SECOND EARTH

The phone rang next to Mark’s bed.

“Don’t answer it,” ordered Courtney. She was too involved in Bobby’s adventure to stop reading, even for a moment.

“I have to,” answered Mark. Though he didn’t want to. He was afraid of who might be calling.

“Hello?” Mark answered tentatively.

“Mark Dimond?” came a familiar man’s voice over the phone.

“Yes,” Mark answered. He wasn’t giving up any more information than necessary.

“This is Captain Hirsch, Mark. Stony Brook Police.”

Mark’s heart instantly started beating faster. This was it. This was the call he was dreading.

“Hi, Captain, how are you?” Mark asked, trying to sound more together than he felt.

At the sound of the word “captain,” Courtney’s ears pricked up.

“Mark, you’re aware that there’s a reward out for any information that would lead us to finding the Pendragons, right?”

“Yeah. Twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“That’s right. Do you know where Courtney Chetwynde is?

I called her home but her parents said she was out.”

“Well, yeah. She’s here with me.”

He looked at Courtney. Courtney raised her eyebrows as if to say, “He’s asking about me?”

“That’s good,” Hirsch said. “I wonder if you two would mind coming down to the station. There’s something here I’d like to show you.”

Uh-oh. Mark thought he knew exactly what Captain Hirsch wanted to show him.

“Uhh . . . . I guess. We’re kind of in the middle of something now though.”

“How about an hour?” asked Hirsch. “We could send a car for you.”

“An hour? Uh . . . y-yeah, okay. I guess we could be finished in an hour. You have my address?”

“Yes, I do,” answered Hirsch. “Oh, Mark, one more thing. Do you know a guy named Andy Mitchell?”

That was it. The door holding back Mark’s fears was blown wide open. Andy Mitchell had stolen Bobby’s journals and it took him all of one day to take them to the police, figuring he’d collect the reward money. The only thing that truly surprised Mark about it was that he’d thought it would take Mitchell a week to read those first four journals.

“Mark, you still there?”

“Y-Yeah, I’m here.”

“Do you know Andy Mitchell? Is he a friend of yours?”

Two completely different questions. Mark wondered what Mitchell had said to the police about their relationship. He wondered if Mitchell admitted that he was a bully who had blackmailed Mark into showing him the journals, only to steal them and turn them in for a reward. No, Mitchell probably didn’t go into that kind of detail.

“Yes, I know him. But he’s not exactly a friend of mine.”

“Okay then, we’ll see you in an hour.”

“Bye.” He hung up the phone.

“That was Hirsch? What did he want?” asked Courtney.

“He wants us to come down to the station to show us something.”

“Did he say what it was?”

“No,” answered Mark. “He’s sending a car here in an hour. I figured we’d be finished reading by then.”

Mark’s mind raced. The drama with Andy Mitchell was going to end in an hour, one way or another. But as anxious as that made him, it didn’t even come close to the drama that was playing out on the pages of Bobby’s journal.

Courtney said, “I don’t want to think about the police until we finish. My mind’s not there. That okay?”

That was more than okay with Mark. His mind wasn’t there either. He didn’t want to have to discuss Andy Mitchell or the missing journals or his being an idiot who got blackmailed until they found out what happened to Bobby and Spader and Uncle Press.

“Yeah,” Mark answered. “We gotta read.”

Mark got back on the bed. He and Courtney stretched out on their stomachs, side by side, with the journal in front of them, ready to discover what happened on that dark day under the oceans of Cloral.