Krakens and Lies

by Tui T. Sutherland

  “I don’t care what your venerable furry ancestors ate,” Zoe said, putting her hands on her hips. “Like me and Dad, you are a respectable vegetarian. If you go back to bed right now and leave this nice trespasser alone, tomorrow I will bring you that eggplant thing from Veggie Monster that you like so much.”

  Guava grumbled again and reached his claws toward Logan and his dad.

  “Right. Now,” Zoe said firmly. “Or there will be NO BUBBLES in your next bath.”

  The giant sloth sighed enormously, rattling the leaves on the trees. He dropped to all fours and slowly shambled back inside his hut.

  Logan twisted around and found his dad sitting up, rubbing his head, and looking rather stunned.

  “See?” Logan said. “I told you Zoe was pretty cool.”

  His dad smiled weakly.

  “Also,” Logan said, “how dare you give me your scarab and then sneak in here with no protection? Do you know how mad I would be if you got eaten by a mapinguari?”

  “Not as mad as I would be if you got stomped by a dragon,” his dad answered.

  “They’re not very stompy,” Logan said. “More . . . fire-breathy. And actually fairly chill if you don’t bother them.”

  “Why are you cavorting with dragons?” his father demanded. He climbed to his feet and hauled Logan up, too. “That is exactly what I was afraid of. Anything could happen to you in here, especially since—since—” He fell silent, glancing at Zoe.

  “Since you sabotaged us?” Zoe said challengingly. “Since you deliberately let the griffins escape and blew a hole in the Reptile House and framed Scratch for murder?”

  Logan studied his dad’s face and felt a surge of relief. There was nothing but confusion there.

  “What?” Dad said. “What are you talking about? Who’s Scratch?”

  “Why else have you been sneaking into our Menagerie?” Zoe asked.

  “Because you have Abigail!” Logan’s dad burst out. He turned and gripped Logan’s shoulders. “The Kahns have your mother, I’m sure of it. I’ve been looking for her all over this place, but there are areas I haven’t gotten into yet. And then I was so worried they’d take you, too—but now they’ll wipe our memories—and then who—who will rescue Abigail—” Dad broke off and rubbed his eyes.

  “No, no, you’ve got it all wrong,” Logan said, putting his hands over his dad’s. “Zoe’s family is as worried about Mom as we are. They’re good people, Dad. Mom was friends with them. If she told you about this place, didn’t she tell you that?”

  “Yes,” Dad admitted. “But she could have been tricked. There was a clue. . . .” He trailed off again.

  “Mom wasn’t easily fooled,” Logan pointed out. “You know that.”

  “I think, if you guys don’t mind, that maybe we should go talk to my parents,” Zoe said. “I double-triple promise we won’t kraken ink you, Mr. Wilde. I’m sure they’ll want to meet you. And then we can tell you what we know about Abigail’s disappearance.”

  Logan looked up at his dad, who hesitated for a long minute, then finally nodded. A thrill of hope ran along Logan’s skin. Maybe if they put together everything they all knew about how Mom disappeared—maybe then they’d figure out where she was . . . and how to get her back.

  Mr. and Mrs. Kahn were surprisingly calm about being woken up in the middle of the night to meet Logan’s dad. But then, they were pretty calm about everything, as far as Logan had seen. They sat and listened with mugs of tea in front of them, bathrobes over their pajamas, as if strangers scrambled over their walls and accused them of kidnapping all the time.

  Dad, understandably, had said no to tea, or anything else that might have kraken ink in it.

  Logan sat next to his dad, in the warm yellow light of Zoe’s living room, with Zoe and then Blue on his other side. It was surreal, but also felt somehow right, having everyone together and talking about everything at last.

  “I hired a private investigator,” Dad said intently, tracing his finger along one of the grooves in the heavy wooden dining room table. “He said Abigail was last seen renting a car in Cheyenne, but someone else returned it—a young man. I thought perhaps that was your son.”

  “Matthew,” Mrs. Kahn supplied. “No, we didn’t know about the rental car.”

  Logan caught Zoe looking at him. Was she thinking what he was thinking? Jonathan Sterling?

