by E. A. House
“That’s the whole point,” Chris explained. “I was just thinking—”
“Never good news,” Carrie grumbled. Her toes, she had just realized, were freezing because she was standing barefoot on the cold garage floor. Carrie’s dad had a bad habit of never remembering to lock the outer door to the garage, so Chris had been leaning against the pile of packing boxes inside the garage when Carrie managed to roll out of bed and open the door. Her parents, when Chris had knocked on the door, had mumbled from underneath their covers and refused to get up. Carrie should have been sleeping with earplugs in so she could ignore annoying cousins until a reasonable hour of the morning, but she hadn’t, so here they were.
Plus, Chris was on a roll, and refused to be deterred by little things like sleepy indifference. “I was thinking,” he continued, “that we need a prearranged way to warn each other without tipping off anyone who might be listening. Something we can work into a regular conversation without it sounding weird or suspicious.”
“I lost that monkey you gave me,” Carrie read at random. “Excuse me while I go to the restroom briefly . . . I never order roast duck . . . did you walk my pet dog, Billy?” She looked up at him. “Chris, I don’t want to imagine a conversation where these phrases would make sense!”
“You have actually said ‘Excuse me while I go to the restroom briefly,’” Chris pointed out defensively. But credit where credit was due, he didn’t call her a walking dictionary like some people did.
“Yes, and that’s the only line that might slip by unnoticed,” Carrie allowed, scanning the sheet again. Then she went to hand it back to Chris and discovered that there was a half page on the back. “But then it’s also the one you could slip up and say accidentally.”
“That’s because it’s the most important one,” Chris admitted, and in a particularly Chris sort of way the logic did make sense. Chris wanted “Excuse me while I go to the restroom briefly” to be code for “Something’s wrong, we need to get out of here.” Of course that meant that at some point Carrie was going to forget and say the phrase in complete sincerity and make Chris panic, and Carrie told him as much.
“I just want us to be able to communicate warnings clearly,” Chris said. And he was sincere, and worried, and the idea for code phrases had come to him at nine o’clock the night before and then he had been up half the night putting them together, which meant that he was worried and trying to fix things in the only way he knew how.
“Still worried about what Maddison was trying to warn us about with CQD?” Carrie asked.
“I still can’t even get through to her,” Chris admitted, and he looked so genuinely worried about Maddison that Carrie sighed and snatched the sheet away when Chris went to take it back.
“No, leave it with me, I’ll try to start memorizing it,” she said, and Chris lit up like the outside sky hadn’t yet. “I’ll try,” Carrie emphasized. “But no panicking if I accidentally warn you of incoming cyclones the next time I try to order an ice-cream cone.”
“I don’t even have a code word for cyclones!”
Professor Griffin’s boat—or, as he kept reminding them, his research vessel—was named The Vanishing Triangle. The reasoning behind the name was Professor Griffin’s, and unfathomable, although Chris had occasionally wondered if the professor was trying to make a sideways reference to the Bermuda Triangle. Carrie kept stopping him before he could actually ask, though.
“It’s, I don’t know, rude,” she told Chris for about the fifth time as they wandered down the harbor, looking for the professor or an unusual amount of startled yelling that might indicate he was trying to load Moby onto the Triangle.
“How is mentioning the Bermuda Triangle rude?” Chris asked. He was curious; he and Carrie had this argument about the possible connection between The Vanishing Triangle and the Bermuda Triangle every time they went near the ship. Carrie always told him to stop looking for mystical triangles where there weren’t any, but today’s objection was a new one.
“You never hear of people ending up in the Bermuda Triangle and having a perfectly uneventful trip,” Carrie explained irritably, tugging at her rain jacket. “It’s always, ‘First the compass failed, and then the fog got so thick we couldn’t see, and then something tried to eat the boat.’ I don’t think it’s nice to imply that you can’t think of a person’s boat without thinking of a place ships go and never come back.”
