CHAPTER 13
The delicious smells of good things cooking greeted Amy as she wearily pushed open the door to Shep’s house. It had taken her over an hour to get back. Plenty of time for her to digest what had happened. But it still hadn’t taken away her fear. It was still there in her stomach, a cold, hard ball.
When she closed the door, she began to shake. Now that she was safe, the horror of what had happened truly sank in. What if Hamilton hadn’t saved her? She saw herself falling into that water, saw the sharks circling with their dead black eyes….
She felt so cold. She couldn’t take a step, she was shaking so hard.
In the kitchen area, Nellie was cooking, a bright bandanna wrapped around her hair. She stirred something in a pan while outside Shep tended to the barbecue. Dan was playing one-person Foosball, running back and forth to each end of the table.
Nellie looked up. Her welcoming smile faded as she took in Amy’s appearance.
She dropped the wooden spoon, splattering tomato sauce on the stove. Amy saw it bloom like blood in the water. Dizziness swept over her, a buzzing in her ears. The room started to spin….
Nellie caught her as her knees gave way.
“Dan, get a blanket!” Nellie’s voice was steady, but it rang through the open space. She half carried Amy to the couch.
The only thing Dan could find was the leather jacket. He brought it over and Amy gratefully wrapped herself in it.
“What happened?” Dan asked, his small face looking pinched. She’d spooked him.
“They didn’t hurt me. I mean, if I’d been thrown into the bloody fish water with the sharks, who knows? But Hamilton came by on a paraglider, so—”
“What?” Nellie exclaimed at the same moment that Dan yelled, “Sharks?”
Quickly, Amy recounted how Irina had led her through the tunnel and warned her about Isabel, yet she’d wound up on the boat anyway. She explained how Isabel had offered them Lucian protection and what had happened when she’d said no. When she described Isabel calmly ladling the fish parts into the sea, Nellie turned white. But the funny thing was that as Amy told the story, she stopped shaking, and her fear went away.
She told them everything, including the rosemary Clue that Irina had given her. But she didn’t tell them the most important thing. That Ian, Irina, and Isabel all told her that Hope and Arthur had been murdered. And that Isabel had accused the Madrigals and Irina of the crime.
“Oh, man,” Dan said, throwing himself back on the cushions. “I missed it! If I’d been there, Isabel Cobra wouldn’t have had a chance. We could have pushed her into the water. Or I could have gotten fishing line and tied her up. Or we could have used Ian as a battering ram!”
“Dan,” Nellie chided. “This isn’t a game.”
The thirty-nine clues are like game to your brother, yes?
Dan jumped up and began pretending to paraglide over snapping sharks. Amy made a decision as she watched him. She couldn’t tell him about their parents. There was a soft, secret spot in her brother that he covered up with jokes. It was all about losing his parents so young — before he could even have memories of them. She would have to try to figure it out on her own. At least for awhile.
Amy touched her throat, momentarily forgetting that Grace’s necklace was gone. The absence of it made her feel more alone than ever. This feeling inside — that there was something she needed to remember — was big and scary. She’d have to hide that from Dan, too.
He hates when I act like a big sister. But I am one.
Nellie patted her knee. “Food. That’s what you need.” She got up and went back to the kitchen.
Amy wrapped the jacket more tightly around herself. She felt the lining tear and she groaned softly. The only thing she had from her mother, and she’d ripped it! She moved her fingers along the lining, searching for the tear, and heard something crackle. Sitting up, she examined it more closely. The jacket had already been torn along the seam and repaired again. She reached inside the tear and took out a brittle piece of lined paper—something ripped from a notebook.
“What is it?” Dan asked, coming closer.
“A piece of old notebook paper hidden in the lining.” Her heart pounding, Amy read the words aloud.
28 June 1937
Each stronghold I was able to enter seems shaky now. War is on the horizon, nothing seems simple or safe, from Natal to Karachi. They fear us; that is good.
