Secrets of Selkie Bay

by Shelley Moore Thomas

  Ione looked up at the ceiling as she considered the logic of my argument. “No. She’s probably on an island, or even farther north. Maybe she is hungry for crab.”

  I could still taste in my mouth the flavor of the lies I’d told yesterday. They tasted worse today. Bitter and sour. But I told myself it was all going to be fine. One thing at a time. I could deal with Ione and her “selkie” Mum after I’d found a hiding place for the money. Because if I knew Ione, she’d spend all morning searching for that jarful of cash. If she couldn’t find it, maybe she’d forget about the whole thing.

  * * *

  “Oh, it’s you again,” Mr. Doyle said, as he opened the door to his shop just as I came up the steps.

  “It is me that’s here today, Mr. Doyle, and we need to have a talk.” I shifted my weight from my left foot to my right, then uncomfortably back again. I’d stuffed all the money in my shoes, except for the coins, which I’d put in my pockets. That’s all there was room for in the old jeans I was wearing. Not a penny left at home for Ione to find.

  “I don’t pay you to talk, Cordelia. I pay you to work,” he grumbled, folding his arms across his chest and rolling his eyes. “Come inside and let’s hear it so we can get on with what needs doing.”

  I followed him in and took a deep breath. I wanted to be diplomatic. At least I thought I did. But the moment I opened my mouth again to speak, the angry box flew open.

  “How could you lie to my sister like that?”

  His snort rattled around in his nostrils before it finally huffed out. “You’re one to talk.”

  He had me there.

  I scrambled for more ammunition. “So you admit that you made up a lie about Ione being a selkie girl?”

  “I did nothing of the sort. You need to get your story straight, Miss Sullivan, before you go accusing people of things you don’t seem to know much about. It’s time maybe you heard the truth about Selkie Bay.”

  Mr. Doyle’s Tale

  Liars come in all shapes and sizes, young lady.

  Sometimes folks think they are telling a lie to make things better. But then they are telling two lies. One to another person and one to themselves.

  Most people think that selkies are some kind of magical, beautiful, half-human, half-seal creature who is both mystical and misunderstood … like a unicorn or that imaginary horse with wings.

  But selkies are not beautiful or magical and they’re not imaginary, either. Well, perhaps the shape-shifting part is magical, but only a small bit.

  First and foremost, selkies are liars and thieves. I know this because they stole from me. And you should know about this, too, because your mum was one of them.

  I’ve met three real and true selkies in my lifetime—at least three that I know of. Could have been more, for I might not have been paying attention all the time. The first was when I was a boy. I was with my da on an island nearby, taking care of the seal problem. And this isle, well, it wasn’t like any I’d seen before. There were caves made for hiding treasure, and the whole thing was covered with seals.

  Oh, the seals! They were eating all the fish in the bay and beyond! My da was fisherfolk—so you can see the problem. The fishermen kept returning from their trips with empty boats. So we did what the fisherfolk did in those days. We took care of the problem. Even a bull seal is no match for a man with a club. Don’t look at me like that. Do you think I liked it? Do you think I enjoyed what I had to do? It was the most awful thing I’ve ever done, attacking those gray seals. Gives me nightmares to this day and still makes me sick when I wake, all cold and shaking.

  So there we were, with our clubs. I was crying about it and my da was yelling at me to be a man. And then she came—a huge black seal, unlike any of the others. There was something about her eyes, fiery and unholy they were. Terrifying eyes. And I knew when I looked in them that she was not an ordinary seal. She was far too intelligent, the mind of a human in the skin of a seal. She chased us away. My da took one look at the demon seal, crossed himself, then turned to run. But he tripped over his own club and broke his leg. He was lying there in horrible pain and then the selkie was coming over to us. I covered my face with my hands. I begged her not to hurt us. I could feel her hot breath against my cheek and I thought I was dead for certain.

  But she left me unharmed. And when I opened my eyes, she was gone, and so were the rest of the seals. Gone with her, except for the hundreds of carcasses on the beach.

