It was sunshine and not his alarm that woke Milton the next morning. He rolled over and groggily held up his utility-belt watch.
Then he sat up sputtering and spitting! Water was pouring out of the watch face, and the hands were stuck at 5:47. Apparently it was not as waterproof as advertised.
Which meant the alarm had not woken him up at 5:30 a.m. as planned. The angle of the sun and the rising temperature in the cottage were a sure sign that it was much later in the morning. There was also silence behind the beaded curtain, which could only mean that Uncle Evan had already left for work at the research station.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
“AHHH!” Milton shrieked.
“Sea Hawk! I mean, Milton! Open up!” came Fig’s voice from the other side of the front door. “It’s almost nine o’ clock!”
Milton leaped from the couch-bed and stumbled across the room.
“My alarm malfunctioned,” he said, throwing open the door.
Fig was there, dressed in clean gear with freshly twisted-in-place buns. “I usually wake up without an alarm,” she said, handing him a banana. “But I guess I was a lot more worn out than I realized. My mother finally woke me up because she wanted to hear how our campout went before she headed to the research station.”
“I think Uncle Evan must already be over there,” Milton told her. “Have you seen Rafi and Gabe?”
Fig started to shake her head when a voice called out, “Hey, where have you two been?”
Rafi and Gabe were coming up the path from the docks. “We’ve been awake since dawn getting these pictures developed,” Rafi said, holding up a large folder and a roll of tape. “Let’s go show your uncle!”
“I want my mother to see this,” Fig said, starting down the porch steps. “She hasn’t left our cottage quite yet—I’ll get her and meet you at the docks!”
“At the docks? Why?” Rafi asked. “My parents are the only ones at the research station. Dr. Greene was there this morning, working on the computer, but he was gone by the time we came out of the darkroom. We figured he was here.”
Uncle Evan wasn’t at the research station. He wasn’t at his cottage.
He was missing again!
But this time Milton knew exactly where his uncle, who needed to do a lot of thinking right about now, had gone.
“To Dr. Paradis’s house!” he shouted, leaping from the porch.
They dashed down the pebbly beach road, with Fig taking a detour to bang on her sunshine door and yell, “Come to Dr. Paradis’s quick!” They turned at the barely there trail, cut through the morning-sunlit dune-grass field, then raced into the shade of the tall trees that didn’t seem nearly so tall now that they had scaled an Enmity-Amity Tree.
“Let’s stick to the plan,” Fig said, panting as they reached the clearing.
“Gabe and I can set it up here,” Rafi agreed. “It’ll only take a few minutes.”
So Milton and Fig climbed the porch stairs of the dilapidated, dusty-musty onetime home of Dr. Ada Paradis. The door wasn’t ajar this time. Milton turned the doorknob and Fig pushed. Together, they stepped over the threshold and traversed the dust bunny–filled, peeling-papered hallway until they came to the jam-packed sitting room.
There was Uncle Evan, seated at the rolltop desk, pen in hand, and a stack of papers in front of him.