I thought about not answering and telling Dad later that Mrs. Slater took the phone from me again. But the tension in the car made me positive that Carter would not back me up. I hit the answer button on my phone and said a very weak “Hey, Dad.”
“What the Hell is going on?” he yelled. “Did I tell you to put any of the footage on the Internet? I don’t recall giving you permission to do that. Your mom is about to lose her mind. What on Earth were you thinking? Haven’t we taught you anything? This is the most irresponsible thing I have ever seen you do. Do you know how this has hurt our mission? What impact your actions have had on our work? Do you have any idea what this is going to do?”
His rant was even longer than that, actually, but it was hard to catch every insult and guilt trip he blared at me. After a few minutes he paused for a breath. I hardly knew what to say. All I could do was whisper, “I didn’t know this would happen.”
And then it started all over again, with Carter in the seat next to me joining in.
“You didn’t know this would happen?”
“What did you think when you stuck it on the Internet?”
“That people were going to ignore it?”
“That evidence of real-life mermaids wasn’t going to be a big hit?”
“You aren’t stupid, June. How did this happen?”
“What were you smoking?”
I went ahead and put Dad on speaker, so they could hear each other rip me apart.
I explained what I had meant to do, but that didn’t help. They just started all over again with a new round of angry questions.
“Why did she need to know that?”
“Did you think of asking me first?”
“You put your friendship with this girl over the safety of the mermaids?”
“What about the oil spill and the sea life?”
“Did you think about anything besides yourself?” they asked in unison, as if rehearsed.
There was a pause, as they registered what just happened. And then they both laughed.
“Yeah, you guys are really funny,” I said. I noticed how tight my muscles were, my arms crossed, my body pressed up against the passenger door as if trying to get away from Carter and the cell phone, which I had stuck in the drink holder.
Carter raised his left hand and literally wiped the smile off his face. He looked at me, his eyebrows raised in the middle in some kind of mock sincerity. “I’m sorry, June. You’re right. It wasn’t funny.”
“Nothing about this is funny,” Dad agreed. “But we do need to lighten up. You made a mistake –“
“Boy did she,” Carter said, followed by a corny whistle like were suddenly in a Little Rascals skit.
“And now we have to fix it.”
Carter steered onto the highway headed west. “We’re going to the Center now. Will you meet us there?”
“I can’t,” Dad said. “There are already looky-loos showing up out here. We’ve had a dozen or more people come with cameras just in the last hour. I don’t understand how this happens. How do people find out about Internet videos anyway? I don’t think I’ve ever even watched one.”
“I don’t understand it either,” I mumbled.
“Well, Carter, let me know what’s going on over there with the mermaid and Dr. Schneider. I’m going to try to keep these idiots out of the water.”
“Yes, sir,” Carter said.
“And June?” Dad said. “Do not do anything else unless I say okay. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Dad.”
He hung up. Carter was silent. I felt like I wanted to throw up.
I thought Carter might launch into a new string of complaints or at the very least tell me what his plans were for the rest of the day. I knew he probably hated me right now. Any hope I’d had of anything happening between us was dashed. He thought I was a dumb, high school kid who deemed her popularity more important than major scientific finds or ecological issues. I had no hope of convincing him otherwise. I didn’t know why he even bothered to pick me up and take me with him, except maybe to keep me from causing any more damage.
Carter didn’t talk at all as he drove toward the ocean, even though I badgered him with questions about the mermaid and the Center. I wanted to know if he’d been there yet and knew what was happening. It seemed he wanted to save the impact of the bad news for when we got there. He also needed to keep some concentration on his radical driving so we wouldn’t be killed.
I subtly adjusted myself in the seat so I could hang on tightly to the armrest on the door. I knew it annoyed guys if they saw people clutching to car parts for life when they drove. My dad always complained about it, but I had to hang on because Dad liked to drive as close to the car in front of him as possible and then switch lanes really fast. He also had a thing about driving so close to the side of the road he’d go up on the curb. Still, as much as I hated to insult Carter’s driving when he was already pissed at me, I also feared a sudden lurch through the passenger window every time he careened around a corner.
