Maybe a Mermaid Page 9

Mom laughed. “If Charlotte Boulay told you she’s a mermaid, I think the choking heron was a more believable act.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “She was pulling your leg, sweetie. Clearly, that’s her thing.”

  I felt an inexplicable lump in my throat. I didn’t exactly expect her to jump on board, but I thought she’d at least give the idea a chance.

  “Gramps tried for a year straight to get you to believe in fairies,” she said. “Are you saying he should have tried mermaids?”

  I didn’t laugh. I always wanted to believe in fairies, but I couldn’t because they weren’t real. If Gramps had shown me photographic evidence and firsthand witness experience? I might have thought he was on to something.

  Mom reached for her phone. “Okay. We can look it up.”

  I leaned close to her while she typed in “Boulay Mermaid.” Not much came up—a list of entertainers at The Palace in 1934, a short story that contained the phrase “Dr. Boulay’s mermaid obsession,” and an article titled “Novelty Acts of the Vaudeville Stage.”

  “That makes sense,” Mom said. She clicked on the link. “Mr. Boulay used to be a vaudeville actor.”

  “Vaudeville?”

  “It was kind of an old-timey variety show,” she said. “Dancing, singing, comedy acts, magic. It used to be popular, especially before movies were invented. I think the ‘novelty acts’ were more gimmicky … well, like these, for instance.”

  The article contained short descriptions of novelty acts like Willard, the Man Who Grows, who could add seven and a half inches to his height; and Dave Monihan, who played xylophone with his feet. Halfway down the page was an entry for the Boulay Mermaid:

  THE BOULAY MERMAID, 1933–1942. Developed by Frank and Selina Boulay, a moderately popular explorer act known for presenting “curiosities” from around the world. Early acts included a dragon’s egg, a boxing kangaroo, and a talking dog that spoke only Hungarian. Their most popular act began in 1933 when the Boulays claimed to have adopted a mermaid girl from the South Seas. The Boulay Mermaid sang and performed onstage in a large glass water tank and was a repeat act at The Palace Theatre in its final year of operation. In 1940, the Boulays moved the act to a resort town in Wisconsin. The show was so realistic that many visitors claimed to believe an actual mermaid did live in the flesh at The Showboat Resort.

  “The Palace Theatre,” Mom said, impressed. “That was a big deal. So … real, but not real. There’s your answer.”

  “It doesn’t exactly say it’s fake,” I said, though I knew it sounded ridiculous.

  “You’re right,” Mom said. “And I think we should get one of those talking Hungarian dogs. I’ve always wanted one.”

  I stuck my tongue out at her, but I couldn’t help smiling.

  “Thanks for looking it up,” I said.

  Mom put her arm around me and I leaned my head on her chest. Her hair smelled like honey. I let my eyes close and my body relax.

  “Speaking of Charlotte Boulay,” she said. “I ought to call some clients. Why don’t you put on a movie, and I’ll get some work done?”

  “Noooo,” I said. “What about your face? You should rest. Please?” I wanted her to work so we could sign up Worker Bees and get our lives back on track, but I also didn’t want to move. I hadn’t forgiven her for messing things up, but it felt nice to lie there, feeling the rise and fall of her chest under my head.

  Mom stood up.

  “I’ll make my calls in the back room,” she said. “Here, I know exactly what you should watch.”

  She put on an old movie called Splash about a boy who meets a mermaid and later in life, the mermaid comes to New York City to find him. It was funny, but watching a movie by yourself is lonely. And it did nothing to help me stop thinking about Maddy or Charlotte Boulay.

  The more I thought about it, I had to admit that the vaudeville act explanation made sense. Sure, the costume in Charlotte’s picture had looked real, but the mermaid tail in Splash looked at least as good. As for the dive, maybe I’d fallen asleep before Charlotte resurfaced, or maybe I dreamed the whole thing. I felt silly. Mom was right. I’d never been one of those kids who fell easily for things like fairies and unicorns. I should have known better.

  In the movie, the bad guy discovered the mermaid and was whisking her off to his science lab to study her, but my eyelids kept closing. The movie music started to meld with the sound of Mom’s phone calls in the back room, and as I drifted off to sleep, one last, awful thought swam through my mind.

