Krakens and Lies

by Tui T. Sutherland

  Marco went home, too, but Matthew went and pulled out a sleeping bag for Elsie, setting up a space for her in the living room, next to the bed they’d made for Miss Sameera on the couch.

  The selkie girl emerged from the lake toward evening. Zoe was at the dining room table, extremely reluctantly doing homework because her parents had insisted on it, with Captain Fuzzbutt snoozing beside her. Elsie and Uluru came through the sliding doors, bringing a gust of chilly night air with them. Elsie was scrunching her curly wet hair with a towel. Her sealskin was back in her shoulder bag, which dripped damply across the floor.

  “Hi, Elsie,” Zoe said. “Dad’s making dinner, Mom is out in the Menagerie with Sameera, and Matthew is up in his room studying. I have no idea where Keiko is. Can I get you anything? How’d it go?”

  “Great,” Elsie said, tossing her towel on the back of a chair. “They’re all very sweet. My mum said I can stay as long as you need help.”

  “Thank you,” Zoe said sincerely. “We’d be in trouble without you.”

  “Is Keiko the kitsune?” Elsie said. “I saw her on her way up to the dragons.”

  Zoe blinked at her. “No way. Keiko hates the dragons.”

  Elsie shrugged. “She went up about an hour ago and hasn’t come back down yet.”

  Is Keiko “furball the small”? Zoe wondered. Was Keiko secretly friends with Firebella? On the one hand, they had almost the exact same personality, so that sort of made sense. On the other hand, why would Keiko pretend she and the dragons hated each other? Why keep their friendship a secret?

  So she wouldn’t have to do any dragon chores, she answered herself. We never send her up there to clean out the caves or anything because we thought there was a major dragon-kitsune feud going on. Very crafty.

  Or was it sinister? Was Keiko up to something?

  “GORM,” the bunyip observed.

  “I know, I remember,” Elsie said to him. “Where’s Abigail Hardy’s kid?” she asked Zoe, pulling out a chair to sit. Uluru flopped to his belly on the floor beside her. Captain Fuzzbutt looked at him askance, eyeing the bunyip’s damp fur, and sidled a bit closer to Zoe.

  “He went home,” Zoe said. “There’s a whole thing going on with his mom—you know she’s missing—well, she may have been kidnapped, and we think we know who has her but not where.”

  “I have a message for him,” Elsie said. “Maybe it’s connected.”

  “A message?” Zoe said, sitting up straight. She closed her math book. “From who?”

  “From the kraken.” Elsie reached over and grabbed a few carrot sticks from the bowl in the middle of the table. “She says she’s been trying to tell him for a week now. But you know krakens. Her idea of trying could be waving the occasional tentacle at him from the lake as he walks by. Krakens always think everyone is paying much more attention to them than we really are.”

  “Why would the kraken have a message for Logan?” Zoe asked.

  “Someone’s been sending it to her through the water. She broadcast an image at me.” Elsie pulled a napkin toward her and sketched out a small head with long wiggly lines coming out of it. “Someone like that? Sorry, I can’t draw at all, I know it’s kind of terrible.”

  Zoe blinked at it. It was beyond terrible; she couldn’t even tell if it was supposed to be human. Was that a mustache?

  “Um . . . maybe Matthew can help. He’s a great artist,” Zoe said. “Matthew! Elsie’s back!”

  She heard her brother’s door open and he came pounding down the stairs. His feet stopped running right outside the living room, and then he wandered in nonchalantly. “Oh, hey,” he said. “How’s everything?”

  “Elsie got a message from the kraken,” Zoe said.

  “But you know krakens,” Elsie said again, shrugging apologetically. “It’s all images and everything has this blurry underwater quality and you can hardly figure out what they’re trying to say at all.”

  “Right,” Matthew said. “Except no, we never get images from her, or messages of any kind. It must be a fellow sea creature thing.”

  “Can you figure out what this is?” Zoe asked, nudging the napkin toward him. “This is who the message is coming from, she says.”

  Matthew studied the scribbled drawing seriously, his mouth twitching.

  “All right, go on and laugh,” Elsie said, shoving him.

  “No, I’m not! It’s a good—well, the effort is—it’s clearly a—huh.”