Left Bandung and flew to Darwin. Here we sent back parachutes to lighten load so I am including this jacket as well. GP has been instructed to pass it along to you. Tomorrow we go on to Lae. Then it is off across the Pacific to Howland.
I’m sorry to report that I failed to find our assassin H, or any real clues to his whereabouts. I was able to get to Batavia from Bandung and managed to find our contact. He told of a “scarred white man” who the natives believed had escaped the mountain. His body was intact but not his mind. What he had endured was terrible enough to break it.
Here in Darwin our informer turned out to be a dead end. It was soon clear that the gentleman — and I use the term loosely, because he was quite a charlatan — was just looking for another payoff. All he offered was riddles. He even had the audacity to try to sell me a ring — it will bring you luck, he said, so I bought it in hopes it would gain me information. It didn’t. When I asked again if he knew H, he said both of them were in a hole but not to worry. Then he cackled a laugh and that was the end of it. Clearly he enjoyed giving me no information … and making me pay for it.
I am off into the blue. No more strongholds to penetrate. Only sky. AE
“I don’t get it,” Dan said. “Who do you think AE is? Some Australian dude who flew a plane?”
“Not a dude,” Amy said with dawning excitement.
She sprang up and ran to Shep’s bookshelves. Naturally, she’d already checked out his library. Shep had whole shelves dedicated to aviation history. It didn’t take long before she found what she was looking for. She thumped the book down on the surfboard table.
Dan hurried over. “Amelia Earhart?”
“It’s got to be!” Amy said. “Her last flight was right around that time.” One of Amy’s childhood heroes had been Amelia Earhart. Grace had given her a biography of the flier when she was eight years old. “She was amazing. She was the first woman to fly solo over the Atlantic. She broke records for speed and altitude. She didn’t let anything stop her.”
She flipped to the index and looked up “last flight.” Then she turned to the page and read through the itinerary. “Look,” she said, pointing to the page. “She was in Darwin, Australia, on June 28, 1937. She was trying to become the first woman to circumnavigate the world, and by the longest distance. And Dan, look at the rest of her stops!” She placed the paper with her parents’ itinerary next to Amelia’s journey. Her parents had hit many of the major stops.
“They match,” Dan said. “But why would Mom and Dad be following where Amelia Earhart went about a bazillion years before?”
“About sixty years before,” Amy corrected. She tapped the paper. “Isabel said something to me about the Lucian stronghold in Karachi. I bet all these cities are strongholds for other branches, too.”
“So what happened after she left Darwin?”
“She flew to Lae, New Guinea, for refueling. Then she took off for Howland Island — which is basically a speck in the middle of the Pacific — but she never made it. Her plane was never found. There were all sorts of rumors that she survived, but basically everyone believes that she and her navigator couldn’t locate the island and ran out of gas. But before that happened, it looks like she had a secret agenda. Do you realize what this means? She was a Cahill!”
“So who was GP?” Dan asked.
Amy searched through the book. “It must be George Putnam, her husband. They shipped the parachutes back because they would be useless over water. But whoever she trusted to ship the jacket didn’t do it. Even then, it would have been valuable as a souve
nir. It must have just stayed in Darwin. Mom must have had some kind of lead to it….”
“ ‘Our assassin H,’ ” Dan read. “Do you think it could be Bob Troppo? Maybe she’s using the word assassin in a funny way because he hit Mark Twain with his cane. She says he has scars, just like the photograph.”
“It has to be!” Amy said. “The Cahills have been looking for him for a long time, I guess. I wonder why.” She reread the letter. “I wonder where Bandung is.”
Shep overheard her from the kitchen, where he was transferring grilled fish onto a platter. “It’s on the island of Java, not far from Jakarta,” he said. “Indonesia.”
“It was Earhart’s stop before she flew to Darwin,” Amy said.
“ ‘They fear us,’ ” Dan read. “Who is ‘they’?”
Amy looked up and met his gaze. “Who does every branch fear?”
“Madrigals,” Dan said.
