Secrets from the Deep

by Linda Fairstein

  DIAL BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  PENGUIN YOUNG READERS GROUP

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Linda Fairstein

  Map © 2018 by Mina Chung

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Ebook ISBN 9780399186516

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  FOR PARKER, MATT, and ALEX,

  wishing you many fish tales and an occasional doubloon

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  MAP

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1

  “Don’t go into the ocean, Dev,” Booker Dibble shouted to me. “It isn’t safe!”

  “I’m just wading in up to my ankles for now.”

  “But the lifeguard isn’t here yet,” he said. “If there’s a strong riptide, you could get pulled right out to sea.”

  “Three years on the Ditchley swim team,” I said, “I think I can hold my own in a couple of feet of water.”

  It was just after nine o’clock on an already hot and humid August morning. Booker and I were on a stretch of beach called the Inkwell, in the town of Oak Bluffs on the island of Martha’s Vineyard.

  “You’re way past the ankles. Looks more like your knobby knees are sunk already,” Booker said. “Just back up and sit tight for a while. Make a sand castle. A huge one, maybe in the shape of the New York City Public Library.”

  Booker and I had solved our first caper at that great building. But I was ready to move on now. New adventures interested me more than looking back, and the key to our next caper was just ahead of me in the dark waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

  “Maybe later,” I said.

  “The beach will get too crowded before very long. Now’s your chance.”

  There had been a fierce thunderstorm the night before. The sand was churned up in the foamy water that was crashing around me and landing on the beach with more force than usual. I was trying to steady myself, stretching out both arms and balancing the large plastic bucket I was holding in my left hand.

  “I just need to scoop up my sample,” I said, leaning over to run the pail from side to side in the rough surf to gather sixteen ounces of water—and some of the sandy sea bottom—for my fall science project.

  Everyone in my class had the same summer assignment. We each had to gather a water sample from the sea or a freshwater lake, to prove whether fish left their DNA behind when they swam through the area.

  “I promise you the ocean is still going to be here when the lifeguard shows up. He’s just running late.”

  “I know that. But part of the idea is that I’m going to collect my sample at a specific time every day. Nine o’clock. I don’t want my first effort to be out of sync,” I said. “I have to be consistent. All good scientists have a firm methodology, don’t they?”

  “Scientists don’t take foolish risks,” Booker said.

  “Benjamin Franklin flew a kite when there was lightning right over his head. In fact, a kite with a silk string and a metal house key attached to it,” I said, shaking my head at the mere thought. “That’s how he proved that lightning causes an electric charge.”

  “Sounds like risky business,” Booker said.

  “You’re just worried because your grandmother doesn’t want anything bad to happen to me while she’s in charge of our Vineyard visit. Isn’t that right, Zee?”

  Zee—short for Ezekiel—is Booker’s eight-year-old cousin. He was sitting on a towel about ten feet from the shoreline, holding Booker’s iPhone in his hands to keep it dry. He was busy playing with some game or app and just shrugged his shoulders.

  I was so busy trying to show off my science skills to Booker—one of my two best friends—that when I swiveled my head to talk to him, I got knocked over by a gigantic wave. It rolled me around on the ocean floor, and I swallowed a mouthful of salt water as I came up for air.

  “There’s your sample for today, Dev,” Booker said, laughing at me. “You’ve got more H2O and seaweed in your stomach than you have in the bucket. Need a hand?”

  I stood upright, planted both feet firmly in the shifting sand, and turned my back on Booker and Zee.

  “Give me one more try,” I said.

  “You could stand right next to me and get your water for the day,” Booker said. “Don’t make more work for yourself than you need to.”

  “It’s about the sand out here. It’s been soaking forever, not like that dry stuff on the beach.”

  I was timing the sequence of the waves, sticking my right hand below the water’s surface to stay still. Then I dragged the pail deep into the ocean floor and lifted it up, confident that I had collected not only a pint of water, but the muck below it. That stuff was home to snails and crabs and critters—maybe prehistoric ones—I hoped our science teacher had never seen.

  I swiveled toward Booker and held up the pail in victory.

  “Doing experiments is awesome,” I said. “You were right about that. I feel like I’m on the verge of some really big discovery.”

  I walked toward Booker, almost completely out of the surf, and rested the bucket on a flat piece of sand. Then I backed out again, raised my hands over my head like I was about to dive, and flipped into the water. I held my breath with my head underwater, plowing into the waves and away from the beach. When I had gone twelve or fourteen feet, I lifted my head and stood up—neck deep—then walked toward shore, shaking myself off as I emerged from the water.

