A Mischief of Mermaids

by Suzanne Harper

  “I can get the Geiger counter from the boat—” Poppy began.

  “Nah, that’s okay,” said Will. “If we keep stopping to take readings, we’ll just slow down our investigation.”

  Henry was bouncing on his toes as if he couldn’t wait to hit the trail. “Maybe next time,” he said. “I’ll call my aunt and ask her to pick us up when we’re done, okay?”

  And with that, Will and Henry ran off.

  “You’re going to wish you had a Geiger counter,” Poppy muttered darkly as she watched them go. “When you find a circle of smoking, scorched earth, you’re going to wish you had a way to measure ionizing radiation over time—”

  Then she felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned to see Mrs. Malone smiling at her.

  “We really need someone to research all the UFO sightings reported in this area,” she said. “After all, if this is an alien hot spot, last night wasn’t the first time they visited. I know how you love to go to the library, so I was wondering . . .”

  Poppy sighed. “Sure,” she said. “That sounds like fun, too.”

  Chapter

  EIGHT

  The next morning all the Malones got up, got dressed, and got away from the house as soon as they could. Mr. Malone sped off to the dock, where he planned to personally oversee the houseboat repair, urging the workers on so that they would complete it ahead of schedule. Franny went back to the lake to spend the day with Ashley. Even Will managed to be out of bed by eight o’clock, ready to head over to Henry’s house, where Henry’s aunt was going to drive them back to the lake to resume their hike.

  “Be sure to get home in time for dinner,” Mrs. Malone said as Will dashed through the kitchen. She pulled a frozen chicken from the freezer and thumped it on the kitchen table. “We’re having coq au vin with roasted vegetables—”

  “Thanks for the warning,” said Will. “I’ll put the fire department on speed dial.”

  “I don’t think that’s quite fair,” said Mrs. Malone. “The recipe your grandmother sent me said that igniting brandy adds extra flavor. How was I to know that your father added an extra cup when I wasn’t looking?”

  “Hey, I happen to like the sound of sirens during dinner,” said Will, grabbing the piece of toast that had just popped up from the toaster. “It adds atmosphere.”

  “Will!” said Poppy, who had been making the toast for herself. “That was my breakfast.”

  “Thanks. Remind me to pay you back some day.” Will grinned and ran out of the house, letting the screen door slam shut behind him.

  Mrs. Malone sat down and opened the little memo book that she used to write her To Do lists each day. “Well, at least I’ll have a few minutes of peace and quiet to do some planning,” she said to Poppy. “Things have been in such a whirl that I haven’t had a moment to think about the Machu Picchu trip your father and I are planning or go to the grocery store or start on new research or anything!”

  She picked up a pencil stub, gazed into space for a moment, then began jotting down notes. Poppy grumpily threw another piece of bread in the toaster and stood frowning at it, her arms crossed.

  For a few minutes, there was no sound in the kitchen except an occasional thump from upstairs, where Rolly was supposed to be getting dressed. (Both Poppy and Mrs. Malone ignored the thumps; it was only the sound of crashes or breaking glass that caused real concern.)

  Eventually, Mrs. Malone looked over at Poppy and said, “You know, the toast won’t get done any sooner because you’re staring at it.”

  “I’m not staring at the toast; I’m thinking,” Poppy said, keeping her eyes fixed on the toaster.

  “I know, dear, you always are,” said Mrs. Malone. “But if you’re thinking about Henry—”

  “I’m not!”

  “Of course not,” Mrs. Malone agreed. “I’m just saying that if you were, I’d imagine you’d be thinking about how nice a friend he is and how you can do things with him on your own sometimes, just as Will can do things with him on his own.”

  Poppy’s eyes slid sideways to look at her mother. “I might be thinking that,” she said, “if I bothered to think about him at all. Which I don’t.”

  “Naturally you don’t,” Mrs. Malone said. “It would be a wonder if you did! You have so many other, more important things to think about—”

  “I do!” said Poppy. “Millions of more important things!”

  “You know what always gets my mind off my troubles?” asked Mrs. Malone in a cheery voice.

