Maybe a Mermaid Page 10

  “People call me DJ,” he mumbled.

  But before he could shake her hand, Charlotte whipped a mini feather duster out of the pocket of her apron and placed it in his outstretched palm.

  “Now, aren’t you a gallant fella?” she said. “Yes, of course, I’d love some help.” She gestured to the picture frames lying in the grass. “Dust ’em down, stick ’em in a box. Easy as pe-can pie.”

  DJ’s mouth dropped open and he looked at me for our next move. As if I had any clue.

  “We came to see if the hotel has a Lost and Found,” I said. “I misplaced my backpack.”

  “Yes. You did, didn’t you?”

  DJ elbowed me again, and I felt my cheeks get hot. You did, didn’t you? What was that supposed to mean? Did she know where it was? Did she have it? I needed that backpack.

  Charlotte Boulay produced another feather duster from her apron pocket and tossed it to me. I had two choices—catch it or let it fall to the ground. I caught it.

  “Don’t be shy now. I know you two can clean.”

  She picked a frame off the ground and handed it to DJ.

  “What is it? A fire-dog?” he asked.

  The frame held a photo of a dog balanced on the top of a ladder with a fire hose in his mouth and a tiny fireman’s hat perched on top of his head.

  “Lord a’mercy,” Charlotte said, keeping up the Southern accent. “Never agree to perform after an animal act. It’s murder.”

  DJ kneeled down. He set the dog photo aside and picked up a picture of seven girls in feather tutus. Grass and dirt stuck to the back of the frame.

  “Sister acts!” Charlotte huffed. “How saccharine can you get?”

  “What is this stuff?” DJ asked. “It’s freaky.” He handed me a photo of a guy in a frog suit with his legs wrapped all the way around his shoulders.

  “Hm. I once fell in love with a contortionist…” Charlotte’s voice trailed away and she lifted her eyes to the sky in a thoughtful pose.

  As I looked at the photo, an ant walked across the frame and marched onto my thumb.

  I was getting annoyed. Not only was Charlotte ignoring my question about the backpack, her system made no sense. If she was going to dust off and box up a bunch of old photos, why bring them outside and get them dirtier than they already were?

  “Why aren’t you doing this inside?” I asked.

  Charlotte reached her arms out and made a dramatic gesture toward the world around her—the sun, the blue sky, and Thunder Lake sparkling through the trees. “Look around you. It’s a beautiful day. Any more questions?”

  “Yes. My backpack?” I repeated. “Have you seen it?”

  “Ahem!” Charlotte cleared her throat and the Southern accent came out thick and strong. “Ahm cleanin’ house today. Gettin’ rid of the riffraff. Clutter. Bric-a-brac. Help or scram, your choice.”

  DJ picked up another picture, balanced it on his cast, and started dusting it. “It could be okay,” he whispered to me. “This stuff is cool.”

  “Let me see that,” I said, grabbing the photo. It was Lady Alice and her Dirty Rats. I don’t know why, but it annoyed me even more, seeing her get shoved away in a box. I waved the frame at Charlotte Boulay.

  “Why are you taking these down?” I asked.

  Charlotte laid the back of her hand on her forehead like she could just wilt. She held the pose, then shouted at the top of her lungs, “Oh my heavens, the weight of the past!”

  DJ looked alarmed.

  Charlotte straightened her dress and stared me in the eye. “I’ve been drowning in the past my whole life,” she said, dropping the Southern accent. “I’m tired of being reminded. The past is past. It’s time to let go.”

  A new song began to pour out of the windows of The Showboat, and Charlotte tiptoed around again, waving her feather duster in the air like a woman doing a scarf dance. She sang along to the music in a pinched, nasal voice.

  “Laugh, laugh, and the world laughs with you…”

  Then she whirled back around to face us, put her face in her hands and dragged her eyelids down like a zombie.

  “Cry, cry, and you cry alone,” she growled in a low, gravelly man’s voice.

  She went back on her tiptoes. “No, no, laugh!” the nasal woman said in a scolding, horrified tone.

  “Cry, cry, cry!” the zombie man growled.

  It was possibly the weirdest thing I’d ever seen. As she went from high to low, she contorted her body and her voice so much that I almost forgot it was Charlotte Boulay standing in front of us.

