Emily Windsnap and the Siren's Secret (21 page)

I picked up another map and passed one to Mandy. Aaron grabbed a third. “Last one,” he said.

This was it, then. If we didn’t find a match in any of these, we didn’t have anywhere else to look. We
had
to find it.

We studied our maps in silence. Staring in front of me at the hand-drawn map, I scoured the real map, looking for anything that seemed to match.

“Hey, I think I’ve found something!” Aaron said suddenly. He was pointing at his map, tracing around the patterns on it and glancing up every few seconds at the one from the shell. Mandy and I left our own maps and crowded around him.

“Look — see that combination there?” He pointed to the group of numbers in the middle of the map that showed the depth of the water. “The numbers are the same on this one.”

I looked up to compare it with our original map. He was right! And there was something else, too, just a little to the side. “Look — the islands!” I said. “They’re not exactly the same, but they’re a pretty good match.”

“The library map has a lot more of them,” Mandy said. “Does that matter?”

Aaron shook his head. “I doubt it. Whoever drew this wasn’t trying to reproduce the whole thing.” He pointed to the island in the middle of the map, the one with the arrow pointing toward it. “They just needed to draw enough so that someone could find this island.”

“So that Melody could find it,” I added. We might not know who drew it, or why they drew it, or even why the sirens were really trapped in their underwater prison, but at least a small piece of the jigsaw was falling into place.

“And find what she’d lost,” Mandy finished.

Aaron folded up the new map and put it beside the shell and the original map. “And now we can go and find it,” he said.

“Whatever
it
is,” I said. I still wasn’t sure how we were going to find Melody’s lost thing when we didn’t even know what it was we were looking for. I had to hope that we’d know it when we saw it — if it was still there.

Aaron handed me the map. “Hold on to this,” he said. “I’ll put the others back.”

“Hang on,” Mandy said, reaching into her pocket and looking in her purse. She rifled through it and pulled out a card. “Got it!” she said, smiling. “My library card.”

Mandy passed me the card and went over to help Aaron put the other maps away.

“Don’t forget to bring the shell,” I said. Then I turned around — and walked straight into someone. “Ooh, sorry, I —” I stopped.

Mr. Beeston.

“What are you doing here?” I burst out.

“Whatever do you mean?” he blustered. “I’ve every right to come to my local library, I should think.” He scanned the three of us slowly with his beady eyes. “I might ask you the same thing,” he added.

“And I might give you the same answer,” I said, folding my arms.

“
Touché,
child,
touché,
” he said with a little laugh. I relaxed a bit. Mr. Beeston didn’t scare me anymore.

“Look, we’re just helping Mandy with some homework,” I said. He might not be a threat to us, but that didn’t mean I was going to start telling him what we were really doing here.

“Of course, of course, you carry on now,” he said lightly. He waved a hand to let me pass him. But as I did, he grabbed my arm. “What’s that?” he hissed.

I followed his eyes. He was looking at the table. More specifically, he was looking at the shell lying on it. His face had turned as white as the shell.

“It’s — we’re — I —”

“We found it on the beach,” Aaron said quickly, looking up at Mr. Beeston with what was probably meant to be a casual smile. “Pretty, isn’t it?” he added.

Mr. Beeston took a couple of steps toward him. He reached out toward the shell. His hand was shaking. “Isn’t it just,” he said. “Mind if I have a look?” he added in a voice that had as much forced casualness about it as Aaron’s smile.

Aaron glanced at me. I shrugged. We couldn’t exactly say no, could we? Mr. Beeston didn’t know anything about what we were doing, or how significant the shell was. Where was the harm in letting him see it?

“Sure.” Aaron held the shell out.

All three of us held our breath as we watched Mr. Beeston study the shell. He turned it over and over in his hands, holding it close to his eyes with the concentration of a watchmaker examining the workings of a particularly complex mechanism.

Aaron broke the silence. “I — er, I think we need to get going now,” he said. He held his hand out for the shell.

Mr. Beeston looked up. “What? Oh, yes, of course,” he said. He held out a reluctant hand to pass the shell back to Aaron. “Right you are,” he said to no one in particular. He seemed to have gone into a trance.

“Mr. Beeston, are you OK?” I asked.

He turned back to me, nodding vaguely. “Gosh, don’t you worry about me,” he said, flapping an arm as if to swat me away. “You be on your way now.” But then he froze. He was looking at my arm. Or rather, the map underneath it. Glancing from the map back to the shell in Aaron’s hand, he took a step closer toward me. “The maps,” he said. “What are they for?”

“They’re for my mom,” Aaron said quickly.

Mr. Beeston spun around. “I thought you said you were helping Mandy with her homework?”

“They are,” Mandy said. “Aaron’s mom is going to help me. It’s for geography. She knows a lot about the subject we’re doing at the moment.”

I could feel my face heat up. It was
so
obvious we were lying. I felt like a criminal — until I remembered something. We hadn’t actually done anything wrong. Then I remembered something else. Shona! If we stood any chance of saving her, we had to get to the island, find whatever it was that Melody had lost, and get the shell back to the sirens before she noticed it was missing.

“Come on,” I said, heading for the counter and passing Mandy’s library card over to the librarian along with the map. “We need to get going.” I looked at Aaron and added pointedly, “Your mom will be wondering where we’ve gone.”

