The Fires Beneath the Sea ebook (11 page)

And where there weren’t restaurants there were the friendly neighborhoods where kids played, their wind-worn saltbox houses covered in climbing roses, and behind them, next to the path, the rambling, overgrown green backyards….

The Cape, they taught in school, was just a big sand bar beneath their feet; it was young, in geological terms, only a few thousand years old, made of the silt left behind by glaciers. It would be gone soon, they said, like a pile of dirt in a puddle of rainwater—going, going, gone. …

But she was here now. She wasn’t going anywhere.

And she wished so much she could be sure, the way she used to be, that when she decided to go home again both her parents would be there waiting.

The feeling—which was almost like longing, or like a caught sob that didn’t go away—faded a bit as they went into the general store, stopping to tie up Rufus outside. It was one of their old haunts, being so near their house. She liked its dusty wooden floors, its dimly lit, homey atmosphere. When they were younger, and allowed to walk to the store by themselves for the first time, their dad used to let them pick up the newspaper for him. He would give them a couple of dollars extra to get snacks for themselves, along with the paper for him, two coffees, and a bagel with cream cheese for their mother.

Jax beat her over to the fresh baked-goods section, where they had muffins and donuts if you got there early enough.

“No bear claws,” said Jax glumly.

“Have the raised maple,” she said.

“Maple,” said Jax and made a face. “Who eats that? It’s so weird. Plus it’s the color of vomit.”

Max honked the horn at them in a jaunty rhythm as they were walking home, pulling up alongside.
Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh, duh duh
. Her dad always sang to that rhythm, some old-time jingle: “Shave-and-a-haircut, two bits.”

“I got it!” Max called out as the passenger window rolled down so that they could hear him.

They stood there for a second with Rufus on the sidewalk, and then Cara bent down to look through the window.

“Got what?” she asked.

“The
Whydah!
It wasn’t the Whydahlee or Whydah Lee, it was just the
Whydah!
Get it? The
lee side
of the
Whydah!
”

“What’s the
Whydah?
”

“A pirate ship!”

Max was exuberant—obviously happy he’d redeemed himself by solving the mystery.

“A pirate ship?”

“It’s sunk right off Marconi! It wrecked there in 1717. I saw stuff about it in P-town, where they have that pirate museum. I was dropping Dad off, you know? And we ended up having to park in the lot near the pier, and then he got on the boat, and I was walking back to the car and I saw the pirate flag and went in. It’s right there on the pier. And inside there was this whole thing on how they’ve dug up artifacts from the
Whydah,
and where it is, and everything!”

“C’mon, Jax,” said Cara, “let’s just get in.” And she opened the car door for Rufus, who leapt past them.

As they pulled away from the curb Max was still babbling excitedly.

“It’s this pirate’s ship that’s, like, less than a mile off the beach. Totally underwater. It’s not that far out at all. I figure I can get Zee to bring out her dad’s powerboat, you know? She’s great with it, she can totally handle the steering. And we can use their scuba gear, or maybe Cory’s. They have it all, the tanks, everything. Even wet suits. I think there’s even a buoy out where the
Whydah
is, you know? Because this treasure-hunter guy has, like, an exclusive on it, it’s some kind of finders, keepers deal? He found the wreck back in the eighties and ever since then he’s been pulling stuff out of it, artifacts and things. Swords and pistols and jewelry….”

“A real, actual pirate ship,” said Cara. “I didn’t know there were any of those around.”

“Hardly any,” said Max. “Just the
Whydah,
as far as I could find out. On the Cape, anyway. And it’s three centuries old. It’s pronounced like
widow
, by the way. Or
widda
, or something. That’s what it means, it’s some old-fashioned spelling. And most of it you can’t see even if you’re diving. Most of it’s under the sand. They use this fancy vacuum to suck up all the pieces of the boat. And the treasure.”

“We still don’t know
when
to go, though,” said Jax. “Even if we can be sure where.”

“Listen, if we really mean it,” said Max, “there’s only one way to do it. We have to patrol. We’ll have to do it in shifts, trade off sleeping. Have someone out there every night, watching for your glow-in-the-dark waterbugs, or whatever they are.”