  The seals have been gone ever since. Some scientists came out many years later, you may know about this, Cordelia, since your da was one of them. They wanted to find the seals that had vanished, the pixie seals they were called, to study them, but that project didn’t pan out, as well you know.

  The next selkie I met was in the form of a woman named Pegeen. Fell under her spell, I did, and married her. But soon she stole all my money and took off with it to that secret isle. I’m sure of it. Oh, I searched for her, and that island. I searched.

  But this story is not about Pegeen, is it?

  The third selkie I’ve met was your mum.

  I didn’t have to look twice at her to know that Rose Sullivan was one of the seal folk, being knowledgeable about them as I now was. We argued, your mum and I, about that island. I knew she lied about not knowing where it was. And we argued about my tour business. She said I was an exploiter. She said I took advantage of folks and lied to them. Lied! As if she was one to talk.

  And now she’s gone, Cordelia, because that’s what selkies do. They leave. The sea calls them and they go. Sure as the moon chases the sun from the sky each night, I knew that mother of yours would leave. You’d better watch that sister of yours, in case the sea calls her, too. Calls her out to that island where the selkies hide their treasures.

  The Seal

  “I DON’T BELIEVE IT. Any of it,” I said.

  “I didn’t expect you would. Too much like your da,” said Mr. Doyle.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means them that’s born with the blood of Selkie Bay in their veins know things that the rest of the world can’t believe.”

  “I was born in Selkie Bay,” I retorted.

  “But you’re not one of them. Ione, she might be. Remains to be seen.”

  I was beginning to think that Cranky Old Mr. Doyle was actually Crazy Old Mr. Doyle. “I don’t want you taking Ione out on that boat of yours anymore.”

  “Legends all come from somewhere. In every fairy story you’ve ever heard there is a grain of truth. In this case, there is a jarful of it. A whole jar of truth.”

  I thought uncomfortably of the money jar and felt my cheeks start to burn.

  “Don’t think folks in the town haven’t wondered about Ione, being your mum’s daughter and all. People talk. I listen. I give the people what they want. I’m just trying to drum up more business. And more business means I can pay more to my employees. We are in this together, Cordelia.”

  The money in my shoes felt enormous, boosting me up, making me taller.

  “Then I quit. And Ione does, too. We want no part of being ex- … exploiters,” I said, using the grown-up word proudly. “What do you even show tourists dumb enough to go on that boat of yours? There are no more pixie seals and there are no selkies—”

  “There’s seals if you know where to look, out far enough, different kinds than the pixie. But they are out there. Besides, only a trained eye can tell the difference between a seal and a selkie, anyway. And for your information, it’s not just the out-of-towners who are curious. There’s folks in the town who’d swear on their mother’s grave they’ve seen a selkie. They come to me for validation. For a small fee, I am happy to oblige.”

  I turned around then, and walked toward the door without looking back. But Mr. Doyle grabbed me by the arm.

  “You know where it is, don’t you? She told you. She told you where the island is. Where the treasure is.”

  “What treasure? I don’t know what you are talking about. Leave me alone.”r />
  I flew out of his store and down the steps, only to bump into Ione, pushing the pram right in front of Mr. Doyle’s shop.

  “Cordie! Cordie! Cordie! You’ll never guess!” she sang out, stopping the pram short, causing Neevy to jerk forward and drop the peeled banana she’d been feeding herself. By the look on her face, it didn’t seem like much of the banana had actually gotten into her hungry little mouth.

  “What are you doing here? I am guessing Neevy is better?” I asked, even though I knew there had to have been something else that drove her to push Neevy all the way into town.

  Ione quickly grabbed the banana from the ground, pretended to dust it off, and then handed it back to Neevy.

  “Ione,” I warned.

  She shrugged, then felt Neevy’s forehead with the back of her hand. “Nope. No fever. Not too hot at all,” she said, even though she had no idea what too hot felt like.

  I placed my own hand on Neevy’s head for confirmation. True, she didn’t feel warm. And she looked livelier than she had last night. I took control of the pram with one hand and Ione with the other, and walked us briskly away from Doyle’s store.

