A Mischief of Mermaids

by Suzanne Harper

  Still, what were the odds that she was about to have yet another paranormal adventure?

  “There’s got to be a reasonable explanation for those lights,” she whispered to herself as she finally closed her eyes. “After all, weird things don’t happen in threes, not really. . . .”

  Chapter

  FOUR

  Poppy was awakened the next morning by the sound of her mother shouting.

  “Rolly, watch it—aggh!” Mrs. Malone yelled.

  In a flash, Poppy pulled on her T-shirt and shorts and raced up to the deck, where she saw Mrs. Malone clutching her head and leaning over in a most peculiar way. Rolly stood some distance away, holding an old fishing pole that Mr. Malone had bought in a flurry of enthusiasm and that had gathered dust in every attic of every house they lived in ever since.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Poppy.

  “Rolly is still trying to catch that silly lake monster,” Mrs. Malone said through gritted teeth. “The problem is that the only thing he’s caught is me.”

  Poppy looked more closely and saw that a fishing lure was tangled in Mrs. Malone’s hair.

  “Hold still. I think I can get it out,” Poppy said, reaching forward to unsnag the lure.

  “Ouch!” cried Mrs. Malone.

  “Sorry.” Poppy glared at Rolly. “What did you think you were doing?”

  “Practicing,” said Rolly. “First, I have to practice casting. That’s when you put the hook in the water. Then I have to practice pulling the fish in.” He lifted the pole experimentally and began to wind the reel.

  “Don’t!” cried out Mrs. Malone, putting both hands on her head and stumbling toward him. “I am not a fish!”

  “I know,” said Rolly. “But Mr. Cameron said Ol’ Mugwump is huge. He’s as big as a whale.” He gave Mrs. Malone a measuring look. “I think you’ll be good practice.”

  Mrs. Malone stopped in her tracks. Poppy took advantage of this to yank the lure out, not bothering to be gentle, and Mrs. Malone strode forward to snatch the fishing pole out of Rolly’s hands.

  “Excuse me,” she said in an awful voice. “I’m sure I must have misheard you, Rolly. I’m sure you didn’t say that I look like a whale!”

  “No, of course I didn’t,” said Rolly. “I wouldn’t say that.” He sounded so honestly puzzled that Mrs. Malone relaxed a little.

  “Well, good—” she began.

  “Whales have waterspouts on the top of their heads,” he pointed out. “You don’t have a waterspout. And whales don’t wear clothes. Or dye their hair—”

  “I do not dye my hair!” shouted Mrs. Malone. “Honestly, sometimes I don’t have a clue how your mind works.”

  Poppy raised her eyebrows. Mrs. Malone was usually the one member of the family who always took Rolly’s side. When he wrote with a black marker all over a freshly painted wall, it was a sign of artistic genius. When he climbed on the roof and methodically threw three dozen eggs to the ground, it was a sign of scientific curiosity. When he took every pillow in the house to the backyard, made a giant pile, and almost jumped off the porch roof (Poppy had grabbed him just in time), it was a sign of innovation, risk taking, and creative thinking.

  But getting a fishing lure caught in her hair and being compared to a whale seemed to have been the last straw.

  “I told you it was a bad idea to give Rolly a fishing pole,” Poppy pointed out.

  “Yes, well, thank you for that advice,” Mrs. Malone said tartly. “Of course, it’s always easy to see what will happen after the fact—”

  Poppy decided not to point out that she had warned her mother before the fact. When someone has been caught with a fishing lure and called a whale and revealed as a person who possibly dyed her hair—well, in Poppy’s opinion, that person had already suffered quite enough.

  When Poppy finally made her way over to where two kayaks were hung on the side of the boat, she found that Will and Henry had already put on their life jackets and were taking down one of the kayaks.

  “Kayaking’s not hard at all,” Will was saying. “Not once you get the hang of it, anyway.”

  “Oh, yeah?” said Henry, panting a little as he helped Will lower the kayak to the deck. “I tried canoeing once at summer camp and I just kept going around in circles.”

