Stranded Read online

  There were no perfect answers for this. Not even any good ones.

  * * *

  The cave led uphill into the dark and quickly banked to the right. Soon after that, Carter couldn’t see any light behind them at all. The only thing they had to go by was the six inches or so that Jane’s camera lit up in front of them.

  “It couldn’t have just been a straight shot, could it?” Carter grumbled. “ ’Cause that would have been too easy, right?”

  “What was that?” Jane said, stopping all at once. Carter brushed something away from his head as it flitted past. Or, at least, he could have sworn he felt something. Already, the dark was playing tricks on them.

  “Any way we can go faster?” he said.

  “Not really,” Jane said. The stream was still on their right, and he could hear another waterfall up ahead. The sound had been muted at first, but it was getting louder with every step.

  “Watch out for this,” Jane said. They’d just come to a low wall of some kind. Carter kept one hand on her arm and felt his way along with the other as they climbed up to stand on a higher elevation.

  They’d just come into a much bigger space, from the sound of it. Everything was more echoey here, including the falls, which were somewhere off to the side.

  In front of them, in the camera’s light, Carter could see the edge of a pond or a pool of some kind. It was impossible to know how big it was, but it was feeding the stream they’d followed inside. The falls he heard seemed to be flowing down into the same pool. That meant the water was coming from somewhere even higher up.

  It was easy to imagine the whole cavern as some kind of crazy, multilevel maze—the kind you walked into and never came back out of. The thought of it put a shiver down his back.

  And right now, they had a big decision to make.

  “Which way?” Jane said. With the pool in front of them, there was no more stream to follow, or to lead them back if they got lost.

  Just then, something else whizzed past Carter’s ear. A bug or a bat or . . . something.

  “Let’s just keep moving,” he said right away. “Follow the edge of the water. We can always track it back to the stream, right?”

  “Yeah . . .” Jane said tentatively. “Unless there’s a whole bunch of streams. How will we know which one to come back to?”

  It was a good question. Getting lost would be a pretty stupid move, Carter thought. But then again, turning around might be, too, if they were getting close.

  And standing still in the pitch dark was starting to drive him crazy.

  “I say we go for it,” he told her.

  * * *

  Buzz still didn’t love crossing the tree bridge, but Carter had been right. The first time was the hardest. And Vanessa was right, too. It helped if he stayed low, kept moving, and most of all, didn’t look down.

  The rest of the way to the beach was familiar by now, and easy. They slid down the gravel slope on their butts, using their heels to brake as they got near the bottom. Then they continued on around the giant rock formation and started past the mouth of the cave in the woods, before the ground began another downward slope.

  It was quiet as they walked. Neither of them seemed to have much to say. But then, as they passed the cave, Buzz thought he heard Vanessa mutter something under her breath.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Huh?” Vanessa said.

  “What did you just say?” he asked her again.

  “I didn’t say anything. What did you hear?”

  Buzz stopped to listen.

  “Nothing, I guess,” he said.

  And then—there it was again. Some kind of mumble.

  He and Vanessa stared at each other, wide-eyed. She’d heard it, too. It was coming from the cave. The hairs on the back of Buzz’s neck stood up. Was it a wild animal? One of those boars Jane talked about?

  “Hello?” Vanessa called out.

  And then, a small voice came back. “Hey! Vanessa? Is that you?”

  It was Carter . . . somehow. Buzz felt more shock than relief at first. None of it made any sense, almost as if they were hearing things.

  Both of them rushed in through the mouth of the cave, as much as they could. The daylight from the woods behind them didn’t reach very far. Soon, Buzz was facing a wall of blackness he didn’t know how to navigate.

  “Carter? Jane?” he yelled. “Are you in here?”

  “Keep talking!” Carter called out. “Where are you?”

  It was hard to know how to answer that one. “We’re . . . here!” Buzz yelled. “Where are you?”

  He could feel Vanessa’s hand on his shoulder behind him. “Should we get the flashlight?” she said. “It’s still on the boat.”

  “I don’t know,” Buzz answered.

  Then he saw it for the first time—a faint, tiny glow just coming around some unseen corner in the dark. That’s all it was at first, until Jane called out again.

  “There they are!” she said. “Omigosh . . . it really is . . . Carter, we did it! We’re back!”

  * * *

  Before Carter could stop Vanessa, she had her arms around him, in a big hug.

  “I’m so glad to see you!” she said. He could barely breathe, she was squeezing so tight. “I never should have let you go off like that!”

  Carter’s first thought was, What do you mean, let us? But this was too happy a moment to worry about that right now.

  “Okay, okay,” he said, stepping back. He was glad to see them, too, but there didn’t need to be a whole production about it.

  It was hard to believe, but Jane’s idea had actually worked. If it weren’t for her, they would have spent the whole day hiking back to the boat on empty stomachs.

  “Where did you come from?” Buzz asked, peering into the dark.

  “From the other side,” Jane said excitedly. “These cliffs are like Swiss cheese. There are caves everywhere.”