“But we aren’t even going into the Bermuda Triangle!” Chris protested. True, the Bermuda Triangle was said to exist more-or-less in the area roughly between the tip of Florida, Puerto Rico, and Bermuda, but Professor Griffin’s two grad students were studying coastal erosion and Chris and Carrie were looking for the San Telmo. There wasn’t any coast to study in the Bermuda Triangle. And Carrie was almost sure the San Telmo had sunk very near the shore of the island, so their boat was never going to drift into the Bermuda Triangle unless they got very lost.
“Sure, we aren’t going into the Bermuda Triangle,” Carrie said grimly, coming to a halt in front of The Vanishing Triangle. The Triangle only had her name on the prow in small lettering and the ship looked aggressively normal, but the action surrounding it was a dead giveaway. A minivan with the college logo on one door was backed up almost far enough to fall off the dock and into the water, Moby was hanging suspended from a complicated tangle of cables and pulleys halfway between it and the boat, and Professor Griffin was flitting around and between the two like a little bird on a sandbar. “We might not even need the Bermuda Triangle to make this weird,” Carrie finished, just as Professor Griffin looked up and noticed them and waved frantically at . . . Moby. The odd little submersible was tilting alarmingly to the left and beginning to spin slightly. Moby was a cheerful plastic-and-metal, robot-like unmanned submersible about the size of a milk crate (although much heavier and more unwieldy), with one eye (actually a camera), two LED “headlights,” and a claw-arm that was supposed to collect samples from the sea floor but tended instead to get caught in seaweed. Or snagged on one of the cables lowering Moby to the deck, as it was now.
“The crane broke again,” a voice said from inside the minivan, and Chris and Carrie hurried over and out of the way of the falling submersible to find the professor’s TA, Abigail Chang, in the driver’s seat, one earbud in and her phone in her lap. She’d been dealing with the professor and with Moby for almost three years now and as such was completely unbothered by Professor Griffin and the submersible’s regular brushes with disaster.
“And so then he asked the first-year engineering students to ‘rig something up for him’ last night,” Abigail continued. “I’m waiting over here because I do not want to lose an eye right in the middle of writing a thirty-page paper on ocean currents.”
The crane substitute did look like it was going to pull itself apart if someone snapped the wrong cable.
Moby landed safely and more or less gently on the deck of the Triangle, the tangle of cables bouncing free and whipping back and forth wildly. One of the students helping Professor Griffin almost fell into the water. Abigail took the earbud out of her ear and buckled her seatbelt.
“Oh, I’m not coming with you,” she explained when Chris gave her a puzzled look. “Too many papers, and I have all my data for wind currents already. I’m just here to help Professor Griffin load Moby and then take that . . . thing . . . back to the engineering department when it’s done.”
“But then who’s going on the trip?” Chris asked. Abigail was widely considered to be the reason Professor Griffin and Moby hadn’t fallen overboard and been lost at sea forever, and Chris had assumed she’d be coming. She liked the sea almost as much as the professor did. And there was the little matter of how Chris knew his parents had caved on the idea of Chris and Carrie being out for a few days with the professor because they had assumed Abigail would also be there.
“Who’s going on the trip?” Abigail repeated. “Well, you two, Professor Griffin, Moby if he doesn’t fall over the side, and Brad an
d Harvey. I don’t know the two guys,” she explained. “Apparently they’re on loan from another college because they needed to do underwater coastal mapping and one of their professors knows Professor Griffin.”
“Huh,” Chris said. Carrie looked faintly suspicious. Of what, exactly, Chris couldn’t say, and then Professor Griffin hurried over to introduce Brad and Harvey as they all struggled to stuff a massive and now hopelessly tangled mess of wires into the back of the van, and by the time they were done and Abigail had left it was half an hour past the point they’d intended to be off and even Carrie was too busy to be suspicious.
The plan—as explained by Professor Griffin while strapping Moby securely to the deck in an out-of-the-way corner of the boat—was to circle the island, hugging the coast, and take samples of the water and pictures of the shoreline at regular intervals. Professor Griffin intended to deploy Moby at about the halfway point, so Brad and Harvey could take samples of the sediment settling in the waters off the relatively undeveloped half of Archer’s Grove.
