Before school on Monday, Ethan told me that he’d called the cryptozoology club in Portland to find out what proof we would need for Marvelo. I rolled my eyes, but he couldn’t see it. His face was hidden behind a giant tuba case. He plays a new instrument every year. Last year was cello, but this year he wanted something shinier.
“They added another thousand dollars to the reward,” he said. “I guess your dad called them too.” Dad spent most of his free time now at Gertrude Lake, sometimes with his comrades but mostly alone. I never know if he’s working late or monster stalking. We’d get kooky monster-hunting tourists again if he kept it up.
“Let’s stake out the lake tonight after dark,” Ethan said.
“What?” I walked out of the main building to the fortune-teller’s cottage for math class and hoped he’d head to music class in the conservatory. It’s the only school building that’s used for the same thing as it was during the resort days. It’s got nice acoustics, but I bet they didn’t have a theremin or a hydraulophone back then.
“We can take the truck. We’ll park nearby in case we need to run back in a hurry,” he said.
“I’m getting low on gas,” I said. It wasn’t true, but the lake isn’t far from where I got bit.
“I don’t have any money,” Ethan said, “but I’ll give you twenty Murphy bucks.”
The Murphy Council made its own money for a while when we were in kindergarten. It was money only for the island. Nobody got used to it. Murphy eventually went back to the regular green dollars, but everybody agreed that the island dollars were prettier. My parents still have some in a box in the dining room, in case it ever makes a comeback. Ethan collects it too.
“New shirt? I like it,” I said. Ethan was wearing a red T-shirt with a T. rex carrying a stack of books.
“Thanks. My mom let me get it at the church rummage sale. I got a fishing pole too, so we can do that this summer. They had a metal detector too! Can you imagine? But it was fifty bucks.” If I’m ever rich, I’m going to buy Ethan a metal detector. We sat down and Ethan leaned in to whisper: “If we see Marvelo, you have to sign up for the festival and we can figure out an act.”
“If we don’t see Marvelo, you can’t talk about him or the festival anymore,” I said. He argued, but the morning announcements started.
Ethan wouldn’t look at me when Principal Erica started her list: Kids going to Lincoln Bay had to register for their ferry pass card for fall. School ended in three weeks, and the barbecue and field day would be in the cove as usual. The older kids would show off and race the boats they’d built.
My stomach flopped when I looked at Ethan. I would need to tell him about moving. If Leti or Rocket said something before I did, he’d be even madder than he already was about Lincoln Bay. I told myself I would tell him later so I wouldn’t interrupt the announcements: Everyone was welcome to come help paint the new mural at the People’s Pub. Lyric almost jumped out of his seat with excitement. The kindergarten class’s gerbil escaped overnight, and the school garden needed weeding. I’d tell him after they found the gerbil.
After school, Ethan came over with Boxwood while I made quesadillas for Leti and me. Mom and Dad were both at work.
“My mom says it’s cool if we go to the lake, but only if we have an adult with us,” he said, and helped himself to a plum from the bowl on the table.
I called my dad. It rang and rang. I was about to tell Ethan we were out of luck, but Dad picked up right before it went to voice mail.
“Newt, everything okay?” I took a deep breath and asked if maybe he could come with us to the lake if he wasn’t busy. He said yes so fast it was hard to understand him.
“The best vantage point is probably the north side of the lake,” he said. “If he comes up where I saw him last time, we’ll see the whole thing.” He went on about people who supposedly saw Marvelo at night a long time ago, and I pressed a drip pattern in the doorframe paint with my thumbnail.
“All right. Ethan’s coming too.”
“Órale, I’ve got a good feeling about this! I’ll be off in an hour. See you soon.” Ethan called his mom, and I made him a quesadilla even though he had already eaten chicken teriyaki at his house.
Dad called back and said he had to work late. Again. It would be safer if we waited and went together. I listened and watched Ethan and Boxwood split the quesadilla.
“Oh well,” I said, and tried to look disappointed.
Ethan said, “My mom already thinks your dad is going to be there, and your dad knows we’re going. Think of what we could do with the reward money.” There was zero chance of getting that money, but I nodded. Mom got home from work, and I told her we were going out. Once I told Ethan about moving off the island, he’d probably be too mad to hang out with me anymore. It made my chest ache, so I tried not to think about it.
“You guys don’t want to stay and watch basketball with us?” Leti told Ethan about player stats, and Mom sewed black fabric. We left. The goats crowded around the gate and bleated at us when we passed, like they wanted to go for an evening stroll.