  “And we found water, too,” Carter said. “There’s a falls back there. At the lagoon.”

  “It’s called Carter’s Falls,” Jane said with a grin. “You could get there in two minutes with a real flashlight.”

  For everything they’d been through, she seemed pretty pumped, Carter thought. And pretty tough, for a nine-year-old.

  “But, I don’t understand,” Vanessa said. “Are you guys okay? Why didn’t you come back last night? What happened?”

  “We’re okay,” Carter said. Already, he was heading toward the mouth of the cave ahead of the others. “Let’s talk about all that on the boat, because I’m staaaarving!”

  CHAPTER 17

  Lunch was a celebration—two cans of ravioli, one of beef stew, one of chili, and four spoons.

  “Cheers!” Jane said, holding hers up. She’d never thought she’d be so glad to eat cold ravioli.

  “Cheers!” everyone said, and they clinked cans right before they all dug in. It felt good to be back together, like a real family. And now, between Carter’s Falls and the rainwater Vanessa and Buzz had collected, they could get as thirsty as they wanted. There was plenty to drink.

  While they ate, Carter and Jane told the whole story of what had happened to them. Then Vanessa and Buzz told about Buzz’s sail rig for catching water and the solar panel they’d put in place.

  “Maybe it’s all hooked up, and maybe it isn’t. I just don’t know,” Vanessa said. “We need some sun to find out for sure. This weather’s driving me crazy.”

  It was just starting to rain again, and Jane could hear thunder rumbling in the distance. It looked like the weather was going to get worse before it got better, but she didn’t even care. At least they were inside the boat this time.

  And they were making progress, too. It was exciting to think that they might actually be able to u
se the satellite phone again. Maybe even in the next day or so. She couldn’t wait to talk to Mom and Eric.

  When they were done eating, it was time to get back to work. Vanessa and Carter spent most of the afternoon going over every inch of cable they could track, from the solar panel to the engine compartment and over to the nav station, trying to make sure everything was good to go.

  Buzz worked on organizing all of their provisions and bottling up the rainwater he was collecting in the mainsail.

  And Jane did some investigating of her own. Vanessa had already started to figure out their location on a map, but not in a way that was going to help them tell the Coast Guard where to look.

  There were lots of navigation materials in the cabin down below. Most of them had been scattered around in the crash, then piled into one corner or another. Some of the sea charts were on the table, others were rolled up in the nav station. There was also a huge stack of books on the floor by the rear cabin door. Jane started digging through them, and that’s where she found Uncle Dexter’s captain’s log.

  It was a tan clothbound book with an image of a jumping swordfish on the cover. Whether Vanessa had been through this stack or not, Jane didn’t know. But the log grabbed her attention right away.

  Inside, Dex had filled page after page with his small, sloppy handwriting. There were dozens of sketches and diagrams, too. He’d dated every entry, going back for three years. It was kind of like looking at Dex’s homework.

  As Jane flipped through, she saw drawings of dolphins and whales; descriptions of places Dexter had been to, like Samoa and Fiji; and tons of notations about latitude, longitude, and other words she didn’t even recognize.

  At the back, on the very last written page, Jane found an entry marked for 10:00 a.m. on June 28—the day of the big storm.

  Got a cold front coming in, faster and slipperier than I thought it was going to be. Heading into some tricky water to try and get around this storm. The kids seem kind of nervous, but they’re troupers.

  Jane stopped there and stared at the page. She wondered if Dex and Joe were still out on that life raft somewhere. It had been three whole days now. Did they have water? Food? Could they fish?

  Had they been rescued? She hoped so, for everyone’s sake. If there was anyone who could tell the Coast Guard where to look for Nowhere Island, it would be them.

  She looked down at the journal again. She’d seen Dex scribbling in it before, a little bit every day, when he worked on navigation with Joe. Usually, they’d look at the charts in the morning, then he’d write in his log while Joe steered the boat. She’d even gotten a little of that on camera for her report.

  And that’s when it hit Jane. Maybe, just maybe, there was something she’d recorded that they could use.

  She ran back to her bunk and got her camera off the shelf where she kept it. Then she sat right down on the cabin floor and started looking.

  It didn’t take long. Within a few minutes, she found the exact entry she’d been thinking about.

  “Hi, everyone, it’s Jane B., and today is June twenty-seventh. It’s the third day of our sailing trip, and today, I’m going to show you how navigation works. . . . ”

  Jane’s heart sped up right along with the video as she pressed Fast Forward. When Dexter came onto the screen, she let it play again.

  “So you see, this is the sea chart we’re looking at today,” Dex’s voice said over the tiny speaker.

  As he unrolled the chart, she pressed Pause. Looking as hard as she could, it was still impossible to pick out any real details on the view screen. It was too small. But then, when she hit Play again, Dexter picked up a pencil and circled something several times.

  “This is a coral reef. That’s something we want to make sure and work our way around. . . .”

  Again, she froze the image. She jumped up and ran over to the galley table, starting to flip through every chart she could find.

