Chapter 19
Nineteen
Angie
Angie, Reesa, and Leo succeeded in gathering a small group of her classmates to join them and Dr. Williams with their mer education outreach project.
Their first order of business was to plan a rally outside the school. As she waited for them in an empty lecture hall next door, she went through her notes from talking to Creston dock workers.
One truck driver said he only saw one diver.
Two others swore they saw two or three divers enter the water.
Another worker said the entire group went in that night.
She appreciated that all of them answered their phones and gave her the time of day, or night, as it were, when she called them.
But the conflicting information wasn’t helping her narrow down who the divers were.
The only thing they all agreed on was that the divers were already fully suited up, and they couldn’t tell who they were, even if they tried.
About to close out her phone notepad, she stopped when a hastily typed out, typo and abbreviation-filled note at the bottom caught her attention, from the final worker she called:
1 womn in grp w/o mask on, unIDable
If Angie could only figure out who this woman was, then she might find out who murdered the Mer-Queen.
Behind her, her friends’ and professor’s voices burst through the door, talking about their just-finished coastal ecology class.
Scratch that, it was mostly Reesa and Leo talking.
Dr. Williams’ deep, jovial voice wasn’t among them, and when Angie turned to wave them in, she saw why.
Their professor walked some feet away from Leo and Reesa, his eyebrows pulled together, the crease like a valley between his brows.
He stared at the tablet in his hands and ran his free hand through his neat, line-up, curly hair.
“Everything okay, Dr. Williams?” Angie asked when the three were close enough.
He didn’t meet her eyes but sat his tablet face-up on the table next to her. He was reading an article about another mermaid caught in a deep-sea fishing net and sold to a facility in central Oregon. “We need to get this project going, stat,” he said, hoarsely.
“Dr. Williams.” Leo squinted at the screen, gnawing his bottom lip. “You know anything about what’s going on with these mer? Like, does SMOSA know anything about this? It’s concerning.”
Reesa nodded. “We don’t know what they’re doing with the mer; we saw the news of them being taken and then nothing.”
“Concerning is the way I’d put it,” Angie chipped in.
Dr. Williams turned the tablet off. “This might be my fault.”
“Your fault? How?” Angie gaped at him.
“Ever since I shared the two mer I found with my workplace. And here.” He cleared his throat, shuffling one foot on the ground.
“After that, the news of the mer spread like a red tide. And my colleagues have been talking about people actively hunting for merfolk. And with those teens that disappeared at Shoreline...” She rubbed her knees, where a slight sore emerged from when the teenagers shoved her onto pebbled ground.
“Damn,” Reesa muttered, and beside her, Leo sucked in an audible breath.
“I don’t know who’s responsible, but that doesn’t matter now. We need to minimize damage to the mer. People think they’re dangerous,” Dr. Williams said.
Angie mulled over her professor’s words, and then, it clicked. “Are you under liberty to tell us what’s going on in your lab? Whatever you can share that won’t get you into trouble. We could use that information to show how people are treating them inhumanely.”
Dr. Williams cleared his throat again, this time, louder, and rubbed his hands down his pant legs.
“We have whistleblower protections, and I don’t agree with some of the things my colleagues are doing.
Not all of them, but a few.” Angie took a seat with Reesa, and Leo and Dr. Williams stayed standing in the lecture hall.
“There’s a merman there who’s just left strewn-up overnight with his chest cavity wide open like a pig on a meat hook.
We’re supposed to put him in a bag and move him to the specimen storage area before we leave.
” He stared at the floor. “Another mermaid, she’s still alive, and we’re only supposed to be studying her skin chemicals and physiological adaptations when she moves in and out of the tank.
” His eyes looked haunted and he shuddered.
“But we’re supposed to be keeping her fed and the water cleaned until we complete our studies and return her to the sea.
When I went in to cover for that group working with her, the water was so dirty, and she was starving. ”
Angie blanched, a stray shiver thrumming through her in the temperate space. The last time she saw dirty tanks with starving mer inside was back in Creston. The visuals came back to her as a nightmarish flashback.
Dr. Williams shook his head, lower lip jutting out. “So, I cleaned her water and gave her some kelp. My supervisor and I yelled at that team and threatened to oust them to the higher-ups.”
This was awful and Angie’s stomach hurt as she jotted down notes in her phone’s notepad. She pushed down the queasiness threatening to rise. “I’m sorry you had to witness that and thank you for helping the mermaid,” she said, once Dr. Williams was done.
“It feels better to get it out.” He had a far-away look in his gaze, and focused his attention on them again, rolling his shoulders. “Let’s get started with rally planning.”
Two evenings, mornings, and afternoons came and went in a blur, and before Angie knew it, she was standing outside her school with Reesa, Leo, and six other classmates, all flitting back and forth from the table in the center of the main lawn.
Dr. Williams had called out sick, leaving the students to hold their rally and information session on their own.
Cloudy skies loomed above with no sign of the sun. At least it wasn’t forecasted to rain today.
The plastic table the school lent them was flimsy, but fortunately, they only needed it for pamphlets and flyers they organized last night with merfolk facts, the general location of where they lived in the seas, and a section at the end with Mer are not animals for us to use!
And brief facts of mer studies in the lab, leaving Dr. Williams’ and SMOSA’s names out of it at his request. And to lure students in, there were stacks of homemade snickerdoodles and chocolate chunk cookies that were on either end of the long table made by another classmate.