It was my first time driving in the dark. I tried to take down the fuzzy dice so I could see a little better, but the knot was tight. Ethan talked the whole time about the tricks he’d been training Boxwood to do. He could make him bark on command. I drove extra slowly and kept an eye out for deer. Most locals avoided the north side of the lake, because it’s boggy and smells gross. We sat on a muddy bank under cedars, not too far from the path. Boxwood waited in the truck with a rawhide. I’d brought my grandma’s chocolate zucchini bread, but the mud was too smelly to eat anything.
“I showered with the unscented goat soap from your mom,” Ethan said, “so in case Marvelo came out, he couldn’t smell me. Mr. Roush said komodo dragons can smell people from over a mile away. Maybe Marvelo has a good sense of smell too.” Path lights shone behind us. The lights from the café and pizza parlor sparkled across the lake, but brambles and brush kept it dark around us. Two guys sat in camp chairs on the far shore in front of the dark theater.
“Now you smell like kid instead of soap,” I said. “Maybe he wants kid for dinner.” I slapped a mosquito and looked back toward the Rooster. We could make a wish on the statue not to see a real bear, but a lake monster was all the magical stuff I could take for one night.
I pointed my flashlight in the shallows. Red-, yellow-, and blue-striped cichlids darted through the light beam like they were onstage. When I was little, Mom and Gilda had a festival act where they were cichlids swimming through hoops under blue lights. I tried to tell Ethan it was funny that the fish reminded me of people that were fish, but he just told me to put my flashlight away. We waited and nothing monsterly happened. My butt got cold. Fog rose on the water. Frogs and night birds made most of the sounds.
I started to tell him about moving, but I couldn’t. If he gave me a look like Leti did, I might cry right there on the boggy side of the lake.
“What if you went to Lincoln Bay next year too?” I said.
“It’s too late to register.”
“No, it’s not. My mom just sent my registration a couple of days ago. She said I can still go to Murphy School if I change my mind.”
“I don’t want to. I don’t know anybody there.” The fog thickened until we couldn’t see the other side of the lake.
“You’d know me. And there are other kids we know going too.” I said. Ethan slurped tea straight out of a thermos.
“I wouldn’t fit in. Kids in Lincoln have more money. Elijah told me he got teased for having holes in his pants.” Elijah was at Murphy last year before he transferred. Ethan took a deep breath and blew it all out until he looked deflated. “Besides, I’d get back too late to volunteer at the museum. And there’s Marvelo, and now you have a statue that grants wishes. Why would anyone want to leave?” His eyes glittered in the dark. It was no use arguing.
I’m too embarrassed to tell Ethan, but Mom said she saw Marvelo once too. When I was a baby, she took me out in the swan paddleboat one night to see a meteor shower. She swears he came up and glided past the boat, scraping silver scales along the side. Or they might have only looked silver in the moonlight, which shone too bright to see any meteors. She says that we stayed out for hours. She paddled back only after I got fussy and cried, so I wouldn’t wake up the people in the lake cottages. He didn’t come back again that night, and it was probably my fault for making such a racket. That’s how the story goes.
We sat in silence. I left the flashlight off, except when the leaves rustled behind us and I had to check for bears. I scooted away from the thicket and massaged my knee, just in case we had to run.
“I’m glad there’s still a chance you could stay at Murphy School,” Ethan said, and I knew I couldn’t tell him about moving yet.
“I met somebody. A girl,” I said.
“Where?”
“On the beach. She’s visiting.”
“You like her?”
“She’s interesting.” The reflections from the path lights turned the water into a liquid galaxy.
“How?”
“I don’t know. She knows…science.”
“She sounds like something you made up. Like one of your goats got lost on the beach and you imagined it was a girl.” He laughed into his hand.
“She was there when I went back for the bear,” I said.
“You didn’t tell her about the bear granting wishes, did you?” Ethan asked. “Maybe we shouldn’t tell too many people until we figure out what’s going on.” I said I wouldn’t tell, which was easy, since there was nothing to tell.
Even when the mud seeped through our pants and mosquitos bit us, Ethan wanted to stay. A small raccoon passed by, and my heart skipped. People say that, but it doesn’t feel like a skip. It feels like it could run right out of your body if your ribs weren’t making a cage. Ethan raised his eyebrows and made a yikes face like the raccoon scared him too, but it didn’t. Ethan isn’t scared of spooky stuff. He was just trying to make me feel better. He’s the best friend I ever had.
I heard the rumors about what was in his backyard before we became friends. The first few times I went over to his house, Ethan kept the curtains facing the backyard closed. When I got there the third time, he walked straight through the house out the back door. All of it was true. The part of the backyard that wasn’t lawn or vegetable garden was one big animal cemetery.
“Go ahead, look around. I mean, if you want to,” he said. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to or not, but I walked around, in case he’d feel bad if I didn’t. “It’s a spiritual thing. The pope says animals go to heaven.” He said it like I might fight about it. “But it’s not just that. My mom learned about different kinds of burials in college, and it stuck with her.” I tried to think of something to say that wasn’t rude.
