In Too Deep

by Jude Watson

  Dan squirmed. “Amy. Wigging. Totally.”

  She lifted her head, swiping a hand across her eyes. “What?”

  “Let me get this straight. Because you had koalas on your pajamas, our parents died?”

  “Well …”

  “That’s just dumb. Our parents died because our house caught fire. You didn’t light the match. One of our dear, devoted relatives did. You dweeb. You think that because you said the magic word, you changed everything? We’re talking Cahills here. They would have done it no matter what.”

  The scorn in Dan’s voice took away Amy’s fear. If Dan had been soothing, if he’d tried to reassure her, she would have lost it again. Soot still streaked his pale face. He looked tired, worn out, sad. And honest.

  “You are one awesomely weird sister-dude,” Dan said.

  She wanted to hug him, but she knew it would totally freak him out. She hugged her knees instead. She felt a little of her shame begin to lift. Dan saw things clear. If he didn’t think she was to blame … maybe she wasn’t. She had said the words out loud, she had dredged up every memory, and she hadn’t shattered.

  Instead, Amy realized, the opposite had happened. She was stronger.

  “Irina said something else in the tunnel,” she said. “She asked me why Mom ran back into the house. Was it just for Daddy? What could be more important than their children?”

  “The fate of the world?” Dan joked.

  But his grin faded as he met Amy’s serious green eyes.

  “The fate of the world,” she repeated.

  They didn’t say anything for a minute. It seemed impossible to think about right now, with the smudge of pink on the horizon and the lightening blue of the sea. Impossible to think of the great, wide world around them … depending on them.

  “I think I know what they were looking for,” Dan said. “The poem.”

  “Alistair stole it,” Amy said. “It all makes sense now. Last night I remembered him standing by the fireplace. While everyone was looking at me, he was looking at the books.”

  “Where they’d hidden the poem.”

  “I bet Mom and Dad thought the poem could lead to lots of clues,” Amy said. “And they sacrificed themselves to save it.”

  “If Alistair was there that night, he could have been in on the plan to start the fire,” Dan said.

  “Not Alistair!”

  “Why not?” Dan asked. “Remember what he said to you yesterday? That when so much is at stake, it’s okay to be ruthless? We can’t say it wasn’t him.”

  “If only we could figure out the poem,” Amy said. “There’s got to be a clue hidden in it. I wish the answer would thunder down on my head. Like last night, during the storm …”

  Dan frowned and looked out at the sea. Suddenly, he slapped the sand and began to laugh.

  “Have you gone troppo?” Amy asked.

  Dan jumped up and down in front of Amy. “It’s just like Mrs. Malarkey said.” Dan put on a falsetto voice. “Class, don’t be scared by the fancy language. Find the meaning.”

  “So?” Amy waved her hand in the air. “Mrs. Malarkey? I still don’t get it.”

  “The poem! The dude is feeling bummed out, and he’s sitting on the beach, and it starts to rain, okay? And rain comes down on his head.”

  “I got that much.”

  “But it also makes him think. The very waves sang the song I knew. What does he keep talking about?” At Amy’s blank look, Dan pointed. “Water!”

  “Water is the clue?” Amy asked. “Could it be that easy?”

  “That’s why the dude was so happy and so mad at himself at the same time,” Dan said. “It is that easy.”

  Amy frowned. “We promised to tell Alistair.”

  “Even though we know he was at the house that night and could have murdered our parents?” Dan asked. “I’d call that a deal breaker.”

  “Last night he was willing to jump off that ledge to save us,” Amy said.

  “Or himself,” Dan said. “I say we wait until we know for sure what happened that night.”

  “Shhh,” Amy said, because she saw Alistair heading toward them. His silk pajamas were stained with soot and dirt, and tufts of hair stood out from his head.

  He faced the rising sun. “It’s a good day,” he said. “We’re alive.”

  He looked sad and funny, Amy thought, in his pink pajamas and his cotton candy hair. How could he be a murderer? But Dan was right. They couldn’t just hand him a Clue. Not yet.

  They heard the faint sound of a motor. Out beyond the reef, a boat was approaching. They could see an arm waving frantically. Nellie.

