Hannah West in Deep Water by Linda Johns

Author:Linda Johns
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US

CHAPTER 11

“WHAT? WE’RE GOING TO DO NOTHING? THAT SEEMS SO BORING. Especially coming from you,” Lily said. I’d filled her in on my plan while we washed Mango off in the shower. Now Lily was pivoting in half circles, admiring her new high-heeled sandals in front of the closet mirror upstairs in Jake’s bedroom loft.

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. You see, if we stay inside here, we can watch all the action firsthand. I thought you’d like that.”

“I don’t want to watch the action. I want to be on TV,” Lily said.

“Really?” I used my best fake-astonishment voice. “Actually, Lily, nothing is brilliant.” I had to pause and think through what I’d said. I’m not often making philosophical proclamations like that. “What I mean is, doing nothing is brilliant. The more we know about the script, the characters, and how things work, the easier it will be for us to get Marcus Dartmouth, director, to put us on the show.”

“Us? You want to be on Dockside Blues, too?”

“You bet. I think they need some diversity on that show, based on all the white people we saw on the dock yesterday. Shhh! Someone’s coming. Darn. I guess we’re stuck here now.”

“Darn,” Lily said, smiling.

We crawled silently to the window, peering between two slats in the white blinds on the loft window. Two black-hooded shapes moved quickly along the dock, glancing behind them several times.

“Hold on,” I whispered to Lily. I tiptoed down to my bedroom and grabbed my camera and an extra lens. Back upstairs, I put on the telephoto lens and wedged the long lens through the slats of the blinds and adjusted the focus until I could see the two faces crystal clear. Despite their melodramatic entrance and head movements, I knew they couldn’t be part of the TV show. Unless Marcus Dartmouth had decided to give his mother and stepfather a couple of stealthy roles and they were rehearsing before the film crew arrived.

“What are they pouring out?” Lily whispered.

I took a couple of photographs. “It’s not dead fish. Not even nondead fish,” I said, backing away from the window, suddenly feeling overwhelmingly sad. “I’m afraid it might be something to kill fish, though. Something toxic.”

We had just witnessed Timothy and Stella Dartmouth walking along the outer edge of the dock, each shaking a plastic bucket so that a white powder spewed into the water. It looked like laundry detergent, but I had a feeling it wasn’t quite that simple. I hadn’t seen what they’d emptied into the lake from their boat the other night, but I bet it was the same substance. I couldn’t imagine what it was, but if we could figure that out, maybe we could figure out why the Dartmouths were pouring it into Lake Washington.

“We need to get a sample of the water as soon as possible,” I said.

“And then what, Captain Science? Do we run some of our genius scientific experiments in our basement laboratory? Oops. We forgot to make a secret laboratory in the basement.

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