Saltwater Secrets

by Cindy Callaghan

  “See ya,” Josie called to Dad as we headed out for the day.

  “We’re going to put our names on the welcome sign,” I added.

  Dad said, “Hold it right there.” He held out a ziplock bag of fresh-cut fruit for each of us. Then he kissed us each on the cheek, grabbed his tackle box, and headed out the door.

  I asked, “No workout today?”

  “I already did. I got a jump on the day while you two were sleeping.” He added, “Don’t forget sunscreen. By the way, we’ll be having company for dinner tomorrow night.”

  “So soon?” Josie asked.

  “You like her?” I asked.

  “So soon?” Josie asked again.

  “Girls!” He put his arms around both of us. “You are my number ones. Got it? It’s just dinner.”

  “But—” Josie said.

  “Seriously. We’re just eating food at the same place. People do it all the time.”

  He hopped into his pickup truck and took off.

  * * *

  On our stroll to the boardwalk Josie asked, “It’s soon, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe it really is just dinner.” My phone vibrated.

  It was a text from TJ. So, Skee-Ball?

  “You too?” Josie asked me, somehow knowing that it was TJ.

  “It’s nothing,” I told her when we came to a section of boardwalk covered with gulls.

  An old man sat on a park bench feeding them his breakfast muffin. It sounds cute, but trust me, it isn’t. The thing is, when you feed one seagull, others see, and they want to be fed too. And in no time, there’s a swarm of birds aggressively pushing for a breakfast muffin. Not a crumb, the whole muffin. People hate when this happens, but the old man loved the attention. He directed them: “One at a time.” “Don’t be pushy.” “Get to the back of the line.” The gulls didn’t follow the instructions.

  We walked on the periphery of the muffin-eating flock.

  In the distance we could see a crane setting up the new bungee ride on Murphy’s Pier. There hadn’t been a new attraction on the pier since the Minotaur was installed. There had been talk of a haunted mansion, but the city council chose bungee.

  Josie popped a strawberry into her mouth. “So, first our Smoothie Factory inquiry and then snorkel, yeah?”

  I went for a cantaloupe chunk. “Yup.”

  * * *

  We stood in front of the Smoothie Factory. “What now?” Josie asked.

  I said, “Let’s go in and ask for an application.”

  Josie looked at the pack of people waiting in line, blocking the door. “How’re we even gonna get inside?”

  “We’ll have to wait,” I said.

  “Ugh. I don’t want anyone to see me in this line. If I’m going to boycott, it has to look like a boycott.”

  A girl in a white lab coat flattened herself between the doorjamb and the crowd, and wiggled herself outside. Once free from the store, she removed her lab coat and name tag.

  Josie and I looked at each other, each with the same idea. We followed for a few beats; then Josie nudged me to say something.

  I said, “Um, excuse me.”

  The girl turned to see if I was talking to her. And as soon as I saw her face, I recognized her as the girl who had opened the basement door last night.

  “Hi. Do you work at the Smoothie Factory?” I asked, but it was kind of obvious.

  She twirled a band out of her hair and let it fall down. “Yeah.”

  “Well, we were wondering if you were hiring?” I asked.

  Josie added, “Looks like you’re super busy.”

  The girl looked at Josie, acting friendlier now. “I love your accent. Australian?”

  “Yeah,” Josie said. “Usually people guess British first.”

  “Well, you sound just like a man who’s friends with the owners of the Smoothie Factory. He’s in town for the week and at the store all the time. I love listening to him.” Then she asked, “Maybe you know him?”

  Josie said, “Uh, I don’t know everyone in Australia, but maybe if I saw him, I’d recognize him.”

  “Wouldn’t it be funny if you and him dock your boat at the same place or something?”

  “So funny,” Josie said.

  The girl offered, “They’re totally hiring. You interested? Because if you know that guy, you’d totally get the job.”

