I had to admit, Aaron was right. Seth was the one who had helped save all of us from Neptune’s evil twin last year. Maybe he’d help me save the woman on the ship.
“And he’s kind of my best friend, I guess,” Aaron mumbled in that cute way he does when he’s feeling shy. It made me want to kiss him, but obviously I would never do that in front of Mandy!
“OK, so us, Shona, and Seth, but we don’t tell anyone else,” I said instead.
“Agreed,” Mandy and Aaron said together.
“And tomorrow, when we’re studying shipwrecks at the Watchtower, we’ll examine every picture, every article, every bit of information we can find about shipwrecks,” Aaron added.
Mandy grimaced. “I’m going to look like such a goody two-shoes,” she said, a tiny shade of the old Mandy returning for a moment.
“Look, if you’d rather not —” I began.
She cut me off. “No! It’s fine. The others can think what they like. We’re in this together.”
As we let ourselves into the cabin and got ready for dinner, I tried to take comfort from her words.
I decided that as long as I had my best friends with me, I wasn’t going to let anything scare me. Not even a huge, disappearing ghost ship with torn sails and silent, screaming passengers.
I mean, why would that be scary?
“All right, children, there isn’t much space, so you’ll have to be patient.”
It was Monday morning, and Miss Platt was attempting to keep order while we shuffled around on the hill, ready to take turns to go into the Watchtower for our Shallows and Shipwrecks session.
“Three at a time on the ground floor for your presentation with Lyle. After that, you can go up to the observation deck. Before your turn, have a look around the outside of the Watchtower. There’s plenty to see. Please, be careful at all times, and stay away from the edge of the cliffs.”
I stood looking out to sea. Aaron came over to join me.
“Wish we could have done the session with the Shiprock class,” he said. “Going out and seeing the shipwrecks for real would have been much better than just reading about them.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, although, after yesterday’s experience, I was actually quite happy not to be exploring underwater shipwrecks up close.
Aaron leaned in and lowered his voice. “Actually, if I’m honest, I’m not too bothered.”
“No? How come?”
He kicked a stone between his feet. “Well, you know . . .” he began.
I turned toward him. “I know what?”
Aaron kicked the stone again, this time firing it off the side of the hill. Then he looked at me. “I, um . . .”
Just then, Mandy called to us from the Watchtower. “Hey, guys! We’re up.”
Aaron pointed at Mandy, then at me. “That,” he said. “This. I get to hang out with my pals. Come on, let’s go.”
And with that, he turned away — leaving me once again wondering if he was trying to tell me something. If it was about how he saw me only as one of his pals, I was quite happy being in the dark for now.
We joined Mandy at the door to the Watchtower.
“Remember, we need to find everything we can that might give us information on the ship,” Mandy reminded us as we went inside.
“Yeah, and don’t forget, after Lyle’s talk, we can go upstairs to the observation level and have a look around there, too,” Aaron added.
“Let’s hope we find something. It’s probably our best chance,” I said quietly, crossing my fingers.
To our right there was a door with a PRIVATE! NO ENTRY! sign on it. Opposite, Lyle was sitting in an office.
“Come in and make yourselves comfortable,” he said without looking up as he shuffled some papers around on his desk. “I’m just tidying up from the last talk. Give me two minutes and I’ll give you a history of some of the ships that have been lost on the rocks around our beautiful island.”
We scuttled into his office and stood awkwardly in front of his desk while he finished sorting his papers.
“OK. Ready. Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said. As he looked at us, his expression changed. Correction: as he looked at me, it changed. It seemed as though whatever made his face face-shaped had suddenly lost its elastic, and whatever made it face-colored had been diluted with gray water.
“Oh,” he said. “Oh. It’s you.” He quickly stood up and went over to the door. He glanced both ways, then softly closed it and came back into the room.
He gestured for us to sit on some stools in a corner of his office and pulled his chair away from his desk to join us in a small circle. “We need to be quick,” he said. “The next group will be expecting to come in soon.” Lyle pointed at me. “What’s your name?”
