Read Get Wrecked :: Chapter 15

Maddy rolled her eyes. Her phone hit the table a little too hard as she traded texts for grilled cheese and an oversized cookie sitting on a plate in front of her. The case scuffed. Ding, ding, ding. She ignored it.

A radar beep sounded- Hazel’s text tone. She put down the sandwich to check. <I got invited to a bonfire on the beach. The part of Ross Hill with all the horseshoe crabs. It’s next Saturday.> In her mind, she said every curse word she knew. In her aunt’s café, where business was slow and it was time for her lunch break, she gritted her teeth and said nothing. <Who invited you?> <A guy I know> <And I found a cool, tropical rock>

Lenses, microchips and lots of unearthly extras came out of the first piece of mer trash being dismantled in Tristan’s bedroom. It was beyond human comprehension, as well as Tristan and Rhea’s. They weren’t finished cleaning most of the items they’d retrieved, not that there was a backup plan or point if they couldn’t figure out how to use them.

“At least we have booze,” Tristan joked, looking over his notes dejectedly. No amount of research on conspiracy blogs or in alternative history books could have primed him on the right concepts. It was like trying to figure out space travel with a Neolithic education.

Rhea was digging through her spell book, having given up on the scanners as soon as the first mysterious parts came into view. “Do any saltwater tests really work?”

“Not conclusively.” Tristan looked over the skull from Rhea’s bag. “What’s this for?”

“What’s your booze for?”

“You’re going to use a bird skull to get drunk?” He glanced at the other slimy trash spread across several flat enough surfaces around the room, looking for anything else that didn’t belong.

Rhea stood up and took the skull out of his hand. “What kind of bird has a head this big? It’s gotta be something cooler.”

“You still can’t drink it.”

There was a knock on the door. “Kiddies? You better not be diving for beer again!” Tristan’s mother came home from work early only once in a blue moon, but when she did, she was always undetectable until it was too late. The knob turned, and just like that, the alcohol, scanners and most the other salvaged items were gone.

For the next few hours both Tristan and Rhea were restricted to the kitchen while Tristan’s mother searched his room to the best of her ability. Rhea’s parents, who had been called over almost immediately, were playing good cop bad cop to find out their plans. Her mother, as the good cop, had been offering a plea deal. Her father was officially authorized to punish them both.

“Just tell us where you got it and we’ll go from there. Can we go from there?” If they answered, they’d have to hear the riot act about underwater dumpster diving. They didn’t answer.

“I don’t care where they got it; I wanna know what they were planning on doing with it!” If knowing about the deep mer was forbidden until they came of age, stealing their secret gadgets from a trash heap somewhere and using them to cheat the curriculum was probably equivalent to a felony. “And if you won’t tell us-“ he looked over the contraband and took the skull to hold in front of Rhea, “Yorick here is going to have to go away.” She bit her lip, but didn’t break. “And any friends he would’ve had at home are going with him.” She gave a pleading look to Tristan, but he remained stoic.

“We can find more Yoricks,” he assured her.

Rhea’s father turned to him. “You know, your mother can do the same with those big foot… yeti books.” He froze. “That’s right, I know your weak points. And I’ll do it- Carol will do it.” He motioned in the general direction of Tristan’s room. “And it’ll only get worse until somebody-“ He met his daughter’s eyes, then her friend’s. “Somebody… explains.”

Tristan finally caved. A game of rock paper scissors commenced between the two teens. Rhea lost. “Shit…” she muttered. It was on her to tell the least incriminating version of the story her parents would accept.

Hazel was ninety percent sure the coral she’d been analyzing was a tropical species from much farther south than Red Marina. It was dead, of course. Nonetheless, it was as absurd as the Crystal it was growing on. Geology wasn’t her strong suit, but it was unbelievably hard to put a name to the coral-encrusted lump. There were plenty of gems with similar descriptions, but none seemed like probable finds on a random beach.

She needed help, but Maddy was busy with robot drama and Tristan hadn’t answered a single text all day. That left a few people she could ask at the bonfire. Until then, she would have to wait.

For the time at hand, she could look up information on Clyde Ball. Having found a promising key phrase on one of the less intact pages of the family scrapbook, she could scour historic document databases for records of “Duchess Coconut.” After an evening of research, she was able to piece together that Duchess Coconut was the name of a ship. He was its captain for about ten years in the late nineteenth century. Mostly, he brought tourists down the coast or to the Caribbean and back.

The final voyage of the Duchess Coconut had been a special commission from an American politician. A few wealthy businessmen, their guests and security personnel were returning from the Florida Keys unexpectedly and needed a quick trip. They were supposed to arrive in Miami, but no trace of the vessel or the crew was ever seen again. Because of the prestige of the passengers, search efforts were intense, but no wreckage, bodies or survivors turned up anywhere. It was lost in the mysterious Bermuda Triangle.

Hazel was disappointed when this avenue of the investigation came to an end. There was so much she still didn’t know, and would never figure out with this information. To organize her thoughts, she found a clean page in a notebook and tried to fit everything she could possibly connect to Clyde in a large circle. Once it was all scribbled down, she began to draw lines and arrows where she could tie things together: Clyde, the owner of Octopuss, was the captain of the Duchess Cocount, which probably appeared sinking in her most recent dream. The tarps from White Beach were very far north of where the ship likely sank, but so was her new rock. They could’ve somehow traveled up the coast together, however unlikely it seemed. An oceanic white tip could believably have scavenged about any shipwreck, assuming it was in their territory. There was still no explaining the eyes, voices, or light from her dreams though. Nor was there a reason for a crystal to be important, for her to be seeing things when she swam or for a spirit of any kind to linger around the Duchess Coconut. Octopuss was also still a bit disconnected on account that the only thing she knew about the cat is that it guarded Clyde’s family; therefore the sinking of the ship and death of Clyde would’ve had very little to do with Octa.

She tried to think more speculatively. If the tarps were indeed from the Duchess Coconut, there could be a coverup involved in their confiscation and disappearance. The chances of anyone knowing where they came from or needing to hide them seemed slim at best though. It was possible the light in her dream was somehow beckoning her to the sunken ship, but the whispering, glowing-eyed shadow creatures certainly weren’t. In addition, she was in no way qualified to dive that deep, no matter what else she was certified for. There wasn’t even a location she could search for it.

It wasn’t until the sun had set and she turned out the lights to go to bed that Hazel found the last connection she would be making for the night. The crystal, which she’d left on her bedside table after the microscope work was finished, wasn’t just shiny and bright. It didn't just have a slight unusual glow. It illuminated much of the room like a hard, frozen fire. A glowing crystal from the Bermuda Triangle...