Moonfin (17 page)

Mrs. Grape leaned back in her chair and rubbed her forehead in puzzled fatigue. She had stayed up all night trying to figure out where these scales came from, searching her library and database, and couldn't find a single source.

“This is quite a discovery, kiddo,” she said to Lizzy, who pondered her mother's words. The scales were practically handed over to them by someone. But who? By Xili, perhaps? And why? And what animal do they belong to? The Fierce One they told her about earlier? So many questions.

Time for a trip to treasureopolis,
thought Lizzy
.

The next day Lizzy paid a visit to Sugar's library to see what she could find out about the scales. When she pushed open the gate to the side-yard, she found Rusty very excitedly running back and forth near the neighbor's fence, and it wasn't hard to figure out why: There was a brand new donkey roaming around the pasture next door and Rusty appeared to be
in love
.

“You're a crazy llama, that's for sure,” she said, doubling over with laughter.

Rusty tilted his furry orange head and fluttered his ample eyelashes at her, looking highly insulted, and then spluttered a wet
MHMHMPHHERRRT!
her way.

“Blech! And just so you know, it's a
donkey
, not a llama,” she said, wagging her finger. “Let's be honest, it can't work between you two.”

He threw a vicious glance her way and continued to devote his full and amorous attention to the prancing burro next door.

Lizzy wandered over to look at the garden and breathe in all the yummy smells. Sugar's garden was the biggest one in the neighborhood. She and her husband moved here from the South and built this farm together—Sam and Sadie Sugar of Sugarlump Hill—but he passed away some years ago, leaving her to tend to it on her own. This time of year it was bursting with lettuce and zucchini, tomatoes and tall stalks of corn.

After picking off a couple of ripe bell peppers, Lizzy walked through the bottom half of the door to the kitchen—Sugar had one of those Dutch doors where the top swung open, while the bottom stayed shut to keep all the animals outside—and sat down at the counter, watching as Rusty pranced about. Sugar worked on her weekly baking; a summer breeze mixed with the hot oven air and delectable aroma of freshly baked biscuits.

“Does he know he's a llama?” Lizzy wondered aloud.

“Don't even get me started—he hasn't moved from that spot for two days!” Sugar huffed.

Mmmmmmmmmmmm … muhummuhummuh … mmmmmmmmmm …
carried in through the door from the yard.

“D'you hear that? Been making those noises nonstop! Not sure if he is in love or thinks that donkey is his baby.”

She pulled a tray of buttermilk biscuits from the oven and set them on the stovetop. “Help yerself, and the book you're lookin' for is on one of them shelves over there.” She motioned toward a separate room off the kitchen.

Lizzy grabbed a fluffy, hot biscuit and headed into treasureopolis, her childhood name for Sugar's gigantic library, and her favorite room in the house where she whiled away so much of her time. It was full of old antique shelves lining the wall, and lots and lots of books piled everywhere from floor to ceiling. Sugar had inherited them all from her daddy, who traveled the world in search of exotic stories, not just ordinary ones found in typical libraries. Some of Lizzy's favorites were
Lost Treasures of the Pharaohs
and
The Codex Murrumba
.

Sugar also inherited a love of reading from him as well. She called him an
autodidact
—someone who taught himself everything from books and life, not school, on account of having to work to eat. Lizzy was that type of person too—a self-learner. She scanned the dusty shelves for the book she was looking for:
Prehistoric Reptiles of the Sea
.

“I remember reading it a long time ago,” Lizzy mumbled. “There were drawings in it from the Mesozoic era …” She thought that was one of the best time periods to study in pre-history—the Age of Dinosaurs.

Climbing an old rickety ladder to the top shelf, she pulled down a few books and let them topple to the floor. The books up top were mostly Sugar's leather-bound volumes, bedecked with ornate, gold lettering. Some were cloth-bound. Many were quite old and tattered along the edges. After a few moments of browsing, she heard a funny noise just beneath her feet. Looking down, she found Rusty standing in the middle of the book room, staring up at her with his unblinking eyes.

Cluckcluckcluck … mhummhum … cluckcluck …
he spurted moistly.

“Yuck, Rusty, go away.”

Then he did something very peculiar—even for him. Walking over to one of the shelves and using his snout, he tipped one of the books off the shelf and onto the floor.

“Silly critter—you know you aren't allowed in the house,” Lizzy chided. “Sugar will make you into a handbag. Now off with you!” This was the first time she'd ever seen him come into the book room. He usually only tried to get the dish towels out of the kitchen to wear as hats on hot summer days.

Rusty didn't budge, but kicked at the book and made more clucking noises. Lizzy watched as he pinched it up between his teeth and plopped it on Sugar's velvety orange reading chair. All the while, his deep-set, chestnut eyes steadily bore angry holes into her. She definitely wasn't his favorite amongst the
people
folk.

Then the grossly unthinkable happened …

The classic llama head-whip and artfully aimed spitball flew through the air and hit Lizzy smack in the face.

Rusty made a quick exit through the kitchen door.

“You wretched beast!” Lizzy shouted after him, rubbing her face furiously on her sleeve. “I don't know why Sugar puts up with such a pesky furball like you!”

She jumped down from the ladder and grabbed a lace doily from off the tea table to wipe the dripping spittle from her forehead, her eyes wandering to the book sitting on the chair.

