by E. A. House
“Of course I did,” Brad grumbled. “Harvey, grow a spine and stop whining.”
“Ay,” the professor agreed, unfolding his arms and revealing that he had a clunky pair of binoculars in one hand. “Although some spineless animals can be quite courageous, this worrying is going to keep you from success. Look at me—I have made incredible and painful sacrifices to get to this moment, but do you see me crying?”
No, they didn’t. He had looked after Chris and Carrie as the boat sped away with a calm, thoughtful expression, and when the tiny black specks had disappeared behind them he had turned to Harvey and Brad and told them that it had been terrible, but Carrie had fallen overboard in the rough waters and Chris, “even though Harvey tried to hold him back,” had leapt after her. There had been nothing anyone could do. And Chris and Carrie were practically the man’s family.
“So we’re here, then?” Brad asked while Harvey was trying to remember if he’d ever seen the professor cry or attempt any kind of normal human response to a situation. This was hampered by Harvey having no good idea how to interpret the way Professor Griffin regularly rambled at people. “Looks pretty tame.”
“Well, there are hardly going to be dragons here,” the professor said, scanning the coastline. “‘Here there be dragons,’ and all that, but that phrase marked the edge of the world known to mapmakers, and this is quite well charted. Just not quite well charted enough . . . ” He trailed off.
“Is something wrong?” Harvey asked. Either the professor or the location itself was scaring him.
“Hmm,” said the professor, and went quickly back into the cabin. He was back out a second later, frowning and holding a yellow sticky note. “No,” he said. “The coordinates are correct, and Carrie’s got lovely, clear handwriting, so there can’t be a mistake.”
“I take it we’re not about to find the lost treasure of the Sam Elmo?” Brad asked. The professor didn’t seem to hear him. Privately, Harvey thought that was a good thing. The professor didn’t look like he was going to take sarcasm very well right now. And the ship was called the San Telmo, not the Sam Elmo.
“It should be here,” the professor said. “It was supposed to be here. They were so close, I could feel it, she can’t possibly be wrong, this has to be the place!” He picked up the binoculars again and scanned the coastline frantically.
“So, I guess this was a bust,” Brad said, stretching and turning in the direction of the cabin.
“It has to be here!”
The moon was shimmering on the water, and moonlight shone off a sliver of sand and bounced amongst the tangles of vegetation all along the stretch of shoreline. It was pretty, in an entirely unromantic way, and the boat hugging the edge of the shoreline, light shining warmly from the cabin and small figures standing on the deck, only added to the picture. The screaming coming from the boat would have detracted from the mood quite a bit, had there been anyone nearby to appreciate it.
“Nothing!” Willis Griffin snarled, getting ahold of himself a tiny little bit. “There’s nothing here!” He was breathing heavily from his session of screaming wordless rage into the night. Harvey was quivering and trying to hide behind Brad, and even Brad looked uncomfortable.
“Well, there’s some sand and trees and bushes and stuff,” Harvey offered. Griffin rounded on him, ragingly furious, and only backed off when Harvey quailed. Brad, who was still nursing a broken nose and was not in any mood to be charitable, laughed harshly.
“Yeah, tell him, Harvey,” he said. “We can make so much money out of all the flipping sand.”
“It makes no sense,” the professor said, turning the sticky note over and over in his hands. “I was sure they’d get it right this time. She was sure she had it right this time. It was time for the ship to be found, events conspired to put me in the right place at the right time! All these years, all this waiting, all the hard choices I’ve made—and can it really all be for nothing?” He crumpled the sticky note and made as if to throw it into the water, but at the last second thought better of it and stuffed the crumpled note into his pocket. “Nothing,” he said faintly. There was silence, broken only by the faintest sound of water lapping against the boat. Then the professor’s dejected posture straightened, and he lifted his head and set his shoulders and turned to Harvey and Brad.
“Clearly, we missed something,” he said decisively, all his old fire and determination back as if he hadn’t just had a minor mental breakdown. “We’ll just have to turn around and get the children back. I’ve no doubt Chris will have argued his way to the correct solution by the time we reach them, and we wouldn’t want them to get too cold now, would we?”