  “Will and I can teach you,” Poppy said, grabbing a life jacket for herself. “We learned two summers ago, when Mom and Dad were trying to track down the Everglades Skunk Ape.”

  Henry’s eyes brightened. “Really? I’ve never heard of a skunk ape. Did you actually see one?”

  “Nope,” said Will. “But we did have a close encounter with the Everglades Monster Snake—”

  “For the last time, nothing was pulling you down to the bottom of the swamp,” said Poppy. “You just got a vine wrapped around your foot.”

  “It was a Monster Snake,” said Will stubbornly. “Not only that, it was a Monster Snake with bad intentions. It would have drowned me if I hadn’t managed to wrest free of its evil grasp.”

  Poppy winked at Henry. “You just keep telling that story, Will,” she said. “That’s what you’re good at.”

  Then she looked at the kayak they were about to launch. Will and Henry had taken down a double, which left another double and a single kayak.

  “We’re taking a double, so I can teach Henry how to kayak. You can take the single, Poppy,” Will said briskly. He nodded to Henry. “Come on, let’s lower it over the side—”

  Poppy’s smile dimmed and she felt her spirits droop a little. Instantly, she told herself she was being silly. After all, she liked exploring on her own. And she knew from experience how bossy Will could get when he was trying to steer anything (kayak, canoe, paddleboat, or bumper car) with another person. She certainly wasn’t looking forward to kayaking with him again.

  Still, she thought, I could have taken the double with Henry. That would have worked just as well. . . .

  “Or I could go with Henry and you could take the single kayak,” Poppy said casually. “I think that would be more fun for Henry. You always get mad when someone else is in your kayak. You always start shouting.”

  Will glared at her. “Only when certain people collide with a submerged log.”

  “You said to paddle harder,” Poppy snapped. “So I did.”

  “Yes, I remember,” he snapped back. “Which is why we rammed into a log at the speed of sound, which is why we tipped over, which is how I ended up being pulled underwater by the Everglades Monster Snake—”

  “Got your foot tangled by a vine,” Poppy said under her breath.

  “And almost drowned,” Will finished.

  Poppy opened her mouth to argue, but before she could say anything, Will grabbed the front of the double kayak. “Henry, you take the back and help me lower it over the side.”

  Henry glanced at Poppy and gave an apologetic little shrug. “We can go out next time,” he said. “Once I get the hang of this.”

  “Sure,” she said, trying to sound as if it didn’t matter to her one way or the other. “Then I can just correct everything Will’s taught you.”

  Henry grinned, jumped up on the railing, and launched himself into the air, landing in the water with a huge splash. Will followed him, leaving Poppy to get her kayak down by herself. By the time she was paddling away from the houseboat, Henry and Will were already more than a dozen yards away.

  “This is the forward stroke,” she could hear Will saying. “See, like this.” He demonstrated.

  “Got it,” said Henry, copying Will’s movement perfectly.

  “And this is the sweep stroke,” said Will.

  “Got it.”

  “And this,” added Will with a grin, “is the tip-over stroke.”

  With that, he suddenly reached with his paddle, leaning out so far that the kayak rolled over in the water. A few seconds later, Will and Henry both came to the surface, spluttering.

  “You just learned your first lesson, Henry,” Poppy said.

  “How to get
out of an overturned kayak?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “How you should never trust Will.”

  “Everyone tips over sooner or later,” said Will, treading water, his eyes dancing with mischief. “I just wanted to get it out of the way. Now we won’t be waiting and wondering about when it’s going to happen.”

  “Well, I’m going to paddle to the shoreline if you want to come along,” Poppy said. “I brought some specimen jars and my microscope with me. I thought I’d collect some water samples for analysis—”

  “Stop, stop.” Will held a hand to his head as if he were about to faint. “I think I’m going to pass out from all the excitement.”

  Henry laughed. It was just a small laugh, but Poppy felt hurt all the same.

