Race to the Bottom of the Sea Read online

  Admiral Bridgewater himself dove onto his hot water bottle of a stomach, his nose pressed against the very boards on which his boots had just walked. Bits of debris from the firecrackers nailed him on the head; his rage was now well past the boiling point. “Get him!” he ordered. “Take down the whole ship if you have to!”

  The naval officers and crewmen staggered to their feet, blinded by the bright flash of the fireworks, and gunners stumbled toward their stations. Admiral Bridgewater watched them with his top lip curled — a deck full of flopping, foolish minnows, and he the only shark.

  He’d shoot the pirate himself.

  Seizing the railing, he pulled himself up, then reloaded a swivel gun and aimed it right between Merrick’s eyes.

  But Merrick blew him a kiss and jumped ship, diving into the waves. The admiral’s shot hit the railing of the Miranda, sending splinters of wood flying.

  “Blast!” Admiral Bridgewater said.

  The white foam from Merrick’s splash dissipated, shifting back to blue.

  “He’s got to come up for air sometime,” said a lieutenant by way of reassurance. “We’ll get him then.”

  Admiral Bridgewater waited, squinting at the water with his piggy little eyes, fantasizing about the scoundrel’s eventual surrender — emerging from the sea half-drowned, staring into the endless black tunnels of the Mother Dog’s guns.

  Any second now.

  Instead of a soggy pirate gasping for air, an entire ship flew out from behind the Miranda. A sloop of war, embodying speed and nimbleness — Merrick the Monstrous’s beloved seacraft. If it were an animal, it would be something muscular, compact: a sleek fish, fast and fanged — and it made a lumbering elephant out of the Mother Dog.

  Merrick was already climbing a line that dangled from the stern of the ship, reeling himself onto the deck like a marlin winding its own fishing rod.

  Admiral Bridgewater could barely get the words out. “Get him! Get him now!”

  The Mother Dog’s guns fired, but the lithe sloop of war rode the waves like a bucking stallion, and so the shots sank deep into the ship’s boards instead of landing in the pirate’s rib cage.

  The admiral aimed at Merrick’s quartermaster, who rolled an eight-pounder into the ship’s cannon and chased it with powder. His shot just missed one of her tattooed forearms, but she chortled and fired back with her flintlock, dinging the railing right in front of Admiral Bridgewater’s belt buckle.

  “Your aim’s gotten worse, old man!” she called. “Did our little fireworks show leave you cross-eyed? Or did you come out of your mother that way?” She fired again, and this time her shot would have hit the admiral square in the forehead, if he hadn’t lurched sideways.

  Cannons exploded; the Mother Dog’s twelve-pound balls crunched the pirates’ wooden spars, sending splinters flying. Merrick’s crew fired their own cast-iron howitzers and took out the naval ship’s mainsail.

  “Surrender!” Admiral Bridgewater said. “The Jewel’s no match for the Mother Dog!”

  Merrick took up the helm, shaking away the excess seawater from his hair. “No, Bridgewater — your little peanut brain is no match for mine!” The pirates’ ship cut across the water, making for open sea while the Mother Dog moved slower than a fat, expectant goose.

  “Fire at will!” Admiral Bridgewater screeched. “Fire, fire! Blast it all, don’t let them get away!”

  Gunners reloaded and aimed the cannons, but by the time they fired, it was too late. The pirates were out of range.

  “Get this sorry lumberyard moving!” The admiral was absolutely steaming. “What are you waiting for?”

  There was a sickening crunch.

  “He’s poured molten lead into the rudder housing, Admiral! We’ll only go in circles.”

  “And look, sir. His squibs did some damage to our mainsail.” Above them, the Mother Dog’s once perfectly crisp main canvas was now tattered as widow’s lace.

  “Admiral!” An officer ran across the deck, holding one of the liberated sea chests under his arm. “They’re all empty, sir! He’s taken the treasure — I don’t know how he did it —”

  “No one knows how the devil does his work,” Admiral Bridgewater muttered, “only that he must be stopped.”

  By now the Jewel was a fly on the horizon. The admiral could have wrung his own neck for failing to squash it when he had the chance.