  “We’re looking at our options,” Josie said. “Do you like it there? How late do you work? Do you have to do stuff besides make smoothies, like make deliveries, or take deliveries, or do stuff in the basement?”

  All of her questions made the girl pause. I explained, “She hates basements. Weird phobia.”

  The girl relaxed. “I like it. We work till about ten o’clock. And sometimes we take deliveries and clean the equipment. The cleaning isn’t too bad, except for the big machine, which is in the basement, so you’d hate that. And it’s a lot of work.”

  “What’s the machine for?” I asked.

  “Sorry.” She giggled. “It’s a secret that only certain Smoothie Factory employees know.”

  “For real?” I asked, as if the idea of a secret made me all sorts of excited. “Me and my sister are really good at keeping secrets.”

  “You’re sisters?” She looked at me: dark hair and eyes, New Yorker. Then she looked at Josie: blond, blue-eyed, Aussie. “How is that possible?”

  “Half sisters,” Josie clarified.

  The girl looked at me. “You drew the short straw on the accent, huh?”

  I smiled at her rude comment only because I wanted to know the secret; if not for that, I probably would’ve shown her how loud a New York accent can get.

  The girl laughed at her own joke and kept going. “Sorry, but unless you’re inside the Smoothie Factory trust cocoon, I can’t tell you that.”

  Trust cocoon?

  She swiped her hair behind her ears. “I gotta go. But if you want, stop in and fill out an application. You can write down that I referred you. My name is Lydia.” She picked up her pace, and that clearly ended our convo.

  “Well, that wasn’t helpful,” I said.

  “No, but she wasn’t the sharpest swordfish in the school, if you know what I mean.”

  I did.

  “We could try to intercept her again at this time tomorrow and tell her you were hired, and that I actually do know that Aussie mate, and get her to tell us the Smoothie Factory secret.”

  “Not a bad idea,” I said.

  On our way to pick up snorkel equipment from the Water Sport Adventure stand on the beach, I asked, “Secret machine in the basement?”

  “Yeah. Do you think that’s true, or is it some high-tech dishwasher, and she doesn’t know it? Maybe her coworkers told her that the dishwasher, or whatever it is, is a big secret, to make cleaning it more exciting.”

  I laughed a little. “You might be right. A secret machine is way more interesting.”

  * * *

  I’d gone snorkeling with Josie before, so I knew the drill. We put on masks and flippers. She swam under the pier, and I followed. Swimming with flippers is so much easier than without.

  I didn’t really know what we were looking for—heck, half the time I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. I was surprised and sad to see trash down there: bottles, a tire, a chair. It felt like humans had invaded a world they didn’t belong in. Talk about careless and lazy. Why throw a bottle into the ocean when we can recycle it?

  While I assessed human disregard for the ocean, Josie investigated other things. And she made two interesting discoveries.

  Twenty Stella

  Police Station

  June 25 (Continued)

  Santoro picks up his pen and asks, “What kind of discoveries?”

  “We’ve snorkeled under the pier lots of times, so we know what it looks like. The pier is held up by wooden pylons, which are like telephone poles cemented into the ground. The pylons are coated with something to protect them. I don’t know what it is, but it looks like wax. Well, Jos
ie noticed that the pylons closest to the shore had less wax. It looked like some of it had been eaten away.”

  He writes that down. “How could you tell?”

  “The wax shines, and the pylons closer to the shore were less shiny. Josie thought maybe fish had been nibbling at it. She had a big explanation like some species had lost its food supply, maybe because of pollution, and that’s why it was snacking on the pylon wax.”

  He isn’t looking at me, because he’s writing. “She sounds really smart about this aquatic stuff.”

  “She is, but in this case her theory was wrong. The wax had nothing to do with starving fish.”

  Twenty-One Stella

  603 Whalehead Street, Whalehead, New Jersey

  June 21

  “Murielle duPluie from WLEO here with the Whalehead news from the Jersey Shore. What a beautiful evening!