  “I happen to think that’s interesting,” she said coolly.

  “Sorry, Poppy,” said Henry, but he was biting his lip not to smile. “We weren’t making fun of you, really. It’s just that collecting water samples on vacation is such a . . . well, such a Poppy thing to do.”

  “If you’re going to do a science project, why not look for Ol’ Mugwump?” asked Will. “At least finding a giant catfish would be cool. Algae is just lame.”

  “It would also be a waste of time,” she snapped. “You know that Oliver Asquith makes all that stuff up for his TV shows.”

  “I think Poppy’s right,” said Henry. “I’ve lived in Austin all my life. There’s nothing spooky or weird in this lake. I would have heard about it.”

  “But a monster sounds more exciting,” said Will. “It sounds more fun. . . .”

  They continued to argue in a friendly way as Will showed Henry how to get back into a kayak, a maneuver that took more time—and involved more splashing and yelling—than Poppy would have thought possible.

  As she waited, her thoughts drifted.

  The water was so calm today, she thought. People always compare calm water to a mirror, and today she could see why. She leaned over slightly to look at her reflection. . . .

  Out of the corner of her eye, Poppy saw a shining, spangled scaly thing slide under her kayak. She jerked upright again.

  “Hey, what was that?” she asked.

  “What was what?” Henry panted as he tried to get his legs back into the kayak.

  She leaned over, peering into the water, but whatever she saw—or thought she saw—had vanished.

  “I thought I saw something swim under my kayak,” she said. “It looked like a fish.”

  “No kidding,” said Will, deadpan. “That’s incredible. I mean here we are, on a lake, and you see a fish in the water. Amazing.”

  “It looked like a big fish,” said Poppy, ignoring his sarcasm. She squinted against the sun and tilted her head, first to the right, then to the left, hoping to get another glimpse. “Really big. Enormous.”

  “Maybe you spotted Ol’ Mugwump,” said Will.

  “No such thing,” she said automatically, not bothering to look up.

  “It could have been a catfish,” suggested Henry. “Some of them can get pretty big.”

  “It didn’t look like a catfish,” she said, remembering that flash of blue and silver, that supple, curving movement.

  Henry grinned. “What—can you identify different species of fish on sight?”

  Will rolled his eyes. “Do you really have to ask?”

  Henry’s grin widened, and Poppy felt herself blush.

  “When I found out we were moving to Austin, naturally I started researching the flora and the fauna of the area—” she said stiffly.

  “Naturally,” Henry said, biting his lip to hide his smile.

  “Okay, so it wasn’t a catfish,” said Will. “And it wasn’t Mugwump the Monster. So what was it?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Poppy slowly. “It didn’t look like any of the photos I’ve studied. It almost didn’t look like a fish at all. It looked too . . . I don’t know . . . elegant.”

  “Elegant!” The boys hooted.

  Poppy felt her face heat up. “Yes,” she said. “Elegant. And you can laugh, but I saw it. You didn’t.”

  “It would be better if it was monstrous and horrible looking,” said Will. “Then we could sell your story to one of those supermarket newspapers that like weird stories. You know”—he put on a deep voice—“‘A Mutant from the Deep!’”

  “‘The Loathsome Leviathan!’” added Henry.

  “‘The Lake Travis Travesty!’” said Will.

  Poppy’s kayak rocked as something—something large and powerful—moved under her.

  “There!” she said, twisting in her seat to peer into the water. “Didn’t you feel that?”

  Will said, “Nope. Not a thing—”

  Poppy saw his eyes widen with surprise as his kayak pitched up and down. In the next instant, the swell of water had reached her.

  She heard Henry yell, “Whoa!”

  She saw Will lose his grip on his paddle.

  And before she could take a breath, her kayak flipped over and she found herself upside down in the water.

  Poppy opened her eyes automatically, even as she pulled her legs from the kayak and swam toward the surface. She couldn’t see much of anything.

