Hoax For Hire

HOAX FOR HIRE

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HOAX FOR

HIRE LAURA MARTIN

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Hoax for Hire Copyright Š 2019 by Laura Martin All rights reserved. Printed in Germany.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Children’s Books, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007. www.harpercollinschildrens.com Library of Congress Control Number: 2018964874 ISBN 978-0-06-280380-1 (trade bdg.)

Typography by Ellice M. Lee 19 20 21 22 23 CPIG 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 v First Edition

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Because my heart belongs to four people, so does this dedication.

For Josh: my forever best friend.

Thank you for being the left brain to my right.

We are a good team unless we are trying to paint a room, at which point it’s every man for himself.

And for my three kids: London, Lincoln, and Levi.

I didn’t know my life was missing so much joy and chaos until you three came along.

I love you three to the moon and back and more than you ever wish.

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“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.”

–Albert Einstein

Cryptid: An animal whose existence or survival is disputed or unsubstantiated, such as the yeti.

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CHAPTER ONE

“S

hould I be worried that I can’t feel my toes?” I asked as I shuffled my flipper-covered feet. I’d

never had to pull off a hoax that involved water this late in the season before, and the murky Altamaha River was a new level of cold that I was pretty sure only polar bears could appreciate.

“Suck it up,” Curtis said, yanking hard on the straps that held my air tank on my back as he finished the last of our safety checks. “Everything looks good,” he said. He came around to stand in front of me, his knee-high boots keeping his feet wonderfully dry and warm. He put a hand up to adjust my dive mask, and I slapped it away.

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“Stop it,” I said. “I know how to put a mask on.

Gramps gave me the same scuba lessons he gave you.

And if I remember right, I was better at them, so stop acting like that.”

“Like what?” Curtis asked.

Like an obnoxious know-it-all, I thought, but I just shook my head. There were some things you didn’t say to your older brother when there wasn’t an adult around to make sure you didn’t get smeared. I stared past his smug face toward the churning river. The water was moving fast, probably due to a recent rain, and I wondered idly what camera lens would work the best in this hazy light. Of course, my camera wasn’t here—it was never allowed at a hoax, not since I’d gotten in trouble over those Loch Ness Monster pictures. I was here to work, not have fun, a point my dad would have made if he were here.

“Are you sure you don’t want to trade me jobs?” I asked Curtis.

“No way,” he said, and grinned. “I like my toes.

They happen to be one of my best features.”

“You aren’t funny,” I said.

“Matter of opinion,” Curtis said. When I continued to frown, he sighed and rolled his eyes. “Grayson, knock it off. We’ve been over this. You’ve never organized eyewitnesses by yourself before, and we can’t 2

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afford to mess up this job. You know that. Dad and Gramps know that. I’m sure even the real Altamaha-ha knows that,” he said with a jerk of his head toward the river. “This whole hoax has a lot better shot of working if you’re under the water and I’m on land doing the hard stuff.”

I sighed. He was right. I didn’t like that he was right.

But he was. “I just wish that Dad hadn’t double booked us with the Loch Ness Monster sighting in Scotland and that Gramps hadn’t gotten held up in the Congo.”

“You and me both,” Curtis said. For a second his cocky demeanor slipped a little, and I caught a glimpse of the nerves he’d been hiding ever since our grandfather had called two days ago to tell us that we were going to have to do this one on our own.

It wasn’t the first time Curtis and I had pulled off a hoax without Dad or Gramps, but it was the first time we’d had to do a sea monster hoax by ourselves.

Those were always trickier, what with the scuba gear, the actual logistics of assembling a twenty-foot monster and sinking it in the water without any unwanted eyewitnesses, and then timing the eyewitness sighting you actually did want. Okay, so maybe Curtis’s job on land wasn’t easier, but I’d still trade him. I took a deep breath and released it through clenched teeth. Man, I hoped we didn’t screw this up.

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I come from a long line of cryptid hunters. Which is a fancy way of saying that my family is ridiculous and they managed to make it a career. A cryptid by definition is a creature that may or may not exist, like Bigfoot or the Chupacabra or the Loch Ness Monster.

It’s a thing that lives primarily in legend, eyewitness accounts, and footprints in the mud but nowhere else.

Every McNeil as far back as anyone can remember has strapped on boots and gone out to hunt for the creatures that seemed to live only in the tallest of tall tales.