Remarkably, we made it to the Rescue Center in one piece. Carter pulled into a spot, got out of the car, and slammed the door shut behind him. I saw him grab the door handle and yank on it. The door didn’t budge. Locked.
“What the...” He pounded on the door. “Dr. Schneider? Dr. Schneider!”
Nervously, I stepped up behind him. “Maybe he locked it so he could go to lunch?”
“That’s not like him,” Carter said, rifling through his key ring and finding the one that matched the front door. “He hasn’t been answering the phone either. Not the one here or his cell.”
“Do you think he’s okay?”
“I don’t know.”
Carter got the door open and held it for me to step inside. All the lights were off in the front room except for the glow coming from the aquariums and the tide pool. I slipped on a pile of mail on the floor that had been put through the slot in the door. I bent over and picked it all up so Carter wouldn’t slip on it too. The double doors to the lab were closed. Nothing seemed out of place to me, but it was pretty dark and I wasn’t so familiar with the place that I would know what might have been moved.
After entering behind me, Carter locked the front door again. “Just in case,” he whispered as he passed me and headed for the double doors. Those weren’t locked, but all the lights were off in there too. Windows high up in the walls allowed a touch of sunlight to leak in around the closed blinds, and there was more of that glow from the racks of aquariums. Schneider’s office door was open and a bit of light came from there, like a desk lamp had been left on.
“Could he have fallen asleep in there?” I asked.
Carter shrugged. I guessed that wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. Of course that didn’t explain him not answering the phone. The ringing would’ve woken him up. “Dr. Schneider?” Carter said in a voice a touch louder than a whisper as he approached the office. “You here?”
We stepped around his door and found his small office empty. The glow was a combination of a small desk lamp and the screen saver on his computer, a series of slides featuring ocean mammals. I bet that was a Christmas present someone gave him one year, thinking it was the ‘perfect thing’ for that old nerdy uncle that didn’t quite fit in at the family gathering.
“Where could he be?” Carter asked, not really intending for me to answer.
I offered some suggestions anyway. “The library? The university? Some kind of lab? Home? Lunch?”
I guess I had lunch on the brain, since I was whisked away at lunch break before I had a chance to eat. A grumble from my stomach punctuated that thought.
Carter poked around Dr. Schneider’s desk as if looking for a note. “No. He would’ve answered his cell phone. Something’s happened.” He lifted his eyes to me sharply and then out the office door to the tanks. “You don’t think...”
Pushing past me, he practically ran toward the mermaid’s tank.
“What is it, Carter?” I asked, chasing after him. “You think something’s happened to the mermaid? The place doesn’t look like anyone broke in. It looks just like we left it.”
“No it doesn’t.”
Carter was right. The large tank was farthest from the bleak light of the windows, and in a pretty dark corner, but now that I was paying attention I could clearly see that the moldy blankets had been removed. The tank was inky dark, and I didn’t detect any motion from inside as we got closer. Dread ripped through me. I slowed down, not really wanting to see if the mermaid was floating lifeless at the top.
“June,” Carter said over his shoulder. “Catch that light switch over on the wall next to the cabinet, will you? I can’t see enough.”
I brushed the light switch on the wall and set the room awash in florescent light and winced at the brightness.
Carter cussed and banged the glass. Not quite the reaction I’d expect if the mermaid had died. I dared to look. The mermaid wasn’t floating at the top or sunk at the bottom. She was simply gone. The tank was empty.
“Where is she?” I asked.
“How the Hell would I know where she is?”
“Maybe she’s dead,” I said. “Maybe Dr. Schneider put her with the other mermaid bodies.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Carter said. He moved to the back examination room, a walled-off room in the far back corner of the facility. I hadn’t dared to go into that room yesterday because I really didn’t want to see the dead bodies or how they were being kept. But now I followed Carter because I had to know. Every step I took felt so heavy. My heart hurt, and my body felt really tired all of a sudden. The grief that overwhelmed me made me want to cry so badly, but I fought it off with a good solid bite on my lower lip.
We stepped into the room and Carter let out another couple expletives. I understood why. There, along the wall was a large empty tank about six feet long and four feet high. It was empty save for a lot of ice water.