  Alistair waved back. He walked to the edge of the sea.

  They watched as Alistair stood, the cuffs of his sooty pajama bottoms getting wet, the breeze blowing his gray hair. The man they were fond of, whom they couldn’t trust, was waving at the au pair they were learning to love … and whom they couldn’t trust.

  “Things are getting complicated,” Dan said.

  “I wish I could remember who else was there!” Amy burst out. “Maybe more flashes will come back to me. I can’t stand not knowing.”

  Dan’s face hardened. “We have to find out who did it for sure. Isabel set the fire, but we need to know who else was there.”

  “And then what?” Amy asked. “What do we do? Call the cops?” She gave a weird strangled laugh.

  “I don’t know yet,” Dan said. “But they have to pay.”

  “Revenge sounds so … Cahill,” Amy said.

  “Not revenge,” Dan said. “Justice.”

  They looked at each other. Amy felt the presence of her parents, closer than they’d ever been, and the ghost of Irina saying, It’s all up to you now.

  She and Dan were together again. There were no secrets between them. There never would be again. She could see that he knew it. Behind his eyes, trust was back.

  And on this sad morning, sitting on a tropical beach with ruins smoking behind them, with Irina’s last cry still ringing in their ears, they made a promise to each other without speaking. A vow. They wouldn’t rest until they had exposed who had murdered their parents.

  They had started on the hunt for the 39 Clues for Grace’s sake. Now they would win it for Arthur and Hope.

  “Justice,” Amy agreed.

  The Hunt Is On

  The race for the 39 Clues continues with more dangerous missions, top secret break-ins, and treacherous double-crossings. Stay one step ahead of the competition by following Amy and Dan’s next adventure.

  Turn the page for a sneak peek! (Just make sure none of your enemies are watching …)

  CHAPTER 1

  Amy Cahill didn’t believe in omens. But black snow was falling, the earth was rumbling beneath her feet, her brother was meowing, and her uncle Alistair was prancing on the beach in pink pajamas.

  She had to admit, the signs were not promising.

  “Ahoy, Nellie!” Alistair shouted across the Java Sea, his hands cupped to his mouth. “Rescue us, dear girl!”

  Amy wiped a dark flake from her cheek. Ash.

  Could it be left over from the fire last night?

  Don’t think of that. Not now.

  Out at sea, a distant engine noise grew louder. On a small launch, speeding toward the tiny Indonesian island where they were stranded, was Amy and Dan’s au pair, Nellie Gomez. In the eerie morning darkness, sky and water merged into a blue-gray wall, and she seemed to be floating in midair.

  “Mrrrrrrrrrrp!” Dan wailed.

  “What are you doing?” Amy asked.

  “Imitating an Egyptian Mau.” Dan gave Amy an exasperated look, as if what he had just said made perfect sense. “Saladin hates the water. If he hears another Mau, maybe he’ll come on deck with Nellie — and we’ll see him at least! Don’t you miss him?”

  Amy sighed. “I do. But after last night … I mean, I love Saladin, too, Dan, but honestly I haven’t thought too much about him.”

  She heard a distant rumble of thunder. As sh
e glanced out to sea, her eyes stung. A tear washed a gray line down her cheek. How could a fire from last night still produce so much ash? It was only one building. A place where she and Dan and Alistair would have become charcoal if it weren’t for …

  Don’t think of her. Think about normal things. Peanut butter. Homework. TV. Saladin.

  But images from last night were racing through her mind. The flames licking up the wall … Dan’s expression, like a frightened toddler … Alistair shouting to them … the call from out the window, from the last person they’d wanted to see … the woman who had almost murdered them in Russia.

  You thought she was trying to burn you alive last night. But she wasn’t. It wasn’t Irina.

  Isabel Kabra had done it. She had burned down their house in Massachusetts all those years ago, and Dan and Amy’s parents hadn’t been able to escape. Now Isabel was finishing the job. She was a murderer. A Lucian killing machine in pearls and perfume.

  Until last night, Isabel had been one of the two people Amy had feared most.

  The other was the blond woman who had called up to them from below the ledge.

