MR. LYNDON HAD GOTTEN THEM A HORRIFYINGLY rough redeye flight, and Maddison’s family landed in Tampa, Florida, at the hideously unnatural hour of four a.m. Maddison hadn’t gotten much sleep the previous night, and had been on far more airplane flights in the past week than she usually went on in a year, and was thoroughly exhausted and mildly jetlagged as a result.
“It’s surprising they even let us go through with the flight,” Maddison’s mom said as they peered around a line of grumpy passengers waiting to disembark. “It was so rough they never turned off the Fasten Seatbelts sign.”
“At least we’ll be home in a bit,” Maddison said. She had pulled her phone out the second they started letting people off the plane, horrifying time of night or not, and still couldn’t reach Chris. It rang out more than once before it went to voicemail this time though, and Maddison wasn’t sure if that was a promising sign or not. She’d been assuming that the phone just wasn’t getting service in the middle of the ocean, but Chris should still be out on a boat—so why was his phone doing something different now? She couldn’t make sense of it.
Actually, what if there had been a manufactured problem with the phone itself, like someone deliberately making it hard for Chris to get in contact with anyone . . .
“How hard would it be to block a cell phone signal?” Maddison asked her mom.
“Moving,” her mom said, tapping Maddison on the shoulder, because the line exiting the plane was in fact moving, and Maddison had to put the phone away to exit the plane. “I would imagine it’s fairly easy,” her mom added as she swung her backpack out of the overhead compartment. “But it might not be the best idea to talk about jamming cell phones in the middle of an airport. Now, see if you can find your father.”
They hadn’t gotten seats together because the tickets had been so last minute, and it took forever for Maddison and her mom to find her dad in the airport terminal. He had been sitting towards the front of the plane rather than in the second-to-last row, and had already gotten off and then wandered across the airport in search of a restroom and a coffee.
“Dad, it’s four in the morning,” Maddison said when she caught up to him, parked on an airport bench sipping a large coffee with deep concentration. “Do you really want coffee this early? Or this late, whichever?”
“Do you want me to accidentally sleep-drive us into the Atlantic Ocean?” her dad asked, tilting his head back to rest it against the wall and staring at the ceiling. “Huh,” he said, straightening up. “Hey, Mads?”
“What?” There was a strangely amused expression on her father’s face that didn’t bode well for her future.
“Do me a huge favor and don’t make a scene, okay?”
“Why would I make a scene?” Maddison asked. And who would care? The airport was basically dead at going-on-five o’clock and the only people in the terminal were Maddison’s family, a cluster of high school students wearing matching orange shirts, and a dark-haired woman with her own cup of coffee who had been leaning against a decorative pillar and studying everyone with one critical eye. Her other eye was fixed on the air conditioner duct on the ceiling.
She glanced up and towards them at about the same time Maddison did and tossed the coffee cup into a trashcan, then started towards Maddison and her dad. Either that, or the gift kiosk next to them, but she didn’t look like the type to want a stuffed alligator wearing a straw hat.
“Because you are a very a passionate girl and you have a temper,” her dad said, getting to his feet and handing his own cup of coffee to Maddison. “And I think I’m about to be arrested.”
“What?”
“Impressive,” the dark-haired woman said, pausing right in front of them. “Officially, yes, that’s exactly what’s about to happen. I’m going to walk you out the side door to the police cruiser I have waiting, and my partner”—she looked behind her, frowned, and scanned the terminal until a young man with an orange-striped tie came hurrying over and skidded to a stop next to her—“Forrest,” she said firmly, “is going to collect your family and their things and follow us.”
“Unofficially, there’s a significant danger that someone might try to attack your father and we’re attempting to take steps to minimize the danger,” Forrest explained when they were all in the car and the windows were rolled up. “He was a person of interest in a missing-persons investigation twenty-five years ago, and the case is being opened again because of recent events involving a church and a dead body. Detective Hermann thought it wisest to pander to the killer, at least for now, so we’re letting him think your father is a suspect.”
The police station, when Forrest escorted them in, was a scene of complete chaos, Maddison’s father and Agent Grey calm islands in the middle of it.
“We’ve got another situation,” Agent Grey said to Forrest. “Or, well, part of one. A Harvey Tanner just reported two teenagers lost at sea. The idiot called one of the families, bawling, and tried to confess, so we have a riot on our hands.”
Maddison sat down hard on a nearby desk.
“And to make matters worse, we’ve also just gotten a report that both kids are fine, if a little cold and shaken, and if we want to catch Griffin in the act we need to suppress that report before he realizes what’s happened.”
“So, Chris and Carrie are okay?” Maddison asked. Then it occurred to her that the two FBI agents might not be able to tell her much, if anything, and she amended it to “Please just tell me if they’re safe?”
“They seem to be?” Forrest said, squinting at a transcript like he wasn’t sure it was real.
“Oh heavens,” Maddison’s father said suddenly, and without warning he began to laugh. Real, deep laughter, edging into hysteria. “Of course! He would get himself mixed up in all this, almost completely by accident, coming in at the very last minute to save the day while babbling.”
“Who?”
“Robin Wyzowski,” her dad said, shaking his head. Forrest blinked, tilted his head to one side, and finally checked something on his phone.
“That’s . . . completely accurate,” he said, impressed. “Saved by Robin Wyzowski.”
“How is Robin Wyzowski mixed up in all this?” Maddison asked, because she knew who Robin Wyzowski was to her dad but there was an undertone to the conversation she was missing.
