Lies Beneath

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2012 by Anne Greenwood Browne

  Jacket photograph copyright © 2012 by Dmitry Laudin

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brown, Anne Greenwood.

  Lies beneath / Anne Greenwood Brown. —1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: As the only brother in a family of mermaids living in Lake Superior, Calder White is expected to seduce Lily, the daughter of the man believed to have killed the mermaids’ mother, but he begins to fall in love with her just as Lily starts to suspect the legends about the lake are true.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-98908-7

  [1. Mermen–Fiction. 2. Mermaids–Fiction. 3. Brothers and sisters–Fiction. 4. Love–Fiction. 5. Revenge–Fiction. 6. Superior, Lake–Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.B812742Lie 2012

  [Fic]–dc 23 2011044337

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  In memory of my grandfather,

  Norman Edward Biorn,

  who loved the lake

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Epigraph

  1. Called Home

  2. The Reluctant Brother

  3. The White Sisters

  4. Lily Hancock

  5. Road Trip

  6. Transformations

  7. Moving

  8. Hypocrite

  9. Indecision

  10. Best-Laid Plans

  11. Changing Plans

  12. I Make Her Nervous

  13. Legend

  14. Promise Me

  15. Victorians on the Green

  16. Like A Book

  17. No Coward Soul

  18. Threat

  19. What I Want From You

  20. Pink

  21. Don’t Tempt Me

  22. Bonfire

  23. Poetry Reading

  24. Traps and Snares

  25. Caught

  26. The Cave

  27. Breathing Lessons

  28. Swimming Lessons

  29. Facing Music

  30. Shopping Spree

  31. Dinner

  32. Confessions

  33. Collision

  34. Shunned

  35. Hammock

  36. Promises Kept

  37. The Replay

  38. Sacrifice

  39. Silver Ring

  40. Nightmares

  41. The Merman

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Mother, may I go out to swim?

  Yes, my darling daughter.

  Fold your clothes up neat and trim,

  But don’t go near the water.

  —Anonymous

  1

  CALLED HOME

  I hadn’t killed anyone all winter, and I have to say I felt pretty good about that. Sure, I’d wanted to, but too many suspicious drownings got people talking. Fearful townspeople were the last thing I needed. Besides, I was getting a sick thrill out of denying my body what it craved. Self-control was my latest obsession. I doubted my sisters could say the same thing.

  Rising through the Caribbean waters, I walked my fingers up the bank of dead coral until I found the pattern of cracks I was looking for. I followed it to the surface, coming up at the spot where I’d stashed my pile of human clothes. My cell phone was ringing somewhere in the pile. Maris, I thought, gritting my teeth. I’d lost count of how many times she’d called today. I’d let all her attempts go to voice mail.

  A splashing sound pulled my attention from my sister’s ringtone, and I jerked around to face the ocean. An easy hundred yards away, a girl lay on an inflatable raft. A yellow light outlined her body. She wasn’t ripe yet. Maybe, if I waited, the yellow light would grow into something more brilliant—more satisfying—more worth breaking my hard-won self-control over.

  Against my will, the memory of my last kill teased the corners of my brain. It tempted me, mocked me for ever thinking I could rise above my nature. My fingers twitched at the months-old memory: the grabbing, the diving, the guise of human legs giving way to tail and fin, the tingling sensation heating my core as I pinned my prey to the ocean floor, absorbing that intoxicating light, drawing the brilliant emotion out of her body until I felt almost …

  Oh, what the hell.

  But before I dove after the unsuspecting girl, my cell went off again. For a second I considered chucking it into the ocean; it was the disposable kind, after all. But that was a little extreme. Even for me. I let it go to voice mail. I mean, it wasn’t like I didn’t know why Maris was calling. The old, familiar pull was back. That pull—somewhere behind my rib cage, between my heart and my lungs—that told me it was almost time to leave Bahamian warmth and return to my family in the cold, bleak waters of Lake Superior. It was time to migrate.

  A shiver rippled down my arms. Get a grip, Calder, I told myself. Ignore it. You don’t have to leave quite yet. I could hear the memory of my mother’s voice telling me the same thing, just as she had before my first migration. Focus, son, she’d said, rumpling my curly hair. Timing is everything.

  Thirty years might have passed, but the loss of my mother still gripped my stomach. It hurt to remember. And the great lake only made the memories more painful. No, there was no good reason to go back to the States. Except that I had no choice.

  The urge to migrate was irresistible. Far more powerful than the urge to kill. With each rise and fall of the moon, with each turn of the tide, it grew more impossible to ignore. Experience told me there were only a few more weeks before I had to rejoin my sisters. By the end of May, I’d be shooting through the water on a missile’s course. God help anyone who got in my way.

  My cell went off again. With a resigned curse, I pulled myself halfway out of the water and dug through my clothes until I found it and hit Send.

  “Nice of you to take my call,” Maris said.

  “What do you want?”