Most no one has ever heard of and will never hear of because they’ve never been discovered for a reason: they don’t actually exist. My Scottish McNeil ancestors grew up in a village on the shores of the legendary Loch Ness, where stories of a sea monster have been told for hundreds of years, so I guess cryptid hunting seemed like a viable career option. It was a life filled with adventure, travel to exotic locations, unbelievable stories, and no paychecks.

Floyd McNeil—I think he was my great-great-great uncle or something like that—is the one who figured out that if you couldn’t catch the real thing, then faking it could bring in enough cash to fund the next exploration. Although, not to give him too much credit, the whole thing was completely by accident. He was hunting the Cadborosaurus, or Caddy, as the people 4

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of British Columbia called the sea monster supposedly living in Cadboro Bay, in 1815. Caddy was allegedly as long as seventy feet with flippers like those of a sea lion, a head like a horse, and a fan-shaped tail. It was also supposed to be able to swim wicked fast. Why Uncle Floyd thought he had a shot of catching something that big is beyond me, but he wasn’t the only one trying to catch Caddy.

Cryptid hunters and adventure seekers were flooding into the little town on the edge of Cadboro Bay, and good old Uncle Floyd was feeling a bit crowded. Apparently, the mayor of Cadboro was feeling the same way, because over one too many drinks, the men decided to fake a Caddy sighting three towns over. Uncle Floyd agreed to arrange and execute the hoax if the mayor would pay, and it worked. Everyone chased the red herring, and Uncle Floyd got a pocket full of cash. And so the hoaxes began, and the McNeils went from wackadoodle cryptid hunters to wackadoodle cryptid hunters with a side of fraud thrown in for good measure.

For every real trip a McNeil made in search of a cryptid, they made two more to create a cryptid hoax. It was a win-win. They muddied the waters for the other cryptid hunters, successfully sending them on wildgoose chases while simultaneously funding their own hunts. They staged sightings, made footprints in mud, 5

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left hair samples, created odd sounds in the night—you name it, they did it.

Barnum and Bailey bought their taxidermy Feejee Mermaids and two-headed cows. Town mayors and officials slipped cash into my ancestors’ pockets to create “sightings” that would attract tourists. Political figures seeking to disgrace their opponents hired them to stage UFO sightings and create crop circles in their opponents’ yards. Husbands trying to discredit their exwives hired them. The list went on.

My family had found a niche, albeit a criminal one, and we weren’t the only ones. According to Gramps, there was another family somewhere out there doing the exact same thing we were: the Gerhards. A fact that bugged him and Dad to no end. Anytime something cryptid-related hit the news, Gramps would watch the footage obsessively until he could determine if “those blasted ninny-headed, flapjacks-for-brains Gerhards were involved.” Curtis and I always watched this performance with barely concealed grins. For a veteran hoaxer, Gramps sure worried a lot about a family located thousands of miles away in Germany.

My dad was the first McNeil to dump the cryptidhunting part of the tradition completely and focus only on the hoaxing, a fact that disappointed Gramps more than he let on. Gramps was a true-blue hunter, but he 6

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never passed up a good hoax, and he’d have given anything to be standing next to me in the freezing cold Altamaha River, which was kind of ironic since I’d have given anything to be anywhere else.

Curtis checked his watch and nodded. “It’s go time.

Don’t screw up.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said before grabbing my regulator and jamming it between my teeth.

“I’m serious,” Curtis said. “We have a lot riding on this.”

I grunted at him as I sloshed through the river in my flippers, lifting my knees comically high in my best impression of a deranged duck, until I was deep enough to submerge completely. I had a date to keep with a sea monster.

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CHAPTER TWO

W

ithin seconds of going under, my dive mask started to leak. I swam toward the middle of

the river, thankful that I didn’t have to dive that deep today, especially since my leaking mask had me a little rattled.

Curtis and I knew how to scuba dive, thanks to Gramps and the key he’d “borrowed” for our town’s pool. Curtis and I had spent many moonlit nights under water learning every scuba trick in the books. I’d loved paddling around the dark pool, with no sounds but my own breath and heartbeat in my ears. But there was a huge difference between diving in a warm pool and diving in a swiftly moving river, a fact that I was well 8

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aware of as I headed toward the spot where our sea monster was tethered and waiting.