“Man,” Brad said, eying Professor Griffin with caution, “I hate to point out the obvious, but don’t you think they’re going to be just a bit suspicious of you by now? You did push them overboard and leave them in the middle of the ocean.”
“Dear heavens,” the professor said, “I had nothing to do with Carrie falling overboard, and it’s so hard to steer a ship in this weather.” In direct contrast to his words, the ocean was almost eerily calm. “We’re awfully lucky that you managed to turn the ship around and remember where they were, aren’t we?”
“Sure,” Brad muttered under his breath when the professor went to put action to words and turn the ship around. “Whatever you say, crazy man. Oh, stop freaking out,” he said to Harvey, who had not stopped shivering. “It’s not like this is a haunted ship or anything.”
Harvey whimpered and clutched the railing. Going below decks would mean having to look at the scattered possessions of the Kingsolvers, so he stayed where he was, looking out at the dark water and the moon glittering on the surface, all the way back to where the professor had left Chris and Carrie. It was a short trip, since the professor had headed straight out into deeper waters and then straight back in to scan the coastline, so Harvey had only just slipped into an absentminded daydream when Brad and the professor came rushing out on the deck and scared him so badly he almost became the third person to go over the side.
“Well, this is a puzzle,” the professor said, peering over the edge. “I don’t see Chris or Carrie, and I don’t see what could have taken them, either. Do either of you see any blood in the water, perchance?”
Harvey, who had finally hit his limit, moaned and bolted below decks, where he panicked and locked himself in the equipment room. Brad watched him go with a disgusted sneer, but even he turned to the professor with a look of apprehension.
“Look, I know I told Harvey that the stupid ship wasn’t haunted, but you don’t think . . . ”
“Oh, I always think,” the professor replied, still staring at the place where Chris and Carrie should have been, and still frowning. “All the time. Come up with all manner of interesting things.”
“Great,” Brad grumbled, and was in the middle of turning away to try prying Harvey out of the equipment room when the silence of the night was split by the most unnatural of sounds.
Beedle-beedle-beedle.
Brad whipped his head around in a panic, and then realized that the sound was more mechanical than supernatural.
Beedle-beedle-beedle.
“Phone!” Brad managed to squeak.
Beedle-beedle-beedle.
“Good heavens!” the professor said, and removed the protesting device from his jacket pocket. “Griffin here,” he said, and huffed in relief when he recognized the voice on the other end of the line. “Oh, yes, Aaron, it’s good to hear from you. That’ll be—what?”
The problem with getting a cell phone jammer and using it to prevent your victims from contacting the outside world is, of course, that if you get a cell phone jammer and turn it on then you aren’t going to be able to get any of the phone calls sent to your own phone. Professor Griffin hadn’t exactly forgotten this, and had in fact counted on it to provide him with an alibi of sorts, since if he were just as cut off from land as Chris and Carrie he would look less like the mastermind and more like a fellow victim.
But he had assumed that there would be no urgent calls for him, and that had, perhaps, been a mistake.
“What do you mean, not the only FBI agent in Archer’s Grove?” the professor demanded. Brad started edging away, and cast a very thoughtful look at the lifeboat lashed to the deck. The professor saw the look and pulled out his pocketknife, then wandered over to the lifeboat while still on the phone and stabbed the blade of the knife through the bottom of the boat.
“I don’t see why you didn’t just tell them that there have been reports of a serial killer going around impersonating a federal agent,” he said calmly when he was done. “You could have killed two birds with one stone. Did you at least tell someone that McRae was a person of interest in the case?”
Brad looked from the professor to the ruined lifeboat and decided to join Harvey in hiding.
“Well, then what am I paying you for?” the professor asked irritably. “No, no, I’ll deal with this. You can’t possibly do what I need, and I highly doubt you have the skillset needed to rid me of the naturalist or that troublesome priest. Yes. Goodbye.” He hung up the phone with a sigh. “It’s as though everyone’s against me today,” he said to himself, and pulled his pocketknife free of the lifeboat.
