The Fires Beneath the Sea ebook (6 page)

“I just have to check on something,” he said, and climbed out of the bed.

In his dinosaur pajamas (none too clean, with threadbare patches between the legs) and dangling his old stuffed animal (a mangy-looking giraffe), it was hard to match the words and attitude that came out of him with his little-kid face and body.

She loved him a lot, but Jax was definitely a puzzle.

“Check what?” she asked curiously.

“It’s just a hunch.” And he went out her bedroom door, depositing his giraffe unceremoniously on the floor.

“Wait up!” she called after him, and leaned over the sink to spit out the toothpaste froth.

When she got to the bottom of the stairs he had the front door of the house open. and the screen door, too. She heard satellite radio playing behind her in the kitchen, a droning voice with a British accent; her dad liked to listen to the BBC World News as he flipped pancakes. She saw Jax bending down to stare at the porch’s old slats, whose white paint was scuffed and faded.

She went outside to join him. On the top step there was a puddle of water.

That was all. A puddle.

“Don’t touch it,” said Jax.

“Are you kidding? What is it, poisoned or something?”

“Something,” said Jax grimly. “Don’t let Dad or Max come out here. And get me a cloth to soak it up with, OK? A thick one.”

“Yes, sir,” said Cara, and ducked into the ground-floor bathroom, stealing a glance into the kitchen as she passed the door. Max was on a stool at the island, scarfing pancakes—he had a big appetite these days—and her dad wasn’t looking in their direction. She grabbed a bath towel from the rack.

On the steps, Jax dropped it carefully so that half stayed dry while the other half soaked up the puddle.

“See, we don’t want it tracked into the house,” he said. “We want it to evaporate before anyone steps on it. I was hoping it would already be gone, but humidity’s pretty high today. Here.” And he picked up the towel gingerly and handed it to Cara, who took hold of it by the dry corners. “Hang it in the sun somewhere. Somewhere the others won’t touch it.”

She walked around to the back of the house, facing the bay, and carefully hung the towel up on a line between two trees where her mother sometimes dried the sheets. She felt slightly foolish doing it, as though she was humoring Jax in a bizarre delusion.

Then she had a strong picture of the Pouring Man’s face, how it had come closer—closer—closer into the frame of the front-door window. It hadn’t happened gradually, like a person walking toward you, but more in sudden
jumps.

Far.

Nearer.

VERY NEAR.

If Jax was seeing things, so was she.

“So,” he was saying to their dad and Max when she came in the back door, standing at the kitchen island holding his glass of orange juice, “no one went out onto the porch this morning?”

“Nah,” said Max, “why?”

“Oh, I—I think I dropped my stylus out there.”

“It’s probably right where you left it,” said their dad soothingly. “Two pancakes or three?”

“Three,” said Jax and Cara together.

“Three more for me too,” said Max.

“I’ve raised a herd of feral hogs,” said their dad.

After they loaded the dishes into the dishwasher Cara and Jax held a council in his room, which was good for privacy since both her dad and Max were reluctant to set foot inside due to snail, frog, and crab hazards.

“So why did you think—how did you know there was something wrong with the water?”

“I don’t know for sure, but we have to be careful is all,” said Jax. “That puddle could easily have been tainted. He can control water, Car. You know how both times we’ve seen him it’s been in the rain? Or with water just—like streaming down off him?”

“Uh-huh,” said Cara.

She got it. He was the Pouring Man.

“It’s his element. As in, ancient Greek element? Air, earth, water, or fire? Not as in the Periodic Table.”

She wasn’t certain what he meant but nodded anyway. If you stopped Jax every time you weren’t quite sure what he was talking about, you’d never finish a conversation.

“Water is his element and night’s his best time, probably because it tends to be more humid then. Who knows what he can do with water? A lot, I suspect. And we don’t want any part of him in our house, that’s for sure. Water is his power
and
his constraint.”

“Talk normally.”

“His limit. He can only move freely where there’s a certain amount of water present, and it’s easier for him at night. It’s how he is.”

“But if there’s no signal to read, how do you know all this?”

“That’s actually a good question,” said Jax in a know-it-all way, as though he were her teacher.

As he talked, he was lifting a frog out of his terrarium, one finger on each of its sides, its thin back legs dangling.

“He sends me messages, right? Last night, he
wanted
us to see him. He wanted us to hear the question. The question
Where is she
. And if we’d known the answer, trust me, he’d know it now, too. So it’s just as well that we didn’t.”

“Wait. You mean he can know what we’re thinking? Like—he can ping us?”

Jax opened his window and set the frog out on the roof, where it hopped away toward a tree branch.

“Is that a
tree
frog?” asked Cara. “Because—”

“He can read me, at least,” said Jax, turning back to her. “I’m not sure if he can read you or not.”

“How about—the stuff about the water? He told you that too?”

“No. That stuff—I just knew it. The way you know what up or down means, but it’s hard to describe them without using the words
up
or
down
. See what I’m saying?”

“Kind of,” said Cara uncertainly.

She half wished Max or Hayley were here, to make Jax explain things in a more basic way. Or just so she didn’t feel like she was the only one whose head was spinning.

“It doesn’t seem empirically verifiable,” said Jax. “Any of it. I realize that.”

“Uh, yeah,” said Cara.

“But Car, I promise you. It’s real.”

