Deep Betrayal (Lies Beneath #2)

  I forced my thoughts back to Maighdean Mara. The dagger was real after all. And so was the cave. But other than the wind-chime carving, I had no clear image of what Maighdean Mara even looked like. Every time I tried to picture her as a killer, it wasn’t a monster I saw. Instead, I imagined a staggeringly beautiful face, with dark spiraling hair and violet eyes that evoked the sky after the rain. Pavati.

  Outside my open window, there was no wind, no birds, no June bugs bouncing against the screen. It was easy to hear the water lapping at the shore, and with it an unfamiliar humming. When the humming turned to soft laughter, I moved to the window. The outdoor lights were off, but the moon beat a path of light across the water to our dock. I thought I could pick out some dark shapes near the shore. Dad?

  I snuck outside, being careful not to let the front door slam, and picked my way across the yard. As I got closer, I heard bits of conversation, an “I can’t” and “It’s too hard.”

  It wasn’t Dad. It was Sophie. She sat cross-legged in the dark at the end of the dock, centered in the beam of moonlight, talking to herself. I’d never known her to sleepwalk.

  “Sophie?” I whispered through the night air. She didn’t respond.

  I crept closer. More indistinct murmurs. I thought someone said “sunglasses” (or “fun classes” or maybe “my guess is”). And then another voice, raspy in the night. “You have to set it up. Two days should give me enough time to prepare. Tuesday at dusk. Can you do it?”

  Sophie said, “How am I supposed to—”

  “Tell him to go to the flat rocks—south of town—he’ll know the place. You must get him there.”

  “And if I do, you think you’ll be able to convince him?” Sophie asked.

  “Sophie,” I called again.

  This time Sophie startled and whipped around, half crouched, half ready to bolt. There was a small splash from the water, but when I got close enough to see, there was nothing there.

  “Who were you talking to?” I asked.

  “No one.”

  “Don’t lie to me. Was it Dad?”

  “It wasn’t Dad,” she said.

  “Someone else then?”

  There was a small pip of a sound, and Sophie turned toward the lake. I was not entirely surprised to see Pavati’s face emerge from the inky blackness—I had been imagining her so clearly just moments before. She folded her arms across her withered chest and tapped her fingers against her arms, making it clear that my presence was unwanted. Her face, yellow as the moon above her, squinted at me from the darkness, her eyes sunken in the sockets, her cheekbones protruding.

  “I’ve always liked your sister better,” she said. “You’ve been problematic since the beginning.” She rose a few inches higher in the water, and her dark hair lay flat against her razor-sharp jaw and over her pointed shoulders.

  I pulled at the back of Sophie’s pj’s, trying to get her to retreat, but she must have been transfixed, because she refused to move.

  “What do you want?” I asked, not wanting the answer because there was nothing I was willing to give her. “Are you here to kill us?” My body buzzed with a dark, prickly heat.

  Pavati grimaced as she sensed my mood, and she looked away without a word. Sophie made an apologetic sound.

  “Then what?” I asked, thankful that the sight of my terror repulsed her. Right now, it was my only weapon.

  “Girl talk,” said Pavati through gritted teeth. She serpentined through the water in front of our dock, back and forth, in a fluid motion.

  I took another step toward the house, pulling Sophie with me. Sophie tried to pry my fingers away.

  Pavati closed her eyes and turned away from me in disgust. Sophie groaned, too, as Pavati said, “Would you please relax, Lily Hancock? You look disgusting. Deep breaths.”

  She squinted at me again, then slammed her eyes shut like the doors to a vault. “God, I must have really scared you. I told you. I’m just here to talk. Your sister is hardly afraid.”

  Sophie whispered, “Please, Lily. Just relax. It’s okay. Pavati is my friend.”

  Pavati looked over her shoulder at me and turned around with a thin smile as my anxiety turned to a less repellant aura of confusion. “Why are you here?” I asked. “What do you want with Sophie?”

  Pavati stopped swimming and laid her arms flat on the top of the water. “Based on what I’ve known about your sister, and based on what I saw of your talents last week, you two might be exactly what Maris needs.”