  Poppy gave her a suspicious glance. “I don’t have troubles.”

  “Analyzing hours and hours of videotape,” said Mrs. Malone, beaming. “Before you know it, your mind has gone completely blank! I always find that a delightful sensation.”

  “I already have research plans, remember?” said Poppy, snatching the toast from the toaster and burning her fingers in the process. “Ow. I’m going to do a historical survey of UFO sightings at the library.”

  “Oh yes, of course.” Mrs. Malone nodded. She looked at the list she had been writing and sighed. “Still, if you did want to stay home, I’d be glad of the help. I don’t know where I’ll find the time to do all this, I really don’t—”

  She was interrupted by Rolly, who appeared at the kitchen door clutching a bow and arrow. The arrow had a stone arrowhead on one end and bright feathers on the other. He was also, Poppy noted, wearing a pink spangled tutu which she thought she recognized from a dance recital she had been forced to appear in when she was six.

  Mrs. Malone’s eyes widened. She dropped her notebook on the table and said in a strangled voice, “Rolly, put down that arrow at once!”

  “Why?” His beady eyes got even beadier as he tried to stare Mrs. Malone down.

  “Because that is your father’s,” said Mrs. Malone, who began edging toward him. “He brought it back from his trip to Massachusetts, when he researched that roving band of Pukwudgies. . . .”

  “So?” said Rolly. “He’s not using it now.”

  Poppy didn’t bother to listen to the argument that was brewing. Instead, she spread some peanut butter on her toast and sat down at the table to eat. She picked up her mother’s notebook and flipped it open, just in case there was anything interesting on today’s To Do list.

  The first item was dull: grocery shopping.

  Milk (remember pint of cream for fairy dishes)

  Eggs

  Bigfoot bait—1 lb. chicken livers, 1/2 lb. rabbit kidneys, 2–3 ham hocks

  Peanut butter—large jar

  Sun god offering for Machu Picchu—maize (or just can of creamed corn?)

  BREAD!!!

  As Poppy read, Mrs. Malone gingerly squeezed behind her chair and headed toward Rolly, saying, “But that bow is very valuable. It’s not a toy for little boys to play with.”

  “I’m not little,” Rolly growled. “And I’m not playing. I’m going to use it to get Mugwump.” He looked thoughtful. “Is it hard to shoot a fish?”

  “Yes, indeed. In fact, it’s quite difficult,” said Mrs. Malone, moving a little closer. “Practically impossible!”

  Poppy rolled her eyes. If there was one way to make sure Rolly would do something, it was to tell him that it was impossible. She turned her attention back to her mother’s list. As usual, Mrs. Malone’s mind only focused on household chores for a short time before wandering to the more interesting aspects of paranormal research:

  Get proton precession magnetometer fixed

  (And it was about time, Poppy thought. The proton precession magnetometer had been wonky for months, ever since Mr. Malone had decided to use it to find ancient burial grounds that might, with luck, have a curse attached to them. Unfortunately, he had been so immersed in his search that he had tripped over a rock, causing both him and the magnetometer to crash to the ground. This, he later said, was positive proof that his curse theory was true.)

  Poppy scanned the next few items on her mother’s list.

  E-mail U. of Edinburgh research library—any new t
apes of banshee wails?

  Phone Eileen re: zombie invasion (send crate of blowtorches? Get-well card?)

  She shook her head and made a tutting sound under her breath. Mrs. Malone lived in hopes of finding someone, somewhere, who had managed to capture a banshee wail on tape. It was a frivolous hope, of course. People who said they had heard a banshee’s eerie wailing—well, they simply had too much imagination. Just like Mrs. Malone’s college friend Eileen, who had called last week in hysterics.

  Zombies! Poppy thought with disgust. Eileen had probably heard nothing more sinister than a bunch of cows. Their mooing could sound like the hollow groans of the undead, if a person were inclined to believe in that. . . .

  “Rolly, dear, please give the bow and arrow to me,” said Mrs. Malone, a desperate edge entering her voice. “Pukwudgies put poison on their arrowheads. It’s quite deadly.”