  A snort came out of DJ’s nose. He started to giggle, which only egged Charlotte on. Her characters fought harder and faster, and soon, the tiptoed woman appeared to get confused.

  “Cry! No! Laugh! Cry!” the high-pitched voice stumbled. Then she squealed, “Oooh, you big lout!” and she smacked herself on the butt with her duster.

  DJ lost it. He dropped to his knees, laughing helplessly, and even though I was frustrated with Charlotte Boulay, I lost it, too. We sat on the weedy lawn in front of the boat-shaped hotel and laughed our heads off. The whole thing was so bizarre that there wasn’t anything else you could do.

  Charlotte curtsied and grinned. “Like that?” she said. “I got a million of ’em.” Then she motioned to the photos. “Chop-chop. These memories aren’t going to box themselves.”

  We boxed picture frame after picture frame, and every time I thought we were done, Charlotte would go back into The Showboat and come out with more. She didn’t do much packing. Mostly, she flitted about, dancing, peering over our shoulders, and answering DJ’s nonstop questions.

  “Did you know all these people? Are they your friends?”

  “Sure. Best friends for a week. Till they moved on to their next gig, and I never saw them again. Believe me, everyone says they’ll visit and write, but no one ever does.” She shot me a knowing glance. “Do they, Anthoni?”

  Of course they didn’t, but how did she know I knew about that?

  “Did you know Houdini?” DJ asked, holding up a photo of a man with thick chains wound around his neck and arms.

  She leaned in confidentially. “He kissed his wife goodbye before each stunt, and she passed him the key mouth-to-mouth. That’s how he made his escape.”

  “Gross. Why does this one say, ‘See you in jail, Frankie Boy’?”

  Charlotte paused. “Well,” she said, finally. “My father spent a lot of time there.”

  DJ and I glanced at each other.

  “Visiting?” he asked, hopefully.

  “No, locked up.”

  I hadn’t thought about it before—bank robbers and murderers had kids, too.

  “What’d he do?” I asked, though I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  Charlotte let us stew in silence. Then she laughed. “You two look like I’m going to eat you up! You really want the whole, dastardly tale?”

  We nodded.

  “Suit yourself. When I was a kid, my folks and I were on the circuit. We performed in a different town every week, sometimes four or five shows a day. It was a good gig, but some lawyer decided I was too young to work that hard and called it ‘cruelty to children.’ So after every show, my dad either got fined or arrested. That’s all.”

  “If it was against the law, why did he make you do it?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” DJ said. “Why didn’t you quit?”

  “And give up showbiz? A Boulay? Never!” she said. “My folks would have sold me to pirates before giving up their gig. Besides, my act was hot. It was cheaper to pay the fine or spend the night in jail than to lose the income.” Her voice still sounded like she was telling a funny story, but her smile had disappeared. She let out a short, sharp laugh and said, “It’s the Boulay way—we’ll risk anything for a quick buck and some cheap applause.”

  I closed up the last box, and Charlotte stared at it for a long moment. Then she clapped her hands together like she was bringing herself to attention. She spun around in a circle. Looking pleased, she r
eached out, grabbed my arm, and spun me in a circle, too. She spun me again and again, until everything whizzed by in a blur. The trees blended into one green smear, and I felt my hair flying weightless behind me. Even after she let go, I kept turning until DJ grabbed my shoulders and dared me to walk a straight line. I managed three steps before I stumbled and fell to the ground, laughing and light-headed, the world still spinning behind my eyes.

  “How about a break?” Charlotte said. “Lemonade and ice-cream sundaes sound grand, don’t they?”

  22

  ALL IS CHANGE

  Charlotte Boulay placed a pink flowered tea set on the table and poured us each a cup of steaming black tea.

  “Crackers, anyone?” she asked.

  I bit into a stale saltine. DJ looked like he’d been robbed.

  “So sue me,” Charlotte said. “I said lemonade and sundaes sounded good. I didn’t say I had any. Oh, sugar!” She snapped her fingers and disappeared into the kitchen.

  DJ picked his teacup up by its dainty handle and sniffed. He put it back down, and tea sloshed over the rim into the saucer.

  “Do you think it’s safe to drink?” he asked.

  Charlotte hummed as she came out of the kitchen. She set a tiny bowl of sugar cubes in front of us. “One lump or two?”

