Emily Windsnap and the Siren's Secret (20 page)

I pulled it out and held it in my palm. I was right about one thing. It
was
just an ordinary piece of plastic. It looked like the kind of thing Mom used to wrap my sandwiches in for school. And it had something inside it — but it wasn’t a sandwich! It looked like a sheet of paper, folded over and over into a tiny package.

“You do it,” I said to Aaron, suddenly losing my nerve.

He took the bag and opened it up. “Time to find out what this is all about.”

The knock at the door startled us so much, we both literally jumped out of our chairs, banging knees as we did so.

Aaron quickly shoved the shell and package on to another chair and slid it under the table. “Who’s that?” he called.

“King Kong,” replied a familiar voice. “Who do you think?”

Aaron opened the door. Mandy stood on the doorstep, peering into the cottage. “Thought I saw you,” she said. “What’s going on?”

“We — we’re just —”

“Let her in, Aaron,” I said, getting up. Aaron held the door open for her and Mandy came in. Sticking his head out and glancing quickly in both directions, he closed it again and followed her inside. The three of us stood in an awkward circle.

“Thanks for telling Mom I was going to be out for the day,” I said.

Mandy shrugged. “No problem. How did it go, anyway — whatever you were doing?”

I didn’t know how to reply. Where could I start? And I still couldn’t stop a bit of me from wondering if Mandy really was being genuine — or if, any moment now, she would laugh in my face and tell me she’d just been pretending and had never had the slightest intention of being my friend.

“It’s OK, I get it. You don’t trust me,” Mandy said, before I’d worked out how to answer her question.

“No, I —” I began. Then I stopped. I took a breath and started again. “It’s not that I don’t trust you,” I said carefully. “It’s — well, maybe I’m scared.”

“Scared? Of me?” Mandy laughed. Then she flushed deep red. “I suppose I’ve given you reason to feel scared of me in the past,” she said sadly. “I was a bully. I made your life terrible. I’m not surprised that’s how you feel.” She turned and headed back toward the front door. “Sorry for bothering you.”

I grabbed her arm. “No! That’s not what I meant,” I said. “Don’t go.”

“Why not? Why on earth would you want to be around me? I was an idiot to think you’d want us to be friends,” she said.

And despite everything that had happened today, and how much of a mess everything was, I suddenly got this really good feeling. It was like looking out at a calm sea and feeling at peace. Mandy and I
were
friends, and I had to stop doubting it. The only block to our friendship was me, and my silly suspicious mind. We had enough battles to fight without trying to turn our friendship into another one.

I patted the chair next to me. “Look, come and sit down,” I said. “I’m going to tell you everything.”

“So that’s pretty much it,” I said. Mandy had sat openmouthed through the whole story, hanging on every word like a child listening to her favorite fairy tale. Hearing myself say it all out loud, I thought it did sound a bit like a fairy tale. The only difference was that every word of this fairy tale was true.

“And that’s what was inside the shell,” she said, pointing to the package Aaron still had folded up in his hand.

Aaron nodded. “We were just about to open it when you came in.” He looked up at me. “Ready?”

I nodded.

He unfolded the package, again and again until it was fully open. A plain sheet of paper, covered with hand-drawn squiggles and lines and symbols and strange words that I didn’t recognize.

The three of us hunched over it, trying to make sense of it.

“I think it’s a map of some sort,” Aaron said. “But I don’t know of where. It doesn’t look like any countries I’ve seen.” He frowned at it. “All those maps back at the castle — I can’t think of a single one that looks like this.”

“Of course you can’t!” Mandy suddenly exclaimed, sitting up straight and staring at us both.

“Why not?”

“Look — the map came from a siren, right?”

“Right,” I agreed, trying to ignore the fact that it was drawn on a plain sheet of paper and stuffed inside a sandwich bag. How did a siren get hold of such ordinary things?

“And where do sirens live?” Mandy went on, as though she were talking to a pair of very stupid people. Which was when I realized she
was
. It didn’t matter how Melody had gotten hold of it. The fact was, it was hers — and she was a siren.

“In the sea!” I said.

Mandy folded her arms and grinned. “Exactly!”