  “I have other skills,” Elsie said amiably.

  “Maybe I can draw it. Can you describe it to me?” he asked. He pulled a sketchbook off one of the bookshelves and a pencil from the emergency drawer and sat down next to her.

  “It’s small, and sort of reddish, with these long whiskers—”

  “So it’s a creature,” Matthew confirmed. “Not a mustachioed Picasso person.”

  “Of course it’s a creature,” she said. “Uluru, I think he’s making fun of me.”

  “GROBAGOG,” the bunyip observed without moving from its prone position.

  “All right, settle down,” she said. “I’ve never seen one before myself, but the picture looked like a blurry Chinese dragon, maybe.”

  “What?” Zoe jumped to her feet. “The Chinese dragon? The one with Abigail? It sent a message to the kraken?” She covered her mouth to keep more questions from pouring out and took a deep breath. “Tell us everything she said.”

  “It wasn’t much, right?” Elsie said apologetically. “The dragon is probably sending a kind of distress signal whenever it gets to be in water, and if it’s in something where the streams or underground rivers or whatever connect back to this lake, then the kraken is picking it up. It’s not a conversation, exactly. The kraken can’t send a message back or anything.”

  “Still,” Matthew said. “What was the distress signal?”

  “It’s four images,” Elsie said. “Its own picture first.” She tapped Matthew’s sketchbook, where he was doodling a beautiful little Chinese dragon. “Then a picture of Abigail Hardy—I recognized her, of course, which is why I figured the message should go to Logan. Then a picture of a box with bars across it—I think that’s just to signal that they’re trapped or imprisoned somewhere. And finally, Jabba the Hutt.”

  Zoe and Matthew stared at her.

  “It’s probably not actually Jabba the Hutt,” Elsie amended. “Now that I think about it.”

  “More description?” Matthew asked. “Maybe?”

  “It’s gray and kind of a triangular shape with a big round head at the top,” she said, leaning closer to him to watch his pencil sweep across the paper. “Two closed eyes, a human nose, squiggly things on the top of the head—no, not antennae, you loon. Like little circles, like a hat with a dome on top of that. There might be hands in the middle of the triangle. And it’s up on a short flat stone pedestal.”

  As Elsie kept describing it, Zoe came around to the other side of Matthew to watch. Something about the drawing was starting to look familiar. She closed her eyes to think. Could it be a statue? A big stone statue? She opened her eyes again and saw it.

  “I know what that is,” she said. “Matthew! That’s the giant stone Buddha in the Sterlings’ backyard!”

  “What?” he said, stopping to study it.

  “Whoops,” Elsie said. “I was just really culturally insensitive, then, wasn’t I?”

  “Why would the dragon send an image of that statue?” Matthew asked. He looked up at Zoe with a small puzzled line between his eyebrows.

  “It’s a clue,” Zoe said, feeling excitement rising up through her chest and shooting out to her fingers. “Think about it. The dragon is trying to tell us—that’s where the Sterlings are keeping him and Abigail.”

  “That makes no sense,” Matthew argued. “It’s a statue, not a building.”

  “I’m going over there to check it out,” she said.

  “You are definitely not,” Matthew said. His hand shot out to catch her wrist before she could charge off to the front d
oor. “Zoe! The Sterlings are having a massive campaign dinner right now. It’s so big, even I know about it. There are cars parked for miles along the street, almost all the way to our house. That garden will be swarming with people. There’s no way you’ll be able to sneak over the wall and poke their statuary tonight.”

  “Besides,” Elsie pointed out, “you should probably get Logan to go with you, yeah?”

  “Tomorrow, then,” Zoe said. “First thing. We’re getting into the Sterlings’ backyard and we are going to shake that statue until Abigail and the dragon fall out.”

  She went over to the window, twisting one hand around the other wrist.

  I hope I’m right.

  I hope they’re there.

  Because if they’re not . . . I have no idea what we’re going to do.