“Isabel said that Madrigals might be rogue Cahills — they left their own branches and formed a new group. They’re like a secret society. That would explain why nobody really knows who they are…. They’re just afraid of them.” Amy frowned. “But Amelia Earhart couldn’t be a Madrigal. She just couldn’t. She was a hero. An explorer. And not only that, she wasn’t … sneaky or mean. I can’t believe she’d betray her branch just to get power.” Or that she could belong to a group that would one day kill our parents … if that part of the story is even true.
“Maybe she was just really good at hiding things,” Dan said, frowning. “Okay, we’ve got Amelia Earhart, branch strongholds, and some crazy dude with no name — maybe he’s H, maybe he’s Bob, but he’s definitely a few Lucky Charms short of a bowl,” Dan summarized. “I still don’t know what we’re doing in Australia. And what were our parents doing here? And why did they come to Sydney? Amelia Earhart didn’t.”
“Well, they probably flew here so that they could meet up with Shep and have him take them on his own plane. Less chance to be followed that way.”
Amy turned back to Shep and raised her voice. “Shep, why did our parents go to Adelaide? Do you know?”
“Sure,” Shep said. “We needed a refueling stop before Darwin. We had a couple of choices, and they picked Adelaide.”
He put down the platter of fish on the dining table.
“I don’t want to be nosy,” he said, “but I have a feeling I don’t have the whole story here. So far today we’ve been attacked by very large American surfers, Amy disappears for hours and then shows up looking like death warmed up, and now apparently Amelia Earhart is speaking to you from a watery grave. Do you want to fill me in on what’s going on? Since I’m flying you over half of Australia and I happen to be your cousin, I think I have a right to know.”
“Absolutely,” Dan said. “The truth is that we’re part of a gang of master thieves who broke into the US Mint and stole one billion dollars in gold. Amy and I are small enough to climb into AC ducts. We took off with the gold, so they’re chasing us. But what they don’t know is that we’re working directly for the president.”
“And Amelia Earhart …”
“… was on a secret mission to find a place to hide the world’s gold in a top secret underwater fortress. We’re looking for that, too.”
Shep nodded. “O-kay. Glad we got that straightened out. Now it’s time to eat.”
Amy couldn’t sleep. Every time she closed her eyes she saw Irina’s fierce gaze, blue as a flame in the darkness.
Do you think your mother left you alone and raced back into a burning house just for her husband?
Remember that night, Amy. Think about that night. You were there. You were old enough to see.
All this confusion, all this tightness in her chest made her feel like she couldn’t breathe. Why was she so afraid? Why did Isabel seem so familiar to her, and why did that fill her with dread?
Nellie snoozed next to her, and Dan was just a lump wrapped in a quilt on the sofa by the window. Amy slipped out of bed. The leather jacket was lying on the armchair near Dan, and she put it on and wrapped it around her. The thrilling thought that it had belonged to Amelia Earhart had been replaced by the simple need to touch something her mother had touched. She lay her cheek against the collar.
“I miss them.” Dan’s voice was sleepy. “How can you miss people you can’t remember?”
“I miss them, too,” Amy said softly. “Being here is so weird. Because they were here, too.”
“Yeah. It feels like they could just walk in the door any second. I don’t know why.”
Amy realized that she felt the same way. She felt closer to her parents here. Closer than she’d felt in a long time. And they were half a world away from everything they knew.
Dan yawned. “They left us for a whole month.” His voice was drowsy, and she could tell he was close to sleep. “That’s a long time to leave your kids.”
“It must have been super important,” Amy whispered.
“I’m glad they were searching for the clues, just like us,” Dan said. He yawned again. “Wouldn’t it be great if after this is over … Shep could maybe be our dad? We could move in with him….”
“Dan, I don’t know. He’s not the dad type.”
“People don’t know they’re the dad type until they’re dads. Besides, can you imagine going back to Beatrice the Bloody?”
