Strong Like the Sea, стр. 42

“You give this stuff to Sarge? Poor dog.”

Uncle leads me along the watery path, always choosing the shallowest part.

When we finally reach the sandbar, I look over my shoulder at the little cars passing over the bridge on the highway. We’ve gone farther than I thought. But how far are we supposed to go? There’s no way to scale the cement walls lining both sides of the wash without climbing through someone’s yard. It’s all private property.

“Come.” Uncle tugs my hand and we walk off the sandbar and back into the water on the other side. Here, the channel curves slightly, and the cement walls down both sides grow taller, the tops of the walls far higher than I could reach. Around our knees, waves roll in from the ocean ahead where Laie Point and Temple Beach join.

“Uh . . .” Suddenly the little path doesn’t seem separate from the ocean at all. The waves cruise right on in here, so what’s to stop dangerous creatures from swimming right in? I slow, but before I can stop alltogether, Uncle tugs my hand, pulling me out of the mouth of our narrow, walled world.

“I know they make you nervous, but waves are an important part of the ecosystem.” Uncle glances at me over his shoulder. “Every wave at high tide brings fresh nutrients and microorganisms to feed the reefs and tide pools. Waves replenish the food supply of plankton and other tiny creatures that feed bigger ones on up the food chain. It’s all connected.”

“Okay.” Chicken skin races up my arms as the sandy bottom drops deeper and water splashes up over my hips. I shiver, my fingers clutching Uncle’s hand like crab pincers. Waves slosh against my sides, but Uncle leads me up and out onto the sandy shore beside the entrance.

The enormous boulder we saw when I took the first sample for Uncle sits beside the mouth of this man-made wash. Hours later, I’ve come full circle and am back where we began.

We could have gotten here by walking down the shore on dry land and not through all that water. So why make me walk through it? I want to yell at Mom, or at least demand answers. But with my feet on the sand, my mind clears and I know the answer before I ask the question. We might have been here before, but Mom couldn’t have known Uncle would take me here. And besides, we never had Mom’s scroll before. This time, I can find her next clue.

To our right, the cliffs of Laie Point jut out to sea. To our left, Temple Beach stretches far down the shore, and right in front is that same big boulder—an oval lying on its side. I open the scroll and compare the rock to the painted, odd-shaped oval with wavy lines and speckles around it.

“The scroll has a picture of the boulder.” I tilt the drawing so Uncle can see. “The wavy lines must represent the ocean, and the speckles are sand, and inside . . .”

I hesitate, studying the small circular holes cut right through the paper inside the drawing of the oval. Each hole with its corresponding alphabet letter written above. “I should have recognized it before—the boulder, I mean. It has the same shape and everything . . . except it has too many holes in the picture. The rock doesn’t have near that many.”

“No way for you to know,” Uncle says. “Could’ve been a drawing of anything. Maybe a rock, maybe a sponge? Only way to find out is to be brave enough to take the next step. And Alex, the girl who just walked with me into the waves despite her fear, is a very brave girl indeed.”

“Whatever.” I roll my eyes, but he leans close.

“Do I look like I’m lying to you?”

His dark eyes bore right through me and I slowly shake my head. “No.”

“Good. I may not always say what you would like to hear, but I promise you, I’ll always tell you the truth. And the truth is, you are brave.”

Heat flushes up my cheeks and I don’t know what to say, so I focus on the scroll instead. I count the holes on the rock against the holes in the picture in case the ratio matters somehow, but that doesn’t help. Maybe the lines behind it mean something when they line up with the real-life rock? But the squiggly lines only represent waves, and they’re never still enough to count for anything.

I bite my lip, hold the scroll in front of me, and step back along the sand until the real rock is far enough away to appear the same size as the oval in the scroll. I circle the rock until two short lines I had dismissed as more waves on the scroll line up with the cement walls at the mouth of the wash we just came through.

The moment those walls lines up, several dark spots on the rock show through the holes on my scroll. I gasp and wave for Uncle to come quick. “I got it! It’s not a code, it’s a puzzle piece. When I hold the scroll in the right spot, the rest of the picture shows through. I need a pen!”

“How about a pencil?” Uncle helps me circle the holes on the scroll that line up with the holes on the rock until each matching one is marked.

I read the marked letters written over each hole, but they spell a nonsense word: SHELILESDBACCVACOS

Three of the holes on the scroll have no letters marked next to them at all. I frown at the letters and blank spaces. They make exactly zero sense to me, but at least it’s a message. I can figure the rest out later.

“Looks like you got the message. What say we go get those groceries, eh?” Uncle takes a step toward the wash.

“Sure.” I roll the scroll up and take a few steps to follow him back to the Foodland bridge, but the deeper water pulls my gaze.