  “You don’t need to show off,” Booker said.

 
“I was covered in sand,” I said. “I had to do that to rinse it out of my bathing suit.”

  That was when I heard Zee call out a name. He was a quiet kid, and I was startled when I heard him yell.

  “What did you say?” I asked him, cupping my hands around my mouth.

  “Gertie!” he yelled again.

  Zee had stopped playing with Booker’s phone and now had his eyes glued to a spot near the end of the pier where the ferry from the mainland docked.

  I turned to look in that direction and saw something break the surface of the water. If Gertie was a swimmer in trouble—with no lifeguard in sight—I knew that I could help her.

  “C’mon, Booker!” I said, jumping into the waves and starting to freestyle my way into deeper water.

  Out of the corner of my eye, it looked like Booker had followed me in for the rescue, but instead I felt him grab my right foot and tug me back toward the beach.

  “Get out of the water,” he said, with a tight grip on my leg.

  “Someone needs to help that swimmer,” I said, wriggling my body around to break free. But Booker dragged me back out until I sat on the sand like a beached whale.

  People were getting out of their cars on the ferry line and snapping pictures of the scene below them, but no one was taking any action to make sure Gertie was okay.

  “Gertie doesn’t need help, Dev,” Booker said, huffing and puffing from his battle to pull me onshore. “She’s a really strong swimmer.”

  “You know her?” I asked, puzzled by his reaction to the crisis I thought was unfolding in front of our very eyes.

  “Not personally, but I know who she is,” Booker said. “She’s a great white.”

  “A what?” I said, looking from his face to Zee’s.

  “She’s a great white shark,” Booker said. “Best to stay on the beach while she’s in Vineyard waters.”

  2

  The lifeguard and two police officers came running from the roadway past the three of us down to the water’s edge, blowing their whistles loud enough to pierce my eardrums. I covered my ears and crunched my toes in the sand.

  “Everybody out of the water!” the lifeguard shouted. He was trying to make up for his late arrival by sprinting ahead of the cops in his bare feet. “Get out now!”

  They didn’t have a thing to worry about on that front. There wasn’t a soul anywhere near the shoreline. So many adults were shrieking and screaming that people were scrambling to get to the beach. The three of us were much more chill and curious about this tourist with the large fin. Gertie pretty much had the water and waves to herself. I’ve often found that grown-ups overreact to situations. They were all quite safe, on a wooden pier twenty feet above the circling shark.

  “Look at her fin,” I said, watching it zig and zag through the rough currents. “It’s huge. That shark must be ginormous.”

  Zee was standing up now. “Fifteen feet long. Three thousand five hundred pounds.”

  “You’re just guessing about those numbers, aren’t you?” I said to him. “And how do you know her name, anyway?”

  Zee sat down again, cross-legged in the sand as the shark dove under the waves and cruised out of sight. Booker and I sat beside him. He had always been a shy kid, and Booker was used to speaking up for him.

  “Zee’s an expert on sharks,” Booker said, taking his phone back. “I’ve got an app on here called shark tracker. It tells you where in the world every one of the tagged great whites is, 24/7.”

  “You taught Zee about that?”

  “No way,” Booker said. “Zee taught me everything. But I’m the one with a phone so he uses my app. Sharks are one of his obsessions. Right?”

  Zee nodded.

  Zee was a super-brainiac for an eight-year-old when he was interested in a subject, like the way he was about sharks. I’d spent time with him before at Booker’s house, but we had never been on vacation together.

  Zee had been reading since he was four years old, and was much happier with a book in his hands than doing pretty much anything else. He kind of idolized Booker and loved to hang out with him.

  “Can you bring me up to speed on sharks?” I asked him. “I hardly know anything about them.”

  Zee’s eyes were fixed on the waves at the end of the pier, probably still searching for the shark he had spotted.

  “Where’d Gertie go? How does that Inkwell app know where she is?” I asked him.

  “Talk to her, dude,” Booker says. “No need to be shy around Dev. She’s family.”

  Zee looked up at me like I was the dumbest person on the beach. “There’s an oceanographic institute on Cape Cod,” he said.

  My tongue would have tripped over all the syllables in that word when I was eight.

  “The scientists there put electronic sensors on great whites,” Zee said. “They tag them. You know, they kind of safely trap them for an hour or so, and then attach a little GPS to the dorsal fin.”

  “Ouch!”