“So, we’ll take the populated side of the island first,” the professor had explained, “and then work our way around the state parks side, then back to where we started.”
Thanks to its state and national parks Archer’s Grove actually had a relatively unspoiled natural side, and it was this natural side that might be hiding the San Telmo. The ship had gone down, according to the seventeenth-century missionary priest, within visual range of the old mission church, somewhere under white cliffs and by a mussel bed. Archer’s Grove had a few beds of mussels even in modern times. They were protected areas because of the endangered mussels that lived there, and they had been much more widespread before development and a governor who hated mussels had ruined a great many of them. The mussel beds that could have been seen from the mission church, Carrie had discovered, lay near the arrowpoint-shaped tip of the island, amongst its largest state forest.
“But not the cliffs?” Chris asked Carrie in a furious whisper that afternoon. “You don’t know where the cliffs are?” They had finished a late lunch in defiance of a flock of seagulls, and now the professor was supposed to be making sure they didn’t hit anything. Harvey and Brad were out on the sliver of exposed deck taking a series of pictures, and Chris had been deathly bored, until he poked his head into the room he and Carrie were sharing and found her frantically poring over books.
“What?” Carrie said. “I’m working on it! I’ll get there! It would’ve been worse to give up the opportunity that the professor dumped in our laps. I’ll figure it out!”
Chris was still floored by the idea that Carrie had managed to be caught flat-footed and less prepared than she could be. Carrie was the person who did her homework ahead of the teacher assigning it. She had once done an entire book report before their second-grade teacher had handed out the book, and she had once broken out in hives at the sight of an overdue assignment. A spelling worksheet from second grade had blown off her front porch and disappeared, and although Carrie had been given a replacement and turned the assignment in on time, she had found the original paper growing mold and mildew in the corner of the garden shed five months later and broken out in hives. Carrie swore up and down that the hives had been from the mold and mildew in the shed, but that didn’t make nearly as good a story and so no one believed her. If Carrie wasn’t prepared with any kind of research, the world was about to end. Chris said as much, which was a terrible mistake.
“I had to order the book from a library in Wisconsin!” Carrie snapped, throwing the book in question at Chris, “and I don’t see you helping, Mister Mopey!” There were two different pencils stuck in her messy bun and she had a sticky note clinging to her sleeve. Slow-kindled rage burned in her eyes. It occurred to Chris that he had kind of left Carrie hanging ever since Maddison had left, and that she’d been researching a dozen different subjects to get the location of the San Telmo as close as possible, and he resolved to be as contrite as possible. This must have been obvious because Carrie relented. “It only got in yesterday and I haven’t had time to go over all the maps,” she explained much more quietly, and yanked a book out of her pile and waved it at Chris, who grabbed it and opened the page with the most sticky notes.
“‘The mussel beds where Mytilus Arquitenens congregate are located at the southern end of the island, where the ocean currents permit a high concentration of salinity and the grasses are seldom disturbed,’” he read.
“I wanted you to look at the pictures,” Carrie sighed.
“Oh,” Chris said, and then, “Oh!” Mussel beds were not just a good place to find endangered mussels, they were supposedly where the San Telmo had sunk, and Carrie’s copy of Endangered Floridian Mollusks had a map that showed the current and past extent of the mussel beds. In full color.
“If I can compare where the beds of mussels were with where there were supposed to be white limestone cliffs,” Carrie said, “and then compare that with what you could see from the old Spanish mission church, I ought to be able to tell you where the San Telmo went down. I just haven’t had a lot of luck finding any maps that show the white cliffs, although three of the books that mentioned them said they were unusual.”
“But that’s good, because it means finding the cliffs should help narrow everything down,” Chris pointed out. He shifted a stack of graphing paper and maps off the bunk that was supposed to be his, and sat down.