  “As you know, I pride myself on being a thorough reporter. And I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t give you some history about our celebrity guest. In my research I unearthed some lesser-known factoids about Miss Maxwell. As we know, she’s all about health and fitness, but she hasn’t always been this way. In fact, in 2016 she canceled concerts because she was sick and exhausted. But she doesn’t get that way anymore. That’s why she’s coming to visit our very own Smoothie Factory to tell her story about how the nutrition-packed drinks changed her life.”

  Dad lifted tuna steaks off the grill and set the platter of fish on the patio picnic table. His new friend Laney shut the French doors and delivered to the table a colorful salad that included raspberries and pecans.

  “Did you hear that?” Dad said about the report on WLEO. “Meredith Maxwell is a health nut too.”

  I passed the fish platter to Laney and in the process knocked her cell phone to the ground.

  “Ohmigod,” I said. “I’m so sorry. That was my bad.” I bent down to get it for her, but her hand snatched it up. I mean, fast. She was on it like a viperous snake snapping up a field mouse. Very weird.

  “I got it.” Without looking at it, she said, “It’s fine.” She slid it into her pocket and went back to the fish platter.

  “It could be cracked,” I said. I wasn’t sure, because I didn’t know her, but I thought she was mad. “I’ll totally pay for it,” I offered.

  She stopped serving fish and looked at me with a smile that I knew was fake. If she were in New York, the next words out of her mouth would have been, Just shut up. But she said, “It’s just a phone,” in a tone that didn’t match the forced smile.

  Josie and Dad hadn’t noticed the look she’d given me, because Josie scooped salad onto my plate and hers. “Are you?” Josie asked Laney. “Are you a health-food nut?”

  Laney left the phone subject behind and said, “I’m a vegetarian and work out, but I’m not gonna lie—I like my cotton candy.”

  Josie asked her, “What do you think of the Smoothie Factory?”

  “I haven’t tried it. I’m kind of loyal to the old Water Ice World.”

  “Thank you,” Josie said. “That’s what I’ve been saying all along.”

  “Plus,” Laney added, “I would never wait in a line like that for anything.”

  “You and me both,” Dad said.

  “But you don’t mind waiting for a fish to bite,” I said to him.

  “That’s completely different!” He wiped his mouth. “So, the really big question is this, Laney,” he started asking, “and this is important to see if you fit in around here. What piece do you usually use in Monopoly?”

  This was something super important to get on the table before dating got serious. Me, Josie, and Dad always used the same ones. Josie was the shoe, Dad was the hat, and I was the race car. If Laney chose one of those, this match was doomed.

  Laney said, “This is a lot of pressure. I don’t want to say the wrong thing. But I’m pretty committed to…”

  We all stopped eating to listen to her answer.

  “The thimble!” she declared.

  “Phew,” Dad said. “You can stay.”

  “I’m so glad,” she said. The rest of the dinner, Laney was funny and relaxed, which was totally the opposite of the glimpse of the woman I had seen when I’d reached to pick up her phone. But the real test of whether she would be able to hang with the Higleys would be in Monopoly, because we don’t mess around.

  Me and Josie cleaned up dinner while Dad and Laney set up the game. When Josie and I were in the kitchen alone, I said, “I don’t know about her.”

  She looked outside at Laney and Dad. “I didn’t like this whole idea, but she seems like she could be great for Dad.”

  “Did you see the phone thing earlier?” I asked.

  Josie just shrugged. “She knew it was an accident.”

  I shook my head. “That was fake. She never even checked it to see if it was fine. She just didn’t want me to see it.”

  “Why?”

  I said, “She’s hiding something.”

  Dad joined us and whispered, “You like her?”

  “She’s super,” Josie said.

  I smiled, but didn’t actually answer.

  Dad grabbed a bowl of pita chips. “Let’s see how she navigates the board—you know, how she handles going straight to jail without passing Go.”