“Is this because of your dad?” is what I said then, but I would take it back now. Ethan looked like he could have hit me, but he pushed the anger somewhere else.
“No. We spread his ashes in Joshua Tree National Park. This cemetery’s only animals. It’s been back here since I was little. My dad built the first few pyramids.”
“Do you, um, mummify them first?” I asked.
“What? No!” Ethan laughed. “A few got cremated, but most are buried.”
When his parents told their friends about it, other Murphers asked if they could do it too, so not all the graves came from Ethan’s family. It was a relief, because there are a lot of graves and grave-type things back there. It’s a big yard. It turns out his mom sold space when they needed money, and it turned into a thing. A Murphy Thing.
There are enough different kinds of animals back there to make a dead-animal zoo. The biggest are the deer crypts. Driftwood antlers and plastic fruit hang over their doors. Gravestones and pyramids made from everything from rocks and bricks to driftwood and ceramic figurines stand in bizarre rows. A line of tiny crystal pyramids runs along the back fence. Ethan explained that those belonged mostly to hamsters and mice. Some were pets, and some of them their former cat, Mr. Crinkles, caught in the garage. The smallest pyramid in the yard, at the end of the line, is Mr. Crinkles’s, the size of a chocolate kiss. Beth said he deserved no bigger monument than his tiny rodent victims.
Boxwood whined in the truck, and I wondered if it freaked him out to go to their backyard. But before I could ask Ethan, I heard something else.
“Shhh,” he said. Something moved through the water in the fog, not far away. Ethan sat up and held a finger to his lips. I pulled branches back. Something splashed, and a murmuring buzz came toward us. Ethan and I sat frozen. I wanted to fold up and hide, or run back to the truck. I squinted but couldn’t see anything. A couple of bats hunted bugs through the fog. A small ripple of wake lapped against the bank, and we both jumped. The wake grew. I heard something that sounded like crying, and my stomach knotted up.
I was too young when Mom told me about La Llorona. Something had cried outside in the yard, and I asked if it was a cat.
“Maybe,” Mom said. “Or it could be La Llorona.”
“Who’s that?” I said, like a dummy.
“La Llorona,” Mom said, “is a ghost lady who walks by the water, looking for her lost children. She drowns any kids she finds.”
It freaked me out bad. I pictured La Llorona walking loops all night around the beaches. Sometimes the wind howls during storms, and it sounds like La Llorona wailing. I told my parents once, and they looked out the kitchen window and said they could see her coming. I know they were joking, but still, I never go to the beach at night. But there we were.
“Ethan, let’s get out of here.”
We crept backward through the mud to the path under the rainbow canopy of lights. The brush and trees muffled the mysterious sounds and hid us from the water.
“You know, these lights emit special rays to repel lake monsters,” Ethan said. “They’re designed specifically as a monster-free path through the park. It’s one hundred percent safe for humans, but it repels anything that’s recently crawled up from the depths.” One side of his face glowed pink, and the other green.
“My dad said Herb hung them up to make it look like a supernova. He didn’t say anything about monster safety.” It’s supposed to be like outer space. Herb owns the market, but he runs an astronomy club too. He put two hundred strings of lights between the trees over the path at first, but Murphers have been adding more for years.
“Well, yeah. It’s a supernova safety portal. If you manage to somehow get to thirty miles per hour when you get to the bottom of the hill, you’ll be transported.”
“Uh-huh. To where?”
“How would I know? I’m way too slow,” Ethan said, and I cracked up. It wasn’t even funny, but he laughed and I laughed harder. We couldn’t hear whatever was in the lake, and the lights made us multicolored. I could have stayed there forever.
“That was fun,” Ethan said when we got to his house. He shut the door and walked up his driveway. I waited for him to get inside before I drove away, like my dad does.
The truck was too quiet without Ethan. I talked to the bear to fill the silence. “I have to call you something. I used to have a teddy bear named Huxley from my grandma, until puppy Chuck came along and used it as a chew toy. How about Huxley?” It fit, and of course, he didn’t complain. Once I’d parked next to the house, I got in the back and kept talking. Maybe if I could get used to him, I could get used to real bears again. I talked about school, and what we used to do at the festival, and what I would do for my part of the tourist pamphlet. It made me feel better.
“Thanks for listening,” I said. I crept into the house and got ready for bed. I closed the bathroom door so the light wouldn’t wake up Leti. The floor creaked in the living room, and soft steps passed down the hallway. I turned the water off. I wanted to brag to someone that we hadn’t seen anything at the lake. But when I came out of the bathroom, the house was dark and still.