  “It’s time. Get home. Now.” Her voice, originally sarcastic, now rang with her usual fanaticism. I could hear my other sisters, Pavati and Tallulah, in the background, echoing her enthusiasm.

  “Why now?” I asked, my voice flat. “It’s still April.”

  “Why are you being such a pain?”

  “It’s nothing.” There was a long pause on the other end. I closed my eyes and waited for her to figure it out. It didn’t take more than a few seconds.

  “How long?”

  “Five months.”

  “Damn it, Calder, why do you always have to be such a masochist? God, you must be a mess.”

  “I’m pacing myself. Mind your own business, Maris.” There was no point in trying to explain my abstinence to her. I could barely explain it to myself. I watched mournfully as the yellow-lit raft girl paddled safely toward shore.

  “Your mental health is my business. Do you think you could take better care of it? One kill, Calder. Just one. It would make you feel so much better.”

  “I’m. Fine,” I sp
it through my teeth.

  “You’re an ass, but that’s beside the point. I’ve got something to improve your mood.”

  I rolled my eyes and waited for her to give it a shot. Good luck, I thought.

  “We’ve found Jason Hancock.”

  My heart lurched at the sound of the name, but I kept quiet rather than give in to her assurance. I’d heard this all before. My silence prompted something on the other end. Panic? Tallulah’s voice was now ringing through the receiver, a fluid stream of words almost too quick for me to catch.

  I let my gaze drift up to the thin lace of clouds above me. My sisters sounded sure of themselves. Perhaps this time they’d gotten it right. “Fine. I’ll start off tomorrow.”

  “No,” Maris said. “There’s no time for you to swim. Take a plane.”

  She hung up before I could protest.

  I tipped my head back as far as my neck would bend and soaked up the last bit of ultraviolet rays. My fingertips dug into the coral as I imagined them around Jason Hancock’s neck, dragging him down into the water, watching the last bubbles rise from his mouth.

  A trill of girlish voices jerked me out of my fantasy. I looked past the bank of hibiscus bushes and, as expected, saw the glow of pure emotion pulsing out of their happy forms. I diverted my eyes from their orange-sherbet-colored auras and tried once more to ignore the temptation to kill. Maris’s words echoed in my head: Just one. It would make you feel so much better.

  The ancient legends had it all backward about merpeople. We didn’t lure humans’ ships onto the rocks. Human beings were the happy, shiny lures that caught our attention. They had what we craved: Optimism. Excitement. Joy. Any positive emotion could whip us into a frenzy, compel us to charge, to grab, to absorb the joy from their hearts into our own. Even an ounce of good feeling could provide at least a brief reprieve from the natural bleakness of our minds. And the approaching girls promised much more than an ounce.

  Besides, how far did I want to push this attempt at abstinence? I’d heard stories of merpeople emotionally starved for human light, languishing in misery, going crazy in the end. Was that what I wanted to become?

  My hands trembled as I imagined what it would feel like to snatch not just one girl but all of them, to dive, to drown, and then to absorb their vibrant auras into my skin—the warmth, the effervescent buoyancy of their collective emotion. I wanted it. It would be easy to take. It could all be mine. And it had been such a long, long time.…

  I shook my head and waited for the girls to pass. It wasn’t their fault I’d let myself get so low. They didn’t deserve to be wrung out, their empty husks stashed under rocks, simply because they’d crossed my path. Their laughing faded as they moved inland.

  When I knew I had a few minutes of privacy, I pulled myself completely out of the turquoise water and onto the black rock. The transformation began before I could catch my breath. First the tightening—and then the ripping as my body strained and pulled against itself. Bones split and stretched, popping into joints that seconds ago hadn’t existed. I thrashed silently on the dead coral, cutting my shoulder and gritting my teeth against the pain, until I eventually flopped onto my back, gasping and bleeding on the rock.

  I staggered to my feet and dressed quickly. God, I hoped Maris wasn’t pulling me back early for nothing. If this Jason Hancock was the Jason Hancock, it wouldn’t be our typical kill. I wouldn’t want to absorb anything his body had to offer. He wouldn’t even count against my experiment in self-control. No. This time it would be nothing more than revenge.

  With that word heavy on my tongue, I lowered my Ray-Bans over my eyes and turned away from the ocean. I was trapped by the inevitable: it was time to head back north.

  2

  THE RELUCTANT BROTHER

  Minneapolis sprawled below me as I circled the airport in a DC-9. My quads cramped with dehydration, and I groaned involuntarily. It was a good thing I wasn’t looking for sympathy. It wasn’t like anyone could have heard me over the roar of the engines.

  A businessman shimmied down the narrow aisle, bumping his beer belly on people’s shoulders as he passed. “Excuse me, excuse me,” he said. A little boy dropped his Mad Libs into the aisle, and his pencil rolled toward me. I unbuckled my seat belt and leaned over the armrest to scoop it up for him.

  “Mad Libs. Cool.” I reached across the aisle to set the pencil on his tray.

  The boy nodded. “I need an adjective.”