  Vanessa and Carter were peering into the engine compartment as she did, and they looked over now.

  “Jane? What are you doing?” Vanessa asked.

  “I think I may have figured something out,” she said. “I was just looking at one of my videos—”

  “You should really save the batteries on that thing,” Vanessa said.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Jane said, pulling out another chart.

  And there it was—the ragged circle of pencil from before. She looked back at the camera’s screen one more time to be sure.

  Yes. It was the same circle. The same chart.

  “This is where we were, just before the storm,” she said, pointing.

  “How do you know?” Carter asked. Buzz was just coming belowdecks now, too, and they all crowded around.

  Slowly, Jane told them everything that she’d just figured out. Vanessa looked at the chart, then compared it to a map she’d found in a spiral-bound book.

  “Okay . . .” she said excitedly. “Okay . . . we might be closer to . . . here.” She put her finger down on the chart. “Five hundred miles northeast of the Marshall Islands. At least I think so.”

  “There’s this, too,” Jane said, holding up Dexter’s journal. “We might be able to find out more about which way we came.”

  The others were all looking at her now, smiling a little with their eyebrows raised. She’d seen that look before, in school. It happened every time she answered a problem one of her teachers thought nobody would ever get.

  Nobody but Jane Benson, that is.

  CHAPTER 18

  Vanessa couldn’t sleep. She lay on her bunk across from Jane, staring at the dark ceiling of their cabin and listening to the rain pound down outside.

  Instead of getting any sun before the end of the day, they’d only gotten more and more rain. More wind. More thunder and lightning. It was beyond frustrating, when the sun was the one thing they needed most at this point.

  As she lay there with nothing to do but think, Vanessa realized she was also starting to hear a new sound from outside. Something that hadn’t been part of the mix before.

  It was almost like a washing machine, sloshing clothes around and around. The noise came, then stopped, then came again.

  What is that? she thought.

  The next time, it was twice as loud—not just a soft splashing, but more like a watery crash against the side of the boat. She’d heard that sound before, she realized, on the worst night of her life.

  The flashlight was on a sill next to her bed, where she’d left it. She grabbed it now and stood up. The wind was kicking around outside, along with the rain beating against the cabin roof. Vanessa took her slicker off the hook by the galley hatch and zipped it up tight around her. With the bad weather, the temperature had dropped considerably.

  A downpour hit her in the face as she slid back the hatch. It felt like sharp little droplets, stinging her cheeks and making it hard to look around.

  Keeping as low as she could, she came off the galley stairs and shone the flashlight back toward the rear of the boat, past the cockpit. What she saw took her breath away.

  It was almost as if they were at sea again. The ocean had advanced on their rocky shelf, and deep water was pooled all around them. Before Vanessa could even make sense of that fact, a heavy wave rolled in from out of the dark and broke hard against the back of the Lucky Star in a burst of sea spray. The sight of it shocked her into action.

  She scrambled back down the stairs, not even bothering to close the hatch this time.

  “You guys!” she shouted. “Wake up! Right now!”

  She went to Jane first and pulled the blankets off her, shaking her awake. Then she went to the boys’ bunks, where Carter was stirring and Buzz was already sitting up.

  “What’s going on?” Buzz asked.

  “Get up! There’s water all around
us,” Vanessa told them. “I think we have to get off the boat before it’s too late.”

  “What?” Carter was wide awake now, too.

  “Get whatever you can,” Vanessa said. “But fast.”

  “Are you sure?” Jane said, standing close now, right behind her.

  Before Vanessa could answer, there was another rushing, watery sound all up and down the side of the boat. For the first time since the crash, the Lucky Star moved. It rose out of the tilt where it had been for the last several days, listed up and over, and then came down hard on its other side with a resounding thud.

  “Yeah,” Vanessa said, starting to gather up whatever was closest to grab. “I’m sure. Now move!”

  * * *

  Carter’s mind raced. His pack was long gone, somewhere in the middle of the lagoon, so he pulled the case off his pillow and started grabbing what he could. If they were getting off the boat, this might be his only chance to save a few things. And they were going to need all they could get.

  “Vanessa! We need the flashlight!”

  “Get out here!” she screamed from the galley. “We’ll take what we can.”

  Buzz had balled up their two blankets and got out the door ahead of Carter, though Carter was right behind.

  Water was pouring in from both ends now, and it sloshed around their feet. It reminded Carter that he wanted his shoes, but when he looked back, the cabin was clearly too dark to try and find anything in there.

  Vanessa was gathering something from the nav station. Jane had her own pack and was pulling what she could from the galley. With everything in shadow, it was hard to see or know what to do or what to grab. The first thing Carter recognized in the dark was the axe. He stuffed it head down inside his pillowcase pack.

  Again, a wave broke outside the boat. Again, the Lucky Star lifted and floated free for just a moment before it slammed down hard against the rocks. Carter heard the hull cracking, as it had on the night of the crash. His heart pounded. There was no knowing how much time they had left—but it didn’t seem like much.