  “Chip the rudder free,” came his order, short and clipped. “Get my flagship back to port. Row it in if you have to.”

  “What about the pirate, sir?” an officer dared to press.

  Admiral Bridgewater stared past the Miranda at the water. “Merrick never keeps his head in the sand for too long. He’s too brash. He’ll poke out when he’s bored, and we’ll be ready for him.”

  Fidelia creaked open her eyes. A smell had pulled her out of sleep, one so pungent her tongue felt coated.

  She rolled onto her stomach, and her pillow meowed.

  Aunt Julia’s fat orange cat grumpily repositioned himself into a fuzzy doughnut. He had been made to share his sofa with her, so she gave him an apologetic scratch behind his ears as she blinked the sleep out of her eyes.

  Her observation book was on the windowsill, the pen capped. She hadn’t opened it in six weeks.

  She stretched, her long arms nearly grazing the loft’s low ceiling when she stood. Out a tiny round window, everything was blurred without her glasses on, but she knew what she would have seen — the harbor, a miniaturized version of itself in the distance. If this were a warm-weathered day, ships would be casting off, heading to the tropics for a haul of cocoa beans. The sun would be shining through the leaves of the poplars. Arborley’s port would be bustling — a healthy, balanced, thriving ecosystem.

  But as long as the Undertow still prowled in the bay, it would remain cold and rainy, the sky dark. An island in hibernation.

  She slipped into a sage green crepe dress and a pair of thick gray stockings and laced up her boots. Her glasses were folded on the table; she put them on as she walked. A last glance out the window, and the gray-blue ocean came into focus. Once upon a time, she would have stayed at the windowsill, nose glued to the glass, enchanted by the waves, marveling at how the sea changed with every second. The tide bringing in new molecules of water by the gallons, the old water washing away. Always something new to see in the ocean. Something new to love.

  This time, she didn’t stare. She saw, she blinked, and she moved along.

  The acrid smell got stronger when she passed through the kitchen. A pot of lumpy green soup bubbled on Aunt Julia’s single-burner stove, a large enough batch to last for several of their future meals. Aunt Julia was nothing if not a well-organized, red-blooded planner.

  Unlike Fidelia’s mother, Ida, Aunt Julia’s big sister, who’d had room in her brain for the entire sea jellies phylum but never remembered to stock the pantry or make a meal plan. She’d work until sundown, then burst into the kitchen with mad, hungry eyes and holler, “I’m starving! Arthur, are you going to magically make some dinner appear, or shall we get Shipwreck Stew again?”

  Fidelia had forgotten how Shipwreck Stew tasted. She’d forgotten how all good food tasted — Aunt Julia’s cuisine was best consumed with nose plugged and breathing stifled.

  As she marched down the stairs, she finger-combed her ratty hair. Aunt Julia made Fidelia scrub her head with a violet-scented hair tonic every night, but Fidelia still stank like fish guts. As if it had permeated her very soul.

  Arborley Library was a three-story building made of white marble bricks, the largest, cleanest building on the island — and it was filled to the brim with books.

  Here, Aunt Julia was librarian supreme. She ordered books and assisted patrons. She shelved. She reshelved. She cataloged, repaired, and circulated — a massive task for a single person. Occasionally she attended big-city library conferences on the mainland — well, she used to. Aunt Julia’s trips to conferences had halted now that Fidelia had come to live with her. />
  The vast collection was housed floor-to-ceiling in the bottom three levels, but books also trickled up the stairs into the loft, which was Aunt Julia’s living space. It was teeny, but tidy. Books stacked up to the chair rails along the walls, books scattered across the kitchen table, books stacked next to the coffee and dried herring in the pantry. The loft was cramped enough without these literary intrusions, but to Aunt Julia, they were welcome trespassers.

  For Fidelia, the loft served as a reminder of how different life at sea — life with her parents — had been. A life that felt like a hundred years ago. Aunt Julia was patient, but she frowned when Fidelia accidentally dribbled her milk onto a book, or forgot to ask to be excused from a meal, or talked too much about dolphins.

  There was no one on the third floor of the library (periodicals, biographies). Fidelia went down another flight of stairs.