  But somehow, even through the water drumming in her ears, she thought she heard something. . . .

  Before she could figure out what it was, she reached the surface. Her head popped above the water, and she took in a deep breath.

  A few feet away, Henry and Will were treading water next to their overturned kayak.

  “What happened?” Henry asked.

  Will blinked water out of his eyes. “It was that speedboat,” he said, glaring after a sleek white blur that was already disappearing into the distance. “It went by so fast, the wake flipped us over.”

  Poppy grabbed her kayak before it could float away, then swam closer to them. “The wake wasn’t that strong,” she said. “And the speedboat wasn’t that close.”

  Henry looked puzzled. “But what else could have tipped us over?”

  She hesitated, wondering whether to say anything. Will and Henry would probably laugh at her. They would probably turn whatever she said into a joke. They would probably tease her for days. And yet . . .

  A good scientist, she reminded herself, always tries to confirm her observations.

  “Did you, well, hear anything?” she asked. “When you were underwater?”

  “I wasn’t listening; I was trying not to drown,” Will said, rather grumpily. Once again, he and Henry were clambering back into their kayak. Will did not seem to find this exercise as appealing the second time around.

  “Come on,” he said to Henry. “Let’s see how fast we can get to that fallen oak tree over there.”

  They shot off for the distant shore, the spray from their paddles glittering in the sun.

  Poppy watched them go, trying not to feel as if she’d been left behind on purpose. Trying not to feel left behind, left alone, left out.

  The only sounds were the lapping of the water against her kayak and the distant sound of laughter from the Camerons’ houseboat.

  But Poppy knew what she had heard—a faint chiming sound, as if bells were ringing under the lake.

  If she didn’t know better, she would have said the bells sounded eerily like laughter. . . .

  Chapter

  FIVE

  That’s okay, Poppy was telling herself a couple of hours later. I’m glad I have a kayak to myself. I’m glad Will and Henry went off without me. I’m glad I’m on my own. Now I can go off to collect lake water without having anyone making fun of me.

  None of this was exactly the truth, but she repeated it over and over to herself as she began paddling. By the time she got to the small cove, she almost believed it.

  It was farther away than it had looked on the map. By the time she got there, she was hot and sweaty. She paddled along a small creek that led to the cove. There were trees overhanging the creek, providing welcome shade. Poppy took a drink from her water bottle a
nd paddled along more slowly, watching the fish and turtles in the water, listening to the birds in the trees, and, without noticing it, getting farther and farther from any of the boats on the lake.

  The creek widened and the cove, a small inlet of water, lay before her. Poppy gently paddled into the middle of the inlet, then pulled her paddle from the water and laid it across the kayak.

  For a few moments, she enjoyed just sitting still as her kayak rocked gently on the water. She tilted her head back to look at the cloudless blue sky and realized with surprise that the sun was beginning to set. She had been out longer than she thought. The sky directly above her was still pale blue and filled with light. But the shadows had begun to creep from under the trees, and near the horizon the sky was turning a deep blue.

  She glanced back at the houseboat, then looked at her watch. It had taken her almost two hours to get here, but then she had stopped often to fill a tiny bottle with water or to watch a turtle sunning itself on a rock. She could probably make it back to the houseboat in time for dinner, although she would be scolded for being out too long.

  If anyone even misses me, she thought, a trifle bitterly.

  Franny would be too busy with her new friend Ashley to spare anyone else a thought. Rolly would be focused on his pursuit of the lake monster. Mr. and Mrs. Malone would be deeply involved in their latest investigation. And Will and Henry . . .

  Poppy scowled ferociously.

  How long, she wondered, would it take for them to realize she wasn’t with them? How long would it take for them to get worried?

  She glared at the houseboat, then turned her back on it, picking up her paddle.

  If no one cares about where I am, she thought, straightening her shoulders, then I might as well see what’s around that next bend.

  As she began navigating her way through the narrow channel, she took a deep breath. The air smelled like cedar, wildflowers, and . . . wood smoke?