CHAPTER 1
Okay, to start, I have to admit that I’m seriously impressed by my twin sis Beck’s ability to draw that picture, because at the time, we were maybe ten seconds away from being chomped on by a family of hammerhead sharks.
(Beck says she drew that illustration later on, from memory, not while we were in the water. I’m doing the same thing with the storytelling. It’s hard to write or draw while you’re swimming for your life. The ink gets all runny and splotchy.)
Oh, right. In the ocean. Off the coast of Costa Rica. Being chased by hammerhead sharks as we swam our way to Cocos Island, a Costa Rican national park also known as “the Island of Sharks.”
(Yes, Beck, that should have been a hint as to what might be lurking beneath the waves.)
We furiously paddled our arms and kicked our legs and tried to outrun the swarm of hungry sea monsters. Good thing hammerheads have eyeballs where their ears should be. Maybe they couldn’t see us—swimming right in front of them.
Why weren’t we in a rowboat or a motorized raft?
Because Mom, Dad, and our big brother, Tommy, had taken all available landing craft when they decided to do a little treasure hunting on Cocos Island without me, Beck, or our big sister, Storm.
“You three need to stay with the ship,” Dad had said when they loaded up the boats. “There are secrets belowdecks in the Room you need to guard.”
Yes, whenever Dad talks about the Room, it sounds like he’s capitalizing it, because the Room is this super-secret high-security walk-in vault on our ship, the Lost. The Room is off-limits to all of us. It’s where Mom and Dad keep their rare and valuable treasure-hunting maps locked up behind the Door. The Door gets the capital-letter treatment, too, because it’s made out of three-inch-thick solid steel. It’s so heavy I sometimes wonder how the Lost can stay afloat with that much deadweight in its hull.
I was pretty sure Beck and I had remembered to double-check the lock on the Door to the Room before we jumped into the Ocean. Pretty sure. We were kind of in a rush.
“How dare they go looking for the Treasure of Lima without us!” Beck had said as we prepared to dive in.
“Yeah,” I’d said. “How dare they!”
Yes, we sometimes think and say exactly the same stuff. It’s a twin thing.
So we jumped overboard and started swimming. Don’t forget, we Kidd kids have lived on the ocean most of our lives. We’re excellent swimmers and scuba divers. Except Storm. She doesn’t do water sports. Maybe because she has a photographic memory, which means that she never forgets that the ocean is full of scary creatures like, oh, hammerhead sharks!
But Beck and I were determined to join Mom, Dad, and Tommy on the island. Hey, we Kidd kids did pretty well treasure hunting on our own, without Mom or Dad. In fact, they were two of the treasures we’d recovered in our kids-only quests.
Now they were searching for buried treasure in the jungles of Cocos Island with just Tommy? Since when did the Kidd Family Treasure Hunters Inc. become a three-person operation instead of a six-person one?
Actually, it was dangerously close to becoming a four-person crew. Because the hungry hammerheads were much faster swimmers than me and Beck.
They were close and moving closer.
With a couple swift chomps of their jaws, they could definitely subtract two from six—permanently!