“Me?” What had I done wrong?
“Yes. What’s your name?”
“Emily,” I said.
Lyle nodded sharply. “OK, so, Emily. These are your friends?”
“Yes.”
“Good. You trust them?”
I glanced on either side of me at Aaron and Mandy. “Yes, I do,” I said. “But I don’t understand. Why are you asking all these questions? Aren’t you supposed to be giving us a talk?”
Lyle waved my question away. “The other groups, yes. Not you. You’re different.”
I swallowed. “Have I done something wrong?” I asked. Had he found out about Aaron and me going off on our own? Was he going to tell the teachers? Could I not even manage a week without getting myself into trouble of one sort or another?
“No! No, no, not at all. Quite the opposite. Look, we haven’t got long. Tell me everything.”
We stared at him. What was he talking about?
“Tell you everything about what?” Aaron asked.
Lyle stared me straight in the eye. “The . . . the ship.” His voice cracked as he said the word.
“The ship? Which ship?” I asked, playing for time. Was this a trick? What was he trying to do? Make me say something impossible so he could tell me how crazy it was?
Lyle’s gaze burned into me. “The ship you saw. The one you mentioned in front of everyone. Describe it. I want every detail.”
For a moment, I pictured the ship as I’d swum around it — the hull, the decks, the sails. The woman.
“I . . .” I began. Where to start? And should I start? I mean, we’d agreed I wouldn’t tell anyone about it.
“Why do you want to know?” Aaron broke in. Good. Someone needed to be in charge here. I certainly wasn’t.
Lyle glanced at him. “Research,” he replied sharply. “We need to keep records of all the ships that come through here.” There was something about the way he said it — he sounded as wooden as a ship’s deck.
We had no idea why we’d seen the ship, but if Aaron and I were the only ones who could see it, that made us valuable — and until we knew more about Lyle’s motives, who knew what kind of value we had to him? In the past I’d been spied on, lied to, and even kidnapped by Neptune — all because I was a semi-mer and because of what that meant I could do. I wasn’t about to let that happen again. Plus, we’d first seen the ship when we were on the part of the island we’d been told was out-of-bounds. There was no way I was going to willingly get myself into trouble by admitting that!
“She didn’t see anything,” Aaron said firmly, leaning right across me and answering Lyle directly. He stared pointedly at me. “You were just kidding around, weren’t you?”
Before I had the chance to answer, Mandy broke in, too. “We put her up to it,” she said. Then she forced out a laugh that sounded like a hyena having a sneezing fit. “Yeah,” she went on. “Emily’s really into, um, like, stories and things. And she’s got a good imagination. All the teachers say so.” She turned to me. “Don’t they, Emily?”
Actually, at least that part was true. “Mm, yes, they do,” I agreed.
“So, we said she had to ask a question that used her imagination,” Aaron put in. “Just for fun. Making a joke, you know.??
?
I wasn’t a hundred percent sure what Mandy and Aaron were getting at, but I knew they were protecting me, and I suddenly felt overwhelmed with relief and gratitude.
Until I saw Lyle’s face. It looked as if a door had closed across his eyes. “Fun,” he said, nodding slowly. “A joke. Making a joke.” His voice sounded like gravel.
Then he got up out of his chair and shuffled over to the door. He turned the handle. “You’d better leave,” he said, opening the door.
Leave? We’d only just gotten there!
The three of us looked at one another, unsure what to do — or what was happening.
“I’m sorry,” Lyle said. “I’m just not feeling too well today. I thought . . .” His voice broke. “I thought . . .” he tried again. Then he shook his head and cleared his throat. “Please tell Miss Platt you’re all welcome to visit the observation deck for as long as you like, but I won’t be conducting any more talks today.”