“They’re not
bugs
at all,” said Jax. “They’re
dinoflagellates
.”

Cara was thinking that Max’s newfound enthusiasm was almost funny. Just give a guy a pirate ship…

“I’m thinking we each take a friend, then switch off. Like Cara? You could go with Hayley say from nine to one in the morning, then I could go over with my crew. Jax, though—being only ten and all?—maybe should stay at home.”

“Unfair,” said Jax. “Age discrimination, apartheid, and segregation.”

“You heard what dad said,” said Max. “I’m the boss.”

They were silent for a minute, Jax sulking.

“Whoever saw them, obviously,” put in Cara, “would call the others right away on the cell. ’Cause we all have to be there for the actual dive. Ultimately. So Jax, all you’ll miss is the boring part. Are you kidding? You’re
lucky
.”

They talked about it as they pulled up to the house and got out, walking up the front steps. Max suggested they reveal only part of the story to their friends—tell them they were looking for the luminous algae, but say they had to do it for Jax, who had been assigned a big science project for a gifted-kids think tank in Washington, DC. (It was true that a school for geniuses there wanted him. It was even true that he was working on a project for them—or at least he had been. But their mother had been his advisor on the project, and it was kind of in limbo, since she wasn’t around.)

Cara wanted to tell Hayley the truth. She felt bad about hiding it from her. She’d been keeping a lot to herself lately. And even if Hayley hadn’t believed her about the driftwood thing … Hayley was her friend, and it felt awkward to keep this a secret. But Max said it was all too much; he said the bizarreness of the story would stress out their friends.

“I mean, let’s face it,” said Max. “Who would believe the story about the turtle mind meld? It adds this whole other level of weirdness and explaining. Plus, let me be frank, I don’t want to be seen as a freak. Let’s take the path of least resistance. Feel me?”

He planned to tell Zee and his other friends that the scuba-diving trip was to collect algae for Jax, for him to study it, but that the whole thing had to be secret from Zee’s father. After all, you weren’t really supposed to swim in red tides, and her father probably wouldn’t let them.

“Plus I still have to figure out how to teach you guys scuba at warp speed,” added Max. “And right now? I don’t have clue one.”

Cara stopped by Hayley’s house to invite her to sleep over.

“I’ll go ask,” said Hayley, and left Cara standing in the front hallway looking at her mom’s big shelf of figurines, which she liked to show off whenever she got a new one on ebay. They were called Hummers, or something. They made Cara feel ill. There was a chubby girl with a white goose, a gnome with a basket of mushrooms, a drummer boy with a flag on his shoulder.… Cara thought they were sort of ugly, but they had big, round eyes and pink cheeks, and Hayley’s mom loved whatever she thought was cute.

Once Cara’s own mother had stood here with her—they had come in to talk about carpooling or something—and Cara had seen her look at the statuettes with kind eyes. She smiled reassuringly at Cara as they waited, then looked at the figurines again, studiously, examining them—not like they were cute but like they were very, very strange. Cara’s mother had a way of looking at tacky stuff sometimes that was kind of deliberate and quizzical—like she was a traveler from afar, born in a different, finer place, where such things did not exist.

Although apparently she was born in Topeka. Where they probably had plenty of Hummers of their own.

Actually, come to think of it, Cara wasn’t sure where her mother had been born, though for some reason she had a vague picture of cornfields with windmills slowly, creakily turning, or maybe the black-and-white landscape Dorothy lived in before she went to Oz. Her mother didn’t talk much about her childhood.

Cara heard Hayley ask her mother if she could stay over at Cara’s house. Her mother seemed to be scrubbing the bathtub, to judge by the back-and-forth scratching that went on and on as Hayley talked, so Hayley must be standing outside the bathroom door.

Her mother had kind of a carrying voice.

“I guess so, honey,” said her mother.

Hayley mumbled something about Cara’s dad not being there to supervise.