  Miserable. Anxious. Freakin’ pissed. “Try ‘reluctant,’ ” I said with a wry smile. I straightened my legs and brushed the pretzel salt off my pants.

  “How do you spell that?”

  I wrote it out for him, then dragged a deep breath in through my nose. Dry, stale air laced with people’s breath and body odor filtered through my lungs. The insides of my cheeks constricted against my tongue. I dug a plastic bottle out of my backpack and shook the last drops of water into my wasted mouth. According to my watch, I’d been dry nineteen hours. Twenty-four was as far as I’d pushed it before. Maris always warned us that that was the limit. I’d never felt the need to challenge her. On that point, at least.

  The flight attendant stood a few rows ahead of me, checking to see if everyone was prepared for landing. I raised my empty bottle and shook it to flag her down. When she glanced at me, I raised my eyebrows sarcastically. Hello, sweetheart. Yeah, you. A little quicker, please.

  “Can I help you, sir?”

  “Bottle of water.”

  “I’m sorry, but our beverage service is over. We’re starting our descent.” She pointed toward the window to convince me.

  Outside, traces of dirty, late-season snow lay crusted and clinging to the Minnesota cornfields and roadside ditches. I clenched my teeth. Maris better be right about this or so help me.… There had been false alarms before.

  I combed my fingers through my dark hair—jerking them through the snarled ends—then quickly gripped the armrests as the plane touched down and took on that out-of-control feel before finally slowing to a stop. Everyone jumped up from their seats before the seat belt sign was turned off.

  I retrieved my tattered baseball cap from the seat back. It bore the logo of the resort where I’d stayed all winter. I ran my thumb along the frayed brim, then pulled the cap down low over my eyes. Powering up my cell phone, I hit Send. Maris picked up on the first ring.

  “We’ve landed,” I said. “Come get me. And damn it, Maris, there’s still snow on the ground.”

  “No, there isn’t. Now relax, little brother. We didn’t pull you out of bikini wonderland for nothing. It will be worth your trouble.”

  “You’re sure you’re not wrong about this one?”

  “Absolutely sure. And we wouldn’t have called you if we thought we could do it alone. As much as I hate to admit it, you’re superior to us in many ways.”

  I grimaced. It wasn’t true. And it wasn’t even false flattery. Maris chose her words like a surgeon chose a scalpel; despite the time we spent apart, she always knew how to cut me. At her mere mention of Superior, the urge to migrate tugged more desperately at my heart, like a hook caught in my flesh.

  Yeah, yeah. I’m coming, I thought, answering the urge as much as my sister.

  I shoved my cell in my pocket and stood up, ducking under the overhead compartment. I gestured for the little boy to go ahead. He dragged and bumped his backpack behind him as he made his way up the aisle. The flight attendants flashed bleached smiles at me as I passed. I would have looked away to avoid the attraction they might pose, but there were no colors radiating off them; there was no true emotion behind their smiles.

  I stepped onto the Jetway and felt a sharp wind cutting through the thin, collapsible walls. It might as well have been January. I cursed Maris as I made my way through the airport and went to wait on the sidewalk outside the Lindbergh terminal. There was no reason to stop at baggage claim. Everything I owned was either on my body or in my backpack: pants, shorts, ratty sandals, sweatshirt, two worn-out T-shirts, a
scuba watch, cell phone, and baseball cap. My sisters had a bit more, but not much. We all traveled light.

  I stiffened my arms at my sides and bounced from foot to foot, trying to keep warm. Every thirty seconds I checked my watch. I didn’t know what they’d be driving, but I knew it was them when I saw an old Chevy Impala fishtailing through the barely rolling traffic. I wondered, ruefully, where they’d snagged this one. It looked to be in pretty good shape—far better than the Dodge Omni from last summer. The owner was probably somewhere scratching his head, the victim of my sisters’ hypnotic gifts. He’d know he lost something. But what was it again?

  Tallulah and Pavati had their windows down, and they hung their heads out, beaming at me. Pavati’s long dark hair blew around her face in loose waves; Tallulah’s shorter hair hung straight like a thick golden curtain. I shook my head in mock disgust at their taste in stolen property and got in the backseat with Tallulah. She kissed me hard on the cheek.

  “I couldn’t wait another minute,” she said. “I’ve really, really missed you.”

  “Me too, Lulah,” I said. It was almost the truth.

  Maris flipped her white-blond hair over her shoulder. “Yeah, yeah. Kiss, kiss. Now get your head on straight. We’ve got business to discuss, and I need coffee.”

  3

  THE WHITE SISTERS

  Tallulah turned away from the barista at the Daily Grind and glided toward our table, balancing four paper coffee cups between her long fingers. She set the cups down, and we all reached for one. Maris leaned toward me, her smooth forearms resting on the table, her hands clasped, the knuckles white. She scrutinized my face. My jaw muscles flexed in response.

  “You need to eat something, Calder. You look skinny.”

  “I’m good.”

  “Did you work much this winter?”