MR. LYNDON HAD GOTTEN THEM A HORRIFYINGLY rough redeye flight, and Maddison’s family landed in Tampa, Florida, at the hideously unnatural hour of four a.m. Maddison hadn’t gotten much sleep the previous night, and had been on far more airplane flights in the past week than she usually went on in a year, and was thoroughly exhausted and mildly jetlagged as a result.
“It’s surprising they even let us go through with the flight,” Maddison’s mom said as they peered around a line of grumpy passengers waiting to disembark. “It was so rough they never turned off the Fasten Seatbelts sign.”
“At least we’ll be home in a bit,” Maddison said. She had pulled her phone out the second they started letting people off the plane, horrifying time of night or not, and still couldn’t reach Chris. It rang out more than once before it went to voicemail this time though, and Maddison wasn’t sure if that was a promising sign or not. She’d been assuming that the phone just wasn’t getting service in the middle of the ocean, but Chris should still be out on a boat—so why was his phone doing something different now? She couldn’t make sense of it.
Actually, what if there had been a manufactured problem with the phone itself, like someone deliberately making it hard for Chris to get in contact with anyone . . .
“How hard would it be to block a cell phone signal?” Maddison asked her mom.
“Moving,” her mom said, tapping Maddison on the shoulder, because the line exiting the plane was in fact moving, and Maddison had to put the phone away to exit the plane. “I would imagine it’s fairly easy,” her mom added as she swung her backpack out of the overhead compartment. “But it might not be the best idea to talk about jamming cell phones in the middle of an airport. Now, see if you can find your father.”
They hadn’t gotten seats together because the tickets had been so last minute, and it took forever for Maddison and her mom to find her dad in the airport terminal. He had been sitting towards the front of the plane rather than in the second-to-last row, and had already gotten off and then wandered across the airport in search of a restroom and a coffee.
“Dad, it’s four in the morning,” Maddison said when she caught up to him, parked on an airport bench sipping a large coffee with deep concentration. “Do you really want coffee this early? Or this late, whichever?”
“Do you want me to accidentally sleep-drive us into the Atlantic Ocean?” her dad asked, tilting his head back to rest it against the wall and staring at the ceiling. “Huh,” he said, straightening up. “Hey, Mads?”
“What?” There was a strangely amused expression on her father’s face that didn’t bode well for her future.
“Do me a huge favor and don’t make a scene, okay?”
“Why would I make a scene?” Maddison asked. And who would care? The airport was basically dead at going-on-five o’clock and the only people in the terminal were Maddison’s family, a cluster of high school students wearing matching orange shirts, and a dark-haired woman with her own cup of coffee who had been leaning against a decorative pillar and studying everyone with one critical eye. Her other eye was fixed on the air conditioner duct on the ceiling.
She glanced up and towards them at about the same time Maddison did and tossed the coffee cup into a trashcan, then started towards Maddison and her dad. Either that, or the gift kiosk next to them, but she didn’t look like the type to want a stuffed alligator wearing a straw hat.
“Because you are a very a passionate girl and you have a temper,” her dad said, getting to his feet and handing his own cup of coffee to Maddison. “And I think I’m about to be arrested.”
“What?”
“Impressive,” the dark-haired woman said, pausing right in front of them. “Officially, yes, that’s exactly what’s about to happen. I’m going to walk you out the side door to the police cruiser I have waiting, and my partner”—she looked behind her, frowned, and scanned the terminal until a young man with an orange-striped tie came hurrying over and skidded to a stop next to her—“Forrest,” she said firmly, “is going to collect your family and their things and follow us.”
“Unofficially, there’s a significant danger that someone might try to attack your father and we’re attempting to take steps to minimize the danger,” Forrest explained when they were all in the car and the windows were rolled up. “He was a person of interest in a missing-persons investigation twenty-five years ago, and the case is being opened again because of recent events involving a church and a dead body. Detective Hermann thought it wisest to pander to the killer, at least for now, so we’re letting him think your father is a suspect.”
