Max’s room faced south and Jax’s north; her parents used to sleep in the big single room of the attic, right under the sloped roof, with a big glass skylight overhead. Her mother liked to lie in bed and look up at the stars.
She walked lightly down the stairs. Rufus was curled up on the runner in the front hall; he’d kept a vigil there every night since her mother had disappeared.
“Come on, Roof,” she said. She snapped on his leash and slipped into her flip-flops.
They walked along the pretty residential streets bordering the marshes till they got to a lonely sand road that wound past a small, reedy shellfish cove. The ground was covered with tiny fiddler crabs that skittered into their holes in great waves. She and her mother used to walk Rufus here together; her mother had pointed out those tiny crabs, as well as the big osprey nests on their manmade posts rising out of the wetlands.
There was no one around, and the sand was wet from the rain. She listened to the crunch, crunch, crunch of her sneakers across its grainy surface.
“OK, Rufus,” she said finally, and unclipped the leash. At the end of the road, sticking up on the other side of a dune, was a modern-looking beach house that was all glass and sharp angles. It was a rental property, and outside the high season it was mostly empty. “Run!”
In the cool of the morning she watched him go—farther and farther away, till he rounded the bend of the dune and was lost to view.
Then she started walking after him, her mind wandering. Her dad had said hurricanes to the south were bringing the storms, and this was hurricane season. He said the hurricanes were getting bigger these days than they used to be, growing more powerful and coming more often.
She felt a shiver of foreboding.
“Rufus!” she called.
The sun slanted off the roof of the big modern house as she shaded her eyes to squint at it. Maybe, she thought, he’d found something at the waterline, a fish to gnaw or a crab to paw.
But then he reappeared, running. Nearer, nearer, nearer, and she saw he was wagging his tail. He looked happier than he had the whole summer. And just as she’d thought, he was carrying some kind of bone in his mouth.
“Hi again, boy,” she said, and rubbed behind his ears.
Instead of worrying the bone, he dropped it in front of her. It was actually a piece of wet driftwood.
“I don’t want that, Roof,” she said. “I don’t chew on sticks like you do. Remember?”
He nosed it toward her feet and knelt, paws together, in front of it. Tail still wagging, tongue out.
“You want me to throw it?”
She picked it up and tossed; he wheeled and fetched it.
“Let’s keep walking,” she said. “We can play fetch when we get home.”
But he dropped it in front of her again and barked once, loudly.
“Geez, Roof,” she said, and picked it up. She would have to carry it.
Then she noticed.
Lightly scratched words. The letters were so thin she could barely read them.
CONSULT THE LEATHERBACK.
She turned it over. There was one more word.
CARA.
She dropped it, shocked. Her hand was shaking.
“Who gave this to you, Rufus?” she asked the dog, leaning down and gripping his sandy snout in her hand.
He just kept wagging his tail.
Maybe it was one of her friends, messing with her head. Maybe Hayley or Jade? But Hayley didn’t come up here, as far as Cara knew. Plus these days she was busy in the mornings because she went to work with her mother, who ran a hair salon. She helped out with the shampooing.
And Cara’s other best friend, Jade, had gone up to Maine with her family till school started. They didn’t like the crowds.
Anyway, this was way too weird for either of them.
When she and Rufus reached the end of the road, and the tide was practically lapping at her feet, she couldn’t see anyone at all. Not even a fishing boat on the water. The big modern house looked locked up and empty.
Rufus gave a low woof, his sound of recognition.
“What now?”
And then she saw something in the waves—round, small, and brown. Dark eyes. She was astounded: it was another otter. She could hardly believe it. First the ocean side, now the bay … it was a plague of otters, practically.
She had to remember to ask Jax about it. Maybe, with global warming, otters were migrating differently these days, or something.
After all, two summers ago great white sharks had been found swimming in the waters off Chatham. That June, dozens of dead sea lions had washed up on the shore. And a couple of summers earlier, a Florida manatee had swum into the mouth of the Hudson River and then headed past the Cape, too.
None of that was supposed to happen.
And now, two sea otters. Sea otters that were supposed to live in a whole other ocean.
But there was no sign of anyone who could have given Rufus the piece of wood. All she saw was the high tide lapping at the toes of her sneaks.
When the waves pulled back they left tiny airholes in the sand.
Jax had left by the time she got home, picked up by the camp carpool, and Max and his friend Zee, short for Zadie—who wasn’t his girlfriend, though Cara thought maybe she wouldn’t mind—were getting ready to ride their bikes to the tennis courts before it got too hot.
“Look,” she said to Max, and held out the driftwood.
He turned it over and over.
“Uh, that’s great, Car. A piece of wood. Real awesome find.”
She grabbed it back and studied it. It was dry now, and you couldn’t really see the words anymore—they must have been etched too lightly, because all that was left was a couple of lines where the C and K had been. They looked like random chicken scratches.
“They’re