  Laney bought every property she landed on, and before long me, Dad, and Josie were all bankrupt. We had a lot of laughs, but I watched her very carefully for any hint that there might actually be a snake under that exterior. I didn’t see anything suspicious, but I really wanted to get my hands on that phone.

  “This is one for the books,” Josie said.

  “I’ll say,” Dad said as he slid the paper money back into the box. “A real estate tycoon, you are.”

  Josie got up from the table. “Can you handle the cleanup while we go to the arcade?”

  “Sure thing.” He added, “Be home by ten.”

  I looked at my watch, crinkled my forehead, and then looked at Dad. “We’re not in eighth grade anymore,” I pointed out. “I think our curfew should reflect that.”

  He looked from me to Josie. “Thirty. Ten thirty.”

  Josie considered this a victory, but I wasn’t done negotiating.

  I crossed my arms in front of my chest.

  “Fine. I give up,” he said. “Ten forty-five and not a minute later.”

  “Deal,” I said.

  “Wait.” He waved me over. “Stay out of trouble.” He kissed the top of my head. Then he told Laney, “Those two.” He held up his finger. “They got me wrapped around it.”

  She said, “They’re great girls.”

  I paused at the door and watched Dad turn on the TV, then go into the kitchen to make coffee. Laney sat on the couch, slipped the phone out of her back pocket, poked in a password, and swiped her finger around the screen as she scanned it. Then she set it on the end table.

  “Josie, wait,” I said. “I need to get a peek at her phone.”

  She rolled her eyes. “For real?”

  “It’ll only take a minute.” I added, “Hurry, before the password locks.

  “Fine.” Josie stepped back into the living room. “Hey, Laney, can I talk to you for just a minute?”

  “Okay.” Laney followed Josie onto the back porch.

  I heard Josie say, “Here’s the thing about my dad…”

  I looked at the phone. No crack. Phew. Then I swiped through her camera roll. There were pictures of boats.

  Boat, boat, boat.

  Actually one boat. Lots of pictures of the same one. There was a cropped photo of its name, the Koala.

  I was just about to put the phone down when I flicked to a photo of a man. And I swiped through shot after shot of this guy. He wasn’t posing; he didn’t look like he knew his picture was being taken. I really quickly took out my phone and snapped a picture of the man. She’s dating my dad and has all these pics of some other guy?

  I put her phone back as Josie and Laney returned.

  Laney said, “
You girls are so sweet to worry about your dad.”

  I smiled at her, and I promise that my fake smile was more believable than Laney’s. “Thanks for understanding,” I said, even though I didn’t know what Josie had been talking about.

  Josie said, “Let’s get going.”

  We left.

  “So?” Josie asked.

  “I was right.” I told her about the pictures.

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Maybe.”

  Suddenly Josie started racing.

  “Or maybe it does,” I said to myself.

  I knew I couldn’t keep up, and I didn’t try. I didn’t want to wipe out in these gladiator sandals, plus this denim skirt wasn’t really made for a marathon. I had managed to talk Josie into a more stylish outfit—I loaned her a cute tank top, cropped leggings, and Chucks—and it was still comfortable enough for her to race a spontaneous 5K.

  “I give up,” I said.

  “Stell, let’s start jogging tomorrow, okay?”

  “Why?”

  “Because you should be able to zip to the arcade without losing your breath!”

  “Nah,” I said.

  “Well, I didn’t want to go to a bonfire, but I did.”

  “Touché,” I conceded. “Fine.”

  Twenty-Two Stella

  Arcade

  June 21 (Continued)

  Dario was already at the Skee-Ball section of the arcade. “Ever notice that some of the lanes mysteriously acquire more balls than others? Don’t worry. I fixed it. They each have seven.”

  “I’m gonna get popcorn,” I said. “Anyone want anything?”

  “No. But you gotta do me a favor,” he said.

  “What?” Josie asked. “I’ll do it while Stell gets the popcorn.”

  “You have to go in the bathroom and wash your hands.”