  “Has she been coughing?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  “All right then. I’ll bite. What’s got you so excited?”

  We finally passed Chippy’s, so it seemed okay to slow down a little. It always smelled best mid-morning, when they fried the first fish of the day. My stomach rumbled and I had to remind it that despite the bills in my shoes, I had no money to spend—none that was mine, anyway.

  Ione had been waiting for me to ask her about the you’ll never guess, but now that I finally had, she was silent for a moment or two. She looked hungrily at a couple of locals leaving Chippy’s, clutching delicious golden morsels wrapped in newspaper—the traditional way to serve fish and chips.

  “Why did you leave Mr. Doyle’s?” she asked, having noticed at last that I’d left early.

  “Tell you later,” I said, hurrying her a little farther down the strip, farther away from the front of Mr. Doyle’s miserable shop, and from the torturously delicious smell of Chippy’s. We ended up in front of Whale of a Tale, where I sat on my favorite bench, one shaped like a dolphin. There was room for two, so I motioned for Ione to sit. “Now tell me why you are here.”

  “I’m afraid you’re going to get mad.”

  “Did you let her flush something important?” I asked, though I was pretty sure that since Neevy was only now beginning to pull herself up, she hadn’t figured out the handle on the toilet. Yet.

  “No. It’s just that I had to see, Cordie.”

  I sighed like Da does when there’s something he doesn’t want to deal with. “You know you weren’t supposed to leave. What did you just have to see?”

  Ione jumped up from the dolphin bench and spun around, her eyes bright and excited. She almost knocked into a long-haired man walking into the bookshop, but luckily he saw her first, doing a strange sort of side step to avoid her. I’d have laughed at their ridiculous dance, except there was something about the way Ione was carrying on that worried me, all the way to the center of my bones. “We went to the dock, over there. I wheeled Neevy down the bumpy old pier and I saw her, Cordie. I saw Mum.”

  My heart thudded. She’d seen Mum? I felt dizzy and hot and filled with all kinds of things, all of them bursting to get out, until I realized that, of course, she was mistaken. If she’d seen Mum, then Mum would be here right now, talking with us.

  And she wasn’t.

  “And I figured out why she hasn’t come back,” Ione continued, having finished her festival of bouncing about, and now sitting close to me again, her voice a whisper. “It all makes sense now, Cordie. Perfect sense. She’s stuck in her seal form.”

  Her seal form?

  I had been so, so stupid filling her head with those selkie tales.

  “See, there was a black seal, black and silvery gray just like mum’s coat,” Ione continued. “I knew it was her. She looked at me, Cordie. Right at me. When was the last time you saw a seal come into the bay like that? I’ll tell you when. Never. Da always said that the people and their boats keep the seals away. But there she was! Right next to the dock. She’s watching over us, Cordie.”

  I had no words for the feelings that swirled inside me. The angry box flew open and little mad meanies swarmed around in my head. This time, I was not only mad at Mum and Da, but at myself, too. How could I have let this go on?

  “Oh, I know what you’re going to say, Cordie. I can tell. But I know what I saw.” There was a light in her eyes that had only flickered dimly since Mum had left, but today it was full, bright, and glowing. “I am so happy.”

  If Mum were here, she would have said something like, You made your bed, Cordie, now you have to lie in it. Mum was great with sayings like that. Except that Mum had made this bed, too, at least partially. She’d made it by leaving us in the first place.

  I took a deep breath. And another. “Okay, well, we should probably get back home.”

  “Oh, no, not until I give this to Mr. Doyle. He wanted to borrow it.” She pulled A Child’s Book of Selkies out of the diaper bag hanging on the back of the pram. “He was asking about this part—the part about the island.”

  I took the book from her and held it out of her reach. “No. Mr. Doyle is not borrowing this book.”

  Ione made a mad face and shouted, “He’s my friend, Cordie!” The long-haired man looked over at us from the window inside Whale of a Tale. If she raised her voice any higher, Mr. Doyle would hear all the way down at his nasty little shop. Then I’d be outnumbered.