  But Rolly wasn’t listening. His eyes narrowed as he notched the arrow in the bow.

  “Rolly, did you hear me?” Mrs. Malone said sharply. “Deadly! Poison!”

  Rolly stared at the frozen chicken and pulled back the bowstring.

  Ah! Poppy brightened as she read the last item on the list.

  Covered dish supper—pineapple surprise

  Mrs. Malone’s desserts were always a hit at school fund-raisers, church suppers, and psychic society potlucks—and she always made an extra batch for the Malones to enjoy at home.

  “Hey, are we having pineapple surprise tonight?” Poppy asked.

  “Assuming we are all still alive, yes,” snapped Mrs. Malone. “Rolly. . . .”

  “Cool.” Poppy swallowed her last bite of toast, grabbed her backpack, and headed out the door. “I’ll ride my bike to the library,” she called back over her shoulder. “See you later.”

  As she ran down the steps, she could hear Mrs. Malone saying, “Rolly, I’m warning you! If you shoot that chicken, we’ll have liver for dinner—and you are going to eat every single bite. . . .”

  An hour later, Poppy was slumped in a wooden cubicle at the library in front of a microfiche machine. She was staring at the images of old newspaper pages as she slowly turned the handle.

  Usually she could get lost in doing research, but not today. Every five minutes, she’d realize that she had flipped past dozens of pages without seeing them. Then she would have to flip back to the last article she had read and force herself to concentrate.

  She had read about airships that hovered over a small town thirty miles from Austin back in the 1890s, and strange lights that streaked across the sky in the 1950s, and reports of tiny figures with large heads that were spotted at night in the beam of a car’s headlight, then vanished without a trace. She had read about one night in the 1980s when dozens of people claimed to see a huge object—two or three football fields long and triangular in shape, covered with blinking lights—glide slowly from the eastern horizon to the west.

  After Poppy had found all the stories, printed them, and put them in her folder, she walked over to where books on folklore, legends, and myths were shelved. As she pulled down one book after another, flipping through the pages, she thought about what her father always said.

  “When you begin any investigation, start with local legends,” Mr. Malone would say. “There’s generally a grain of truth in them. Someone saw something mysterious, maybe a few centuries earlier. They told their friends and family. Their children told their grandchildren. After a while, the story grew. Embroidery was added. It became too fantastic to be believed. But if you could go back to the original story—the one that was told right after the fact, when the person’s heart was still pounding and his hair was still standing on end—well, maybe that story would sound real. Real enough to be believed. You just have to scrape off all the ornamentation and find the truth.”

  It sounded good in theory. But now that a day had passed, Poppy was starting to question herself.

  Had she really seen mermaids?

  Or was she just imagining things?

  She took down a fat book with a faded green cover. The title on the spine had been gold, but most of the letters had been rubbed away. The spine was broken, and the cover was stained. Most people would have put the book back without even opening it. But Poppy was experienced in the ways of libraries and bookstores. She knew that the small, unnoticed, shabby little volume was often the one that had the most interesting information.

  She turned to the title page. It read: Mermaids in Myth, Legend, and Life.

  Poppy nodded to herself. This was exactly what she needed.

  “Who knows how many people have heard the siren call of a mermaid? Most of those who have were never seen again. The lucky few who survived their mermaid encounter have said that they never saw a woman more lovely or heard a voice more sweet. Furthermore, they say the mermaid’s song bewitches any man who hears it, so that he loses his senses and often leaps into the deepest ocean in order to follow it.”

  Poppy rolled her eyes and turned the page.

  “There have been other stories as well,” she read, “stories of mermaids that were seen walking on land. Some say mermaids can only leave the sea during an eclipse of the sun or a blue moon; others have suggested that the mermaids were washed ashore during a storm and could not find their way home. At any rate, several men claimed to have married these mermaids and had children with them, although no one knows whether the children ended up choosing the land or the sea once they grew up. . . .”

  Poppy wrinkled her nose and flipped to the section labeled “Hoaxes.”