  “I don’t follow. Why are you here?”

  She sighed as if I were being unbelievably obtuse. “Mermaids need family, Lily Hancock. We’ve lost fifty percent of ours. Looks like you’re our key to gaining our brother back.”

  “That’s not what we were—” Sophie said, but Pavati cut her off with a look.

  “I don’t have any influence over Calder that way. He’s pretty stub—”

  “I mean our other brother,” Pavati said quickly.

  I set my jaw and ground my teeth. If she thought I was going to turn over my father, she must have short-term memory loss.

  “Easy, girl,” said Pavati. “Let me put it this way. Your skills as Halfs have me wondering about him. You say he isn’t hunting. I’ll take you at your word.”

  I swallowed hard, wishing I could just as easily accept that as the truth.

  Pavati continued, “But is he … normal?”

  “Define ‘normal.’ ”

  “Once Maris explained the truth to me about your father, I naturally assumed, since he never came back to the lake … all those years … that he wouldn’t be able to make the change.”

  I stared at her without speaking.

  “But Calder suggested that wasn’t the case. My next assumption was that delaying his natural development would have had some debilitating effects. Perhaps he is a little impaired?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “Is he sane?”

  “Sane enough.”

  “His brain hasn’t been addled by malice?” When I didn’t respond she started ticking things off on her fingers. “He isn’t unnaturally sadistic, melancholy, morbid, masochistic, neurotic—”

  I held up my hand and stopped her list in its tracks. “Unnatural is an interesting word. He’s just going through some … growing pains right now.”

  She sighed knowingly. “Maris said she always assumed he’d be a freak.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I said.

  “What part?”

  “I don’t believe any of what you’re saying. You’re not here because Maris wants to bring Dad—or Calder, for that matter—back into the family.”

  “Why would you say that?” asked Pavati, her voice a velvety seduction.

  “If that were true, you wouldn’t have been so hard for them to find. Calder wouldn’t have had to use me, my friends …”

  “You’ve got that backward,” said Pavati. “I think you mean if Calder hadn’t left the family, we would have been easy for him to find. And vice versa. And I promise—”

  “Promises! What about your promise to Jack? What about the promise you made this spring?” I asked, and Sophie drew in a quick breath behind me. “Did you really go see him two weeks ago? Jack said you did, but Calder had a hard time believing it.”

  Pavati tipped her head to the side like a seagull examining an apple fritter. “Jack saw me? He knows I came?”

  “He said you came, but then you ran away.”

  She sighed and looked at Sophie. “I’m trying to make good on my promise. I need to make good on that promise. But the timing is out of my hands,” she said. She moved her arms gently across the surface of the water, bringing her hands together, palms up.

  “Whose hands is it in?”

  She stared intently at Sophie in a way that made me squirm. Instinctively, I positioned my body between my sister and the emaciated mermaid. “Easy,” Pavati said. “I’ve always had a soft spot for your sister. She knows I would never hurt her.”

  “Why
was it so easy for you to leave Jack?” I asked. It was a question that had bothered me for months—ever since Jack first told me his history with Pavati. It was the question that had allowed me to doubt Calder’s feelings for me.

  “I don’t understand what you’re asking,” she said, her gaze moving from Sophie to me. The water rippled softly across her shoulders.

  Her confusion made me more uneasy than the expected answer. “You loved him.”

  “If you’d like to call it that,” she said, shrugging. Her eyes burned like the aurora borealis.

  I wondered how she’d feel if she knew it was Jack who killed Tallulah. Would she want to kill him just as they’d wanted to kill Dad? Was there enough love between Pavati and Jack that she’d feel at least a little bit bad when she dragged him under?

  Pavati dropped lower, the water now grazing her chin. “I understand you went looking for Maighdean Mara today.”

  “How did you know that?” I hadn’t made any attempt to hide my thoughts yesterday. Calder had never asked that I “blank canvas” my mind. Had it been Maris and Pavati watching us? Had they watched ambivalently as we risked our lives?

  “Did you find her?” she asked.

