For Naomi
PROLOGUE
There’s a mermaid tail hanging in my closet.
And it’s all my cousin Mackenzie’s fault.
Look, I love anything to do with water—especially swimming. I’ve been on a swim team since I was five years old, and my father likes to tease that H2O is my native element. But mermaid lessons? That would never have occurred to me in a million years. Maybe a billion. Mackenzie, though, was all over the idea the minute she spotted the brochure at the library.
I should have known that a place with a name as lame as Sirena’s Sea Siren Academy could only spell trouble. Which I’ve had my fair share of ever since we moved to Pumpkin Falls, New Hampshire, and I accidentally became a middle school private eye. This time, however, I found myself way over my head in the trouble department as I tangled with pirates onstage and off, suffered a very public wardrobe malfunction, and embarked on a near-disastrous spelunking expedition while hunting for long-lost treasure.
(I didn’t know what “spelunking” meant either, until it was too late to turn back. It’s a good word, well worth looking up.)
But before any of this happened, and before anything remotely resembling a mermaid tail showed up in my closet, I had one major hurdle to face: the annual Gifford Family Reunion.
CHAPTER 1
“Smile like you mean it!” My grandmother clapped her hands, trying to attract the attention of the seven adults who were lined up on the steps of the Pumpkin Falls Public Library, talking and laughing. She turned to the woman behind the tripod beside her. “Aren’t they something?”
The tripod, and the camera attached to it, belonged to Janet Foster, ace reporter for the Pumpkin Falls Patriot-Bugle. If it were possible for a newspaper as teeny as the Pumpkin Falls Patriot-Bugle to actually have an ace reporter, that was.
“They certainly are,” Janet replied, peering through her camera lens. Janet moonlighted as a professional pet photographer. I had no idea how she was with people pictures, but in a town the size of ours, you took what you could get. And my grandmother had done exactly that, hiring her to take our traditional family reunion photos.
Grandma Gifford beamed. “All my beautiful babies!”
My brother Hatcher let out a snort. Our grandmother slipped her arm around him and squeezed. “Just you wait! Someday you’ll have kids of your own, and then you’ll understand. Your babies are always your babies, no matter how old they are.”
I gazed skeptically at the half dozen men and one petite woman who were being photographed. It was hard to imagine any of my big Texas uncles as babies. Or my mother, for that matter. She stood at the end of the lineup like the period at the end of a sentence. Or rather, an exclamation point. Dinah Gifford Lovejoy didn’t have much to offer in the height department, but she wasn’t lacking in spunk.
“So these are all your kids?” Janet asked, pulling a small notebook and pen from the back pocket of her jeans.
My heart sank as I watched her switch into reporter mode. Janet may have been hired to take our family reunion photos, but she clearly knew a story when she spotted one. Not that we were hard to miss: thirty-seven Giffords in matching T-shirts parading through Pumpkin Falls were a sight to behold, as my grandmother would say.
“You bet your sweet cowboy boots they’re my kids!” Grandma G replied, her voice brimming with Texas sugar and sass. “A boy for every day of the week and a girl for Sunday.”
I looked at my mother, wondering how she’d survived growing up with six brothers. Six! And I thought two was bad. Hatcher and Danny were a handful, but my mother had had to deal with Uncle Teddy, Uncle Lenny, Uncle Craig, Uncle Rooster (his real name was Richard, but no one ever called him that), Uncle Brent, and Uncle Scott.
Then again, she’d had our grandmother’s example. Grandma G was petite like my mother, but she had a voice like a bullhorn and backbone to spare. There was no mistaking who was boss when my grandmother was around. She’d had to be strong to raise seven kids by herself after my grandpa died.
I’d never met my Texas grandfather, but I still felt like I knew him. He was practically a legend in our family—the penniless cowboy from West Texas who’d pulled himself up by his bootstraps, swept our grandmother off her feet, and built a ranch near Austin with his own two hands. Theodore Roosevelt Gifford. My uncle Teddy was named after him.
I didn’t have a favorite uncle, not really. I loved them all. But if I did have a favorite, it would be my uncle Teddy. He was my cousin and best friend Mackenzie’s father, and I knew him almost as well as I knew my own dad. The hardest part about leaving Texas and moving across the country to New Hampshire had been moving away from them. And I knew I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Uncle Teddy and my mother were at the tail end of the Gifford lineup, and the closest of the Gifford siblings in age, barely eleven months apart. The two of them were best friends when they were little, and they were still best friends now that they were grown up.
“How are you enjoying Pumpkin Falls so far?” Janet asked my grandmother, her pen hovering over her notebook.
“Mighty fine!” Grandma G enthused. “You’ve got yourself a real slice of American pie here.”
I could tell by the way Janet was nodding and scribbling that she liked that quote. It was perfect headline material, and I braced myself for the fact that, thanks to my ridiculously quotable grandmother, my family was probably going to end up plastered all over the front page of