  Zoe’s mom went on. “We got a call from her after she left Cheyenne—she said she was on her way with the Chinese dragon and would be here in about two hours. Usually with Abigail’s driving that means more like one and a half, but we waited and waited, and she never showed up. We called her a hundred times, but she never answered.”

  “Same here,” said Logan’s dad. “But she did get to Xanadu that night. My PI said the last signal from her cell phone came from somewhere around here, before it went dead. That’s why I thought she must have made it to this place.” He waved one hand at the Menagerie around them.

  “But why would you think we kidnapped her?” Mr. Kahn asked mildly. “We were getting the Chinese dragon anyway. Why would we want a Tracker locked in our cellar, when she could be out finding and saving more creatures?”

  Logan saw his dad’s eyes dart around the room, as if he was looking for a hidden cellar door, before he caught himself. With a sigh, he reached into his inside coat pocket and pulled out a wrinkled white rectangle.

  Logan recognized it immediately. It was the last postcard his mom had sent them. The only postcard Logan hadn’t wanted to put in his box of postcards from her. He’d read it about three thousand times that first week and then, when it still refused to make any sense, he’d thrown it out. He hadn’t realized his dad had kept it; he must have salvaged it from the trash.

  “Abigail sent us a postcard after she disappeared,” Logan’s dad explained. “It’s all nonsense, doesn’t sound like her at all. She says we won’t see her again—that’s crazy. She would never, never in a million years leave Logan. She’s told me every day since he was born that he’s her heart and soul.”

  Logan stared down at the table, blinking hard. He remembered her saying that, too.

  “I wish she’d told me what she really does,” he mumbled. His dad reached over to put one hand on Logan’s shoulder.

  “She was planning to,” he said. “According to SNAPA rules, she had to wait until you turned thirteen. Then she was going to tell you everything. She even had this crazy idea that you might want to go to some kind of mythical creature tracking summer camp.”

  “Camp Underpaw!” Zoe chimed in. “He does! He should! He’d be perfect for it.”

  Logan’s dad gave her a curious smile.

  “Can I see the postcard?” Mrs. Kahn asked. She studied the front of it—a bland “Greetings from WYOMING” banner with a silhouette of a cowboy on a horse below it. It was nothing like the kinds of postcards Mom usually sent: sweeping vistas of Costa Rican rain forests, or Indonesian elephants giving themselves a shower on a beach, or Japanese monkeys swinging over a sunlit koi pond.

  Mrs. Kahn flipped it over and slid it sideways so Zoe’s dad could read it at the same time. Logan could remember the words as clearly as if he’d read them yesterday.

  Hello my dear wild boys,

  I am so sorry about this, but a new job opportunity has come up that I can’t say no to. It means I can’t come home—in fact, I probably won’t see you again. I know it’s sad, but the silver lining is that you won’t have to worry about me anymore. Just know I am on the kind of grand adventure we used to have with Roberto, Louise, and Fanny. I love you both. Take care of yourselves.

  Love, Abigail

  “Wow,” said Mrs. Kahn. “That doesn’t sound like Abigail at all.”

  “Agreed,” said Mr. Kahn, shaking his head. “Someone made her write this.”

  Logan’s chest ached with guilt. He hadn’t even questioned the message. He’d just assumed that his mother meant everything she’d said. He’d been so mad at her all these months, thinking sh
e’d left him and that she didn’t really care about him at all. But the Kahns had known right away that it was all fake. His dad had known, too.

  “You could have told me,” Logan said to his dad. “I thought it was real.”

  “I wasn’t sure which would be worse,” his dad admitted. “If you thought she left, but was okay, or if you knew she’d been kidnapped.”

  “What made you think kidnapped?” Mrs. Kahn picked up the postcard and frowned at the top right corner.

  “And what made you think it was us?” Mr. Kahn asked again.

  “Roberto and Louise,” said Logan’s dad, pointing at the card. “I think she’s hinting at Robert Louis Stevenson. Kidnapped was one of the books Abigail bought after Logan was born, for his future library.”

  “What about Fanny?” Logan asked. “Is that a real name? Who is it?”

  “That, I don’t know,” his dad said. “If it’s a clue, I haven’t figured it out. But then there was something—”

  “Under the stamp?” Mrs. Kahn guessed.