  “We did not,” I said, my face and voice like stone.

  “Hmmm. Maybe Coyote has a better idea.”

  “Coyote?”

  “Go see Jack’s dad. He knows him,” she said, her Cheshire-cat smirk disappearing in the darkness.

  MY SCRIBBLINGS

  I do not need to breathe

  to write these lines because air

  is a luxury for the weak

  and if I haven’t mentioned it,

  that’s not me.

  MERMAID STATS

  Best Swim Time: 5 Min. 52 secs

  Voices: Able to Project and Receive

  Tail: None

  32

  COYOTE

  The Pettits’ house was a two-story farmhouse close to the lake. Calder wouldn’t go to the door, but he got out of the car and listened from the woods. I’d been here only once before—the night Calder attacked Jack—and it looked different in the daylight. I found the door, but I was too short to look through the three small square panes at the top. On the other side of the glass, the lights were off, although I could hear that the TV was on. I looked for a doorbell but, finding none, knocked several times. The sound was low and heavy against the solid oak door. No one came, and I knocked again. I was about to leave when the panes vibrated with approaching steps.

  The door opened slowly, and Mr. Pettit peered out. “If you’re here to cause trouble …”

  “Mr. Pettit? It’s me, Lily Hancock.”

  “Oh. Oh, I’m sorry. Come on in, Lily. I’m afraid Gabrielle’s not here and Jack, well … who knows where he is these days.”

  “I don’t want to bother you, but I was wondering if you knew a … a coyote.” The question sounded more ridiculous out of my mouth than it did in my head.

  “Are you talking about Everett Coyote?”

  “Oh!” This whole time I’d been picturing an animal. This wasn’t going to be as embarrassing as I thought.

  “He’s my dentist. Let me go look in the kitchen. I think he has an ad in the phone book. I’ll be right back.”

  I’d never been inside the Pettits’ house before. Dark brown shag carpeting led from the front door down a long hallway. The TV blared from a room on the left.

  “Your dad told me about your Minneapolis friend,” called Mr. Pettit from the kitchen. “I hope he’s okay.”

  “Yeah, he’s okay. You saw my dad?”

  “Ran into him at the IGA. He was in a really good mood.”

  “Oh.” I was already clinging to Calder’s Maighdean Mara theory by a thinning thread. A happy merman meant one of two things, and since Dad hadn’t been spending any time with Mom, that didn’t bode well for my exercise in denial.

  While Mr. Pettit fumbled in drawers in the kitchen, I wandered farther down the hallway, pulled by the childhood pictures of Gabby and Jack hanging on the wall, an eight-by-ten glossy marking each year of school. Gabby’s room was just past the last frame, judging by the band posters and pile of clothes on the bed.

  A second door was opened a crack. I peeked in. A blanket hung heavily over the window, making it seem more cave than bedroom. The light from the hallway raced in—breaking across the walls, exposing a floor-to-ceiling collage of Jack’s artwork. I slid my hand along the wall inside the doorway, searching for a light switch. I flipped on the light and drew in a sharp breath.

  It was like being underwater. A blue light flooded the room. Seconds later, a lava lamp sent a pulsing pattern of bubbles across the ceiling. Pictures of mermaids, some beautiful, others terrifying, plastered the walls. He’d drawn some images on full sheets of paper, others cut out precisely along their exquisite shapes. Charcoal drawings, oil paintings, sculpted pieces that reached toward the center of the room.

  I walked in, holding my breath. On a bookshelf beside the bed, a battered sketchbook lay open. I flipped through its pages. Every single drawing was of Pavati, her blue-sequined tail unmistakable. Her lavender eyes stared out from the paper as if she could leap at me as soon as I turned my back. Page after page. Until I got to the back cover and found something I would have never expected.

  There, Jack had stashed at least two dozen letters, all sent from a P.O. box in New Orleans. The postmarks indicated weekly letters through last fall, but then they tapered off. There were six weeks between the last two. Pavati had sent her final letter just two weeks before my family arrived. I pulled it from its envelope.