“Is that where they were being kept?” I asked, gagging at the rotten fish smell coming off of the dirty salt water.
Carter nodded and started pacing the floor. “There’s no water on the floor, so it had to have dried up. The ice is mostly melted. They were taken out of here hours ago. Nothing’s really been moved out of place, and the locks weren’t damaged. It doesn’t look like anyone broke in here. Dr. Schneider must’ve just let them in.”
“Let who in? Carter, do you think someone stole the mermaids?”
He shot me a look that froze my blood. “This is all your fault.”
“My fault? Because of the video?”
“Someone found out they were here. Someone came and took them.”
“My video didn’t say anything about where we took the mermaids.”
“No,” he answered, “but this is the closest facility to Grayland Beach, which was mentioned. You don’t have to be a genius to figure it out. I’m kind of surprised there isn’t a crowd out front banging the doors down for a peek.”
“Oh come on, Carter,” I said. “You’re being a little ridiculous. It’s just a stupid video that no one is going to take seriously. Maybe Dr. Schneider just moved them somewhere else. Maybe he decided to dissect them after all.”
“Where?” Carter shouted. “This is his lab. Where else would he have taken them?”
“Well, where is he now?” I asked. “Surely, if someone stole the mermaids out of here he’d still be here. He’d have called you. The police would be here.”
“Maybe whoever took the mermaids took him as well,” Carter suggested. “Maybe they...” He stopped himself and shook his head.
“What? Maybe they killed him? Is that what you think?” I grabbed his shoulder. “Who would have done that? That’s kind of crazy.”
But a part of me knew it wasn’t. I thought of the fear I felt when Mom’s call from Alaska came early the morning before. Hadn’t I been afraid that Affron thugs would have done the very same thing to her for nosing into their business? It didn’t happen, though. She was fine. So, my worries weren’t founded. Surely Affron didn’t really have thugs. That was just TV stuff.
Carter shrugged me off and ran his hands through his blond hair and clenched it with his fists, his eyes closed tightly. “Think. Think. Where could they be?”
“The computer,” I said, the thought popping out of my mouth the moment I had it. “It’s still on. The lights are out, the door was locked, but the computer was still on. He left, planning to come back.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. They could’ve come so early this morning he hadn’t even opened up the place yet and turned the lights on. I’ll bet you ten to one that Dr. S. slept here last night in that office. He has before.”
I threw up my hands in defeat, and that’s when I realized my right hand was still clutching all the mail I’d picked up on my way in. I hadn’t taken a moment to put it down yet.
“What’s that?” Carter said, pointing at the mail.
“Nothing. Mail for the Center, I guess.”
“No, that one, right there.” He grabbed one of the envelopes out of my hand. “From Affron.”
“What?” I grabbed it right back. Sure enough, the envelope had the Affron logo on the return address corner. “What’s this about?” Carter plucked it from my hands once more and opened it. “Are you going to get in trouble for that?”
“I work here, right?”
“I guess so.” I really wasn’t sure if being an intern gave him the right to open Dr. Schneider’s mail, but I also really wanted to know what was inside.
He pulled out a two page, three-fold application. “It’s for a grant. Some kind of research grant.” He showed it to me. At the top of the form was the Affron logo and their feel-good motto: We Make the World Better.
“Why would he have a grant application from Affron of all places?” I asked, thinking maybe I needed to call my dad. This was his area of expertise.
Carter gestured to all the equipment around us. “This place is run on grants. It couldn’t operate without donations and grants. The government puts a tiny amount into it, and there is some funding from the University, but otherwise it’s all grant money. Dr. S. does a lot of the grant writing himself, and he was going to teach me how to do it too.”
“But Affron? That’s kind of contradictory, don’t you think?”
After giving the application another quick look over, Carter strode out of the examination room and back to Dr. Schneider’s office. I really wanted to bolt to the back door just for a whiff of fresh air. My head was getting pretty dizzy from the odor in this place, but I stuck close. Once in Dr. Schneider’s office, I grabbed a tissue from a box on the shelf behind his desk and put it to my face to help me breathe something that wasn’t so foul. Carter moved the mouse around until the desktop showed up. He started opening folders and poking around.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. Instead he told me to look through the office drawers and files to see if I found anything else that was from Affron.