There was something about his tone that made it very clear this wasn’t up for discussion. We awkwardly got up from our stools and shuffled across his tiny office toward the door. Lyle stood there, his hand tight on the handle, his face turned down toward the floor. For a split second, something about his posture made me want to take it all back and tell him the truth.
Then he looked up and his eyes met mine. “Just go,” he said. “Please.”
Even if I’d wanted to tell him, I couldn’t. Not now. There was no doubt that the only thing he needed from us right then was space. Which, to be honest, was absolutely fine with me. All of this was way too strange for my liking, and I was happy to get out and leave him to it. I started making my way out of his office.
Five more seconds and I would have been gone.
A glance in the opposite direction and it would have been fine.
A different way around the desk and I would never have known.
But none of those things happened.
Instead, I walked around the back of Lyle’s desk, glanced at a photo in a frame — and my world tilted.
The photo was of a woman. A woman I’d glimpsed very recently. A woman whose face had been burned into my thoughts ever since I’d seen it.
It made no sense. It surely couldn’t be true. And yet it was.
The woman with the big green eyes and the straggly red hair — the one I’d seen screaming inside the vanishing ghost ship out at sea — was now smiling brightly at me from a picture in a frame on Lyle’s desk.
I stumbled out of the office.
“Weirdo,” Mandy hissed.
“Come on, let’s go upstairs. We’ll probably find more useful stuff up there anyway,” Aaron replied. “I’ll just go tell Miss Platt that there won’t be any more talks. I’ll meet you up there.”
I followed Mandy upstairs in a trance.
“Em, are you OK?” Aaron asked once we were all up at the observation deck.
“You’ve gone white,” Mandy added. “Are you sick?”
Was I? Maybe I was. Perhaps it was a hallucination. Either way, I knew I couldn’t keep it to myself. I had to tell them what I’d seen.
“There was a photo on the desk,” I said, my voice coming out in such a quivery shake that it sounded as if I were singing.
Aaron held my eyes and nodded for me to go on. “I didn’t see it,” he said. “What was it? Was it something that upset you?”
“No. Well, yes. I don’t know. It . . . it was a woman.”
“Oh, yeah, I saw it on my way in,” Mandy said. “Long red hair, smiley eyes, quite pretty?”
“Mm-hm, that was the one.”
They both waited for me to go on. “I, um, I’ve seen her before,” I mumbled. “On the ship. Out there. Out at sea.”
Mandy’s jaw dropped open.
“You’re kidding!” Aaron breathed.
“I’m not. I mean, I might be wrong. . . .”
“But you don’t think you are,” Mandy finished.
I shook my head. “No. I’m positive it was her.”
Aaron whistled. “That is seriously freaky,” he muttered.
I bristled at his words. Was he calling me a freak?
“Not you,” he added quickly. “Her. Him. This place. What is going on around here?”
I shrugged. I had no idea what was going on around here.
Mandy broke the silence. She was standing by the door that led into the observation room. “Look, we’re in the best place to find out,” she said. “If there’s a spooky ship somewhere near this island, surely we’ll see it from here — a watchtower with windows all the way around it.”
“And if there’s information about the ship, it’ll be in here if it’s anywhere,” Aaron added. “Lyle told us there were lots of reference books and maps here.”
“OK, so we find out what we can here,” I said.
“And we don’t give up till we’ve searched every corner of the place,” Mandy finished.
Aaron led the way. “Agreed. OK, let’s go.”
Half an hour later, we’d used every telescope and pair of binoculars in the room to scan the ocean from the closest shores all the way out to the horizon. Nothing. The ship was definitely not out there.
We disregarded the folders labeled FLORA AND FAUNA, bypassed the ones named FLOTSAM AND JETSAM, ignored BUTTERFLIES AND BUGS, and a quick flip through the ones titled REEFS AND ROCKS showed us that even those were of no use to us.
Finally, we found what we were looking for — three whole shelves of folders labeled SHIPS, WRECKS, AND LOCAL LANDMARKS.