  Every morning when she woke, she helped Aunt Julia with library duties until dinnertime, and then the two of them usually spent the evening in silence, reading. She hadn’t put so much as a toe in the ocean since that night. She hadn’t even left the library.

  Except for the funeral.

  Fidelia liked organizing the catalog cards best — drawer after drawer of entries to be sorted, alphabetized, and filed according to Aunt Julia’s stringent system. Time flew past when she was at the catalog cabinet. It kept her mind occupied. Distracted.

  No Aunt Julia on the second floor (atlases, maps, general nonfiction).

  A man made eye contact with Fidelia — one of the chandlers, from the warehouse near the harbor. Someone from her old life. Could she duck behind a bookcase? No, he had already spotted her. He waved as the gap between them closed.

  “Fidelia …” he said.

  She pressed her lips together, her eyes finding a scuff on the hardwood floor.

  “It’s sure been quiet around the boardwalk,” he said.

  Fidelia rubbed the toe of her boot along the scuff. The scuff only got bigger.

  “We — well, we miss seeing you around, kid.” The man rubbed the back of his neck. “Nothing’s been the same since —”

  “I’m sorry,” Fidelia cut in. “I need to find my aunt Julia.”

  “Of course,” he said. “Just wanted to —”

  But she didn’t stick around to hear what he wanted. She ran down the last stairway two steps at a time.

  All of Arborley wanted to talk to her, it seemed. Tell her how sorry they were, reminisce about her parents — reminding her over and over again that they were gone and never coming back.

  Here in the library, she was safe. Here, she didn’t have to talk about it — or think about that awful night.

  On that night, just as the blackest hours began splintering into a deep tangerine sunrise, there had been a knock on the door. The knock Fidelia had been dreading.

  Fidelia heard only snippets of the conversation between the constable and Aunt Julia: “Dragged the bay and recovered the bodies … Next of kin … Death certificates will be issued… . Absolute tragedy …”

  Then Aunt Julia had shut the door and held on to Fidelia, and the two of them had collapsed as one, wrung-out and raw-faced, crying too hard to sleep.

  Fidelia finally found Aunt Julia on the main level (sciences, histories, medical texts). The librarian was halfway up a ladder, stocking encyclopedias onto a polished bookshelf with loud thumps. Her Oxford heels pointed straight out to both sides, like a ballerina in first position.

  “There you are,” Aunt Julia said without turning around. “Did you sleep all right?”

  “Fine.” A lie — for weeks, her nights had been the same. Endless tossing, dreamless sleep, except for two faces with dark hair and identical black glasses, floating in a suspended sea of fog.

  “You slept through breakfast.” Thump, thump. “There’s turtle soup in the loft.”

  “I’m not hungry.” Another lie. But if the smell of that soup was any indication of its taste, she’d rather deal with the groans of an empty stomach.

  “Fidelia, darling …” Thump, thump. “We need to discuss something. Something important.” Aunt Julia spoke so softly, as if someone had used a damper pedal on her vocal cords. “It’s about your parents’ estate.”

  Fidelia waited. Was that her heart that thumped, or an encyclopedia landing on the shelf ?

  “I just received a letter,” Aunt Julia explained. “Your parents left you a respectable sum of money, which will be yours when you come of age. The house will be turned over to the bank and auctioned off to new owners, but all the things inside the house …” She paused, swallowing. “Their collection has been left to the university.”

  Fidelia’s jaw tightened. To the university? “But … but …” she stammered.

  “Your parents funded their studies with research grants,” Aunt Julia said. “So legally, all their findings, all the equipment — everything belongs to the school. The university is sending someone tomorrow to collect it. They’ve asked that we make sure everything is packed and ready for pickup.”

  Fidelia tried to picture it — the Quail family home without any microscopes, without sea stars scattered across the dining table. The garden shed without its mishmash of fishing nets and spare spools of line. It would look empty, lifeless. It would look normal.

  “We’ll walk over this afternoon,” Aunt Julia said. “After we’ve finished sorting the returns.”

  Her father’s set of rocks covered in mustard lichen, proudly displayed in the foyer. Her mother’s assemblage of molted lobster shells, lined up like antique suits of armor next to the tea tins on a shelf in the kitchen. Things that had been in the house since Fidelia was brought home as a baby.