“But why?”
Carter looked at me right then like I was an idiot. “It’s kind of weird timing, isn’t it?” he asked. “A research grant application from Affron? The day after we find mermaids on the beach? The morning after a couple fake rescue team workers from Affron show up at our door with animals that clearly weren’t in the oil spill? Do you see the coincidence?”
“But this came in the mail, Carter,” I said. “Snail mail. Take-a-couple-days-to-get-here-mail.”
“Not if it was mailed from nearby and, say, yesterday morning.” He went back to opening files.
“Does Affron have an office in Washington?” I asked. I opened the top drawer of a metal filing cabinet in the corner.
“Oh, probably something in Seattle,” he said. “That would make sense. I know they have some kind of outfit up in Vancouver. That’s not exactly far from here. Just a couple hours.” He clicked the mouse. “Here’s something! Oh. Never mind.”
I flipped through file folders with tabs that held no meaning for me but apparently meant a lot to Dr. Schneider because each folder held a lot of paper. It was hard to get to the back ones. “So, you think that Dr. Schneider called Affron yesterday morning after we dropped off the mermaids and asked for a grant to research them?”
“Yeah,” Carter said. “Something like that. I think those guys that came last night knew about the mermaids and would have taken them then if we hadn’t been there. So, they came back after we were gone.”
“Dr. Schneider doesn’t seem like he would do that,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought too,” Carter replied. “I’ve always respected him. Until today.”
I opened the second drawer down and found what I was looking for: a tab marked “Grants and Donations”. I pulled it out and found copies of applications, letters, and check stubs from various grants. They weren’t in any particular order, and as I went through them I found ones dated as far back as five years and some as recent as a few months ago. Every time I saw the Affron logo I pulled it aside. By the time I was done I had at least fifteen check stubs from Affron. A quick estimation in my head had them donating close to $250,000 to this institution over the past several years. I handed the stack to Carter who was in the middle of trying different possible passwords to open Dr. Schneider’s email.
“Looks like Affron is our main benefactor,” he said.
“Looks that way,” I agreed. “Dad’s gonna be pissed when he hears about this.”
“You think?”
“He would have never used this facility if he’d known.”
“He didn’t have a choice.”
“I should call him.”
“Please don’t.” That voice came from Dr. Schneider’s office door. We both looked up to see the skinny old man standing there. Neither of us had heard him enter the building. He was still in yesterday’s clothes. His glasses exaggerated the deep purple bags under his eyes. And I think he was shaking a little, like he had Palsy. “Juniper, please don’t call your father. I’ve had enough humiliation for one day. I know what you two must think of me.”
“We’re not sure what to think, sir,” I said. “We’ve gone back and forth from wondering if you were kidnapped or killed to being the thief who organized it all.”
“Oh, I was hardly any of that,” he said, weakly moving into the office and lowering himself into the cushioned reading chair by the bookshelf. “I am far too unimportant for any of that.”
“So what did happen here?” Carter asked. “You haven’t been answering your phone. I had to come down to see for myself.”
“Is that what you’re doing on my computer?” Dr. Schneider asked, pointing at the screen.
Carter didn’t bother to apologize for their invasion of the scientist’s office. He only spoke in icy tones that betrayed his distrust of the man. “Just trying to understand a few things.” With a click from his right finger, he closed the web service.
I moved my left arm slightly to cover the Affron grant pay stubs. He didn’t need to know that I’d been snooping though his file cabinets just yet.
“You won’t find anything there,” Dr. Schneider said. “It was all by phone.”
We stared at him until he went on. “You want to know about the mermaids? Well, go ahead. Ask me.” He crossed his arms and readied himself for our attack.
Ask him? I didn’t get it. Why was he being so cavalier? Was he proud of himself that the mermaids were in Affron’s oily hands? At least he wasn’t smiling. I’d have slugged him in the jaw.
Carter continued to do the talking, which was fine with me. I had nothing productive to say to the man. “So, what happened?” His tone left no room for sympathy. He expected to be told the truth by Dr. Schneider, and he didn’t expect to like it.
Neither did I.