The sea monster decoy, one of our versions of the legendary Altamaha-ha, was suspended by bungees, cables, and heavy-duty steel carabiners. I remembered with a twinge of guilt that it had been Curtis who’d tethered her here while I stayed in the van—warm and dry. Stretching a good twenty feet from nose to tip, the Altamaha-ha decoy—or just Altie, as we affectionately called her—consisted of a gigantic crocodile-like head and a long snakelike body that could be controlled from below using a system of ropes and pulleys so that she undulated realistically in the water. She wasn’t my favorite sea monster decoy. For one thing she was ridiculously long and unwieldy to control, especially on your own. But since Dad had shipped our best decoy to Scotland to use for his Nessie hoax, I was stuck with this clunker.

“She’s more authentic than the Nessie decoy, anyway,” Gramps had said as we dragged Altie out of her crates to start assembling her last week. “You’ve gotten too soft with all the high-techy junkity-junk your dad’s done to Nessie. Corrupted a classic if you ask me.

Lady Altie here is good old-fashioned hoaxing, that’s what.” I shook my head. Gramps did always see the bright side of things.

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Okay, girl, I thought grimly as I swam down to begin feeling along Altie’s belly for the first loop, let’s get this over with. I’d asked Gramps once why all of our sea monsters were girls, and he’d said something about them being like boats, which were apparently also always girls.

My cold-deadened fingers searched for the first loop. Finding it, I managed to detach the carabiner that kept Altie tethered to the five metal anchors resting on the bottom of the riverbed. My hands slid along her side, and as I searched for the next loop and clip, felt the ridges of the recycled tires my grandfather had melted down and stretched over a chicken wire frame to make the creature. If you believed the stories, it was a definite upgrade over the decoys Gramps and his dad had used, but as a general rule, I didn’t really believe most of my family’s stories.

I unhooked another carabineer, mentally counting in my head. Only three more and the long neck and alligator-nosed head of Altie would rise to the surface. I found the last clip and barely had time to grab the trailing ropes before Altie started her ascent. Our Nessie decoy did this on her own using a pressurizing system that Dad had developed, but like Gramps had said, this decoy was old-school. I was going to have to stay under water, pulling on the ropes like a puppeteer in 10

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just the right pattern and with just the right timing so that she’d appear to be swimming across the river. At least the head is upgraded, I thought, grateful I didn’t have to worry about making Altie’s mouth open and shut or her eyes blink. Which is when I remembered that I hadn’t turned the head on.

I’d have probably muttered a few choice words if my mouth hadn’t been full of the regulator, so I had to content myself with a good mental butt kicking for being so careless as I dropped the ropes and kicked hard to get close to Altie’s head. She was only about three feet from the surface when I reached her and hit the large black button under her jaw. Whirling, I swam back down to reclaim my ropes, leveraging them so that Altie would emerge like the monster of the Altamaha River legend and not like a rubber duckie. Her head broke the surface a second later, and I started my rope-pulling routine. Yank rope A, wait a half second. Yank rope B. Now Rope C and D. Repeat. It was exhausting and tricky and it made my brain hurt.

“Come on,” I muttered, willing the pager on my hip to buzz. “Get on with it.” The eyewitnesses should have seen Altie by now, their cell phones raised in shaky hands to document what could only be the famed sea serpent that had been spotted on this river for more than two hundred years. But I knew all too well that 11

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should was a very dangerous word.

Finally, after what felt like a lifetime of pulling ropes, I felt the pager buzz. I paddled hard for the bottom of the river, the ropes clutched loosely in my hand.

I needed to get Altie back under water, fast, but I wasn’t strong enough to do it without the help of our anchors.

When I was far enough from the surface, I flipped on my headlamp, and the beam of light ripped through the dark water. Where were the anchors? They should have been directly below me, but the riverbed was empty.

If I couldn’t find those anchors, the whole hoax was going to be a bust. Worse than a bust, we’d be found out. Dad and Gramps would probably go to jail, and then what would happen to me and Curtis? I could just picture the headlines: Family of Frauds Found Out and Sixth Generation of Hoaxers Finally Comes to Justice.

My pounding heart decided to relocate itself from my chest to somewhere near my tonsils as I frantically scanned the seemingly vacant riverbed.

After what felt like hours but probably wasn’t more than a minute, I spotted an anchor. It had tipped over, and the Altamaha’s sandy bottom had done its best to swallow it whole. Diving down I grabbed it, and bracing my feet on the bottom, pried it out of the sand to stand upright again. With no time to waste, I looped the rope connected to Altie’s head through it and started pulling.

