Cry of the Sea (16 page)

Remarkably, we made it to the Rescue Center
in one piece. Carter pulled into a spot, got out of the car, and
slammed the door shut behind him. I saw him grab the door handle
and yank on it. The door didn’t budge. Locked.

“What the...” He pounded on the door. “Dr.
Schneider? Dr. Schneider!”

Nervously, I stepped up behind him. “Maybe he
locked it so he could go to lunch?”

“That’s not like him,” Carter said, rifling
through his key ring and finding the one that matched the front
door. “He hasn’t been answering the phone either. Not the one here
or his cell.”

“Do you think he’s okay?”

“I don’t know.”

Carter got the door open and held it for me
to step inside. All the lights were off in the front room except
for the glow coming from the aquariums and the tide pool. I slipped
on a pile of mail on the floor that had been put through the slot
in the door. I bent over and picked it all up so Carter wouldn’t
slip on it too. The double doors to the lab were closed. Nothing
seemed out of place to me, but it was pretty dark and I wasn’t so
familiar with the place that I would know what might have been
moved.

After entering behind me, Carter locked the
front door again. “Just in case,” he whispered as he passed me and
headed for the double doors. Those weren’t locked, but all the
lights were off in there too. Windows high up in the walls allowed
a touch of sunlight to leak in around the closed blinds, and there
was more of that glow from the racks of aquariums. Schneider’s
office door was open and a bit of light came from there, like a
desk lamp had been left on.

“Could he have fallen asleep in there?” I
asked.

Carter shrugged. I guessed that wasn’t out of
the realm of possibility. Of course that didn’t explain him not
answering the phone. The ringing would’ve woken him up. “Dr.
Schneider?” Carter said in a voice a touch louder than a whisper as
he approached the office. “You here?”

We stepped around his door and found his
small office empty. The glow was a combination of a small desk lamp
and the screen saver on his computer, a series of slides featuring
ocean mammals. I bet that was a Christmas present someone gave him
one year, thinking it was the ‘perfect thing’ for that old nerdy
uncle that didn’t quite fit in at the family gathering.

“Where could he be?” Carter asked, not really
intending for me to answer.

I offered some suggestions anyway. “The
library? The university? Some kind of lab? Home? Lunch?”

I guess I had lunch on the brain, since I was
whisked away at lunch break before I had a chance to eat. A grumble
from my stomach punctuated that thought.

Carter poked around Dr. Schneider’s desk as
if looking for a note. “No. He would’ve answered his cell phone.
Something’s happened.” He lifted his eyes to me sharply and then
out the office door to the tanks. “You don’t think...”

Pushing past me, he practically ran toward
the mermaid’s tank.

“What is it, Carter?” I asked, chasing after
him. “You think something’s happened to the mermaid? The place
doesn’t look like anyone broke in. It looks just like we left
it.”

“No it doesn’t.”

Carter was right. The large tank was farthest
from the bleak light of the windows, and in a pretty dark corner,
but now that I was paying attention I could clearly see that the
moldy blankets had been removed. The tank was inky dark, and I
didn’t detect any motion from inside as we got closer. Dread ripped
through me. I slowed down, not really wanting to see if the mermaid
was floating lifeless at the top.

“June,” Carter said over his shoulder. “Catch
that light switch over on the wall next to the cabinet, will you? I
can’t see enough.”

I brushed the light switch on the wall and
set the room awash in florescent light and winced at the
brightness.

Carter cussed and banged the glass. Not quite
the reaction I’d expect if the mermaid had died. I dared to look.
The mermaid wasn’t floating at the top or sunk at the bottom. She
was simply gone. The tank was empty.

“Where is she?” I asked.

“How the Hell would I know where she is?”

“Maybe she’s dead,” I said. “Maybe Dr.
Schneider put her with the other mermaid bodies.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Carter said. He moved to the
back examination room, a walled-off room in the far back corner of
the facility. I hadn’t dared to go into that room yesterday because
I really didn’t want to see the dead bodies or how they were being
kept. But now I followed Carter because I had to know. Every step I
took felt so heavy. My heart hurt, and my body felt really tired
all of a sudden. The grief that overwhelmed me made me want to cry
so badly, but I fought it off with a good solid bite on my lower
lip.