  NINETEEN

  Monday morning dawned cold and chilly, much colder than usual for early November, according to all the chatter on the car radio. Logan and his dad drove in silence for the first five minutes, listening to the local Xanadu station newscasters talk about the mayoral election the next day, which Mr. Sterling was predicted to win by a landslide. He’d been profiled in Time magazine as a small-town political star with big ambitions and a bright future, so the buzz around town was that a national news network was coming to cover his victory speech.

  “He’s always been such a benefactor to this town,” gushed one of the radio DJs.

  “I just hope we get to keep him for a few years before Congress snaps him up!” said the other with a laugh.

  “I heard he’s going to make a big announcement tomorrow night,” said the first one. “Something that will put Xanadu on the map.”

  “And bring in lots of jobs, let’s not forget!” said the second. “An economic boom for everyone, that’s what Mr. Sterling has promised. We’ll all be millionaires in three years if his plans are even half as successful as he’s predicting they will be.”

  “Of course, the election’s not over yet. There’s also . . . the other candidate.”

  “Right. Anything could happen, after all—”

  Logan’s dad reached over and switched the radio off. “He’s going to look like quite an idiot,” he said calmly, “when everyone is standing there ready to hear his big announcement and he doesn’t have that little dragon to show them.”

  Logan shot him a smile. Whether his dad was faking it or not, his confidence was incredibly reassuring.

  “Or Pelly,” Logan said. “I guess they stole her for the same reason—to prove to the world that the Menagerie is real.” He shook his head. Something still didn’t fit about that theory. Why frame Scratch? Was there a connection to the deaths of Scratch’s mom and sister? Why disrupt the Menagerie so much at all? Why not just go on TV with the Chinese dragon?

  He also didn’t understand how telling the world about the Menagerie was supposed to benefit the Sterlings. Even if everyone knew about the unicorns and griffins, that wouldn’t make the Sterlings any money—exposing it still wouldn’t give them the right to turn it into an amusement park for their own profit—and from what he knew about the Sterlings, money was the end goal of everything they did.

  He wrapped his cold hands in the ends of the scarf around his neck. It was a warm fiery red shot through with soft gray streaks. His mother had brought it back for him from one of her trips—to Mongolia, she’d said. He wondered which animal she’d been Tracking on that trip and whether it was in the Kahns’ Menagerie right now.

  “Listen,” his dad said. “I don’t want you getting the wrong idea about skipping school. I’ll write you a note saying you were sick today, but this isn’t going to happen again, understand? Special exception for rescuing kidnapped mom.”

  “Got it,” Logan said, returning his smile. He knew his dad was trying to joke to break the tension, but he had to be feeling as anxious and keyed up as Logan did.

  His dad parked in the Menagerie driveway and turned to face Logan. “But seriously, Logan, I’m worried about involving you in this.”

  “I involved you,” Logan pointed out. When Zoe had told him about the message, he knew they could have kept it to themselves and investigated the statue without their parents. But he also knew he was done with keeping secrets from his dad, and he hoped the same was true in reverse. “I want to find her together, Dad.”

  “I know,” his dad said. “Me too. That’s why I’m letting you come along.”

  “That’s why I’m letting you come along,” Logan said, grinning but only half joking.

  “Partners, then.” His dad held out his hand and Logan shook it.

  Zoe and her mom were standing at their front door as Logan and his dad got out of the car. Zoe was wearing a fuzzy white hat with little black eyes and ears so it looked like a yak. Her red hair stuck out under the earflaps and her face was pink with cold.

  “No luck with Blue?” Logan asked, pulling his own plain gray wool hat down over his ears.

  Zoe shook her head. “Melissa said he was not allowed to miss school just to go on ‘some wild goose chase,’ when we don’t even know if we’ll find anything, and plus there were quite enough of us ‘wasting our time’ already.”

  “Melissa doesn’t handle disorder well,” Mrs. Kahn said sympathetically. “It’s the merfolk situation. She’s in a bit of a state about Elsie’s paperwork, and SNAMHP is supposedly coming to negotiate with Cobalt today. Zoe’s dad has to drive all the way to Cheyenne with Agent Runcible to pick them up from the airport. Apparently one of them is a vampire and needs special transport during daytime travel.”

  Captain Fuzzbutt poked his trunk around the door and made a mournful noise.