“He has always had the most amazing ability to find weirdness,” her father explained, still laughing.
Meanwhile, out in the Atlantic Ocean, with the lights of Archer’s Grove sparkling in the distance, Robin Redd looked up from trying to make Chris and Carrie hot chocolate and made a face.
“My ears are burning,” he said. Bethy automatically looked at his head in alarm, because he had in fact once caught his ears on fire by standing too close to a candelabra, but he was mercifully flame-free. This she pointed out, on the off chance that he didn’t know.
“Would it be more accurate to say that someone just walked over my grave?” Redd asked. “Or, hmm, that there’s a pricking in my thumbs?”
“Something wicked this way comes,” Carrie finished automatically. She and Chris were curled together at the boat’s tiny table, wrapped in blankets and still dripping slightly on the floor. “Shakespeare, Macbeth. Is something coming?” She didn’t know how much more she could handle tonight. It had been a lucky chance that had brought the Meandering Manatee close enough to where Chris and Carrie were bobbing in the water to see them, and an even more massive stroke of luck that had given Carrie the courage to flag down the bizarre little ship. With multicolored Christmas lights reflecting crazily off the lavender hull and a crimson deck and a life-sized purple inflatable manatee dangling crazily from the hook, intended as a windsock, the Manatee looked like a ship from the depths of Hell itself. Then Robin Redd had leaned over the side, recognized Chris and Carrie, and yelled a “Hello!” and the ship suddenly looked welcoming. Not that Carrie wasn’t afraid Redd was going to poison them with the hot chocolate he was trying to make, using the remnants of someone’s mixed-value pack of Hershey’s bite-sized chocolates and a carton of soy milk.
“Nothing’s coming, except for a storm front this Thursday,” Redd said. “But I feel as though somewhere out there, someone is talking about me,” he explained, whisking industriously. Carrie had watched him drop several Hershey’s almond bars in the saucepan, so she doubted he was getting rid of all the lumps even if he whisked for the rest of the night. “Or perhaps they’re taking my name in vain. It’s hard to tell when your worst episode ever has become a meme.”
As one, the camera crew, Bethy, and Flo groaned “Muskrat Dinner.” Although Flo was stuck in a perpetual state of horror at the sight of what Redd was doing to a handful of innocent chocolate bars.
“Do I even want to know?” Carrie asked Chris, who had watched more episodes of Robin Redd: Treasure Hunter than she had.
“Did you know,” Chris asked from his nest of blankets, “that some Catholic churches in Minnesota and surrounding states have muskrat dinners during Lent?”
“Right,” Carrie said, “I did not want to know—Redd, aren’t you used to people talking about you? You have your own television show.”
“I don’t use my given name for the show,” Redd explained. “It’s too embarrassing, and I like being anonymous.”
Nobody pointed out that someone who naturally dressed and acted like his television persona was hardly being anonymous, but Redd said, “I have a double life,” defensively anyway.
“I only ever feel my ears burn when someone is talking about me using my given name,” Redd explained, giving the hot chocolate a final whisk and tipping the contents into cups. “It’s much more serious an occasion, there are only ten or twelve people who know—anyone else want some of this?” he offered. There was not a sudden rush.
“Oh, here,” Bethy sighed when he started to looked dejected, handing the first two cups to Chris and Carrie and cautiously taking a third when Redd offered it to her. “You were saying?” The hot chocolate was definitely hot, and also definitely had some chocolate in it, so technically it fit the definition. Even if it did taste strangely like strawberries.
“Only ten or twelve people know that I was born Robin Wyzowski,” Redd finished. Carrie swallowed her mouthful of hot chocolate too fast and started coughing. “And now almost twenty of them do,” Redd added thoughtfully, sipping his own hot chocolate. “I’m not sure that’s a good thing. Nobody takes me seriously when my name is Wyzowski, it’s probably why nobody believed me when I tried to help give Kevin an alibi during that business with Ryan.”
“I’ll take you seriously,” Carrie offered, still coughing. Somehow the name fit him.
“Thank you,” Redd said, and then took a deep gulp of his drink and made a strangled urk noise.
“Redd!” Bethy gasped. He was making the most amazing faces.
“I think that all the nuts from the chocolate bars settled at the bottom,” Redd said faintly once he’d taken several deep breaths and blown his nose.
“Why me?” Bethy muttered, burying her head in her hands.
“Otherwise, this worked really well,” Redd added, studying his cup. “I’ll have to make this kind of hot chocolate again some time.” This time it was Flo who made a horrified noise.
“Don’t,” Bethy said, not looking up. “Flo might actually throw you overboard and we’ve had enough people go overboard tonight.”
“Yes, that would put a damper on the evening.”
“I’m damp,” Chris said glumly. “And still a little confused.”
“I just can’t believe you actually took that inflatable manatee on the boat,” Bethy mumbled, “and that it actually made the boat look frightening from an angle, and that anyone would think this ship was haunted. This ship would be an insult to all haunted ships!”
Carrie blushed and took a sip of her hot chocolate to cover it up. The manatee had looked just enough like a person floating in mid-air to scare her. Up close, the only thing scary about it was the painted doe-eyes.
“You keep telling me the San Telmo isn’t a haunted ship,” Bethy added. “But ever since you mentioned the name we’ve been followed by strange events—which I guess would make it more of a cursed ship than a haunted ship.”
“Oh, that’s the great trick of the San Telmo,” Redd explained. “It’s not a haunted ship, but it’s the sort of ship that haunts your whole life if you aren’t careful.”