  “Many mermaid sightings have been revealed as hoaxes,” she read. “One of the most famous, of course, was the Feejee Mermaid displayed by P.T. Barnum, the famous American showman, businessman, and con artist. The mermaid was nothing more than the bodies of a large fish and a monkey which had been sewn together and mummified. Still, it managed to fool a good number of people who flocked to Barnum’s circus to see it. . . .”

  Poppy dropped the book to the table, shaking her head. “A Feejee Mermaid,” she muttered to herself. “Honestly.”

  “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?” a voice said over her shoulder.

  Startled, Poppy turned around to see a girl standing behind her. She looked about Poppy’s age. She had red hair pulled back in a long ponytail and bright green eyes. She wore a faded T-shirt, wrinkled shorts, and old tennis shoes with holes in the toes, and she had a battered canvas backpack slung over one shoulder. The only thing that didn’t look old and ragged was a necklace made of tiny shells strung on a piece of twine. She stood with her head tilted to one side, smirking at the illustration of the Feejee Mermaid in Poppy’s book.

  “Totally ridiculous,” said Poppy, pushing her chair back so that she could see the girl more clearly. “Are you interested in mermaids?”

  The girl gave Poppy an odd, sidelong grin.

  “You could say that,” she said. “But even so, I’d never pay good money to see a creature that looked as daft as that.”

  Poppy glanced down at the book. “Yeah,” she agreed. “Of course, this was back in the olden days, before nature shows on TV and science magazines and the Internet. People didn’t know any better.”

  “Idjits,” the girl declared with an annoyed shake of her head. “Just take a look at this!” She dropped her backpack to the floor, picked up another book from the desk, and gave a little sniff of disdain as she examined the cover. It showed an angelic-looking mermaid perched on a rock and simpering at a sailor on a ship.

  “Totally daft,” she said. “Who’d be sitting on a burning hot rock in the sun when they could be swimming? Who’d want to make cow eyes at a man?”

  She held up the book so Poppy could see it, too.

  “Especially a man who wears one of those little round sailor hats,” she added.

  But Poppy only half heard her. She was staring at the girl’s hand.

  There were delicate webs of skin stretched between each finger. A dark green bracelet of lake weed was wound around
each wrist. In the dim light of the library, the girl’s skin seemed to have a greenish blue tone.

  “You—you . . .” Poppy’s voice came out in a squeak. She cleared her throat and tried again. “You’re the girl at the lake. I saw you dancing on the shore.” She paused again, then said in a rush, “I saw you dive into the water.”

  The girl’s grin widened. She raised one eyebrow. “Did you now?” she said. “That must have caught your attention. Someone deciding to take a swim when they were at a lake—”

  “I know you’re a mermaid,” said Poppy, more loudly than she meant to.

  “Shh,” someone sitting at a table two bookshelves over hissed.

  Now that Poppy realized who the girl was, she was surprised she hadn’t recognized her right away. She’d had the same stormy expression on her face when the others had teased her about her dancing. . . .

  Poppy snapped her fingers. “Nerissa,” she said. “That’s your name. Nerissa. What are you doing here?”

  Nerissa’s chin lifted defiantly. “I ran away.”

  “You did? Why?” Poppy frowned down at Nerissa’s feet. “And I don’t mean to be rude, but . . . how? What happened to your tail?”

  Nerissa tossed her head. “All mermaids can walk on land when the conditions are right,” she said. “You didn’t learn about that in all your books, did you?”

  “Well, actually—” Poppy began.

  “It takes a blue moon,” said Nerissa, “and a spirit of adventure, of course.”

  Poppy’s fingers itched to pick up her pencil and start making notes, but she worried that it might offend Nerissa, so she just said, “But then why haven’t more people met mermaids? There’s a blue moon almost every year.”

  “I know!” said Nerissa. “You’d think they’d take advantage of it. But most mermaids are happy just hanging around in the same water for centuries, swimming with dolphins and teasing seals and sitting around on rocks combing their hair. And, of course, most mermaids think human beings are silly and kind of, well, dim. They’re always joking about how easy it is to play tricks on people. So most of them aren’t very interested in pretending to be one, even for a few days.”