  If Charlotte Boulay wasn’t a mermaid, how was I going to win back Maddy Quinn?

  19

  SPLASH! TAKE TWO

  “Be my friend! Be my friend!”

  I shook the mermaid’s shoulders, but she squinted her eyes and showed me her silver fangs. I shook her harder and yelled again, “Be my friend!”

  The mermaid’s head morphed into the head of Charlotte Boulay. “You like that?” she cackled. “I got a million of ’em.”

  I screamed.

  The mermaid yanked out of my grasp, and her head morphed again. Maddy Quinn floated in front of me. Her arms were full of stuffed dolphins, and she glared at me as she opened her mouth: Ska-REEEEEEEEEEE!

  * * *

  I jerked awake.

  My heart was going a mile a minute. I felt a soft blanket over me, and took in the dusty smell of the couch.

  I wasn’t underwater.

  I sat up and listened to the rain on the roof of The Blue Heron.

  My head had not been ripped off by a morphing, bloodthirsty mermaid.

  I wrapped the blanket around my shoulders and climbed the ladder to the loft. The rungs creaked underneath my feet.

  It was too early to be up, but thanks to my nightmare, I was wide-awake. So instead of falling into bed, I sat on the window seat and watched the clouds change from gray-blue to yellow-pink over Thunder Lake. The rain was letting up, and a soft breeze blew in from the window. A loon let out a lonely wail. I cringed, but steadied myself. I wasn’t falling for that one again.

  As the sun peeked over the trees and shot a hazy orange glow into the clouds, I heard footsteps on the dock below my window. Charlotte Boulay’s orange hair caught the light, and I watched her walk to the edge of the dock. She paused, adjusted her bright-pink swimsuit, and looked up at the sky. A few scattered raindrops sent ripples circling on the surface of the lake.

  Charlotte raised her arms and dove.

  When she didn’t come up, I scanned the shore, looking for a logical explanation—she could hold her breath a long time, or had trained herself to swim long distances underwater. Or she’d already come up for air, and I wasn’t looking in the right place.

  After a few minutes, there was a splash toward the edge of the bay, where Mom had tumbled out of her ski. I leaned against the window and squinted. There was something on the water, but it could be anything. A loon, a duck, a floating stick.

  Quickly, I climbed down the ladder of the loft and grabbed Mom’s phone from the charger in the kitchen. The camera lens could zoom. It might not be far enough, but it would be better than nothing.

  By the time I got back to the window seat, the water was as still as glass. I was too late. I wrapped the blanket back around me and used the camera lens to zoom in on the squirrel nest instead. What a mess.

  Another small splash came from farther away, near the edge of the bay. I focused the camera. There was a person out there, head bobbing above the surface. As I watched, the head disappeared into the water again but came back up in the same spot. Down. Then up. What was she doing?

  The fourth time, she stayed down. I started to believe she’d vanished for good, but then I heard a splash, and she appeared in front of the dock. She pulled herself up with surprising arm strength and sat on the edge, dangling her feet in the water. I zoomed the camera in on her legs. They looked normal. No scales, not one sign of a tail. Clearly, it was proof that, like fairies, mermaids don’t exist and only a three-year-old would believe otherw
ise. So why was there still a nagging voice in the back of my head whispering: Maybe?

  As I zoomed the camera out, I saw something else. Her wet head was bent, forehead in her hands, and her shoulders were bobbing up and down. Charlotte Boulay was crying.

  20

  TEAM GOALS

  Mom gave me a pleading look and pointed to the coffeepot. She was on a video call with her Worker Bees, but it wasn’t going well. I refilled her cup as one of the pixilated women on the screen jerked from pose to pose like a robot as she talked.

  “Kimmy,” Mom said loudly. She studied a chart in her binder and marked it with a highlighter. “If you’re going to place that order anyway, can you get it in before the end of the week? Kimmy? You’re freezing up again.”

  I poured myself a bowl of cereal and shook it in front of Mom’s face to see if she wanted any. She shooed me away and tried to keep her voice cheerful.