He said this softly. He’d sat back down on his bed, opposite her, and his scrawny legs were crossed in front of him. Jax always managed to have scabs on his knees and bruises on his shins.

“I guess, if I’m gonna go with this,” she said slowly, “I have to stop second-guessing you. It’s kind of like I have to either believe it all or believe none of it. Otherwise I’ll just keep feeling like my head is going to explode.”

“Like the posters from that old TV show,” said Jax, and nodded solemnly. “Remember?
I Want to Believe.
”

“Mmm,” murmured Cara. Actually it was more like she had to suspend disbelief—a term from English class. “But what does he have to do with her? I mean, how could Mom be connected to a scary—whatever he is? And why is he looking for her?”

“I don’t have those answers yet,” said Jax, and shook his head. “But I did remember something. The leatherback? In the writing on your driftwood?”

“Yeah? What about it?”

“They have one at Woods Hole—at the Aquarium. They got it recently. It hasn’t been there for long. Mom was telling me about it though, how she wanted me to come see it. But then she….”

He trailed off.
Then she vanished
.

After a second Cara spoke.

“You think that could be the one in the message?”

“I don’t have any other ideas,” said Jax. “I mean, how many leatherbacks can there be on the Cape? Unless we want to head for the open ocean, that is.”

“Then we need to come up with an excuse to get Dad to drive us there,” she said.

It was Jax who invented the pretext: a flash drive he claimed must have been left in their mother’s desk, with some of his data. Their dad wasn’t happy about it, but Jax played on his heartstrings. Cara suggested they could combine it with a trip to the Aquarium, which was in the building next door.

At the last minute, as they were getting into the car, Max appeared on his skateboard, flipping it up into his hand right before he hit the sandy stretch of their street. He jumped into the backseat next to Jax, his board tucked under his arm.

It was a new one, Cara noticed—flames and a grinning skull. Really cute.

“Slide over,” he ordered him. “I got long legs.”

“You’re coming?” asked Cara.

“You kidding? Miss the dogfish swimming around in the dirty water? And the quahogs that look so yummy? Forget it.”

Cara didn’t like to eat quahogs, or anything slimy that came from the sea. When she had to watch people slurping oysters in restaurants, she felt like throwing up.

Maybe she shouldn’t plan on bussing tables after all.

“Didn’t expect you back so soon,” said their dad to Max as they pulled away from the house.

“This scuffle broke out at the park,” said Max mildly.

He meant the skatepark, near the pier.

“You were
fighting
?” asked their dad.

“Not me,” said Max. “I had to break it up, sorta.”

Max was hardly ever on one side or the other. He was the kind of guy who got along with all the groups at school but wasn’t really a part of any of them: the jocks, the geeks, the stoner types. He was kind of a free agent, which was hard to carry off if you also wanted to be popular. But somehow Max did it.

“What happened?” asked their dad, flicking on his right-turn signal as they reached Route 6.

“Oh, you know,” said Max, shrugging. “What always happens. Nothing much. Two guys with supersized egos. Name-calling, whatever. It wasn’t too bad, maybe a sprained wrist was all that happened. Anyway, I just wasn’t in the mood after, so I figured I’d cut out. No biggie.”

Cara glanced back at Jax, who was looking at Max admiringly. Max was a hero of Jax’s but had no idea his little brother worshiped him. In fact, Max thought
Jax
thought he was stupid. Which made him come down hard on Jax sometimes. Especially lately.

“That’s cool,” said Jax, trying to sound cool himself.

Max shrugged again, settled back in his seat and stuck in his buds.

When they finally got to Woods Hole, Cara was relieved: her dad had taken advantage of the long car ride to deliver a lecture on the Protestant Reformation—mostly to her, since Jax was typing on his smartphoneand Max was listening to
London Calling
(with the volume cranked up so high that she was practically listening to
London Calling
too). Her dad tried to spice up the lesson with details about how Martin Luther got married to a nun he smuggled out of her nunnery in a stinky fish barrel, but that part sounded made up and the rest was a bit on the snoozy side.

They drove through hilly, tree-lined neighborhoods and out into the town, which was arranged around a harborfront, with restaurants and bars built right onto the pilings and a big salt pond set back from the shore in the middle of the ocean institute’s buildings.

“Let’s do the Aquarium thing first,” said Max when they’d all climbed out of the car and stretched.

Jax and Cara exchanged looks.

“There’s no rush on the thumb drive, I guess,” said Jax.

“How about I’ll go check the office for you, Jax,” said Cara. “I’m better at finding things. You guys can hang with the seals or whatever.”

Jax nodded. “OK with me.”

“I’ll let you in, Cara,” said their dad from the driver’s seat. “I’ve got her keys somewhere in here.” And he fiddled with the door to the glove compartment.

“See you in a few,” said Max, and he and Jax split off toward the Aquarium entrance.

Cara hadn’t thought it would affect her the way it did, being inside her mother’s office. But as soon as her dad unlocked the door and opened it for her (“Take your time, honey, I’m going to step down the hall and talk to Roger”) she felt overwhelmed. The feeling washed over her that her mother had been with them a long, long time ago.

And that long-ago time might never be coming back.

Her knees went weak and she had to sit down in her mother’s desk chair.

As she sat there, a strange feeling of mixed dread and anticipation trilling though her, she looked around slowly. The office wasn’t much different from how she remembered it; the only sign of anything out of the ordinary was a dried-out plant that had dropped some dead leaves. No one had bothered to water it.