  “Shhh,” Zoe said, kissing his trunk and then nudging it back inside. “You know you can’t be seen out here. We’ll be back soon, I promise.” She pressed her hands together, squeezing her fingers nervously.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Mrs. Kahn asked her. “You could get in trouble. Maybe you should stay here, or go to school after all.”

  “You could get in bigger trouble,” Zoe pointed out. “Logan and I are just kids poking around a friend’s house. You and Mr. Wilde could get arrested for breaking and entering. Maybe you should stay here.”

  It sounded so much like Logan’s conversation with his dad that he laughed.

  “All right,” Mrs. Kahn said. “I guess we’re all going.”

  They walked to Jasmin’s house, stopping at the bottom of the long driveway to scan for the Sterlings’ cars. Zoe pulled off her glove to check her phone.

  “Jasmin says they’re all gone,” she reported.

  “Someone is going to notice that you, me, and Jasmin were all out sick today,” Logan pointed out.

  “We’ll have notes,” Zoe said, nodding at her mom and his dad. “And I highly doubt anyone will get Jasmin in trouble the day her dad gets elected mayor.” She stuck her phone in her pocket and put her glove back on. “Except maybe her own parents,” she mumbled. “I told her she didn’t have to stay home and help us.”

  “But she didn’t listen,” her mom said. “Because she’s just like you two.”

  “Intrepid?” Zoe guessed as they headed up the drive.

  “Resolute?” Logan offered.

  “Heroic!” Zoe said.

  “I was going to go with stubborn,” said Mrs. Kahn. “But sure.”

  Zoe hesitated at the bottom of the steps, looking at them. “Remember, Jasmin doesn’t know about Logan’s mom yet. I’ve told her we’re looking for our missing creature. I just—I didn’t want to tell her her parents are kidnappers until we were sure.”

  From the grim look on his dad’s face, Logan could tell he was pretty sure. But he didn’t argue.

  Jasmin threw the door open before they could knock. She was wearing the same fuzzy yak hat as Zoe. “Eeeeee!” she cried, pointing to Zoe’s head. “I was hoping you’d wear it!”

  “Well,” Zoe said, “I decided if we could wear them when we were pretending to be Arctic explorers—”

/>   “We could wear them to find a mythical creature on the coldest day in the history of the universe,” Jasmin said. “Me too!”

  Logan had met colder days, living in Chicago with the wind coming right off the lake. But there was an extra chill in the air today that wasn’t about the weather; it was the danger of hope rising under the awful dread that all this could lead to nothing.

  “This is my dad,” he said. “Dad, Jasmin.”

  “Hello,” his dad said awkwardly. “Thanks for your help.”

  “It’s nice to see you again, Jasmin,” said Zoe’s mom, stepping forward to hug her.

  “You too, Mrs. Kahn,” Jasmin said warmly. “Where do you guys want to start looking?” She waved them inside. “I swear, I don’t think it could be here, considering how people get into every nook and cranny of this house. Even last night, at least three different people wandered into my room during that awful party, claiming they were looking for the bathroom. I ask you, what bathroom says JASMIN in huge glittery letters on the outside of it? I mean, seriously.”

  “We think we found a clue,” Zoe said. “Can we look at the giant Buddha in your garden?”

  Jasmin wrinkled her nose at her. “Sure. I don’t think it has any secret compartments, though. Remember how we used to climb up and sit on its lap?”

  “And remember how your mom yelled at us for doing that?” Zoe countered.

  “Oooh, good point,” Jasmin said. “She freaks out whenever anyone goes in her Zen garden. Okay, let’s check it out.”

  Logan had seen the Sterlings’ yard up close once before, the night he and Zoe and Blue snuck in to look for one of the missing griffin cubs. It had looked a lot more mysterious and creepy in the twilight. Now, in the pale morning, it just looked gray and a little trampled. There was a cover over the pool and a few champagne glasses were scattered around, abandoned on the poolside table and the edges of the wooden planters.

  The stone Buddha was as tall as Logan and sat in the corner of the yard, near the towering white brick wall. It was surrounded by a neat square of white sand dotted with three piles of smooth black rocks. A small bonsai tree grew out of a miniature rock mountain beside it, and water trickled down a pebble fountain nearby.