Cry of the Sea

by D. G. Driver

  Ask him? I didn’t get it. Why was he being so cavalier? Was he proud of himself that the mermaids were in Affron’s oily hands? At least he wasn’t smiling. I’d have slugged him in the jaw.

  Carter continued to do the talking, which was fine with me. I had nothing productive to say to the man. “So, what happened?” His tone left no room for sympathy. He expected to be told the truth by Dr. Schneider, and he didn’t expect to like it.

  Neither did I.

  Dr. Schneider let out a long sigh. “Everything that has happened here is my fault.”

  I shot a look to Carter that related only one thought: Duh!

  “I called the president of the Board of Directors for the Sea Mammal Rescue Center yesterday morning. These seven people make all the decisions regarding how funds are to be used and which projects are going to take priority. Very little of what happens around here is up to me.” He fidgeted with the pen in his lab coat pocket. “I had to call them regardless to let them know about how the oil spill affected us and that we were full up with rehabilitation cases.”

  “You didn’t have to tell them about the mermaids,” Carter said. “Not yet. Not until we’d learned more about them.”

  Dr. Schneider grimaced. “I didn’t. Not exactly. I told them we had an extraordinary find that would require more research. I suggested that if they could arrange the funding, I could triple my efforts to learn about our discovery.” He paused, then added, “I could have been the one to declare what these creatures were with definitive testing results. I could have...” He raised his hands to his face and pushed his fingers under his glasses to rub his eyes. “I could have been a pioneer.”

  “Those men last night?” Carter urged him on.

  “They were from Affron,” Dr. Schneider said. “They weren’t who they said they were. I could tell that as well as you. I thought they were sent to find out what my discovery was, but I didn’t think they knew exactly what they were looking for. I assumed they were just making sure I wasn’t trying to fraud Affron into grant money I didn’t need. And we had nothing ‘unusual’ here last night that they could see, did we? It was all very awkward for me.”

  “Did you call them back after we left?” Carter asked. The accusation in his tone was clear. “Is that what happened?”

  “I don’t know what happened, Carter. Honestly. I was here all night studying and I fell asleep on my desk. I woke up to banging on the door. It was those same men. I let them in and they went straight to our mermaid’s tank and ripped down the tarps. Within moments they hauled her and the mermaid cadavers out of here without saying one word to me.”

  I couldn’t take this any longer. “Why aren’t you with them, then? Why aren’t you wherever they took the mermaids and testing them and becoming famous like you wanted?”

  “I don’t know where they are,” he said, burying his head in his hands. “I chased after them, but I lost them about forty miles up the highway.” He clenched his jaw and looked almost like he would snarl. “I don’t have anything. I didn’t get a chance to take pictures of her. I don’t have any lab results. I don’t have a single thing that suggests that she ever existed.” He shook his head. “I swear that I never mentioned to anyone that we had discovered mermaids. I don’t know how they figured it out.”

  “I do,” Carter said, the ice from his gaze cutting through me. “And there is evidence, thanks to June and her father doing some taping at the beach when they found the mermaids.”

  I could sense the relief flowing back into Dr. Schneider as he realized that this fiasco wasn’t completely his fault. The guilt transferred to me. I didn’t want to deal with it, so I nearly shouted, “So, how do we find them?”

  “They work for Affron,” Carter said. “We figured out that much.”

  “But why would they want the mermaids? Where would they take them?”

  Dr. Schneider stood up and nudged me aside so he could reach the computer mouse. “It could be any number of places. Affron gives funding to every marine facility from Monterey, California to Valdez, Alaska. Their way of ‘giving back to the community’ as they put it.” He opened the Internet and went to a site all about Affron’s philanthropic deeds. Their motto ‘We Make the World Better’ scrolled across the page accompanied by some pretty classical music.