“Bingo!” Mandy whispered.
Aaron pulled out three folders and put them on the table in the middle of the room. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get to work.”
We flicked through the papers, ignoring our classmates who came and went around us. Mostly, they ran straight for the telescopes, looked out to sea for a bit, then wandered around picking up binoculars and walkie-talkies before getting bored and leaving us to it.
Mandy was halfway through a new folder when she nudged me. “Em . . .” she said.
“Uh-huh.” I looked up from a page entitled “Some Pleasure Boats That Have Visited Our Shores in Recent Years.”
“What did the ship look like again?” Mandy asked.
“Big,” I said. “Really big. And Long. With a dark-blue hull, three masts, and sails that —”
“Did it look anything like this?” Mandy held her folder up to show me the pictures she’d found.
It looked exactly like it. I couldn’t speak.
Aaron glanced up from what he was doing. He saw the page Mandy was holding, saw my face, and came to my side. “That’s the one! Em, it is, isn’t it?”
I held my hand out for the folder. “Let me see.”
Mandy passed it across to me. There were three pictures on the page. I studied them, one by one. The first showed the ship from a distance. You could see the bowsprit jutting proudly forward, the three tall masts behind. I couldn’t see the sails because they were wrapped up and rolled away. But from what I could see, this looked like the same ship.
The second photo showed a closer side view — the long, sleek hull, dark blue and rising outward at the sides. Again, the sails were wrapped up. They looked much neater than the scrappy bits of cloth I’d seen — but everything else looked more or less the same.
I was about to say this was definitely the ship, but when I glanced at the third photo, I wasn’t so sure. This one showed a detail of the front of the hull. The netted hammock was the same. The mermaid/dragon figurehead was there, looking just as spooky. But the lettering along the front of the hull — something about it was different. On this third picture, I could clearly see the ship’s name: Prosperous. Was that the same name? It sounded familiar but not quite right. What was different about it?
Underneath the photos, an extract from a newspaper article had been stuck onto the page. There was just one paragraph of text:
Prosperous was built in 1857. It was one of many ships built during the
Golden Age of Sail that were intended to be efficient commercial sailing ships. Prosperous carried people, goods, and mail for almost forty years until its illustrious career was brought to an abrupt end with its tragic wrecking in 1893.
I stopped reading as my eyes glazed over.
“Tragic wrecking?” Aaron murmured.
“So it was a ghost ship!” Mandy replied. “I mean, I know I joked about it, but I didn’t really think —”
“No. Wait.” I stopped them both. “Look at this.”
Beneath the newspaper extract was another piece of paper. This one contained two sentences:
To mark the centennial of the demise of Prosperous, a replica was built in 1993. Prosperous II serves mostly as a luxury passenger ship, although it also carries some specialized cargo from time to time.
Prosperous II — that was the name of the ship I’d seen!
“The replica,” I said, pointing at the words on the page that were now beginning to swim beneath my gaze. “That was the one I saw.”
“You’re sure?” Aaron asked.
I nodded. “It had the name on its hull. It was definitely Prosperous II. Apart from that, it looked exactly like this ship.”
“So we’ve found it!” Mandy said. “Wow!”
“Yeah,” I agreed.
Aaron was stroking his chin. “But that’s . . . I mean, OK, let’s look at this logically . . .”
I almost laughed. “Logically?” I asked. “How are we supposed to be logical about any of this?”
“Well, let’s look at the facts. If Prosperous II was the ship you saw . . .”
“Which I’m positive it was.”
“Then it wasn’t a shipwreck.”
“Unless the replica one was wrecked, too,” Mandy put in.
Aaron tilted his head and frowned. “Yeah, I guess.”
“But that’s highly unlikely,” Mandy conceded. She flicked over a couple more pages. “And surely it would have said something in here if it had been. These folders seem pretty thorough.”
“OK, so let’s assume that Prosperous II didn’t meet the same fate as the original Prosperous,” Aaron went on.