Last one!!
Two weeks after we went missing in Venice, we were back home. We never did end up getting to St. Ives- but we did get a free luxury plane ride all the way back home, just in time to meet the news crews. I now understand why people say fame is exhausting.
Mom is at the kitchen table, doing one of her adult coloring books (whatever those even are; I've seen it, it's just a coloring book, what makes it "adult"?), and Dad is doing the dishes at the sink while on the phone. Toby, Mark, and Tommy, fresh out of the hospital, are supposedly doing homework up in Toby's room. I suspect they're just playing Minecraft, judging by the shouts coming from upstairs.
Me, I'm sitting on the couch as the news plays on the tv in the background. I'm rewatching the video, hoping to catch something I missed the first hundred times.
There goes Mark, as expected. I crouch under the doorframe. "What is it?" I whisper along with Toby's voice. The camera dips, and when it comes back up, there's Venice in front of us. There's literally nothing that gives me any clue what happened out there.
"The incident in Venice is really one of our more major issues; though not as dangerous as some that came before," I vaguely heard the tv say.
I immediately tossed my phone aside and scrambled to turn the volume up. There, on the screen, Officer Jason Wood (or Jace, as his email address read) was being interviewed by the reporter. He looked exactly the same as he had two weeks ago, maybe with messier hair here.
"After all," he continued as I listened eagerly, "the APOC has been searching for the source of our Venice appearances for a while now."
"And what have you discovered to be the source, Mr. Wood?" the reporter asked. I've always sort of hated reporters- they're so obnoxious and too energetic. It makes me wonder how much coffee they down before going live.
"That," Jace said as he cut his eyes to the camera. "That's something along the lines of the Bermuda Triangle. Classified information."
I felt my heart sink, realizing I may never really know what happened, but the reporter came to the rescue.
"Are you sure there's not a single thing about the incident you could tell us? Inside scoop on the crime scene, a clip of what happened, anything at all?" I just love reporters, don't you?
Officer Wood rubbed the back of his head. "Well, I met this lovely little girl at the scene- her family was on a vacation aboard the ship that crashed."
"Oh my," the reporter said with exaggerated distress. "Are they all okay?"
"I believe one of her brothers was loaded into an ambulance, but records show that he's safe and back to normal now," Jace explained.
Tommy as my brother? Mm, I'll pass.
But... the more I think about it, the more I realize I do see him (and Mark, for that matter) just like another older brother. He definitely acts the part.
"I talked to her at the scene; she really helped us out by recording the events as they happened on her phone."
"Might we know this brilliant girl's name?" the reporter asked. My excitement spiked severely.
Jace looked at the camera and grinned. "Melani Smith. Lani, I hope you know how much you helped us."
As soon as it cut to commercials, I turned the tv off, grabbed a throw pillow, and screamed into it in frustration. He couldn't bear to tell us anything? I almost lost my life for that video! One of my best friends got really hurt!
Okay then, Officer Wood, I thought as I pulled up my email. I think you owe me an explanation.
I waited four hours. Four, agonizing, slow hours for Jace to reply.
When he finally did, I heard the ding come from the living room while we were eating dinner. I scrambled out of my seat so fast I nearly fell over but caught myself on my chair.
"What... exactly... are you doing?" Toby called after me as I flung myself onto the couch for my phone.
"Nothing!" I yelled back. I didn't have the concentration to explain myself and also read the new email.
It read:
Lani,
As much as I'd like to explain myself and my organization to you, I can't. You have to understand that this is a TOP SECRET government agency. So I couldn't tell you that we were launched in 1958 because people were reporting sightings of a Six-Toed Biped Gorilla, which they called "Bigfoot". Not long after, we were hired to fish Charles Taylor's missing plane out of the Bermuda Triangle in 1957. The rest of the world was told those missing divers drowned in a fatal mistake in the oxygen tanks' installment. No one, including yourself, knows that they disappeared without a trace while searching for the airship, and no one, including yourself, knows that we still track their stable vitals and are restlessly searching for them as I write this. And of course, it would be absurd to suggest that much more recently we flew all the way up to Antarctica to go fishing for the Kraken, the last of its kind, and now keep it in a monitored underground facility in Canada. I couldn't tell you that somewhere in the English Channel contains a similar anomaly to the Bermuda Triangle, except that it teleports anything that floats or flies through it to a random body of water anywhere in the world, and obviously this isn't what happened to your vacation. Naturally I couldn't tell you that the password to the APOC wing in the CIA private intelligence log is 160694513865 in case you wanted more information. Really, Lani, I'm very sorry I couldn't help you out.
Jason Wood, Private Investigator.
PS, you're gonna get me fired for this, you know that, right?
Oh, THANK YOU, Officer Jason Wood. I'd probably look further into that CIA log, but not right now. The rest of the information he'd given me was satisfying enough, especially the bit about Legacy. At least I'm not wondering anymore.
I smiled to myself, carefully set the phone back down, and went to join my family back at the table again.
Done! Thoughts?