“Unless I don’t have the books I need to find the cliffs,” Carrie groaned. “I couldn’t pack everything.” Chris raised his eyebrows, because Carrie had probably weighed the boat down with her books more than the professor had with Moby, and he was seriously wondering if Carrie had thought to pack a change of clothing and a toothbrush along with the ten books and an uncounted number of maps.
“I couldn’t pack everything that I wanted to,” Carrie clarified, tossing to Chris a map on which she had picked out the marshes and the old mission church, along with a circumference of what a reasonable human being could have seen from the mission church. “And I did remember my toothbrush, thank you very much. And even my phone, although I’m not getting a signal, so if I do need a book I don’t have, I don’t know how I’m going to call home and get Dad to read a few pages for me.”
Chris had been wondering whom Carrie had found to calculate how far Father Gonzalez could have seen from the mission church on a stormy night and why he didn’t know that person, but he jumped and fished his own phone out of his pocket when she mentioned the phone. No service.
“We still have a radio,” he said, trying to ignore the small spike of unease. It was the simplest thing in the world to lose phone reception when you were on the ocean—despite what Carrie thought of the Bermuda Triangle, weird things did happen when you were surrounded by a vast blue mystery—and yet it seemed almost too inconvenient. A shipboard radio was all well and good, but no phones meant no contact with the outside world, and no contact with the outside world meant no warnings in or out, if you thought there was a need for warnings. Chris squashed a little trickle of unease with considerable difficulty. They would only be away for two days, and it wasn’t as though Maddison had been trying to call him all morning.
MADDISON ONLY GAVE UP AFTER SPENDING HER whole morning trying to call Chris and getting nowhere. She’d also gotten nothing but sympathetic looks from her parents and even Mr. and Mrs. Lyndon. It was the sympathetic looks that were freaking her out, far more than the lack of contact from Chris or even the cold, hard truth that her father had once been a suspect in a murder investigation. It was impossibly hard to convince yourself that you were overreacting when all the adults in your life were acting like you had a right to be upset.
And it was a missing person case, Maddison told herself fiercely. Not murder. At least not then.
After all, there were perfectly good explanations for why the phone was going directly to voicemail, starting with “He dropped it in the water” and going on from there. There didn’t have to be anything suspicious going
on. There shouldn’t be anything suspicious going on, and Maddison shouldn’t be afraid that a respected college professor was going to turn out to have pushed two of her friends over the side of the boat.
Maybe if she called one of their home phones again?
“Maddison, try a different tactic,” her mother finally said, interrupting her in the middle of dialing Carrie’s parents’ number for the sixth time. “You aren’t going to get through that way.”
“Or get some rest,” her father added. “You were up very early this morning.”
“Okay!” Maddison said—yelled, really—and took herself back to the bedroom she was staying in, because if nothing else, her mom was right and she could probably stand to get dressed before noon. There were a number of significant looks exchanged as she left, but Maddison was feeling irritable and miserable and out of sorts so she didn’t really register them.
It was shaping up to be a pretty day, the gray rain giving way to a clear blue sky with nice puffy clouds and no heat haze, and the Lyndons had given her the prettiest room in the house. It was the topmost room in the house, aside from the attic, and had a white and lavender color scheme, and could be called charming with absolute sincerity. Maddison didn’t have time for the white lacey curtains, or the pretty dried flowers on the bedside table, and she went directly to her bed, replaced the covers she’d been carrying around all morning, threw two cross-stitched pillows across the room, and pulled up the pictures on her phone.
Then Maddison felt horribly guilty so she got up and retrieved the cross-stitched pillows and then sat back down. The picture of Carrie, taken from a picture in her father’s study, gazed up at her, even though the Carrie in the picture was looking away from the camera with her face half hidden in a halo of escaping red hair. Glaring at the picture was a nice substitute for glaring at her dad. Maddison was sure that he had nothing do with the disappearance of some kid he’d gone to school with. She was absolutely sure that he hadn’t murdered anybody. She knew—she’d known her whole life long—that he always had her best interests at heart.