“Well, that family needs a
lot of extra support
,” said her mother, who sounded like she was trying to be discreet but was actually practically yelling. Cara cringed. “We have to be real supportive of
that whole family
.”

Anyway, said Hayley’s mother, they were right down the street, so as long as Hayley called her if anything made her uncomfortable …

Out on the sidewalk, while Hayley tossed a tennis ball up and down and popped her gum, Cara explained that she had a science project of Jax’s to help with, and would Hayley mind spending a few hours on the beach that night?

Then they would come back here. Hayley could borrow Max’s bike, since she didn’t have a light on her own.

Hayley shook her head uncertainly. She didn’t like to keep things from her mom; it was just the two of them.

“Max is pitching a tent for us,” Cara added. “We’ll trade off shifts. So he’ll be there, too—you know, part of the time.”

Which she had to admit was sort of devious of her, since she knew Hayley had a big crush on Max.

But this was about getting their mother back. Desperate measures…

“Oh,” said Hayley and nodded. “OK, then.”

They went to a pool that belonged to one of Max’s friends, whose parents were off at work, and practiced with the scuba gear for a couple of hours, mostly in the deep end. It made Cara nervous, but Jax liked dealing with the equipment; he was always a quick study. The tanks were surprisingly heavy, she thought, and you had to trust that other people knew how to fill them off a big machine and then carefully check them—Max, in this case. Who had been diving with Cory for years but still didn’t have his certification.

Then they spent the rest of the afternoon getting ready for beach camping, which Jax solemnly informed them was against the law. Or at least Park Service rules. They’d have to be stealthy and sneak down after dark, and just hope that no rangers would come driving along the beach in their Park Service jeeps to notice them.

The gear needed to be ready and stowed in their big, external-frame backpacks before Lolly got there to make dinner so there was no chance of her noticing anything.

“Why don’t we set the tent up under the trees on the cliffs, overlooking the beach?” suggested Cara. “Not far from the parking lot, so it’s easy to get to in the dark. And it’s not right at the water, in fact it’s a long way up, so that makes it harder for him to get to us.”

The three of them were in the garage digging up camping gear from previous years, when the family had made road trips out West to hike in the red-rock country of Utah and near the Grand Canyon. Cara remembered her mother laughing as the wind tossed one of their picnics into the air—running, as she held Cara’s hand, through a high alpine meadow where there were purple lupines.…

This summer, of course, there’d been no road trips.

“From up on the bluffs we’ll definitely have a view of the water,” she pressed. “A
better
view. We can see way further out from up there. So if the glow’s all the way out at the shipwreck, say?—and doesn’t come up to the waterline, we’ll still be able to spot it. And there’ll be less chance anyone will catch us.”

Human or otherwise
, she thought.

Max was rolling up sleeping bags and pads and stowing them in the back of the car. He thought they should take those along in case their friends got bored and wanted to crash; the four-person tent had a clear-mesh door flap, so the others could just lie down while Cara or Max kept a lookout.

“You’re probably right,” he said. “Plus, if we hit paydirt, and we have to call Zee to bring the boat out, we get better cell coverage up there, too.”

“’Course the downside,” said Jax, “is you’ll have more mosquitoes.”

“Note to self: pack bug juice,” said Max.

The garage was dusty, with cobwebs clinging to the boxes of battery-powered lanterns and lightweight cooking equipment. Cara brushed them off and wiped her hands on her jeans.

“So, here’s how we’ll do it,” said Max. “I’ll drive over early and pitch the tent, OK? I’ll leave the bags and pads in there, flashlights and lantern, drinks, insect repellent”—he looked down at the pile of gear, nodding as he took stock of what they’d need—“and some snacks. Also extra batteries for the lantern, cause we wouldn’t want to run out of light. After I set it all up, I come back and we all have dinner with Lolly and act like normal kids.”

“Act like,” said Cara.

“Then, as soon as Lolly goes home, you and Hayley take off on the bikes. Me and the guys’ll come relieve you at one in the morning, in the car. We’ll do the rest of the night shift. It’s no problem. Keat wants to play poker with nickels. But we all gotta sync up our watches. And charge our phones.”