The police station, when Forrest escorted them in, was a scene of complete chaos, Maddison’s father and Agent Grey calm islands in the middle of it.
“We’ve got another situation,” Agent Grey said to Forrest. “Or, well, part of one. A Harvey Tanner just reported two teenagers lost at sea. The idiot called one of the families, bawling, and tried to confess, so we have a riot on our hands.”
Maddison sat down hard on a nearby desk.
“And to make matters worse, we’ve also just gotten a report that both kids are fine, if a little cold and shaken, and if we want to catch Griffin in the act we need to suppress that report before he realizes what’s happened.”
“So, Chris and Carrie are okay?” Maddison asked. Then it occurred to her that the two FBI agents might not be able to tell her much, if anything, and she amended it to “Please just tell me if they’re safe?”
“They seem to be?” Forrest said, squinting at a transcript like he wasn’t sure it was real.
“Oh heavens,” Maddison’s father said suddenly, and without warning he began to laugh. Real, deep laughter, edging into hysteria. “Of course! He would get himself mixed up in all this, almost completely by accident, coming in at the very last minute to save the day while babbling.”
“Who?”
“Robin Wyzowski,” her dad said, shaking his head. Forrest blinked, tilted his head to one side, and finally checked something on his phone.
“That’s . . . completely accurate,” he said, impressed. “Saved by Robin Wyzowski.”
“How is Robin Wyzowski mixed up in all this?” Maddison asked, because she knew who Robin Wyzowski was to her dad but there was an undertone to the conversation she was missing.
“He has always had the most amazing ability to find weirdness,” her father explained, still laughing.
Meanwhile, out in the Atlantic Ocean, with the lights of Archer’s Grove sparkling in the distance, Robin Redd looked up from trying to make Chris and Carrie hot chocolate and made a face.
“My ears are burning,” he said. Bethy automatically looked at his head in alarm, because he had in fact once caught his ears on fire by standing too close to a candelabra,
but he was mercifully flame-free. This she pointed out, on the off chance that he didn’t know.
“Would it be more accurate to say that someone just walked over my grave?” Redd asked. “Or, hmm, that there’s a pricking in my thumbs?”
“Something wicked this way comes,” Carrie finished automatically. She and Chris were curled together at the boat’s tiny table, wrapped in blankets and still dripping slightly on the floor. “Shakespeare, Macbeth. Is something coming?” She didn’t know how much more she could handle tonight. It had been a lucky chance that had brought the Meandering Manatee close enough to where Chris and Carrie were bobbing in the water to see them, and an even more massive stroke of luck that had given Carrie the courage to flag down the bizarre little ship. With multicolored Christmas lights reflecting crazily off the lavender hull and a crimson deck and a life-sized purple inflatable manatee dangling crazily from the hook, intended as a windsock, the Manatee looked like a ship from the depths of Hell itself. Then Robin Redd had leaned over the side, recognized Chris and Carrie, and yelled a “Hello!” and the ship suddenly looked welcoming. Not that Carrie wasn’t afraid Redd was going to poison them with the hot chocolate he was trying to make, using the remnants of someone’s mixed-value pack of Hershey’s bite-sized chocolates and a carton of soy milk.
“Nothing’s coming, except for a storm front this Thursday,” Redd said. “But I feel as though somewhere out there, someone is talking about me,” he explained, whisking industriously. Carrie had watched him drop several Hershey’s almond bars in the saucepan, so she doubted he was getting rid of all the lumps even if he whisked for the rest of the night. “Or perhaps they’re taking my name in vain. It’s hard to tell when your worst episode ever has become a meme.”
As one, the camera crew, Bethy, and Flo groaned “Muskrat Dinner.” Although Flo was stuck in a perpetual state of horror at the sight of what Redd was doing to a handful of innocent chocolate bars.
“Do I even want to know?” Carrie asked Chris, who had watched more episodes of Robin Redd: Treasure Hunter than she had.