  “Sara, are you still there? Bee’s Knees is the free gift for the month of June—but tell your client she can have two free gifts if she gets a friend to order, too. But it has to be this week. Sara? Sara? Can you hear me?”

  I chewed my cereal and watched Mom frown into the camera. It used to be that her end-of-month conference calls were all about who won the bonus movie tickets and spa coupons that Mom bought for her top sellers. It was like a party online, with all the Worker Bees cheering, and Mom congratulating them like they’d won a million dollars. But over the past year, she had stopped announcing prizes and spent more time talking about strategies to get the most out of the last few days of the month. Now she looked pained. There was no way she was going to motivate her team with a negative attitude. Mom needed to Change Her State.

  I made a monkey face at her, and she smiled a little, so I did a robot dance in my chair to make her laugh. She needed to pep up and put on a bit of the old Chief Pollinator charm.

  “Girls, hold on a minute.” Mom lowered her laptop screen. “You’re really distracting me,” she whispered. “Go play outside.”

  “Fine. In a minute.”

  To get my mind off the depressing call, I read Mom’s whiteboard as I slurped down the rest of my cereal. I almost choked on the last bite. On the GOAL section of her board, Mom had added Pay Off Credit Card underneath Rent: Mr. Li. She’d never told me anything about a credit card. How much did we owe on that? The month-end bonus was only going to be enough to cover Mr. Li. What happens if you don’t pay your credit card? Would we get dragged deeper and deeper into debt until … what? Until we had to live in the Beemobile? I knew a kid in Ann Arbor who lived in his station wagon. It wasn’t out of the question.

  Before I left the cabin, I dropped a note onto Mom’s keyboard: Negative Thoughts Attract Negative Results. Then I headed to The Black Bear to look for my backpack.

  * * *

  The wooden bear cub was dark and damp from the rain. I high-fived him before I hopped onto the porch and jiggled the screen door handle. The handle clicked, and I pulled it open, feeling around for the key to the inside door, but it wasn’t there. I bumped the door with my knee and it creaked open.

  “Hi-YAAAA!”

  I stumbled backward and fell flat on my butt on the front porch. I scrambled to get up, prepared to run for The Blue Heron as fast as my legs could take me, but then I saw DJ flinging his limbs around in a flurry of fake karate moves. When he realized it was me, he dropped his arms.

  “Oh, hi, Gills. I thought you might be a ghost or something.”

  “And flailing around like a madman would scare a ghost?”

  “It’s worth a shot.”

  I held back seven cranky comments and dusted myself off. DJ went back to sorting his rocks. He was in the process of moving the entire collection from the bedroom to the kitchen counter, table, and shelves.

  “It’s easier to sort them in here,” he explained. “Now that it doesn’t smell so bad.”

  I picked up a pink-colored rock with a tiny purple stripe.

  DJ took it out of my hand and set it back on the table. “That’s Baraboo Quartzite,” he said. “It’s metamorphic.”

  “Like Mystique?”

  “What?”

  “Mystique. From X-Men. She can psionically shift the atoms in her body to morph into anyone she wants.”

  DJ shrugged. “I’ve never seen those movies.”

  “They were comics first,” I said. If Maddy had been there, she would have set him straight.

  “This is my best one.” He reached into his pocket and took out another pink rock. “My parents and I found it camping at Devil’s Lake,” he said. “It’s ancient. Thousands of millions of years old. See these ripples?”

  He handed me the rock. It was a deep maroon color with a jagged edge and five dark-purple bands. It was beautiful. One section did look wavy, like the ripples near the dock after Charlotte Boulay dove in.

  “The ripple shows it used to be underwater sandstone, which isn’t very strong, but the glaciers put so much pressure on it that the grains of sand cemented together and morphed into quartzite. It’s so tough and durable that in the Stone Age, it was used to make tools like axes and stone-hammers.”

  I ran my thumb along the jagged edge. It was sharp. I could imagine an early human using it to chop kindling for a fire.

  “Baraboo Quartzite has iron fused into it, too—that’s why it’s purple.”