  “Four, please,” DJ said.

  We’d left the boxes on the lawn and followed Charlotte into the front office. I hardly recognized it without all the photos. Hundreds of nails dotted the walls where the picture frames had been. The room felt bigger without all the clutter, but the blank white walls made it seem even more deserted. The mermaid lamp seemed to slouch by the bookshelf, and the traveling-trunk desk shrank into the back corner. Charlotte didn’t appear to notice. She walked straight to the mermaid lamp and pushed against the bookshelf behind it. Silently, the wall shifted, and the bookshelf swung into the interior of the hotel.

  “No way!” DJ said. “I always wanted to see one of those.”

  Charlotte winked at me.

  “Is that how you sneak in and out?” I asked.

  “You didn’t think I could walk through walls, did you?”

  We followed her through the secret doorway and up a few steps into the hotel lounge. The porthole windows all around the room made you feel like you were in the hull of a ship. They were positioned high enough so you couldn’t see the grass outside at all—only a few trees, and beyond that, Thunder Lake. To add to the illusion, a big wooden steering wheel sat in the center of the room. You could almost convince yourself to be seasick.

  The lounge was fancy in an old-fashioned, abandoned sort of way. Part of the room was lined with half-moon booths with thick, cushioned seats. DJ and I sunk into the cushions of the center booth while the tea steamed on the table in front of us. All the booths faced a giant stage and a tiki bar like you see in commercials for Hawaiian vacations. Above the stage was a large wooden plaque that read The Showboat Lounge: Palace Theatre of the Wilderness!

  “Now then,” Charlotte said. She scooted into our booth, sandwiching DJ in the center, and took a sip of her tea. “Let’s talk turkey.”

  She reached under the booth and pulled out my backpack. DJ flinched and spilled his tea again. His cup was half empty, and he hadn’t even taken one sip.

  “I can explain,” I said, but Charlotte held up a hand.

  “Drink your tea. I’ll do the talking.”

  DJ leaned toward me and whispered, “It’s probably okay. She’s drinking it, and hers is from the same pot.”

  Charlotte peered down her nose at him. “If you watched more movies, young man, you’d know that I could easily have spent decades building up an immunity to an arsenal of poisons before you were even born.” Her mouth twitched into a smile. “But you’re right. It’s safe. See?” She took another sip.

  DJ looked terrified. He kicked me under the table, and in case I didn’t get the message, mouthed the words “Don’t drink it.”

  Charlotte ignored him. “The facts are these: My trash collector informed me that the tin outside The Black Bear was full this week. I told him that was unlikely, but he was able to provide evidence in the mundane form of garbage, et cetera, et cetera, and here … we … are.”

  To punctuate her last words, she unzipped my backpack, reached her arm in, and took out the picture of the Boulay Mermaid.

  “Most people,” she continued, “don’t approve of breaking into cabins and stealing personal property.”

  “I only wanted to borrow it,” I said. “I wasn’t going to steal it.”

  Charlotte held up her hand to shush me, but her fingers trembled. Her eyes were on the photo.

  “You are obviously not hooligans,” she said quietly, still studying the happy family in the frame. “In fact, The Black Bear was in need of a deep cleanse. So let’s not cry over spilt milk.”

  She placed the photo face-down on the table next to the teapot and straightened her shoulders. “Who is the rock collector?”

  DJ raised his hand tentatively. His face was fire-engine red. I was afraid if this went on much longer, his whole scalp might burst into flames.

  “You may continue to house your collection in my cabin. Rent-free,” she said. “My father was a collector of sorts.

  “And you.” She raised her cup in my direction and took another sip before reaching back into my backpack. She removed one of Josh’s SpongeBob floaties and raised one eyebrow as she held it in the air. I winced. Next, she took out my notebook.

  “That’s mine!” I said. “It’s private!”

  Charlotte arched her eyebrow higher. “So is my cabin. You look through my things, I look through yours. Seems fair.” She flipped through the pages. “Potentials … criteria … ah, this is the page.”

  She paused at TRUE BLUE FRIEND: ACTION STEPS.

  I lunged for the notebook, but Charlotte whisked it out of my reach.

  “I think you should know,” she said, tapping her finger on the page, “that there is no such thing. And even if there was, this is not the way to do it.”