We stepped into the room and Carter let out
another couple expletives. I understood why. There, along the wall
was a large empty tank about six feet long and four feet high. It
was empty save for a lot of ice water.

“Is that where they were being kept?” I
asked, gagging at the rotten fish smell coming off of the dirty
salt water.

Carter nodded and started pacing the floor.
“There’s no water on the floor, so it had to have dried up. The ice
is mostly melted. They were taken out of here hours ago. Nothing’s
really been moved out of place, and the locks weren’t damaged. It
doesn’t look like anyone broke in here. Dr. Schneider must’ve just
let them in.”

“Let who in? Carter, do you think someone
stole the mermaids?”

He shot me a look that froze my blood. “This
is all your fault.”

“My fault? Because of the video?”

“Someone found out they were here. Someone
came and took them.”

“My video didn’t say anything about where we
took the mermaids.”

“No,” he answered, “but this is the closest
facility to Grayland Beach, which was mentioned. You don’t have to
be a genius to figure it out. I’m kind of surprised there isn’t a
crowd out front banging the doors down for a peek.”

“Oh come on, Carter,” I said. “You’re being a
little ridiculous. It’s just a stupid video that no one is going to
take seriously. Maybe Dr. Schneider just moved them somewhere else.
Maybe he decided to dissect them after all.”

“Where?” Carter shouted. “This is his lab.
Where else would he have taken them?”

“Well, where is he now?” I asked. “Surely, if
someone stole the mermaids out of here he’d still be here. He’d
have called you. The police would be here.”

“Maybe whoever took the mermaids took him as
well,” Carter suggested. “Maybe they...” He stopped himself and
shook his head.

“What? Maybe they killed him? Is that what
you think?” I grabbed his shoulder. “Who would have done that?
That’s kind of crazy.”

But a part of me knew it wasn’t. I thought of
the fear I felt when Mom’s call from Alaska came early the morning
before. Hadn’t I been afraid that Affron thugs would have done the
very same thing to her for nosing into their business? It didn’t
happen, though. She was fine. So, my worries weren’t founded.
Surely Affron didn’t really have thugs. That was just TV stuff.

Carter shrugged me off and ran his hands
through his blond hair and clenched it with his fists, his eyes
closed tightly. “Think. Think. Where could they be?”

“The computer,” I said, the thought popping
out of my mouth the moment I had it. “It’s still on. The lights are
out, the door was locked, but the computer was still on. He left,
planning to come back.”

“That doesn’t mean anything. They could’ve
come so early this morning he hadn’t even opened up the place yet
and turned the lights on. I’ll bet you ten to one that Dr. S. slept
here last night in that office. He has before.”

I threw up my hands in defeat, and that’s
when I realized my right hand was still clutching all the mail I’d
picked up on my way in. I hadn’t taken a moment to put it down
yet.

“What’s that?” Carter said, pointing at the
mail.

“Nothing. Mail for the Center, I guess.”

“No, that one, right there.” He grabbed one
of the envelopes out of my hand. “From Affron.”

“What?” I grabbed it right back. Sure enough,
the envelope had the Affron logo on the return address corner.
“What’s this about?” Carter plucked it from my hands once more and
opened it. “Are you going to get in trouble for that?”

“I work here, right?”

“I guess so.” I really wasn’t sure if being
an intern gave him the right to open Dr. Schneider’s mail, but I
also really wanted to know what was inside.

He pulled out a two page, three-fold
application. “It’s for a grant. Some kind of research grant.” He
showed it to me. At the top of the form was the Affron logo and
their feel-good motto:
We Make the World Better
.

“Why would he have a grant application from
Affron of all places?” I asked, thinking maybe I needed to call my
dad. This was his area of expertise.

Carter gestured to all the equipment around
us. “This place is run on grants. It couldn’t operate without
donations and grants. The government puts a tiny amount into it,
and there is some funding from the University, but otherwise it’s
all grant money. Dr. S. does a lot of the grant writing himself,
and he was going to teach me how to do it too.”

