Thief Eyes - Janni Lee Simner [5]
Spray blew into my face. A few more threads of sun poked through the clouds, casting rainbow patterns onto the water. Beautiful, I thought, but I only felt colder. I wondered if Mom had seen this same waterfall. “Where is she?” I asked the rushing water. Of course it didn’t answer. I sighed, turned around, and clambered back down to the trail.
Something glinted in the dirt there. A small silver coin, not much bigger than my thumbnail, crisscrossed with a strange pattern of circles and lines. I knelt down, as somewhere a raven cried out, and picked the thing up.
The coin burned as my fingers closed around it. The ground shook as if a train were going by. The air blurred and a hot desert wind stroked my cheek. I should have been scared, but that heat felt so good after the chill rain. I clutched the coin harder and leaned into the wind. The roaring waterfall seemed very far away.
Somewhere a woman’s voice whispered, “Hvad heitir thu?”
I knew that from my phrase book, too. I frowned, trying to remember the right response. “Eg heiti Haley.”
Someone touched my shoulder. The air snapped back into focus, and rain spattered from the cold sky onto the trail. I turned around, looking for the woman who’d asked my name. No one stood there but Dad. “Ready to go?” He shouted to be heard over the water.
I shoved the coin into my pocket. It felt merely warm now, like it had been too long in the sun. Maybe I was just homesick and had imagined the desert wind. But why would I have imagined a woman’s voice to go with it?
I followed Dad back down the trail. “Did you feel the earthquake?” he asked, once the waterfall was far enough away that he didn’t have to shout.
“Earthquake?” I remembered the ground shaking—was that what an earthquake felt like? Did the air usually go all blurry during a quake?
“Just a small one.” Dad grinned, like he couldn’t wait for the ground to rattle and shake some more. “Earthquakes, volcanoes—really, Iceland’s just one huge geologic event waiting to happen.”
Now there’s a comforting thought. I stepped past the drowning pool and onto the main gravel path.
Katrin ran up to us, her braid flying out behind her, and looked right at me. “You’re okay?” The anger was gone, and her face was pinched with worry.
“I’m fine.” Was there some reason I shouldn’t be? “It was just a small quake.” I smiled, but Katrin didn’t smile back.
She looked sharply at Dad. “Tomorrow, Gabe. Both of you.”
Dad sighed, as if he found the idea troubling. “Yes, Katrin. We’ll be there.”
Katrin nodded and walked away without another word. I looked at Dad.
“Lunch,” he said. “We’re meeting to talk about this summer’s observation stations, and Katrin invited you along.” Dad shoved his hood back and ran a hand through his unruly hair. Before I could ask why Katrin would want me to come to lunch when she thought I shouldn’t be here at all, he said, “Speaking of food, what do you say we get some dinner?” Dad blinked hard, like he did when he stayed up too late working on a paper.
I rubbed my eyes, too. A night without sleep was enough to make the world seem more than a little blurry, right? “Dinner sounds good.”
“We’ll get hot dogs,” Dad said. “Iceland has the best lamb hot dogs—”
“Yeah, Dad.” I laughed. “I came four thousand miles just to eat hot dogs.”
Dad laughed, too, and for a moment the tiredness left his face. It wasn’t only the flight—he’d looked more tired at home, too, since Mom had disappeared. I knew how he felt.
I had to find her. For both of us. I’d have dinner first, and try to get some sleep—and then I’d make Dad answer my questions. Or else I’d go look for Mom on my own. No way was I letting this go. I followed Dad back to the car. My hand itched, and I glanced down at it.
There was a small red circle on my palm, right over the red half-moons where I’d dug my nails in—right where the coin had burned me.
Chapter 2
The red mark had long faded by the time we ate dinner and returned to our guesthouse in Reykjavik. It was nearly ten by then, not that you could tell by the sun, which was low but still up, shining like