  Zee shook his head at me. “Sharks don’t have nerve endings in their fins. It doesn’t hurt them when they’re tagged.”

  “Oh! Phew.”

  Zee punched in the app on Booker’s phone. “Once that fin is above water for ninety seconds,” he said, “the sensor pings, and we know where each one of these sharks is.”

  “What else do you know about Gertie?” I asked.

  Zee cocked his head and glanced over at Booker.

  “Don’t worry,” Booker said. “She won’t tell Grandma.”

  Booker’s parents—both doctors—had gone to Vassar College with my mother. Zee’s mom was Booker’s aunt, and we were all staying at their grandmother’s summer cottage in Oak Bluffs.

  “I won’t tell her what?”

  “Zee’s not supposed to be using my shark tracker app,” Booker said. “He’s got some homework of his own to do, and it’s not about fish.”

  “My lips are sealed, guys,” I said. “I’m really curious, and I don’t know anyone who knows as much as you do about sharks.”

  Zee smiled at the compliment.

  “So the scientists think Gertie’s about thirty-five years old,” he said, “and they know that she likes to move around a lot. Last winter she swam all the way south to Georgia, and this summer she’s been up north off the coast of Canada.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “She likes cool water,” Zee said, “and she likes to eat seals.”

  “Whoa! I didn’t know that,” I said. “I mean about the seals.”

  “That’s why Gertie always comes back around here in the summer,” he said. “There’re lots of seals that hang out on the little islands off Cape Cod, and that means they swim right past Martha’s Vineyard to get there.”

  “So how do the great whites follow the seals?” I asked.

  Zee pursed his lips and looked at me. “Sharks have an amazing sense of smell,” he said. “They can sniff out a seal colony miles away.”

  I scanned the surface of the water for Gertie’s fin, hoping there were no seals anywhere close by. I like seals way better than sharks.

  “Is your elbow bleeding?” Zee asked me.

  I lifted it up and brushed off some seaweed. “No. That’s just an old scratch that’s healed up. The scab looks red, is all.”

  “Good thing,” he said. “A great white can smell a single drop of blood, even if it’s in a billion drops of water.”

  I cringed. I didn’t want to be anywhere near a seal colony or have a nosebleed while I was in the ocean. The Ditchley swimming pool was beginning to look like a mighty fine place to do my laps.

  “Don’t go scaring Devlin,” Booker said. “Check the app for us. The lifeguard’s looking at his phone, too. They won’t let anyone back in the water until they know where Gertie has gone.”

  “She hasn’t come up for a few minutes,” Zee
said. “She’s probably on her way to another beach.”

  The large car-ferry that brought people to Oak Bluffs from Woods Hole on Cape Cod had docked and probably forced most of the fish to scatter out of its path.

  “Did you know great whites have at least three hundred teeth, Dev?” Zee asked, apparently enjoying the way he’d spooked me. “Sharp ones, shaped like little triangles, in seven or eight rows.”

  I pulled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around them. “It’s getting kind of cloudy, don’t you think? Maybe it’s a good day for a tennis lesson.”

  Zee laughed. “You are afraid, aren’t you?” he said. “Booker says you aren’t frightened of much.”

  “You got me, Zee! I’m not putting so much as my big toe in that water today,” I said, standing up again with a brand-new thought. It was as though a lightbulb had gone on in my brain. “But I’ve got an idea for you. If you help me with my science project, I’ll help you with your homework. I love to do book reviews.”

  He frowned. Maybe he was worried that he wouldn’t be able to figure out my sixth-grade problem.

  “Mine’s about sharks,” I said, hoping he could shortcut my science reading by telling me things I didn’t know. “I’m sure you can do it.”

  “That’s weird,” Booker said. “You didn’t tell me your project was about sharks on our way over to the beach a little while ago.”

  “That’s because I didn’t know you were going to introduce me to a great white,” I said, my excitement growing as I thought things through. “It changes everything.”

  “It scared you, too,” he said. “Didn’t it?”

  “Totally. I’ll write about Gertie if you like. She’ll be part of my essay,” I said. “You can tell me more about her habits, and maybe I can even find out how she got her name.”

  Zee hesitated for a few seconds and then spoke. “I named her.”

  “No, really. I’m sure the people at the institute can tell me.”

  Zee was clicking on the app again. “There’s Mary Lee, Harvey, Vader, George, Oscar,” he said, reading from the screen. “There are fifty-one tagged sharks around here. And I’m the person who gave Gertie her name.”