  “Are you all right?” Aunt Julia stepped down the ladder’s rungs. “Fidelia?”

  Fidelia scrunched her toes inside her boots to keep from crying. She pointed to a gap on the shelf. “You’re missing a volume.”

  Aunt Julia blinked at the sudden switch of topics. “It’s been lost for months.” She turned back to the shelf. “A library runs on efficiency, you know. All books must be returned on time, to their proper homes on the shelves …”

  Fidelia wasn’t listening. She had picked up Aunt Julia’s clipboard to see the title of the missing book, just in case she’d shelved it in the wrong section —

  Exploring an Underwater Fairyland by Dr. and Dr. Quail.

  “I’m in the mood for a nice fruit pie for dinner,” Aunt Julia continued, oblivious of the fact that to her niece, the earth had stopped spinning. “Perhaps after we’re finished at the house, we’ll stop by the vendor for some lemons.”

  Fidelia reached out and ran her fingers along the names on the clipboard.

  Something inside her pulsed, threatening to crackle.

  Aunt Julia plucked the clipboard from Fidelia’s hands like a seagull plucking a fish from the water. “I need to reorder some things for the catalog,” she said. “And we need to get some food in you.” Gently, she took Fidelia’s shoulder and tried to steer her away.

  “I’m not hungry,” Fidelia said again, and this time it was the truth; all the soup in the world wouldn’t make this cold stone in her belly go away.

  But Aunt Julia guided her niece toward the stairs, and Fidelia climbed them listlessly.

  At the kitchen table, Aunt Julia placed a bowl of turtle soup and a platter of honey biscuits in front of Fidelia. “Eat,” she implored.

  Fidelia bit down on a honey biscuit and immediately regretted it; the thing was harder than a mollusk shell. She stirred the sickly green soup, her spoon clinking the side of the bowl.

  After a moment, Aunt Julia said, “There’s something else I wanted to bring up. I wondered … I wondered how you might feel about a change.”

  Fidelia watched the steam rise from the soup in curlicues. “A change?”

  “A move.” Her aunt dabbed at her mouth with a napkin. “To the mainland.”

  Fidelia’s heart fell, anchoring itself in her stomach. She opened her mouth, then
closed it again, like a landed fish, but no words came out.

  “We can come back to Arborley to visit, of course —”

  “But … But Arborley is home,” Fidelia said. Hot tears filled her eyes, fogging her glasses — how could Aunt Julia even talk about moving away?

  Aunt Julia gripped the edge of the table with both hands. “Don’t you see their faces everywhere?” she whispered, and Fidelia’s throat tightened. “In every shop window? Every cup of tea, every book? I see them everywhere I look… .” She gazed at Fidelia, and Fidelia finished the thought for her: I see them in you, Fidelia. In my own niece. It hurts to even look at you.

  How do you think I feel? Fidelia wanted to cry out. I look down at my hands and they’re my dad’s hands — long-fingered, knobbly-knuckled. I touch my hair and it’s my mother’s, and she’s twisting it back in one of her braids. I’m a Quail. It hurts to even be me.

  “Think about it,” Aunt Julia said. “You could go to a new school and make friends — friends your own age,” she said. “It’s not natural for a young lady to be friends with sailors and ship brokers and … and barkeeps.”

  “What about the library?” Fidelia asked.

  “I’ve already secured a position at a library on the mainland. You can still help me with the daily tasks,” she added quickly, as if this were Fidelia’s concern.

  Fidelia had been to the mainland enough times. The architecture was impressive enough, she supposed — a skyline that was glorious to see silhouetted from the ocean as one approached the port. But that was where her affections stopped. On the mainland, roads didn’t end in shorelines — they didn’t end at all, but kept winding farther and farther around one another in a confusing web. No canals, no shipyards, no seafood. Towns were surrounded by more towns, rooftops as far as the eye could see.

  She’d be landlocked. A fish, drowning on the sand.

  “Fidelia … we need a new start,” Aunt Julia said. “To get away from all these — these memories.” She waved her hand as she said this, as if Fidelia could so easily wipe her mind clean of her parents, her old life. Like erasing a chalkboard.