  “Guilt money,” I griped. “They ruin our oceans and then put money into the rehab centers to make it look like they care. With promotion like this, Affron lets all the people know that they are the good guys who work very hard to take care of the environment. They back up their slogan by putting money into aquariums like this one. This way, no one can say they’re lying. That’s why they’re always the first to show up at major oil spills, too. Oh, my parents are going to have a field day with this.”

  Dr. Schneider went to a link on the site that had a map of all the marine centers supported by Affron money. Along the Atlantic shore of the United States there were only a couple. Only one in Hawaii. However, from Northern California to Alaska there were about twenty-five.

  Carter pulled out his cell phone and opened up the video link he’d saved there and played back my mermaid video. I glanced back and forth from the video to the dots on the map on Dr. Schneider’s computer screen. “Or there could be another reason Affron always shows up first.”

  A chill ran through me. They knew.

  Affron knew about the mermaids all along.

  Chapter Eleven

  “I have to go,” I told Carter and Dr. Schneider. Before they could open their mouths to argue, I was up and heading for the door. “Carter, can you give me a ride home?”

  “We’re kind of in the middle of a discussion here, June,” he said, gesturing to the computer.

  “There’s nothing else to discuss here,” I said, heading out the office door.

  Carter pushed back from the desk and followed me. “I think there is.”

  I stopped and looked him dead in the eye. “Affron knows about the mermaids. I’m sure of it. I’ll bet they discovered them long before we did.” I turned to Dr. Schneider who was standing in his office doorway wringing his hands. “Those men last night weren’t here to check you out for grant fraud. They were looking for the mermaid. They knew exactly what we had and where we had her. My video only made them move faster so they could snatch up the mermaids before anyone else had a chance to see them. I’ll bet the next move is to prove that you never saw them, Dr. Schneider. You said yourself you had no evidence. And then they’ll figure out how to prove my video is a fake.”

  I started toward the double doors again. Carter reached out and grabbed my arm. “But why? Why would they do all that?”

  “Because my mom is right. If people, ordinary people, knew that there were real mermaids swimming around in the Pacific Ocean, they wouldn’t allow Affron to continue leaking oil in the ocean. People will finally stand up against them.”

  “Why do you think it would make a difference?” Carter said. “Polar bears, whales, sea otters... I could go on. The slow extinction of those beautiful creatures hasn’t stirred that kind of reaction.”

  “They don’t look like people,” Dr. Schneider said. “The mermaids are very humanesque in their upper torsos and face. Human looking enough to stir the mind into thinking they are like us. They are also mythological, and the human race will go to extremes to discover and protect a find such as that. And what if we can prove that the mermaids can communicate? People will want to know how many mermaids exist. Are there male as well as female mermaids? Where do they live? Are there cities under the oceans? Are the mermaids immortal? Could they have existed since the age of the Ancient Greeks? If so, does that mean that the Greek gods are also in existence—or that other mythological creatures exist? What impact could that have on the religions of the world and our existence on this planet?”

  “You’ve thought a lot about this,” Carter said to the scientist.

  “Up all night.”

  Okay, that was taking it a bit further than my brain could h
andle at the moment. But it sounded right. I only nodded and said, “So, are you going to drive me or not?”

  “Where are we going?”

  “My house. We’re going to let the secret out and make Affron scramble.”

  “I don’t understand,” Carter said. “Don’t you want to help find them?”

  “Yes,” I answered. “I’m going to make that his job.” I pointed at Dr. Schneider. The way his neck stiffened I could tell he didn’t like being told what to do by a seventeen-year-old girl, or by anyone for that matter. “Dr. Schneider, you need to figure out where Affron might have taken the mermaids.”

  “I don’t know how,” he almost whined. “I used up my cell phone battery trying to get through to someone at Affron to find out who those men were and what department they were with. No one over there could help me. No one seems to know anything.”

  Carter took his keys out of his pocket and tossed them up and down in his right hand. “Which direction did they go this morning?”

  Dr. Schneider shrugged. “North. I lost them.”