“Of course!” Aaron said. “It’s a map of the sea!”

He leaned back over the map, pulling it straight and indicating for us to join him. “We had these at the castle, too. It’s because it’s hand-drawn. I couldn’t tell right away,” he muttered, clearly embarrassed that Mandy had figured it out before him.

He ran a finger over some lines that looked like contours. “Look. This shows you the different areas and currents of the sea,” he went on, taking the lead now that he knew what we were dealing with.

“What are all the numbers?” I asked.

“They tell you how deep the ocean is at that point. And those darker bits there,” he said, pointing at some dark gray patches dotted on the map. “They’re sandbanks.”

“What are those thick arrows?” Mandy asked. They were all over the paper, pointing in different directions, left, right, up, and down.

“They tell you the direction of the tide. Very useful,” he replied.

“What about that?” I pointed to a circle in the bottom left-hand corner. It looked like an old-fashioned watch, with a little cross on the top.

“That’s a compass, isn’t it?” Mandy said. “The cross on the top is pointing North.”

“That’s right,” Aaron said. He rubbed his chin and stared at the map. “You can tell all sorts of things from a map like this. You can find any point in the sea if you’ve got the right information.”

Which was something we were lacking. We didn’t have
any
information. How were we ever going to make sense of this?

Aaron ran his hand over some roughly drawn shapes dotted on the map — the only bits of it that weren’t filled with squiggles and numbers. “These will be our best guide,” he said.

“What are they?” I asked.

“Land — islands in the sea. And this one . . .” He pointed at a scraggily drawn oval right in the center of the map. Whoever had drawn it had circled it again and again with a different color. They’d done it so hard, the paper had almost ripped. An arrow pointing toward it made sure it stood out even more. It was different from the other arrows. They were thick and broad. This was more like the kind you draw through a heart to indicate true love.

“What about it?” I asked.

Aaron looked up at me. “This is the place we need to find.”

The pieces started falling into place. “Melody wanted the shell to help her find something,” I said slowly. “The lost thing, whatever it is, I bet it’s out there, on that island. It must be! And if we stand a chance of rescuing Shona from that awful place . . .” My sentence trailed away.

Mandy finished it for me. “We need to find the island,” she said. “And we need to find it fast.”

Fifteen minutes later, Mandy, Aaron, and I were in the map section of the Brightport library. We had to work quickly. The library closed early on Sundays and we only had an hour to find what we needed. We’d pulled out all the sea maps they had. There weren’t many, but we figured they’d probably have the local ones at least. We were banking on the hope that the hand-drawn map would be of somewhere reasonably close. It had to be, or how would Melody have been able to swim there?

Aaron dumped a handful of maps and charts on the table in front of us. “Right,” he said. “Let’s get started.”

I pushed the hood off my head. I’d kept my face hidden in case anyone spotted me on the way over and recognized me from the newspaper. There was hardly anyone in the library, though, and no one was taking any notice of us, so I figured it was probably safe enough to show my face. And anyway, sitting in a library with a hood over my head would probably have attracted
more
attention, not less.

I opened up a map. It was crisscrossed with lines and numbers, yellow circles, purple blocks. And it was massive.

“What are we meant to be doing?” I asked as a feeling of hopelessness washed over me like a wave creeping high up the shore.

“Look for any similar patterns,” Aaron said as he placed the shell on the table and propped up our map in front of it. “Same groups of numbers, islands that look similar in shape, or grouped in the same kind of way — anything. We need to find a match.” He grabbed a map and started unfolding it. “OK?” he asked.

“OK,” Mandy and I replied. Then Mandy opened up a third map and the three of us got to work.

“This is hopeless.” Mandy folded up a map and threw it on the floor. The discarded pile was getting bigger and bigger, and the ones we still hadn’t looked at were dwindling rapidly. We’d nearly gone through them all. “We’re never going to find it.”

Mandy was right. We were kidding ourselves. I wasn’t ready to admit that out loud yet, though. That would mean giving up on Shona — and I would
never
be ready to do that. “Come on, we haven’t finished yet. We’ll find it,” I said, trying to inject some optimism that I didn’t actually feel into my voice. “We’ve got to.”