  “Do what?” DJ asked.

  “Nothing,” I said, and turned to Charlotte. “Put it away. Please?”

  Charlotte considered the matter, then turned to DJ. “What I am trying to explain to your companion is that there is no such thing as a True Blue Friend.”

  I bit the inside of my cheek until it hurt.

  “Oh, maybe for an hour, a day, a month,” she continued. “But people change. They look out for themselves. Even the ones who love you most will turn on you in a dark moment. Worse yet, you’ll turn on them.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. I tugged at DJ’s arm. “We should go.”

  “I’m not being an ogre. I’m simply trying to save you some heartache.”

  Charlotte rested her hand on the photo of the Boulay Mermaid. Slowly, as if it were made of lead, she turned it over again.

  “I haven’t seen this photo in years. My mother should have been in the movies, don’t you think?”

  DJ shifted to get a closer look and knocked the teapot over with his cast. Charlotte let out a yelp and, with surprisingly quick reflexes, lifted the picture before it got wet. She shoved it into my hands. “Hold this,” she said, and began sopping up the tea with her napkin.

  “Sorry,” DJ said in a pitiful voice. He reached across the table with his own napkin, and tipped over Charlotte’s teacup, adding to the flood.

  She ran to the kitchen to get a towel.

  “Want to help?” DJ asked. He frantically wiped at the table with his sopping wet napkin. His entire neck was red now, and he gritted his teeth like he was in misery.

  “Just a minute.” Something in the photo had caught my eye. It was the star-shaped barrette holding back the Boulay Mermaid’s bangs. A mermaid silhouette was set in the center of the star.

  When Charlotte returned with dishtowels, I held up the picture.

  “I’ve seen this before.”

  “Obviously,” she said. She handed DJ a towel and motione
d to the growing puddle on the floor.

  DJ crawled dutifully under the table to clean up the tea.

  “Not the picture,” I said. “The hair clip. A friend of mine has one exactly like it.”

  Charlotte froze for a second, then started stacking the teacups on a tray. “Impossible,” she said. “My mother had that hairpin made—it’s one of a kind.”

  DJ poked at my leg under the table.

  “What happened to it, then?” I asked.

  Charlotte turned toward the porthole windows and gazed out at Thunder Lake. The rims of her eyelids were red. “I was a foolish child,” she said. “I threw it away in a dark moment. It’s one of my deepest regrets.”

  DJ poked me again, and I shifted my leg away from him.

  “Is that why you were crying?” I asked.

  Charlotte set down a teacup and locked her blue eyes on mine.

  “I saw you swimming this morning,” I said. “Out in the bay. You were crying.”

  Charlotte’s eyes narrowed. “Oh,” she said. “Really?”

  “Anthoni,” DJ said from under the table, but I kept watching Charlotte Boulay. The image of Maddy’s bloodthirsty mermaid popped into my mind. I wanted to look away, to break the stare, but I couldn’t.

  “You can stay underwater a long time,” I said. “How do you do that?”

  “Magic,” she said flippantly.

  “For real.”

  “I’ve got gills.”

  I held my breath. Was she being serious?

  Twice, Charlotte opened her mouth and closed it. Then she shrugged and said, “Look, kid. What do you want to hear? Breathing tubes?”

  DJ shook my leg hard. “GONZO!”

  “What-zo?” Charlotte asked.

  “DJ!” I said, and peered under the table.

  “Anthoni,” he whimpered. “I’m stuck.”

  23

  SWIM LESSONS: TAKE TWO

  “Okay, Anthoni,” Mom said. “You’ve set your goal. Now visualize yourself achieving it.”

  I scanned the beach to see if anyone was looking at us. The sparkly-suit sunbathers were stretched out on their towels, parents and toddlers were busy with their sandcastles, and everyone else was preoccupied with another epic water fight at the edge of the lake. I spotted Maddy and Julie, running hand in hand, squealing as Kurt dumped a pail of water on their heads. On the other end of the beach, DJ was surrounded by a circle of Tadpoles. He had his cast wrapped in a black plastic garbage bag, and each time the little kids splashed him, he’d screech and jump around like an orangutan, scratching at his armpit with his good hand. The more ridiculous he looked, the more the kids splashed and screamed with laughter.