And with that, the three of us shoved past Mr. Beeston, shuffled out of the library, and ran back to the beach.

“Be careful, OK?” Mandy stood on the shore under the pier, biting her nails and pacing up and down along the water’s edge. The beach was almost deserted. Just a few people here and there: an elderly couple arm in arm in the distance, their faces bent close together. Someone else walking in the opposite direction, throwing sticks into the sea for his dog to chase.

“We will be,” I replied.

“And come back if you need anything.”

I smiled. “We will.”

Aaron glanced around one last time and took a step into the water. “We’d better go,” he said.

“You sure you’ve got it all in there?” I asked, tapping my head. He’d spent the last half hour studying the map and committing it to memory.

“Every symbol and every digit,” he said. I believed him. I’d never met anyone with a memory like his. All he had to do was look at information, and it was stored in his brain. Maybe that was what happened when you spent the first thirteen years of your life with nothing much to do except study a whole bunch of maps and books.

“And you’ve got the shell?”

He patted his big jacket pocket in reply. “It’ll be safe — don’t worry,” he said.

I glanced around, too, before joining him at the water’s edge. “Come on, then,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Mandy started to walk away. Then she stopped and turned. “Hey,” she called.

I looked up. “What?”

“Good luck.”

I smiled. “Thanks.”

She nodded and walked away. I looked around one last time, then dived into the water and swam away from Brightport.

“Are you sure we’re heading the right way?” We’d been swimming close to the surface so we’d see the island when we got there. But we must have been out here for at least an hour, and there was no sign of an island anywhere.

Long, deep swells lifted us up and carried us along as we scanned the horizon.

“We should be nearly there,” Aaron said, squinting into the distance. “That way. Come on.”

He dived back under the surface, and I followed him.

Moments later, I noticed that the water was changing. The dark rocks below us were becoming more scattered. Stretches of sand started appearing in between them.

Aaron glanced back at me. I swam harder to catch up to him. “It’s getting warmer,” I said.

He nodded. “Getting shallower,” he said. “This is where the depth numbers started getting lower. We’re nearly there.”

His words spurred me on, and I kept pace with him as we swam in silence. The water grew warmer still. The dark brooding rays and sharks we’d been passing along our way were replaced by brightly colored fish darting along beside us in long rows and pointed formations like line dancers. It was as though they were escorting us.
This way, this way. Nearly there. Follow our moves.

And then the water was so shallow I could see the bottom right below me. My tail brushed sand; reeds stroked my stomach as I floated across them. I stuck my head above the surface and looked around. An island!

“We’re here!” Aaron breathed as we pulled ourselves on to the shore.

I sat watching our tails slowly flap at the water’s edge, then melt away as our legs returned. “You’re sure this is the right island?”

“Positive,” Aaron said. “Come on, let’s see if we can find whatever it is we’re meant to be looking for.”

I followed him away from the shore, and we started to make our way around the island. It was long and narrow, so I could see the opposite side from where we were. The beach we’d swum up to stretched all the way along one side, from what I could see. Beyond that it was rocky, with a couple of small hills and a few trees dotted here and there. It shouldn’t take us long to get around.

Just a shame we didn’t know what we were looking for.

Half an hour later, we’d walked all the way from one end of the island to the other, and still had no idea.

Half an hour after that, we’d covered the whole coastline, the rocky hills, every tree — and
still
had no idea.

“This is hopeless,” I said, flopping down to sit on a rock. “There’s nothing here.”

Aaron searched around, pulling his hair away from his face, looking this way and that. “There must be something,” he said. “There has to be.” He sat down beside me. “Melody was asking the shell to help her find something. Inside the shell we find a map. The map leads us here. It
has
to be here.”

“I know — I agree, but it
isn’t
here. Whatever ‘it’ is.”

Aaron chewed a fingernail. “I just don’t get it. What was she trying to find?”

I stared out to sea, seeing nothing but blue ocean stretching out in a huge flat expanse, as it always did. As it had done for years and years.

Years and years . . . ? Of course! “Aaron,” I said. “Morvena told us the sirens had been down there for years.”

Aaron tilted his head. “Yes? And?”

“So Melody must have had the shell for years. Whatever she’s looking for . . .” I let my sentence trail away. I didn’t want to say the rest of it out loud.

“It might have gone,” he said, finishing it for me.

I nodded. “That makes sense.”

We sat in silence for a while, staring out to sea. I picked up handfuls of sand and let the grains trickle through my fingers.

“We’ll have to get back there,” Aaron said. “Tell Morvena what we found.”

“What we didn’t find, you mean.”

Aaron’s forehead crinkled into a frown. “I just don’t see what else we can do,” he said.

“I know. But if we leave, does that mean we’re giving up on Shona? Giving up on any possibility of getting her out of there?”

Aaron took hold of my hand. Wiping the sand from my palm, he stroked it gently. “Of course it doesn’t,” he said, smiling at me. “We’re not giving up on anyone.” He stood up, pulling me up with him. “Let’s get back there, tell Morvena and Shona everything, and we’ll work out a plan together.”

And I don’t know if it was because we were walking along the beach hand in hand or because Aaron’s words had given me a bit of hope, but as we walked, I felt lighter and more positive. He was right. We weren’t giving up at all. I’d
never
give up on Shona. We’d get her out of there!