June 2018

It was precisely 3:27 am, and Melody Campbell was sitting cross legged by the beach, having stealthily snuck out of the house due to insomnia. It wasn’t a public beach with mobs and mobs of vacationers and gaudy umbrellas that made your eyes ache when you looked at them too long—it was more like a huge cove along the Atlantic coast, private to only Melody’s family and their neighbors. In fact, Melody rarely saw anybody out there but herself, and of course the bottlenose dolphins. There was no particular reason for Melody’s insomnia; it just happened some nights. But the Cove always seemed to help with that. The sound of the gentle night’s waves tamed her restlessness, the humming breeze helped her to think, and the sand, cool from the shade of nighttime, was a welcome difference to the stuffiness of sharing a small room. By now, Melody’s eyelids were heavy and she was struggling to keep them open. Just as she turned away from the lulling waves, she caught something in her peripheral vision. Stifling a yawn, Melody turned back and blearily took a second look. What she saw astonished her. Footprints. At first she thought they might be her own, but a closer inspection proved otherwise. Then she noticed the next thing. The footsteps lead right into the water– and never back out. Scanning the ocean front, Melody didn’t see any signs of a human disturbance. The churning waves crashed on smooth sand, and behind the surf, the ocean was glassy smooth. The footprints must have been fresh, the bottoms still filled with tiny pools of water. Eventually exhaustion won her over and forced her to turn back to the house. At the front porch, Melody took one last glance at the Cove and the footprints, only to find she couldn’t even see them anymore. Maybe it was just a trick of the moonlight, she thought doubtfully. Or perhaps I was just dreaming the whole thing. She went into the house, silently shutting the door behind her, and crept into the room she shared with her little brother Harmony. (Her parent’s bad idea of a joke.) The moon shone through a crack in their curtains, forging a path onto his face. For a second, she stared at him lovingly. His shaggy blonde hair was strewn about his pillow, those plump little-kiddish cheeks were littered with golden freckles illuminated by the moonlight, and his lips were curled into a quirky smile, perfectly reflecting his sweet nature. And then she was stumbling into her bed, pulling her sheets around her, and falling asleep, dreaming of mysterious footprints leading into the ocean… *          *          * Melody woke up to Harmony banging out a lively (and very out of tune) song on the piano downstairs. On second thought, it probably wasn’t a real song. Her little brother was indeed a… creative… composer. However, nobody in the Campbell family had the heart to tell him how he really sounded. Any headaches or earaches were carefully hidden. At first she screwed her eyes shut, trying to close off the sound and fall back asleep. And then it hit her with the force of a pummelling wave, one of the freezing ones you get when you first run into the water, one that soaks you through and makes your breath hitch up in surprise. Everything that happened last night was recalled, and suddenly she didn’t feel so tired. Leaping out of bed, she dragged a comb through her honey blonde hair, changed, and rushed into the bathroom to perform the quickest brush-your-teeth-while-washing-your-face procedure mankind has ever seen. “I’m running out, but I’ll be back soon!” shouted Melody to her mom over the commotion of the piano as she scooped up a pancake and folded it into her palm. Her mom nodded and sent her a thumbs up signal, not even bothering to try raising her voice above the chaos. Slipping on her flip-flops, Melody sprinted out the door to the cute gray house and ran around to the back, stuffing the pancake into her mouth. She’s always thought she must be one of the luckiest girls in the world, to have a beach for her backyard. Melody raced to the shore, golden-speckled chocolate eyes probing the sand for a trace, any trace, of the footprints she thought she had seen the night before… And there, to the left, a trail of faint imprints that just defined footprints leading into the water. There still weren’t footprints leading out of the water. So she hadn’t imagined it, she wasn’t crazy. Someone or something had definitely been here last night, had definitely walked right into the water and never came back out again. Most kids would have been scared when they figured that out, but Melody wasn’t like most kids. She was intrigued, curious, pulled into the mystery, the mystery of the footprints. *          *          * When she got back to the house, Melody was relieved that the piano abuse had finally stopped. Melody’s mom smiled knowingly at her, one of the smiles moms can give you when they know just what you’re thinking at the moment. “Don’t tell him, but I was relieved Harmony decided to go play in the back with you and got off of that poor piano.” Wait. There was something wrong with that sentence, but Melody couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Oh. Her eyes widened, lips parting slightly. She looked at her mom. “What, honey?” “Harmony. He- he wasn’t in the back. When did he leave the house?” “About five minutes ago,” volunteered her dad, looking up from his copy of the paper, eyebrows creased in worry. “If he went back to the Cove, you would have seen him.” They all exchanged glances. They knew how quickly Harmony’s little blond head moved from one thing to another– he might have started out intending to