping on a cold stone floor.
    I glanced at my uncle. He was still snoozing.
    I needed to pee, but I didn’t want to wake him, so I decided to stay in bed as long as I could. I lay there, mulling over the events of the last couple of days, wondering if I’d made a terrible mistake, flying halfway around the world with my uncle. I was just wondering if I’d ever see my own home again when my eyes focused and I suddenly realized what I was looking at.
    I sat up and stared. Then I laughed aloud.
    I threw aside the blanket, stepped across the room, and shook Uncle Harvey’s shoulder.
    He groaned and rolled over. “Urgh. What time is it?”
    â€œLook at this,” I said.
    He reached for his watch. “Oh, it’s too early. Leave me alone.” And he pulled the blanket back over his head.
    â€œYou’ve got to look at this.”
    â€œGive me five more minutes.”
    â€œCome on. Take a look.”
    With a sigh, he sat up. “What’s the problem?”
    I pointed at the wall. “Look at the wallpaper.”
    â€œWhat about it?”
    â€œJust look at it.”
    Uncle Harvey peered at the wall. He rubbed his eyes and stared harder. Then he threw aside his blanket too and sprang to his feet. “I don’t believe it!”
    â€œYou see?”
    â€œHa! This is fantastic! You’re a genius!”
    â€œThanks.”
    The wallpaper wasn’t wallpaper at all. It was pages from a journal—from
the
journal—written in the same spidery handwriting as the page in Uncle Harvey’s blue folder.
    He stood on his bed and ran his hands over the wall, stroking the paper, then found a loose corner and gave it a gentle tug.
    I said, “Shouldn’t we ask those old folks before we tear down their wallpaper?”
    â€œI suppose we should,” said Uncle Harvey, sounding surprised, as if the thought had never occurred to him.
    He pulled on his clothes and went next door. I could hear him trying to communicate with the old couple. He returned soon with a pan of boiling water. “I bought the lot,” he said. “For twenty dollars.” He winked at me and got to work.

11
    Removing the wallpaper took most of the morning.
    Uncle Harvey did it alone. He didn’t trust me to help. He said I’d rip the pages. I thought he was actually much more likely to mess them up than I was, but I didn’t complain. He was having a miserable time, steaming and pulling and scraping each page millimeter by millimeter. The room got hotter and hotter. His face went bright red and big pools of sweat spread across his shirt.
    Some of the pages faced outward, showing their words to the world, and others had been stuck facedown to the wall. As he peeled them off, Uncle Harvey couldn’t help leaving a few scraps behind, littering the plaster with tiny bits of paper and the faded impressions of old ink. We’d just have to hope those weren’t the words that we needed.
    The old woman summoned us for breakfast. It was a loaf of bread, two boiled eggs, and a tin of sardines, shared between the four of us and served on cracked white plates. She gave us cups of coffee, too. Uncle Harvey said his was disgusting, but he drank it anyway. I didn’t touch mine.
    We went back to work. The old folks popped their heads around the door to watch what we were doing. They whispered to each other. I could imagine exactly what they were saying.
These foreigners are crazy! If they’ve got so much money to throw around, why do they want this old wallpaper? Why don’t they just go to the market and buy themselves a few nice fat goats?
    While my uncle was finishing off the wallpaper, I searched the rest of the house, hunting for any final pages