Emily Windsnap and the Siren's Secret - Liz Kessler [61]
Melody gasped. “Inside it? Oh, my — no! Of course!”
“What? What is it?” I asked.
For a moment, Melody looked utterly lost. Her eyes flickered wildly around us all. Then they settled on Mr. Beeston and she grew calmer again. “I never knew there was something in the shell,” Melody said. “What a fool. How could I have been so stupid?”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Why have you been stupid?”
“He gave it to me the last time we met, in the storm, but the storm was so fierce that I couldn’t hear what he was telling me. I thought he was telling me it had magic in it, magic that would somehow lead me to him. But he wasn’t telling me there was magic in it — he was telling me there was a map in it!”
Melody shook her head. “All these years I’ve held it, whispered to it, begged it to reveal its magic, and all along I was looking for the wrong thing.
“And you could never get the map out because Neptune must have sealed the shell when he sealed the caves!” Aaron said.
Melody nodded. “All those lost years. So very many of them,” she said sadly, reaching out to touch Mr. Beeston’s arm. “I knew your father had discovered a small island during his travels. He said he’d never seen a soul there. He must have believed that once Neptune’s rage blew over, we could live there in secret.”
“That must be the island we found!” I burst out.
“You knew about the island?” Melody glared at me, then around at us all. “You all seem to know so much,” she said. “And do you know I have lost the shell now?”
“You know?” Morvena gasped. “I thought you only looked at it in the mornings and at night. I thought —”
“You thought wrong,” Melody said. “That shell is the only thing that has kept me going in here.”
Perhaps this was the time to own up. But how was I going to tell her we’d lost it? What would she say? What would she do to us? Perhaps she’d turn as nasty as the others. One look at her pleading face and I knew I had to take the risk. I opened my mouth. “Um . . . we . . . um —”
Mr. Beeston stopped me with a wave of his hand. Then he reached into his pocket. Pulling his hand out, he opened it up to reveal the shell. “Here it is.”
For a moment, Melody stared in wonder at the shell. “But you — but how —?” she began. Then she smiled. “No matter,” she said gently. “We have all the time in the world for explanations. All that matters now is that the shell has brought me what I always knew it would.” Then she closed her hand over Mr. Beeston’s, and they held the shell between them — her face a picture of serenity.
An hour ago, discovering that Mr. Beeston had taken the shell would have made my blood boil. But after everything we’d heard, I couldn’t blame him, and I wouldn’t hold it against him. For the first time, Mr. Beeston’s trickery seemed like an act of love and loyalty.
He cleared his throat. “There’s — ah, there’s something else I need to tell you,” he said to Melody. “There was one more lie in my childhood.”
Melody put her other hand over Mr. Beeston’s. “What is it?”
He swallowed hard and then nodded slowly, as if making an agreement with himself to tell us. “After you had gone, Zalia wasted no time with my father. She tricked and lied her way into his life — telling him you had abandoned us and making herself indispensible to him. She told me that her one failure was that she had never managed to get him to love her. There was only room for one in his heart.” He looked up at Melody, and her cheeks glowed with warmth and embarrassment.
“After you had been gone for over a year and he had heard no word from you and been unable to find you, he began to believe her. And that was his fatal mistake.”
“What do you mean?” Shona asked, as wrapped up in Mr. Beeston’s story as the rest of us. “Fatal how?”
“He no longer cared about anything. He wouldn’t look after himself; he could hardly look after me. Zalia did that — in her own way.”
“What happened?” I asked. “You told me he’d run off and left you when you were a baby. Is that a lie, too?”
Mr. Beeston