It was holding its own on the damp grass beneath its legs.
Reesa was behind her with two other students on their phones, circulating and creating social media posts and managing comments and shares.
“Excuse me, can I take one of these?” A student asked at the opposite end of the table where Angie stood, and she craned her neck.
That was Leo’s responsibility—to hand out pamphlets, and he appeared entirely uninterested, hanging back from the table, a faraway look in his eyes. “Um, hello?” The student waved at Leo.
Angie furrowed her brow. Leo was acting like he didn’t want to be there; he hadn’t spoken more than two words during their rally planning session with their classmates, and he halfheartedly organized their pamphlets yesterday, moving like his arms and legs were made of lead.
Something must have been going on, and after this was over, she planned to figure it out.
“Hi, are you Angie Song?” A woman dressed in a crisp, gray jacket approached, holding a microphone. “I’m Isabela Rodriguez from the Pacific Pulse. Your professor and one of your classmates reached out to me last week and I’d love to interview you if you have the time?”
Angie stood at attention. “Yes, I’d love to speak.”
Isabela waved over her news crew and they gathered around her and Angie and spoke her introduction into the camera.
“Angie, I think I speak for a lot of us when I say we’re equally fascinated and scared of what the mer can do.
You were in Alaska two years ago when the mer war started and now you’re trying to protect them. Tell me. What happened?”
She took a breath, gathering her thoughts, resolving to keep Kaden out of it, to protect him, his identity, and his station.
“I nearly killed one myself when our war started with the mer, before we took the time to understand each other. I became friendly with a few of them and I learned the mer were not animals, but human-like.”
A ghost of a smile tugged at her lips, remembering her first contentious meeting with Kaden.
“They have their own language, their own hierarchies and societies. They are complex thinkers; they have feelings of pain and love and hate; they have relationships with each other and the sea. They’re not so different from us.
They should be treated with the dignity and respect. ”
“How do we do that? Some of our viewers and I live inland, and might never see mer.”
“Even if you live inland you could help by spreading awareness, getting the word out there about the mer. Should you wind up at a beach, you never know if you’ll see one.” Angie took in another breath of frosty air with a shaky inhale.
“It’s still hard to believe that they actually exist.” Isabela looked awestruck.
“Believe me, I felt the same way before I saw them myself. Although if you ask my niece, she’d say ‘I told you so’.”
Isabela broke into a broad grin and the last of Angie’s nervousness fled. “And we had a longstanding peace with the mer until their queen was assassinated.”
“You worked so hard to gain peace with the mer war in Alaska just to have that come to an end. When the news spread, I know there were a few of us who worried what would happen next,” Isabela said with a sympathetic nod after moving the microphone back to herself.
“Do you have an idea of who might have wanted to hurt her? Any leads? You don’t have to say any names, of course. ”
The microphone went back to Angie.
“We don’t. So please, if you’re listening to this.
” Angie looked into the camera. “If anyone has information on Mer-Queen Serapha’s murder, please let me know or inform the authorities so we can be at peace again.
The mer have a right to be angry and betrayed about their queen being killed, but we all must do our part to promote harmony.
” She gave out her school email to Isabela who wrote it down on her tablet.
“Thank you so much, Angie. You’ve made a passionate case, and I can see your and your peers’ efforts are paying off.” Isabela nodded at her cameraman who panned over the students and staff.
When Isabela and her crew moved on to speak with another student about what they were doing there, Angie let out a long, purposeful exhale, closing her eyes and tilting her head toward the skies. That went much better than she thought.
Pacific Pulse had confirmed their presence with Reesa last night and Angie had been practicing what she would say over and over, until she no longer thought about what to say and how to say it.
After another hour, most of their pamphlets and flyers were gone, and both cookie plates were dotted with crumbs. Reesa and her classmates came around as they were cleaning up.
“That went so much better than I thought,” Reesa said.
“Hell yeah, I’m texting my family to tell them I was in the news.” Another student cheered.
Adrenaline still pulsed through Angie’s veins as she took the rest of the pamphlets and flyers and slipped them into a three-ring binder. She looked around. “Where’s Leo?”
Reesa motioned with a hand toward the back entrance of the school. “He left about twenty minutes ago. Said something about how he had to head out.”
Angie arched an eyebrow. “Something’s going on with him?”
Reesa shrugged. “Maybe. Let’s text him later and see if he wants to talk.”
“Yeah, good idea,” Angie replied. She addressed the rest of her classmates as they approached her, leaving their area on the lawn as empty as they found it. “Everyone free for dinner tomorrow? You all let me know where and I’ll make a reservation.”
“Let’s text each other some options and we’ll go from there?” Reesa asked. The students chimed in with enthusiastic nods and made their way back to their student event center to return the table and folding chairs.
The rally’s upbeat energy and her talk with Isabela left Angie on a high as she sat back on her couch that night, a comedy movie playing on her TV, Lulu in her lap, and holding a cup of steaming butterfly pea flower tea with a drop of honey.
It was the tea she drank for celebratory reasons, because high quality tea leaves were so damned expensive.
The tea was a light purple-blue color with a mildly earthy scent, and she enjoyed looking at it as much as sipping it.
Kaden was on his way back to Seattle, and the last she heard he would be there tomorrow in the late afternoon. Even better was tomorrow was Friday and she had completed all her classwork ahead of time so she could have the weekend with him.
At that moment, life was perfect.