I looked at Aaron. I could see he was thinking the same thing. I lifted my shoulder in a tiny shrug. He gave me the slightest nod in reply. We had to tell them.

"Look," I said. "I'll tell you everything. But please, please don't be mad. We've tried everything. And it wasn't our fault. OK?"

Morvena swam toward me. "It's OK, Emily. You don't need to be afraid of us," she said. "We're on the same side."

Melody crinkled her eyes in a sad smile. "You don't need to worry, little ones," she said. Her words. .h.i.t something inside me. Dad always calls me little 'un. I suddenly realized how much I wished I had him with me - how much I needed him and Mom. There was something about the way Melody spoke to us that reminded me of them both. She talked to me as gently as if I were her child. In that moment, I knew there was nothing to fear.

I took a breath. "OK," I said. "Here's what happened."

But then Morvena suddenly shushed me and swam to the entrance. There was a noise outside.

"The others," she said. "I think they're coming. We need to hide the children. We can't let them take them away. Not now."

"Where can we hide?" I asked, looking around the room in a panic. What was there to hide behind?

But it was too late anyway. The sound was coming closer. Whoever it was, they were just about to come into the room.

And then they did - and all five of us froze exactly where we were.

"Mr. Beeston!" I burst out. "What the - how the - why -?" Random words spilled out of my mouth. They refused to join up, and none of them could even express the depth of my shock and disgust. He'd followed us - again!

But he wasn't looking at me. He didn't see me; he didn't see Aaron or Shona. He didn't even see Morvena. He was looking at just one person in that room.

He swam slowly toward Melody. For a moment, he simply looked at her. Then with tears in his eyes matched only by the tears in hers, he whispered just one word.

"Mother?"

The room was silent. It was more than silent. You know if you're watching a DVD and you want to go and get something from the kitchen, so you pause it, and everything freezes exactly as it is? That's what it felt like.

I couldn't speak. I couldn't move. My brain seemed to have glued stuck while trying to understand what had just happened.

And then, what felt like a year later but was probably about three seconds, Melody replied.

"Charlie?" she said, her voice quivering like a tiny fish caught in a net. "Is it you? Is it really you?"

Mr. Beeston was smiling broadly as he swam another tail's length toward Melody. "It's me, Mother," he said. "I'm here."

A moment later, they were hugging and crying and laughing, and all that the rest of us could do was stare - and wonder what in the world was going on!

I swam closer to them. "Look, do either of you want to explain any of this to the rest of us?" I asked. Even Morvena was looking baffled.

Melody smiled at me. Her smile was - I don't know. It's hard to explain. It was more than a smile. It seemed to warm the room up and brighten the colors. Everything felt lifted and lighter when she smiled.

Mr. Beeston turned to me. "You deserve an explanation," he said. "I'll grant you that, child."

"Good," I said impatiently.

He took a breath. "You remember when I told you that my father deserted me when I was a baby and that I was brought up by a mother who hardly cared a bit about me?"

I nodded.

He glanced at Melody and then turned back to me. Pulling a loose strand of hair over his head, he went on. "Well, it turns out that wasn't strictly true."

Oh, what a surprise! Mr. Beeston had been telling lies again! I folded my arms and waited for him to continue.

"No - wait!" He waved a hand at me. "Don't get me wrong. I never told you a lie. At least, I didn't know it at the time."

Aaron swam over to my side. I could feel his arm against my elbow. "You're talking in riddles," he said, somehow managing to find the words I couldn't seem to get out. I think I was in shock. I felt as though we had just stumbled upon a jigsaw puzzle and we had all the pieces in front of us but couldn't see how any of them fitted together.

Mr. Beeston fumbled with his hair, pulled at his jacket, all those things he always does when he's feeling awkward about something - which, in my experience, he usually is.

"Let me start again," he said.

"That sounds like a good idea," said Aaron.

"The other day, when I told you I was going to talk to my mother, you remember that?"

I nodded.