  “So it’s more like Wolverine,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Did the kid live in a hole? “Wolverine. From the X-Men. Scientists wanted to use him as a weapon, so they fused his bones with metal.”

  “I guess.” DJ took the quartzite from my hand and put it back in his pocket. “My dad said I should carry it for good luck, but it doesn’t really work.”

  “So why do you carry it?”

  “Same as ghost karate,” he said. “It’s worth a shot.”

  “Good luck with that.”

  I headed to the bedroom.

  “Hey, DJ,” I yelled. “Where’d you put my backpack?”

  “I thought you took it,” he called back.

  “I left it on the bed, but it’s not here.”

  I heard rocks clattering, and DJ met me in the doorway. His eyebrows lifted to the ceiling, and he let air whistle through his teeth.

  “Don’t mess with me,” I said. “Where is it? I need it.”

  “I’m not kidding you, Gills. I haven’t seen it.”

  We checked everywhere—under the bed, in the closet, the living room, kitchen, even the bathroom and the loft.

  “Do you think a ghost took it?” DJ asked.

  I sat down at the picnic table in the kitchen. Two small rainbows of light danced above DJ’s rocks. I looked up at the window where two butterfly sun catchers dangled above the sink.

  “Did you put those there?” I asked, pointing to the window.

  DJ shook his head.

  “They weren’t there before?”

  DJ’s nostrils flared. “No!”

  I had a weird feeling like someone was watching me from behind. I turned around slowly, but no one was there.

  “Okay, then. Will you come with me?” I asked.

  “Where?”

  “The Showboat. I think Charlotte Boulay has my backpack.”

  DJ gaped at me. “What are you going to do? Just ask her for it?”

  “Yup.”

  “For someone who’s afraid of the water, you’re pretty brave,” he said.

  “I’m not afraid of the water. Look, you said you wanted to see her. Are you in or out?”

  I tried to look like I didn’t care, but I hoped he was in. Mom had asked me not to go see Charlotte alone. I wasn’t sure a strange, rock-obsessed boy with ghost-karate skills was going to meet her security standards, but it was better than nothing. Besides, the last time I’d seen Charlotte Boulay, she was crying her eyes out on the dock, and the time before that, she’d disappeared in the dark. I had no idea what I was walking into.

  DJ he
sitated, then scrunched his face into a tight grimace and let loose a loud, quick “AHHH!” like he’d been stabbed in the gut.

  “Are you all right?”

  He shook out his shoulders and arms and pumped his legs in place.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m ready. But if I yell ‘Gonzo!’ that’s when we run.”

  21

  THE WEIGHT OF THE PAST

  Charlotte Boulay stood on the lawn of the Showboat hotel and waved a feather duster at us.

  DJ slowed his steps. “She knows,” he whispered. “She knows we broke into her cabin and puked on her floor.”

  “She doesn’t know we puked,” I said, pulling him up the path by his shirtsleeve.

  “What’s she doing?”

  It was a good question. The lawn outside the hotel was strewn with empty cardboard boxes. Charlotte traipsed around them in a maid’s uniform—only instead of a plain white apron, hers was covered with bright pink and blue butterflies. Her hair was wrapped in a matching butterfly maid’s cap.

  As we got closer, we could hear old-timey music streaming from the windows of the hotel. Charlotte weaved her body around the boxes, swaying her hips, and occasionally kicking a foot in the air. Messy stacks of picture frames were piled on the grass around her. She leaned over, picked one up, and gave her feather duster an artistic flourish. She wasn’t exactly cleaning, and she wasn’t exactly dancing either.

  “If it isn’t my busy bees,” she said in a Southern drawl. “Y’all do inspiring work. That was one ship-shape clean job.” She smoothed her apron and tiptoed toward us, extending a gloved hand to DJ. “Dana Johnson, I presume. I don’t believe we’ve met,” she drawled. “Formally.”

  DJ flinched and poked my ribs with his cast, about three times harder than necessary.

  “Ow!”

  “How does she know who I am?” he hissed through his teeth.

  “Shhh!” I elbowed him back.

  Charlotte pretended not to hear any of it. She stood there with her hand extended until, finally, DJ reached his good arm forward.