Emily Windsnap and the Siren's Secret - Liz Kessler [62]
Melody made a sound as if she were choking. Mr. Beeston grabbed her hand again, squeezed it tight. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I never knew. I don’t know if she wanted to taunt me by making me believe that my father never cared or if she was protecting me from the truth. I suppose I’ll never know. But she wanted me to know the truth now — about all of it. She said she was relieved to finally tell me everything, and that maybe she would be able to sleep at night again.”
“I know Zalia,” Morvena said sharply. “She never does anything to protect anyone.”
“She brought me up,” Mr. Beeston said. “I like to think she cared at least a tiny bit.”
“Maybe she did,” Morvena said. “But let’s not forget it was her fault you were orphaned in the first place.”
Melody raised her head and held it high. “He was not orphaned,” she said firmly. “My son was not orphaned.”
There wasn’t much any of us could say after that, and we fell silent, each lost in our own jumble of thoughts and questions.
Shona was the first to break the silence. “So what did you find?” she said, turning to me and Aaron. “Did the shell give you a way out of here?”
Of course — we’d forgotten all about that. Her question made me realize something else, too. “You followed us in here, didn’t you?” I said to Mr. Beeston.
“I had no choice. I wasn’t spying on you. I’d seen the shell. I knew what it was. Zalia told me all about it. It seems her guilty conscience demanded a thorough unburdening. So I knew the shell would lead to something — although I have to confess I didn’t think I would actually find my real mother! That was far too much to hope for, or so I thought.”
“But the waterfall — you came down it?” I said impatiently.
“Yes — what of it?”
I sighed. “I hope you haven’t got any plans in the near future.”
“Whatever do you mean? Explain, child.”
So we did. We told him about the waterfall, about how you could get in but not out; we even told him that Aaron and I could somehow get ourselves out of the waterfall but no one else.
“Well, there’s only one thing to do then,” Mr. Beeston said when we’d explained everything.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“You’ll have to go out the waterfall again. The two of you will have to perform one more task. You have a visit to make.”
“What do you mean?” asked Aaron. “Who do we have to visit?”
Mr. Beeston met Aaron’s dark eyes with his own and replied firmly, “Neptune.”
I woke early and lay looking up at the ceiling, trying to get my head around everything that had happened yesterday — and what we had to do today.
Mr. Beeston had told us where to find Neptune, and what we had to say to get the guards to let us see him. All we had to do now was get there and persuade Neptune to set them all free. I wished I was as optimistic about the task as Mr. Beeston was.
I got out of bed, threw my clothes on, and wrote Mom a note. Then I hurried over to Aaron’s. The pier and the beach were deserted. Luckily for me, not many people tend to go wandering around a seaside town at seven o’clock on a Monday morning. I still had that image from yesterday’s paper in my head — and I’d convinced myself there’d be others around who did, too.
Aaron was coming out of his cottage when I got there. “Ready?” he asked, closing the door softly behind him.
“To face Neptune?” I asked with a shudder. “I’ll never be ready for that!”
He laughed. “Come on, let’s go.”
We were waiting in some sort of grand holding room in an enormous underwater palace. It turned out that Mr. Beeston’s influence and instructions were as impressive as he’d said they were.
I recognized the style from the last time I’d been in one of Neptune’s palaces. He wasn’t exactly what you’d call subtle in his decorating taste. Marble pillars with fancy golden spirals circling their bases marked the corners of the room. The most enormous chandelier you could imagine hung from the domed ceiling,