"Well, that's what I did, that very day." He glanced at Melody, his cheeks coloring a touch. "Or at least I thought I did. But it turns out that I was brought up with a big lie." He glanced at me. "Just like you were," he added. "After all these years, I discovered that nothing was as I'd thought. My *mother' was nothing more than a scheming siren who simply wanted to get my real mother out of the way so she could get her fins on my father."

Melody's eyes had darkened. "Zalia," she said hoa.r.s.ely.

Mr. Beeston nodded. "She even seemed glad I'd come. She was different from how I'd ever seen her before. At first I put it down to the years that had pa.s.sed since I last saw her, but then I realized those years had brought her something else. Guilt. I could see it in her eyes." He turned to me. "I recognized it in myself - from my years of tricking you."

"Guilt? Why?" I asked.

He turned back to Melody. "She told me how she'd tricked you into going into hiding and then betrayed you to Neptune."

Morvena clapped a hand over her mouth. "I always suspected - but I never believed she really could have done it."

"I did," Melody replied. "I never doubted it for a moment."

"She told me how she wheedled her way into my father's confidence, too," Mr. Beeston went on. "She got him to tell her about the plan you and he made."

Melody lowered her eyes. "It was a wild night," she said. "A terrible night. We knew what it meant. We understood about Neptune's rage - we knew what he was capable of. My singing voice had already been taken, but I knew that would not be punishment enough for him. There was worse to come. And so we made a plan. I was to go into hiding, just for a while, just until Neptune's attention, and his rage, moved away from us and on to something else - as it always does."

She reached out to take Mr. Beeston's hand. "I gave you to him, until we could be together again," she said. "We both agreed it was safer that way."

"But why?" Morvena asked. "Why would he be safer with his father? I mean we could have -"

"He would be beyond Neptune's reach," Melody replied starkly. "He would be brought up on land. His father is a human."

Morvena's mouth fell open. "A - but . . ."

"I know. That is why I didn't tell you. I knew you would never understand, never forgive me. How could you? A siren and a human. It is unheard of; it is a shameful thing. I'm a disgrace to all sirens." She lifted her head to look at Morvena. "That is the secret I never told you. I'm sorry. I couldn't risk losing all my friends as well as -" She glanced at Mr. Beeston. "As well as everything else that mattered to me."

"So what you told us, about the only way out of here being the sound of a siren's beautiful voice, it was a lie too?" Morvena asked.

Melody nodded. "You all wanted to believe it," she said. "When all your singing voices were taken away too, it was the only thing I could think of to avoid more questions - and answers which I knew I could never share with you. And anyway - at least you all had something I never had."

"What was that?" I asked.

Melody met my eyes. "Hope," she said. "However remote, at least you had something. I had nothing. I knew forgiveness and freedom were two things I would never get from Neptune. Or so I believed."

Melody looked at Morvena. "I'm sorry," she said. "I have told you many lies. But now the look on your face tells me I was right to keep the truth from you. I can see the disgust in your eyes. I couldn't bear to have had you look at me that way all of these years."

Morvena shook her head. "No, you are wrong. This look is because I am your friend, your best friend, and I can't believe that you felt you couldn't trust me with this." She swam to Melody's side, lifted her chin, and looked into her eyes. "You had a son. All this time - all these long years, you grieved on your own when I could have helped you." She opened her arms, and Melody fell into them.

Morvena stroked her hair. "So that's what you meant when you asked the sh.e.l.l to help you."

Melody pulled away. "What do you mean? What do you know about the sh.e.l.l?"

"I've seen you," Morvena said softly. "I've heard you - many, many times."

"What have you heard?" Melody asked. "What have you heard me say?"

"I heard you say, *Help me find you.' I always knew something was lost." Morvena glanced toward Mr. Beeston and her voice caught as she went on. "I just didn't know that the lost thing was your child. Melody, you poor thing. You suffered so much, and I could have helped." She held Melody close, rocking her gently. "I don't understand how the sh.e.l.l was meant to help you find him, though," she said after a while.