“Now, why in the world would you risk your life coming into the house like that …?”

She snatched it up—
more yuck
, slobber from Rusty's mouth—and wiped it on her jeans. She read the title aloud: “
Blowing Prawn: The Last 200 Years … hmm
, never saw this before.”

Falling into the poufy, old chair, she turned the book around in her hands, looking it over carefully. It was one of those publications the Chamber of Commerce puts out during the summer celebrations each year. But this one seemed special, since it marked the two-hundredth birthday of Blowing Prawn. It was plain on the outside—had a green cloth-like cover, bronze letters on the front, and was about the size of a picture book.

Lizzy leafed through the pages and read about the early settlement of the area—how the canneries opened up and provided jobs to the city folk that flocked from the central valley, and all over the country, to work in them. There was a whole section on whaling and gold mining. She chuckled at the part about the town's naming. Apparently there was some big event called The Plague of Prawns in 1812 where the shore was piled as high as eight feet with the fat shrimp … something about a population boom and an underwater earthquake forcing them on land…. So of course it's logical to name the town Blowing Prawn, complete with a metal sculpture of the famous crustacean (they call him “Alfie”) smack-dab in the middle of town.

After that, there was an informative chapter about the college opening up. When she turned over page 131 on the marine research facility, she found she had arrived on page 134.
Odd.
She turned the page back and forth several times, but didn't see any pages torn out. She searched for the edge of the page.

“Maybe it's one of those fold-outs with an extra large picture on it,” she said, tugging at the creases. Nope. Was it glued? She grabbed the letter opener from Sugar's desk and attempted to slide it in between the two sheets—
sealed tight
. The pages were actually fused together to make it seem like one page.

She found some scissors and carefully cut a thin sliver around the edges of the paper; it opened into a single print spanning the two pages. The hidden photo within was a black and white panorama of the cliff where the aquarium and labs were now built. About fifty townspeople were shown holding shovels, and the caption read: “Groundbreaking, 1910.”

“That must've been the day the labs were built as part of the college,” she said curiously.

Lizzy scanned the names to see who had attended the ceremony that day. It looked like the Pinkertons had—
no surprise there
—the Bickles, the Greers; mostly the old families that homesteaded the area long ago. But one face popped out of the crowd and caught her attention. She grabbed a magnifying glass out of the desk drawer and took a closer look.

“That's
impossible
,” she muttered.

She tore out the photo, cramming it into her jeans' pocket, completely forgetting about the book on prehistoric reptiles for the moment.

“Macaroni and cheese is ready!” Sugar hollered.

Lizzy placed the book back on the shelf and scurried into the kitchen right as Sugar was pulling out a bubbly, homemade casserole from the oven. She licked her lips at the sight.

“The Mysterious Macaroni and Cheese of Wonder!”

“What d'ya mean by mysterious? There ain't no secret to it.”

“Oh, come on. When all the ladies from The Tickly Turnip (that's Sugar's garden club) ask for the recipe, you say, ‘a little of this, and a little of that,' so no one actually knows how you make it.” Lizzy piled a big spoonful of noodles onto her plate.

“I don't have a recipe to give 'em—a bit of flour, some milk, that processed cheesy stuff, a dash of salt—yeah, that's how my momma did it.”

“But how much of each ingredient
exactly
do you use?”

“The problem, sweetie, is that you try to reduce everything down to a scientific formula. Sometimes you have to
feel
your way around. That's when the magic happens.”

“Okay,
Magical
Macaroni and Cheese of Wonder. Either way, it's the best in the world.”

While savoring every cheese-drenched noodle, Lizzy pondered all the events that had happened in recent weeks, her mind working to find one common thread. First, she considered the cave full of mutated fish below the aquarium. Second, the mysterious scales that gave off the EM pulses her mom told them about—most likely from the “Fierce One” the Waterpeople mentioned before.

She took two more mouthfuls of heavenly mac-n-cheese and a long swig of lemonade …

I'm missing something
.

The Waterpeople said Dr. Krell captured Moonfin out at some island where she hunted for food. And he did mention something about an island back in the cavern when he said to the lab tech, “
Take Lilith out to the island and collect tissue samples
…” There are seven islands off the coast of Blowing Prawn. It could be any one of those. And there was that time he acted weird when she mentioned her brother, Brandon, and—

“
Otter Island
!” she practically shouted, astonished for not having realized it sooner.

“What about it?” said Sugar, looking up from her bread machine, which she busily filled with plump dough.

“Oh, nothing—just thinking.”

It's Otter Island
. The one baffling piece to this puzzle … the one place they needed to go to find answers. It was right in front of her the whole time.

“No more thinkin'—you do too much of that. Go out and have a fun adventure this summer, for once, before school starts back up.”

“Okay, I'll do that.” And Lizzy started planning an adventure at that very moment, although she wasn't sure how much fun it was going to be.

Chapter 13
THE QUARANTINE ROOM

B
eneath the aquarium, a misty roar rose up from the crags of Deadman's Reef where three docents chased very different thoughts into its foggy swirls: Kai wished she had her new sweet board to try out in the surf below; Jeff was going through the supply list over and over in his head, hoping they hadn't forgotten anything; and Lizzy tried to calculate the exit door of the holographic cave from their current position, for today was the day they were going to make a break for Otter Island.