“But Affron? That’s kind of contradictory,
don’t you think?”

After giving the application another quick
look over, Carter strode out of the examination room and back to
Dr. Schneider’s office. I really wanted to bolt to the back door
just for a whiff of fresh air. My head was getting pretty dizzy
from the odor in this place, but I stuck close. Once in Dr.
Schneider’s office, I grabbed a tissue from a box on the shelf
behind his desk and put it to my face to help me breathe something
that wasn’t so foul. Carter moved the mouse around until the
desktop showed up. He started opening folders and poking
around.

“What are you looking for?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. Instead he told me to look
through the office drawers and files to see if I found anything
else that was from Affron.

“But why?”

Carter looked at me right then like I was an
idiot. “It’s kind of weird timing, isn’t it?” he asked. “A research
grant application from Affron? The day after we find mermaids on
the beach? The morning after a couple fake rescue team workers from
Affron show up at our door with animals that clearly weren’t in the
oil spill? Do you see the coincidence?”

“But this came in the mail, Carter,” I said.
“Snail mail. Take-a-couple-days-to-get-here-mail.”

“Not if it was mailed from nearby and, say,
yesterday morning.” He went back to opening files.

“Does Affron have an office in Washington?” I
asked. I opened the top drawer of a metal filing cabinet in the
corner.

“Oh, probably something in Seattle,” he said.
“That would make sense. I know they have some kind of outfit up in
Vancouver. That’s not exactly far from here. Just a couple hours.”
He clicked the mouse. “Here’s something! Oh. Never mind.”

I flipped through file folders with tabs that
held no meaning for me but apparently meant a lot to Dr. Schneider
because each folder held a lot of paper. It was hard to get to the
back ones. “So, you think that Dr. Schneider called Affron
yesterday morning after we dropped off the mermaids and asked for a
grant to research them?”

“Yeah,” Carter said. “Something like that. I
think those guys that came last night knew about the mermaids and
would have taken them then if we hadn’t been there. So, they came
back after we were gone.”

“Dr. Schneider doesn’t seem like he would do
that,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought too,” Carter
replied. “I’ve always respected him. Until today.”

I opened the second drawer down and found
what I was looking for: a tab marked “Grants and Donations”. I
pulled it out and found copies of applications, letters, and check
stubs from various grants. They weren’t in any particular order,
and as I went through them I found ones dated as far back as five
years and some as recent as a few months ago. Every time I saw the
Affron logo I pulled it aside. By the time I was done I had at
least fifteen check stubs from Affron. A quick estimation in my
head had them donating close to $250,000 to this institution over
the past several years. I handed the stack to Carter who was in the
middle of trying different possible passwords to open Dr.
Schneider’s email.

“Looks like Affron is our main benefactor,”
he said.

“Looks that way,” I agreed. “Dad’s gonna be
pissed when he hears about this.”

“You think?”

“He would have never used this facility if
he’d known.”

“He didn’t have a choice.”

“I should call him.”

“Please don’t.” That voice came from Dr.
Schneider’s office door. We both looked up to see the skinny old
man standing there. Neither of us had heard him enter the building.
He was still in yesterday’s clothes. His glasses exaggerated the
deep purple bags under his eyes. And I think he was shaking a
little, like he had Palsy. “Juniper, please don’t call your father.
I’ve had enough humiliation for one day. I know what you two must
think of me.”

“We’re not sure what to think, sir,” I said.
“We’ve gone back and forth from wondering if you were kidnapped or
killed to being the thief who organized it all.”

“Oh, I was hardly any of that,” he said,
weakly moving into the office and lowering himself into the
cushioned reading chair by the bookshelf. “I am far too unimportant
for any of that.”

“So what
did
happen here?” Carter
asked. “You haven’t been answering your phone. I had to come down
to see for myself.”

“Is that what you’re doing on my computer?”
Dr. Schneider asked, pointing at the screen.

Carter didn’t bother to apologize for their
invasion of the scientist’s office. He only spoke in icy tones that
betrayed his distrust of the man. “Just trying to understand a few
things.” With a click from his right finger, he closed the web
service.