  He nodded and took a small bag out of his pocket. Unzipping it, he tipped the contents onto the table: a tiny microchip, smaller than one of Logan’s fingernails. Logan peered at it, trying to figure out what it was. He wished he’d noticed there was something under the stamp. It made him feel like his parents were both kind of secret agents, sending each other hidden spyware and messages in code.

  “Aha,” said Mr. Kahn. “I see. It all makes sense now.”

  “Aha what?” Zoe asked. “What aha?”

  “It’s the chip from Abigail’s Tracker ring,” Mrs. Kahn said. “All Trackers have them—it’s a kind of identification card to let them into places like the Menagerie, no matter what alarm system is in place.”

  “That’s how you’ve been getting in,” Logan realized. “This little thing makes the dragons think you’re Mom?”

  “Or at least some authorized SNAPA representative,” Mr. Kahn said with a nod.

  “And that’s why you thought we had her,” Mrs. Kahn filled in. “Because the microchip seemed like a clue about where she was.”

  Logan’s dad nodded tiredly. “She’d explained her ring to me before, so I knew what this would do. I thought I was supposed to sneak in here and look for her. I don’t know why else she would send it to me.”

  “There’s one possibility,” Mr. Kahn said gently. “She wanted us to trust you. She hoped if you came to us with her microchip and this postcard, then we’d know she wanted us to include you in our investigation.”

  Logan looked up at his dad. There was some kind of war going on behind his face, and Logan could guess what it was about. Should he trust these people he’d suspected for months? Were they right about Abigail’s plan with the microchip? Had he been all wrong this whole time?

  Worst of all, had he wasted the last six months looking in the wrong place because he’d misunderstood her message?

  “It’s okay, Dad,” Logan said. “Now we’re all together, we’ll find her. I know it.”

  “I totally didn’t know their rings did that,” Zoe said. Logan guessed, gratefully, that she was deliberately distracting everyone from staring at Logan’s dad.

  “It’s a fairly well-kept secret,” said Mrs. Kahn. “We wouldn’t want anyone to get the idea to steal one of them.”

  “It’s a good thing Jonathan never found out, for instance,” Mr. Kahn pointed out. “Or the Sterlings could have taken it and snuck in here anytime they wanted.”

  “The Sterlings?” Logan’s dad jerked back in his seat. “What do they have to do with this?”

  “Nothing for sure,” Mrs. Kahn said quickly. “It’s just a theory we have.” She explained about the map in Mr. Sterling’s study and about the kraken ink Jonathan was supposed to take but didn’t.

  “Ohhh,” said Logan’s dad. “Yes. Okay, Mr. Sterling showed me some plans for an amusement park in this area, but they weren’t as specific as what you’re describing. He wanted to talk about permits for a zoo from the wildlife department, but he didn’t say anything about mythical creatures. Understandably, I suppose. But if they’re planning to take over the Menagerie—surely you don’t think they were involved in Abigail’s disappearance?”

  “I find it hard to imagine the Sterlings as kidnappers,” Mr. Kahn said doubtfully. “It’s not like they need to hold anyone for ransom; they have more money than J. K. Rowling. And if they were going to use Abigail to blackmail us somehow, why haven’t they done anything about it in the last six months?”

  “Maybe it was an accident,” Zoe suggested. “Maybe they tried to grab the Chinese dragon and ended up getting Abigail as well. Maybe they’ve been trying to figure out what to do with her. They have to be careful, knowing we could kraken ink them if they showed their hand too early.”

  “Dad,” Logan said suddenly, sliding the postcard back in front of him. “Look! Here where she talks about the silver lining—what if that’s a clue? Sterling silver? Maybe she’s trying to tell us that the Sterlings are the ones who kidnapped her.”

  But his dad was shaking his head. “I thought of that,” he said. “I did. I investigated just about everything having anything to do with silver in this town. But my PI checked into the Sterlings and they were out of town skiing in Colorado when Abigail was here. Not only that, they’re in the spotlight all the time. When they’re not at home, they’re almost always at campaign events out in public. He trailed them for three days and they didn’t go anywhere where someone could be hidden away, let alone someone and a Chinese dragon.”

  “They could have henchmen,” Zoe pointed out. “People to carry out their evil deeds for them.”

  “Minions,” Blue offered sagely.