  Yesterday, if you’d asked Amy to list the Predictions Least Likely Ever to Come True in a Million Years, right up there with The world will turn into cheese and My brother Dan will say he loves me, would have been this:

  Irina Spasky will sacrifice herself— for us.

  But Irina had leaped to the roof on a pole, into the flames. She had held that pole in front of their window so they could slide to safety. Then she had disappeared into the fire before Amy’s eyes. Why?

  How could a person change so much?

  “Earth to Amy,” Dan said. “Dude, can you hear what Nellie’s saying?”

  Stop. Thinking.

  Amy’s thoughts blew away into the smoky air. Out at sea, Nellie was waving frantically. Behind her, the sky was dark with ominous low clouds.

  “The dear girl looks frightened,” Alistair said.

  “There’s a storm coming,” Amy said.

  “Maybe she just noticed your pjs, Uncle Alistair,” Dan suggested. “They are kind of scary.”

  Alistair glanced down. His silken sleepwear was tattered and sooty from the previous night’s fire. “Oh, dear, would you pardon me while I change?”

  Now Nellie was gesturing to something behind her, toward an island called Rakata. Amy stiffened. In 1883, the Krakatau volcano had erupted there, one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history.

  Amy remembered the words of the motorboat skipper who had taken them here.

  Not good today … very active.

  She felt the ash on her cheek and suddenly it made sense. She held out her blackened fingertips toward her brother. It wasn’t only the storm Nellie was worried about. “I — I think she’s trying to tell us something about the volcano,” Amy said.

  Dan’s eyes lit up. “Whoa. Are we going to be like Pompeii? Like, hmm-hmm, here we are, cleaning the kitchen — whoa, zap! — lavafied!”

  “This is no joke,” Amy said. “For your information, the last time the volcano blew, there were tidal waves all over the South Seas. Thirty-six thousand people died.”

  Dan took a deep breath. “Okay, Amy, let’s chill. Nellie’s almost here. In a few moments we’ll be riding away, cuddling Saladin, everything situation normal….”

  “We have no lead, Dan,” Amy said. “Even if we make it out of here, where do we go — back to Boston, so Social Services will take us to Aunt Beatrice?”

  Dan glanced over toward where Alistair had disappeared. “I bet he knows where to go next.”

  “Great. After Alistair freshens up, we’ll ask him,” Amy said. “Do we have a lie detector handy? And where is he, anyway?”

  As far as Amy was concerned, Alistair was the Whac-A-Mole of reliability. One minute he’d pop up in your life as protector and best friend. The next minute he’d betray you, and you wanted to bonk him down again. Where had he gone to change clothes? Did he have a secret hiding place here? Was he going to vanish now, the way he had after the cave-in in Seoul?

  The Ekaterinas had been on the Clues search for years. So had the other Cahill branches — the Tomas, the Lucians, and the Janus — all with money, experience, and the willingness to kill. The odds were so on their side. Grandmother Grace’s will had raised the stakes by inviting handpicked Cahills to join a bizarre hunt to find 39 Clues that would lead to the greatest power ever known. But the will had given an out, too. Amy and Dan could have taken a million dollars each and forgotten about the hunt.

  That choice would have been normal.

  But Grace wanted them to find the Clues. And Amy couldn’t imagine not doing what Grace wanted. Dan couldn’t imagine not finding the greatest power ever known. Then there was the part about tracking hints left by famous ancestors, like Mozart and Ben Franklin. So here they were, four continents and six Clues later: a fourteen-year-old girl, her eleven-year-old brother, and an au pair whose main espionage training had involved downloading punk tunes and mastering tattoo pain — that is, unless she was really a master spy.

  In the 39 Clues search, Abnormal was the new Normal.

  Once again, Nellie’s voice pierced the air. She was closer now, the launch’s engine noise softening as it prepared to dock. Now her cry was crystal clear.

  “POLICE!” She gestured over her shoulder. “POLICE!”

  “They’re going to arrest the volcano?” Dan asked.

  “Come on!” Amy said, grabbing her brother’s arm and heading toward Alistair. “A house burned down, Dan — and somebody died! Police investigate stuff like that. Uncle Alistair! Nellie’s being followed by the cops!”