Dr. Schneider let out a long sigh. “Everything that has happened here is my fault.”
I shot a look to Carter that related only one thought: Duh!
“I called the president of the Board of Directors for the Sea Mammal Rescue Center yesterday morning. These seven people make all the decisions regarding how funds are to be used and which projects are going to take priority. Very little of what happens around here is up to me.” He fidgeted with the pen in his lab coat pocket. “I had to call them regardless to let them know about how the oil spill affected us and that we were full up with rehabilitation cases.”
“You didn’t have to tell them about the mermaids,” Carter said. “Not yet. Not until we’d learned more about them.”
Dr. Schneider grimaced. “I didn’t. Not exactly. I told them we had an extraordinary find that would require more research. I suggested that if they could arrange the funding, I could triple my efforts to learn about our discovery.” He paused, then added, “I could have been the one to declare what these creatures were with definitive testing results. I could have...” He raised his hands to his face and pushed his fingers under his glasses to rub his eyes. “I could have been a pioneer.”
“Those men last night?” Carter urged him on.
“They were from Affron,” Dr. Schneider said. “They weren’t who they said they were. I could tell that as well as you. I thought they were sent to find out what my discovery was, but I didn’t think they knew exactly what they were looking for. I assumed they were just making sure I wasn’t trying to fraud Affron into grant money I didn’t need. And we had nothing ‘unusual’ here last night that they could see, did we? It was all very awkward for me.”
“Did you call them back after we left?” Carter asked. The accusation in his tone was clear. “Is that what happened?”
“I don’t know what happened, Carter. Honestly. I was here all night studying and I fell asleep on my desk. I woke up to banging on the door. It was those same men. I let them in and they went straight to our mermaid’s tank and ripped down the tarps. Within moments they hauled her and the mermaid cadavers out of here without saying one word to me.”
I couldn’t take this any longer. “Why aren’t you with them, then? Why aren’t you wherever they took the mermaids and testing them and becoming famous like you wanted?”
“I don’t know where they are,” he said, burying his head in his hands. “I chased after them, but I lost them about forty miles up the highway.” He clenched his jaw and looked almost like he would snarl. “I don’t have anything. I didn’t get a chance to take pictures of her. I don’t have any lab results. I don’t have a single thing that suggests that she ever existed.” He shook his head. “I swear that I never mentioned to anyone that we had discovered mermaids. I don’t know how they figured it out.”
“I do,” Carter said, the ice from his gaze cutting through me. “And there is evidence, thanks to June and her father doing some taping at the beach when they found the mermaids.”
I could sense the relief flowing back into Dr. Schneider as he realized that this fiasco wasn’t completely his fault. The guilt transferred to me. I didn’t want to deal with it, so I nearly shouted, “So, how do we find them?”
“They work for Affron,” Carter said. “We figured out that much.”
“But why would they want the mermaids? Where would they take them?”
Dr. Schneider stood up and nudged me aside so he could reach the computer mouse. “It could be any number of places. Affron gives funding to every marine facility from Monterey, California to Valdez, Alaska. Their way of ‘giving back to the community’ as they put it.” He opened the Internet and went to a site all about Affron’s philanthropic deeds. Their motto ‘We Make the World Better’ scrolled across the page accompanied by some pretty classical music.
“Guilt money,” I griped. “They ruin our oceans and then put money into the rehab centers to make it look like they care. With promotion like this, Affron lets all the people know that they are the good guys who work very hard to take care of the environment. They back up their slogan by putting money into aquariums like this one. This way, no one can say they’re lying. That’s why they’re always the first to show up at major oil spills, too. Oh, my parents are going to have a field day with this.”
Dr. Schneider went to a link on the site that had a map of all the marine centers supported by Affron money. Along the Atlantic shore of the United States there were only a couple. Only one in Hawaii. However, from Northern California to Alaska there were about twenty-five.
Carter pulled out his cell phone and opened up the video link he’d saved there and played back my mermaid video. I glanced back and forth from the video to the dots on the map on Dr. Schneider’s computer screen. “Or there could be another reason Affron always shows up first.”
A chill ran through me. They knew.
Affron knew about the mermaids all along.