"I do," Mr. Beeston replied. "Zalia told me that, too. She'd managed to get it out of my father. He put a map inside it."

Melody gasped. "Inside it? Oh, my - no! Of course!"

"What? What is it?" I asked.

For a moment, Melody looked utterly lost. Her eyes flickered wildly around us all. Then they settled on Mr. Beeston and she grew calmer again. "I never knew there was something in the sh.e.l.l," Melody said. "What a fool. How could I have been so stupid?"

"What do you mean?" I asked. "Why have you been stupid?"

"He gave it to me the last time we met, in the storm, but the storm was so fierce that I couldn't hear what he was telling me. I thought he was telling me it had magic in it, magic that would somehow lead me to him. But he wasn't telling me there was magic in it - he was telling me there was a map in it!"

Melody shook her head. "All these years I've held it, whispered to it, begged it to reveal its magic, and all along I was looking for the wrong thing.

"And you could never get the map out because Neptune must have sealed the sh.e.l.l when he sealed the caves!" Aaron said.

Melody nodded. "All those lost years. So very many of them," she said sadly, reaching out to touch Mr. Beeston's arm. "I knew your father had discovered a small island during his travels. He said he'd never seen a soul there. He must have believed that once Neptune's rage blew over, we could live there in secret."

"That must be the island we found!" I burst out.

"You knew about the island?" Melody glared at me, then around at us all. "You all seem to know so much," she said. "And do you know I have lost the sh.e.l.l now?"

"You know?" Morvena gasped. "I thought you only looked at it in the mornings and at night. I thought -"

"You thought wrong," Melody said. "That sh.e.l.l is the only thing that has kept me going in here."

Perhaps this was the time to own up. But how was I going to tell her we'd lost it? What would she say? What would she do to us? Perhaps she'd turn as nasty as the others. One look at her pleading face and I knew I had to take the risk. I opened my mouth. "Um . . . we . . . um -"

Mr. Beeston stopped me with a wave of his hand. Then he reached into his pocket. Pulling his hand out, he opened it up to reveal the sh.e.l.l. "Here it is."

For a moment, Melody stared in wonder at the sh.e.l.l. "But you - but how -?" she began. Then she smiled. "No matter," she said gently. "We have all the time in the world for explanations. All that matters now is that the sh.e.l.l has brought me what I always knew it would." Then she closed her hand over Mr. Beeston's, and they held the sh.e.l.l between them - her face a picture of serenity.

An hour ago, discovering that Mr. Beeston had taken the sh.e.l.l would have made my blood boil. But after everything we'd heard, I couldn't blame him, and I wouldn't hold it against him. For the first time, Mr. Beeston's trickery seemed like an act of love and loyalty.

He cleared his throat. "There's - ah, there's something else I need to tell you," he said to Melody. "There was one more lie in my childhood."

Melody put her other hand over Mr. Beeston's. "What is it?"

He swallowed hard and then nodded slowly, as if making an agreement with himself to tell us. "After you had gone, Zalia wasted no time with my father. She tricked and lied her way into his life - telling him you had abandoned us and making herself indispensible to him. She told me that her one failure was that she had never managed to get him to love her. There was only room for one in his heart." He looked up at Melody, and her cheeks glowed with warmth and embarra.s.sment.

"After you had been gone for over a year and he had heard no word from you and been unable to find you, he began to believe her. And that was his fatal mistake."

"What do you mean?" Shona asked, as wrapped up in Mr. Beeston's story as the rest of us. "Fatal how?"

"He no longer cared about anything. He wouldn't look after himself; he could hardly look after me. Zalia did that - in her own way."

"What happened?" I asked. "You told me he'd run off and left you when you were a baby. Is that a lie, too?"

Mr. Beeston paused for a long time. "In a way," he said. Then, his voice rough and ragged like a weathered old rope, he said, "I have just discovered the truth. He - my father -" He swallowed hard. "He drowned."

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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.l. I knew what it was. Zalia told me all about it. It seems her guilty conscience demanded a thorough unburdening. So I knew the sh.e.l.l 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.