The Fires Beneath the Sea (A Novel)

Chapter 4

4.

She and Max came out of their rooms into the upstairs hall at exactly the same time in the morning. It was early; she was surprised to see him. Usually he liked to hole up in his room till 11 on weekend mornings, headphones securely engaged.

“What can I say,” said Max, and grinned. “Curiosity and felines.”

They stood at Jax’s door and Cara knocked. When Jax didn’t open it they went in. A window was open, as usual, curtains fluttering in the breeze, but Jax was nowhere to be seen.

“Wait,” said Max. “There’s something else missing.”

Jax’s terrarium was gone, and so were his two saltwater tanks. In fact, his whole room appeared to be wildlife-free.

“No way,” said Cara.

They went down the stairs together; Max peeled off for the front yard while she went through the kitchen to the back. Past the clothesline, where the towel from the pouring man’s puddle still hung, through the pitch pines and bear oak, down onto the marshy shoreline. Past the patch of grass beneath her room where the skate eggs must have fallen—the eggs that were not skates but something else instead.

But there was nothing there.

The tide was low.

And there was Jax, looking absurd in nothing but big rubber boots and baggy blue swim trunks, his bare stomach and ribs smeared with dirt. He stood at the water’s edge, and a few feet behind him in the reedy mud were his tanks, tipped over and empty.

She wondered if it was dangerous, so near the water. But then, Jax had said the pouring man moved best at night, and it was daytime now.

“What’s going on?” asked Cara.

“Just re-releasing them,” he said. “They’re animals, you know. Wild animals don’t enjoy captivity.”

“Uh huh,” said Max, coming up behind Cara. “So that’s what the turtle did? Sang you the theme song from Born Free?”

That was a famous but boring old movie their mother made them watch, about training a tame lion to go back in the wild again. Totally seventies, but Jax loved it.

“No, the turtle, as you call her,” said Jax with some dignity, “was far less juvenile than you are.”

“Whoa-ho,” said Max. “Testy.”

“Really, Jax,” said Cara. “We’re dying to know, here. Did she—communicate something?”

Jax looked at Max, and then back at her.

“I told him,” she said.

“She said we have to go underwater,” said Jax after a few seconds, and sloshed through the shallows to pick up a plastic cup. He poured it out gently, and Cara thought she saw minnows glitter in the falling stream. “She said we have to watch the sea, and when the sea—lights up at night, I guess it was?—we have to go in. And if everything goes right a friend of hers will help us.”

“Help us what,” said Max flatly.

“Help us to get Mom back.”

Cara was still a moment, her flip-slops sinking into the mud. Then she pulled up her feet with a sucking sound.

“The night of fires beneath the sea,” she murmured.

“Yes,” said Jax, looking at her sharply. “That’s what she said! How did you know?”