  Jack,

  Don’t send any more letters like the last one. Get a grip or you’ll ruin everything.

  P

  Oh, poor Jack.

  “I see you’ve found my son’s room,” Mr. Pettit said.

  I jumped and slammed the sketchbook shut. “It’s beautiful.”

  “It’s a nightmare,” he said. “Ever since his friends all left for college he’s gotten stranger and stranger. I keep telling him he’s got talent. He should pursue this art thing if that’s what he wants to do. So what if he’s a year behind now? People go to college later in life all the time these days. But there’s no talking to him.”

  Mr. Pettit handed me a torn piece of paper. “Here’s Dr. Coyote’s address and phone number. Are your teeth bothering you?”

  “Something like that.”

  I found Calder pacing in the woods beyond the car, pitching pinecones against the trunk of a tree. When he saw me coming, he lobbed one over my head and reached for the piece of paper I handed to him. He read it quickly, nodded, and said, “Let’s roll.”

  The sign read DR. EVERETT COYOTE—THE GENTLE DENTIST. It seemed like an oxymoron to me. Calder pushed open the door and a string of bells announced us to the receptionist. Calder walked quickly into the office and put both hands on her counter, leaning toward her with a wide smile.

  “Do you have an appointment?” she asked.

  “No,” Calder said. “We were hoping to speak to the dentist.”

  “Oh, well, you’d have to have an appointment to do that.”

  “It’s important,” Calder said, and I felt the temperature tick up a degree or two.

  The receptionist’s eyes widened and her cheeks flushed scarlet. “Well, I suppose I could go see.…”

  A man in a white lab coat came into the lobby through another door. His gray hair stood off his head like a puffy dandelion gone to seed. He pushed the last third of a sandwich into his mouth and picked up a magazine from the coffee table.

  “Dr. Coyote?” I asked.

  “Hmmm? I’m sorry.” His words came out garbled. “I was just finishing my lunch. I didn’t know I had another appointment so soon. Let me clean up and we can get started.”

  “I’m not here about my teeth,” I said.

  “Well, honey, I’m sorry, that’s all we do here,” he said, and there was a twinkle in his eye. “I can’t help you with much else.” r />
  “Actually … we thought maybe we could talk to you about Maighdean Mara?” Calder asked. He leaned in and focused his eyes on the doctor’s.

  Dr. Coyote’s caterpillar-like eyebrows shot up; then he chuckled and diverted his eyes. He wiped his hands on his wide-wale corduroys and glanced at his receptionist. “Why don’t you kids come on back. We can meet in private.” Calder and I exchanged looks as the dentist led us to a small office decorated in pastel dentist chic. Two chairs sat opposite the desk, and Calder and I fell into them.

  Always blunt, Calder cut to the chase. “We’re told you know something about her, the legend, I mean.”

  “Some might call me a bit of an expert,” said Dr. Coyote. “I come from a long line of devotees.”

  His gaze settled on my pendant. “Who sent you?”

  “My aunt suggested you might know where to find her.”

  Dr. Coyote looked me hard in the eyes, then got up and went to a bookcase behind his desk. Most of the books had the same ADA label on the spine, but up high, in the top right corner, were some smaller, older books, with cracked and broken bindings.

  “You’ll like this,” he said, pulling one down and opening it up to a page marked with a red satin ribbon. “It’s a children’s book. Easily overlooked, but still useful for the basics, and even more if you read a little deeper.” He opened the book and turned it around so we could see the pictures: charcoal drawings of a beautifully fearsome creature taming a storm.

  “See here, that’s Maighdean Mara,” said Dr. Coyote, pointing as if we could have missed her. “Her mother was Talamh, ‘The Earth,’ and her father was Gailleann, ‘The Tempest.’

  “She also had a brother named Dóiteán, which means ‘blaze.’ They were fire and water, and they hated each other. One day they got in a terrible fight and Maighdean Mara ran far away. She came west and found the cave behind Copper Falls.”

  Calder took my hand, fumbling with my fingers.

  “Back in the day, my grandfather always told me that Maighdean Mara was the ancestor of … the others.”