  “Yeah,” Carter said slowly. “After forty miles you said. That would have taken about half an hour. What have you been doing since then?”

  A good question. I hadn’t thought about that. I took a step back toward Carter.

  “I followed them to the freeway, but once they got on the 5 I couldn’t keep up,” the scientist said. “Then I kept driving for a while, hoping I’d see them at a gas station or something. I drove quite a ways. Finally, I realized I was being ridiculous and pulled over and got on the phone. I was on the phone for a while, being put on hold over and over again. When my phone died I started back.”

  I bought it, but I wasn’t sure Carter did. His lips were pressed tightly together, like he was trying not to say anything. I spoke for him. “So, you know they went north. That’s a starting place. The mermaid can’t survive long without being in a good-size tank, so unless they wanted her to die, they had to have taken her someplace not too far away.”

  “I’ll look into our options,” Dr. Schneider said.

  Carter raised his cell phone out of his pocket and waved it. “Charge your phone and please answer it when I call.” With a dismissive nod and a wave, Dr. Schneider pulled out his own phone and wiggled it in response before turning his back on us and sitting down at his desk. Satisfied, Carter tapped my shoulder and led me out the door.

  After a quick stop at the drive-thru, we were on our way back to Olympia. Carter practically devoured his burger in one bite, wiped his mouth and then said, “So what’s your big plan?” I was a bit preoccupied with texting a message to Haley and took a moment to answer him.

  “Hello.”

  “Sorry,” I said, putting down my phone and grabbing a couple fries. “I’m trying to get Haley to meet me at my house.”

  “Not Haley again,” he moaned. “Hasn’t she caused enough damage? You need to get rid of her sorry butt.”

  “No, you don’t understand,” I said.

  “I understand that she’s not cool. That’s all there is to it.”

  “She’s my best friend.”

  He shrugged as if to say that made no difference to him at all, but he didn’t say anything. He kept his eyes on the traffic, his right hand on the wheel while his left arm rested on the door.

  “She made a mistake, okay?” I said. “She didn’t get what was going on here. But she’s a good person. Plus, she’s the one who can help me do what I want to do.”

  “What is that exactly?”

  “I’m going to improve the video and get even more attention to it.”

  Carter swerved into another lane to avoid running up the bumper of the car in front of us. My drink tipped a bit into my lap, but I saved it in time. “Why?”

  While I dabbed at my jeans with a couple napkins, I reminded Carter about the phone conversation I’d had with my mom at his house the morning before and what my mom had suggested about releasing the video so people could know about the mermaids.

  “You heard all that, right?” He nodded at me, so I went on while I freed my French fries from the bag so I could shove the soggy napkins in there instead. “I thought she was wrong, jumping the gun, but now I think she was right on the money. I’ve got to make a splash with what we know. National. International. People have got to know what we know.”

  Carter reached over and grabbed the paper bag out of my hand and tossed it over his shoulder into the back seat, uncaring of where it landed. Then he took my hand and lowered it to my knee gently and held it there. His hands were remarkably warm compared to mine, and the touch was soothing to my tense nerves. “Breathe, June,” he said. “Calm down a second.”

  I did as he suggested, allowing air to pull in through my nose and fill my lungs. I took three long breaths before taking my free right hand and placing it over his, making a hand sandwich.

  He waited a moment for me to collect myself before speaking again. “You need to think this stuff through. You’re being impulsive.”

  “I really don’t have time to think this through,” I told him. “I’ve got to act now while there’s still oil on the beach. If I wait, the oil will be cleaned up and no one out there will relate this discovery with the problem. We need to get Affron in the spotlight.”

  Carter laughed then. It wasn’t an outright guffaw like he was making fun of me, but it had a teasing tone to it. “Little Miss Activist. You really are the product of your parents, aren’t you?”

  “No, I’m not!” I barked back too quickly.

