Chaos At Christmas – Episode 39
Chaos At Christmas by Ewan Smith
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- 1. Chaos At Christmas – Episode 39
The two girls tried to stay silent as they followed Geraint and Ferelith back to the hotel but it was hard for them; they were natural chatterboxes. “I miss the penguins,” Bree sighed but she was hurriedly hushed by Holly.
No comment, Bree!
Making their way in through the doors of the hotel, they were spotted by Lionel and Lyle, who were talking together by the reception desk. Lyle hurried over. “Your father has just told me that you have one of the GroupChat phones?” he said eagerly to Ferelith.
She nodded and handed it to him. “We also now have a pretty clear idea about what happened last night,” she replied, with a glance at Holly and Bree. “Though we’re still not sure where the rest of the phones are.”
“But I can use this one to find the others,” Lyle retorted. His fingers flew over the keys. “I’m putting out a group call to the rest of the phones. Once it goes through, their location beacons will automatically be switched on. Then we’ll be able to find them all, wherever they are.”
He pressed the call button. A moment later, from across the hall, they heard the sound of dozens of phones starting to ring at the same time. It was coming from one of the large decorated boxes at the foot of the Christmas tree.
Holly and Bree could see that the game was up and the whole story quickly came out. As they spoke, a number of other youngsters gathered to add their own contributions to the tale. They had all loved their new GroupChat phones but they hadn’t been so keen on the fact that the phones allowed their parents to keep a close eye on them.
A few of them realised that they had an opportunity to do something about it when Lyle announced that all the phones would be plugged into the charger during the Christmas Eve party. It gave them the perfect chance to make all their parents’ phones disappear.
“There was so much going on after the party that no one noticed us sneaking the phones and the charger out of the cloakroom in one of the big boxes,” Holly said. “We’d taken our own phones so that we could carry on using them though we knew that we would have to keep them hidden.”
“Was it you who wiped the CCTV then?” Ferelith asked.
Holly nodded. “We opened the window in the cloakroom to set off the alarm. Then, when Erik left the reception desk to check it out, my brother Deke slipped into the security room and cleared the data from the system. He’s a complete geek.”
“Cheers for that, face-ache,” a tall, sprawling boy said to Holly, rubbing her hair fondly. He shrugged to Ferelith. “Wiping the memories was a doddle.”
“So what about the man with the ginger beard?” Geraint asked in puzzlement.
Bree grinned. “We invented him put you off the scent.”
Lyle smacked his hands together and burst out laughing.
Absolutely brilliant. I should have guessed from the very beginning it was something like that.
He held out his hands to the youngsters. “But there was no need for any of it. You could easily have set up your own sub-group which your parents didn’t have access to. It’s perfectly simple; I’ll show you how to do it.”
“Don’t encourage them, Lyle!” one of the adults cried out in mock-horror.
“So you’re not angry with us, Uncle Lyle?” Bree asked uncertainly.
“Of course, I’m not,” he retorted with a wide smile. “I gave out the GroupChat phones to see how people would use them. This is exactly the sort of thing I wanted to happen.”
“I just don’t like surprises,” Lionel said wearily. “Especially ones involving Lyle Cranford.”
Ferelith burst out laughing; the look on her father’s face was a picture. “Whatever Lyle’s surprise is, it can’t be that bad. He and his guests will all have left the hotel in a couple of hours.” However, Lionel didn’t look convinced.
The past few days seemed to have passed in a blur for Ferelith. With Lyle and his guests around, the hotel’s staff were always going to kept on their toes. But after the mystery of the disappearing phones had been solved, no further disasters or emergencies had occurred.