  “We need to finish it first. You don’t loan someone a book when you are right in the middle of it. Besides, it was Mum’s favorite. Maybe she wouldn’t want us to loan it out.”

  I’d made a good point, so Ione shrugged and rolled her eyes a tiny bit, which was her way of acknowledging that I was right without actually saying so. And then, as quickly as her bad mood had come, it was gone, floating away on the morning breeze that played with her pigtails. She’d done them herself, to look nice for Mum, I guessed. They were a little askew but at least her hair was out of her face. Mum had been fond of intricately braiding our hair, but that was before. Since then, Ione’s hair had resembled a bramble.

  But not today.

  “Can we go and see her, then? See if she’s still there?”

  It was my turn to shrug. “Um … okay, I guess.” We rose and I wheeled the pram, following Ione as she ran down to the edge of the pier.

  I caught up with her in a few seconds and we stood side by side, in the exact spot where we’d dropped our tears into the blue. Three from Ione, three from me, and one tiny silver one that slid down Neevy’s cheek and silently splashed upon the foam far below. As we scanned the waves, I was planning in my mind what I’d say when we didn’t see anything. Would I make up some story about how selkies have tea parties at the bottom of the sea every day at precisely eleven-thirty, just to keep her happy? Or would I tell her that I’d lied, that Mr. Doyle was a liar, and that yes, Mum had left her family by choice? Would I finally end this before it went too far?

  As I weighed the benefits of the fantasy against the risks of the truth, Ione began tugging on my arm.

  “There she is! There!”

  Neevy started kicking her legs and moving her arms wildly.

  “I don’t see anything,” I said, unbuckling Neevy from the pram and holding her on my hip.

  “There!” Ione pointed, jumping up and down.

  “I don’t see—” I began, but Ione interrupted me by taking my face in her hands and pointing it a little left of where I had been looking.

  A large, silvery-black seal swam out in the bay.

  “Mum!” Ione called.

  The seal swam toward us.

  “I told you, Cordelia Sullivan,” said the gravelly voice of Mr. Doyle from right behind me. “I told you.”

  Coincidence

  I COULDN’T REMEMBER THE
LAST TIME I’d seen a seal in the bay—and this wasn’t even a pixie seal, the small, gray ones that Da researched. The kind that used to be abundant but had vanished. This was just a regular seal. True, it was very large, but Da would say it was a coincidence, and coincidences happen. If they didn’t, then no one would have invented a word for them, now would they?

  “Ione, we have to go,” I said, so calmly that it surprised me.

  “Not until you let me have a look at that book. The one with the map,” said Mr. Doyle. He glanced quickly at me, at the book that was still in Ione’s hands, and then away, back out at the seal. He kept shaking his head like he didn’t believe it. “Look at her out there. Can’t you see it? She’s a selkie all right, just look at her eyes.”

  The seal was too far away for us to see its eyes, but Ione and Mr. Doyle were hypnotized by the animal just the same.

  “Come on, Ione.” I pulled her arm, but she stood fast.

  “She’s so happy out there,” Ione said with a sigh. “I can see why she wanted to go back.”

  Mr. Doyle finally turned away from the seal and bent down next to Ione and whispered. In less than a second, she handed him the book.

  “But you can only look at it, you can’t borrow it. Cordie says it’s too special to loan out.”

  “I’ll bet she does,” Mr. Doyle muttered, flipping through the book to the page with the map. He stared at it for a moment, then flipped some more. “Is this it, then? The only page with a map?”

  I didn’t answer. Ione shrugged. “I don’t know. You can read about it if you want, but the words are pretty boring.”

  “I just wanted to see the map,” he said.

  He turned each page, one by one, looking carefully at both sides. He grunted a couple of times. I was tempted to snatch the book away, but I was afraid it would rip.

  I would just wait him out.

  He was quickly becoming very exasperated.

  “Oh,” said Ione, pointing out to the bay. “I think she’s gone. She hasn’t come up in a while. She must have swum away for a bit.”