  “Wow,” he said, pulling his hand back to the wheel. “Touched a sore spot, did I?”

  Heat flushed my face. Anger? Embarrassment. I didn’t want to talk about the fact that despite everything going on at the moment, I still had this nasty gut reaction at the mention of my parents’ work. You’d think I could be a little more mature, especially as I was up to my eyeballs in activism at the moment. But no. At the slightest comment that I might be anything like my parents, who were nearly psychotic with their activist movements, I turned right back into one of those brainless teenage girls Carter had said didn’t interest him.

  Whatever tender moment had been building a moment ago between us was now lost. After a minute of silence, Carter turned on the radio, and we listened to classic rock the rest of the way.

  He didn’t cut the engine when he pulled into my driveway. As I opened my door to get out, Carter sighed and asked, “Do you want any help?”

  I didn’t. Not really. I had Haley for that. However, my impulse was to say yes. Even if there was nothing for him to do, I would have liked him stay with me.

  “Thanks. No,” I answered instead. “I’ll call you later and tell you how things are going.”

  “I guess that’ll have to do,” Carter said. He turned up the radio volume and didn’t even say goodbye. I closed the car door and stood on the front path and watched him drive away.

  I was blowing it right and left with him. How many more things could I say and do wrong? If I waved my arms at him and signaled for him to come back, I might have been able to fix this. I could tell him I was sorry. I’d say I was just in a ‘mood’ or really focused on what I had to do and not thinking. Maybe he’d understand and hold my hand again.

  But I didn’t wave him back. I just watched his car disappear around the corner, not knowing when or if I’d see him again.

  Disappointed with myself, I went inside and dropped my backpack on the kitchen floor. I was glad my dad wasn’t home, so he wouldn’t get in my way as I worked. Knowing him, he’d want to take over and do it all himself. He was definitely not the “helpful hint” kind of dad. He was more like the “I’ll take care of it, you can watch if you want” kind of dad.

  Frankly, he’d really screw this one up since he knew nothing at all about computers, editing videos, or uploading them to the Internet. Thanks to him and Mom I knew next to nothing. They didn’t put me in front of a computer much as a kid. Books, books, books, they preached all the time. God bl
ess Haley and a couple good computer teachers in 7th and 8th grade. Without them, I’d still be living in the 1980’s world my parents are stuck in.

  My phone jingled, and my heart jumped. Was Carter texting to say he was coming back? I flipped the phone open, but the message wasn’t from him. Haley wanted to know if I was home yet. I typed that she needed to come over already. I only had time to pop open a soda before she was at the door.

  With Regina and Marlee in tow.

  I put an arm around Haley and ushered her inside, closing the door on the other two. “I didn’t tell you to bring them.”

  “They wanted to come.”

  “Haley!”

  “Do you want me to tell them to leave?”

  “Yes!” I said, but as I did Regina took it upon herself to open my front door and step inside. I should have locked it.

  “That wasn’t very hospitable,” she said to me.

  “So rude,” Marlee agree, stepping in behind her best friend. She took a quick glance around my living room and sneered.

  Right, I thought. I’m the rude one.

  “Just go away,” I said to Haley. “I’ll do this without you.”

  Haley raised an eyebrow. “Really? Your text said you needed help editing the mermaid video. Do you have any idea how to do that?”

  “No. But I’ll figure it out.”

  Regina put out her hand for me to shake. I didn’t take it. “Look, June,” she said in a very even, non-chiding voice. It was the kind of voice that I guessed won her over with teachers and parents and made her so damn successful at school. “We really don’t want to be a problem. I think the mermaids are very interesting. Truly. Finding them like you did really impresses me, and I want to help somehow. I mean this, I really do.”

  I studied her brown eyes and perfect eye shadow that she had to have redone recently because it was very fresh. Her gaze didn’t waver. No sneer formed on her glossy lips. She actually seemed sincere. So, I took her hand and shook it.