Amy couldn’t. She couldn’t imagine what the end of this would be like at all. But as soon as Dan said it, she realized he was right. She couldn’t imagine going back to Aunt Beatrice. She couldn’t imagine going back to school, or Boston.
They didn’t belong there anymore.
They didn’t belong anywhere.
After a minute, Dan’s breathing was deep and regular. Amy went back to the foldout couch she shared with Nellie. She climbed back under the covers and she fell asleep, clutching her mother’s jacket around her.
She dreamed. Her mother’s hand gripping hers. A fire crackling in the fireplace. And then a fire out of control … ash falling like snow on the lawn.
“Get the children out!”
She woke with a start. It was still dark. She could hear Nellie’s soft breathing next to her.
And then memory lit up her brain, and the shadows went away.
She hadn’t gone to sleep after her bath. She’d turned on her little green glass lamp and picked out a book. Sometimes she read herself to sleep. It was a secret she kept from her parents. Grace knew. Grace always let her.
So she heard the sound of visitors arriving. Heard a murmur of voices. Then suddenly the voices were raised. She got up and listened. She was dressed in her nightgown, the one with the koalas her mother had brought back from her long trip. Her parents’ voices sounded different. There was something hard in their voices, something that glinted and clanked like coins.
She crept down the stairs and then down the hall to her father’s study. She couldn’t see her parents. Strangers surrounded them. The lights were low, but the fire blazed in the hearth.
She heard bursts of words, and Amy closed her eyes, trying to remember.
The violation of the strongholds …
Where did you go …
And her father’s voice: Our travels are our business, not yours.
Let’s all calm down. We only want what is ours.
Where did you go …
Tell us or …
Or what? You are standing in my home and you dare to threaten me?
Her mother’s voice was hard and cool. It scared Amy. She burst through the circle. “Mommy!”
But before her mother could scoop her up, someone else did. Someone who smelled of perfume and makeup. A beautiful lady with big eyes the color of honey. In Amy’s mind, she’d seen the flicker of fire reflected there.
“And who is this? What a pretty nightgown! Such cheerful teddy bears.”
“Koalas,” Amy corrects, because she’s proud to know the word.
The lady’s fingers tighten, just a bit. She looks over Amy’s head and smiles
at Mommy and Daddy.
“Did your mommy and daddy bring it back for you from their trip?”
The lady holds her too tightly. Amy starts to squirm, but the grip doesn’t loosen.
And her mother looks so afraid …
Amy sat up in bed. The truth brought a rush of horror.
The facts pounded her like body blows.
The lady holding her had been Isabel Kabra. Who else was there? She strained to remember. A bunch of people, strangers to her at the time. She’d been too shy to look at their faces. They knew her parents had come back from a trip but they weren’t sure where they’d gone. For some reason, they had to know. Her parents had hidden the destination from them … until a seven-year-old girl had run downstairs in her nightgown and said the word koalas.
And then her parents’ enemies had their answer.
She had betrayed them.
CHAPTER 14
“Rise and shine, mates,” Shep called cheerfully. “I’m going to make a pot of coffee and a bit of brekkie, and then we’re off to the field. Everybody sleep okay?”
It was still dark out. Shep had switched on the lights.
“Mmmfff,” Nellie said, her head in the pillow.
“Great,” Dan said, sitting up in a tangle of quilts.
While Nellie put the pillow over her head and Shep started the coffee, Amy rose woodenly and went to the bathroom. She splashed cold water on her face and looked at herself in the mirror.
They had all come to find out where her parents had been. That was crucial. Finding that out told them something. Something that made one of them start the fire.
Her fault.
She remembered the flush of triumph on Isabel’s cheeks as she held her. The way she held her even as she squirmed … that had been a threat.
Isabel was saying I can get to your children.
Amy closed her eyes, remembering the flash of fear and anger on her mother’s face. She held on to the sink and leaned over while the words beat inside her….
My fault my fault my fault
Dan banged on the door. “Are you asleep in there?”