  “Let’s not get carried away,” said Mrs. Kahn. “The Sterlings are hardly supervillains. I mean, Mrs. Sterling runs the PTA bake sale every year, for goodness’ sakes.”

  “But we do think they must have someone working with them,” Logan said. “Right? Whoever is really sabotaging the Menagerie? Since now we know it wasn’t my dad. Maybe that person is also the one who grabbed my mom and the dragon for them. Maybe he’s the one who brings her food and stuff, so the Sterlings can look clean and aboveboard.”

  “Did SNAPA find out anything from Miss Sameera or Pelly?” Zoe asked her parents.

  Mr. Kahn sighed. “Pelly said she never saw her abductor. She was knocked out by the tranquility mist when she was taken from the Aviary, and she woke up in a cabin in the woods somewhere. She screamed bloody murder, as you can imagine. Miss Sameera, meanwhile, apparently spotted a young man driving a van out into the woods and followed him—don’t ask me why. She didn’t know him, that much is clear. But when she heard Pelly screaming, she went in and got her. That’s all the agents told me.”

  “We could have shown her pictures!” Zoe cried. “Maybe she would have recognized Jonathan! Or led us back to the cabin!” She ran her hands through her disheveled hair. “Our best source and they wiped her. I can’t believe they did that.”

  “They didn’t want her out in the world with any mythical creature memories,” her dad reminded her. “They have a job to do, remember. And this morning they didn’t know anything about the Sterlings, the map, or a saboteur.”

  “We’ll find our answers some other way,” Mrs. Kahn said reassuringly.

  “Will we?” Zoe said. “By Tuesday?” She stopped, looking guilty.

  “Tuesday?” her mom echoed. “What do you mean?”

  “Um,” said Zoe. “Well . . . let’s just say I have reason to believe that Mr. Sterling is planning to expose the Menagerie on Tuesday, at his election night party.”

  “What?” Mr. Kahn cried.

  “Let’s just say a bit more than that,” Mrs. Kahn said firmly. “What ‘reason’?”

  Zoe scrunched up her face. “A . . . reliable source?”

  “Zoe.” Mr. Kahn’s tone was ominous. “You know we’ve always trusted you more than Ruby. Don’t make us wrong about that.”

  “Okay,” Zoe b
lurted. “I just—hadn’t figured out what to do about it yet—and this may not be the best time to tell you this, but . . . Jasmin kind of sort of knows about the Menagerie now, too. As of this morning. But in a totally fine, I-trust-her, she’s-nothing-like-the-rest-of-her-family kind of way.”

  Her parents stared at her in disbelief.

  “It was an accident?” Zoe offered.

  “It was,” Logan chimed in. “She came over here, and then the basilisk escaped, and it was all chaos after that.”

  “All right,” Mrs. Kahn said slowly.

  “I suppose it’s no worse than the rest of her family knowing,” said Mr. Kahn. “If we have to kraken ink them all, she’ll end up getting it, too.”

  “But maybe we don’t have to kraken ink her,” Zoe protested. “She’s on our side. She warned me about her dad’s election night plans. And she’ll help us, I know she will.”

  Her parents exchanged a look and Mrs. Kahn lifted one shoulder. “Let’s see what happens,” she said. “I always did like Jasmin much more than the rest of them.”

  “So what do we do next?” Logan asked. “To find Mom? What can Dad and I do?”

  But he knew before the Kahns even shook their heads. They had no idea. No one knew how to catch the saboteur or track down Mom’s kidnappers.

  They were at a dead end.

  FOURTEEN

  Snuffle. Snuffle. Snuffle.

  Logan drifted slowly up from the depths of sleep.

  Was I dreaming? Did I have nightmares? He had a vague sense that kelpies and basilisks and masked kidnappers had all been lurking in his dreams, but that they’d all been vacuumed out suddenly, leaving him to the most peaceful night of rest he’d had since Mom left.

  He kept his eyes closed for a moment, wishing he could stay in that serene darkness just a little longer.

  Something was gently poking his head. It felt squashy and warm and a little furry, like Captain Fuzzbutt’s trunk. The mammoth must have come to visit him on the floor of Blue’s room—and he should probably sit up before he got accidentally stepped on.