  Alistair emerged from the nearby woods in a crisply pressed gray silk suit, his yellow shirt bright and clean, his bowler hat tilted just so. His face fell as he heard Nellie’s cry. “Isabel …” he murmured. “She must have told the police we’re to blame. That’s her modus operandi.”

  Dan sighed. “You know, I follow you just fine and then bam! You stick in the vocabulary words.”

  Alistair gently placed the tip of his cane on Dan’s foot, pinning him in place. He leaned into his nephew. “I know what you are doing. You believe that humor will lighten our load. But some things do not have a lighter side — like being thrown in jail in Jakarta. Because that, young man, is where we are all headed.”

  CHAPTER 2

  “Rock star do not jump!” The launch was cutting sharply, its skipper calling out a phrase that bore no relationship to the English language as Amy knew it.

  “Rock star in a hurry!” Nellie replied, one foot on the boat’s gunwale. As the skipper docked next to a beat-up old fishing boat, Nellie tumbled out onto the soggy planks. She was dressed in a black jeans vest, shorts, striped knee socks, laceless red Converse, and a Mr. Bill T-shirt. Her spiky two-toned hair lay flat, making her head look from a distance like a wet skunk. As she ran to Dan and Amy, Saladin slinked along behind her. “Oh, my God, you guys!” Nellie cried out. “You’re okay! I am so happy to see you!”

  “Saladin!” Dan cried out, running toward the Mau.

  “Saladin? What am I, chopped liver?” Nellie scooped both Dan and Saladin into a big hug as she walked. “Okay, listen up, dudes. We have to book. Yesterday, when I find you guys are, like, AWOL? I, like, freak. Yelling at everybody—where are they, why did you let them leave—the hotel people are, like, whaaaa? Anyway, I pack up all your stuff, figuring I may never see the place again, and down in the lobby I find my man Arif. I’m, like, help me, and he takes all our stuff to this launch—and then we’re halfway across the sea when Arif gets this radio message, and he’s all excited, but I don’t know what he’s saying until he’s, like, ‘POLICE!’ in English. And we see these cop cars and somebody’s getting a big old boat, so we’re, like, sayonara, only in Indonesian, and we tool out into this boat-traffic jam to try to lose them, and I’m hearing these radio reports that are half English—there’s been a fire and somebody’s dead, yada yada, and I’m total
ly wigging out — Why did you do that? Why did you and your sister leave me in the hotel without even a note?”

  “Sorry,” Dan began. “But you were sleeping—” He glanced quickly at Amy. All their lives they had been able to communicate so much with just a look, and Amy silently gave him everything she could:

  … and also, Nellie, we saw that you were receiving coded e-mails from someone …

  … and back in Russia you also got a voicemail that said “Call in for a status report”…

  … plus, you just happen to be able to fly a plane … … and we hate to be paranoid, but one thing we learned on this clue hunt is “Trust no one.”

  “Dang! Do they do this in front of you, too, Al?” Nellie said, throwing Dan and Amy each a huge backpack. “Mind-melding?”

  Alistair looked flummoxed. “Do they … pardon?”

  Nellie handed Saladin’s cat carrier to Arif. She took Alistair’s and Arif’s arms and headed for the woods. “Don’t mind us, kiddos. We’re just going to hide in the trees. You can send us mental tweets from jail. Just include an explanation about why you betrayed your loyal babysitter.”

  “Wait, we’re coming!” Dan said, donning his backpack as he ran after her. “And you’re an au pair!”

  As they neared the woods, Amy glimpsed the smoldering remains of the house. She turned away, not wanting to see. Not wanting to think about Irina.

  Irina’s visit to the island would not be round-trip.

  The thought made Amy stop in her tracks. “Why don’t we use Irina’s fishing boat?” she called out. “The police won’t recognize it.”

  “Far too small,” Alistair said. “And I was the one who arrived on that boat, not Irina.”

  “Then how—” Dan said. “Uncle Alistair, is there another dock on this island?”

  “Well, now that you mention it …” Alistair stopped, catching his breath. “Many years ago I found the remnants of a small sailing vessel in a tiny cove to the north. Why do you ask?”