My arm muscles burned at the effort, but slowly, slowly, 12

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the shadow above me of the monstrous and completely fake Altie started to make its way back toward the bottom of the lake.

The panic that had clamped around my chest moments before eased as I saw her finally sink completely below the surface. All that was left to do now was to hook the ropes to the rest of our specially made anchors that had become a bit of a McNeil family heirloom over the years. I snorted, sending a shower of bubbles up past my mask. What kind of family were we that our heirlooms were twenty-pound anchors created specifically for pulling a sea monster hoax? Weird, I decided. It made us weird.

Now that the crisis was over I could feel the adrenaline of the hoax slipping away, allowing my body’s awareness of the freezing temperature to sink back in.

My feet and hands were so cold that they felt like foreign objects only vaguely related to me, and I struggled with the knot that I’d so easily made just moments before. Minutes ticked by, and I knew I was pushing it with my air tank, but there was no way I was going to swim all the way back to shore just to have Curtis hand me a fresh tank and send me right back down here to tie Altie up the right way. It didn’t matter that we’d be back for her later. It made no difference that it was freezing or that it was a Thursday and three hundred miles away my school was starting right now 13

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without me. All that mattered was the integrity of the equipment, the perfection of the plan, the completion of the hoax.

Finally I had Altie tethered once more to the bottom of the river. My sigh of relief bubbled up around my still-leaking mask, and in a moment of goodwill I swam over to give Altie a pat on the nose like she was a golden retriever who’d performed a trick well. The rubber of her head felt rough even to my frozen hands, and I took a second to admire the new paint job Dad had done to make the mottled gray-brown skin look appropriately scaly. Inside Altie’s jaws were two rows of pointy teeth, which, unlike the rest of her, were actually real. Gramps had spent hours mounting the alligator teeth he’d bought on eBay into the monster’s jaws one painstaking fang at a time. I noticed one of the back teeth was sitting sideways. It must have been knocked loose when we were transporting her. Reaching into her jaw, I tipped the tooth up and shoved it down into its socket. One of Altie’s big animatronic eyes chose that moment to blink.

I’d never turned the head off.

I yanked my arm backward, but it was too late.

Altie’s jaws came down hard on my hand. I jerked as I felt those teeth penetrate my glove and sink into skin as a rush of bubbles exploded out of my mouth in a silent scream. Grabbing Altie’s jaw with my free 14

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hand, I attempted to pry it upward, but all I managed to accomplish was knocking my mask off, and I was blinded instantly by the muddy waters of the Altamaha River.

My hand was on fire, and the feeling reminded me of the time Curtis had accidentally slammed my fingers in the van door, except worse because the van door hadn’t stayed shut. Panic clouded my brain, and I felt light-headed. For a second I thought it was from pain before I realized that my regulator had fallen out of my mouth when I screamed. I reached for it with my free hand, but it was just out of reach, twisted behind me and stuck on my air tank. My lungs burned. I was going to die down here.

Frantic, I gave my hand another ineffective jerk, but Altie had me in her jaws and wasn’t letting go. I remembered the button under her jaw, but I knew from past experience that turning her off wouldn’t open her mouth. However, at that moment my lungs were starting to do that weird heaving thing inside my chest like they could bust through my rib cage and out if they just tried hard enough. Logic didn’t really matter anymore. I fumbled around for the button; my eyes burned as I tried to see through the murky water. Finally I found it and brought my free hand down on the button again and again, the water making everything feel like it was in slow motion. When Altie’s jaw still didn’t 15

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budge, I fumbled for the button and pulled downward.

It resisted for a moment before springing free and bringing a trail of twisted wires after it. Altie’s eyes began blinking frantically, and I pushed my fingers inside her head, grabbed a wad of wires, and pulled backward again. Black spots were starting to appear in my vision, and I knew I only had seconds left before I lost consciousness. All too aware that this was my last shot, I pulled back and decked the sea monster right in its giant blinking left eye. Altie opened her jaws, and my hand popped free.

I fumbled wildly for my regulator and shoved it in my mouth, inhaling the best mouthful of air in the history of ever. Crisis one solved, I used the mask-clearing skills I was now grateful Gramps had insisted I practice over and over on those nights in the pool. Blinking the last of the water out of my eyes, I held my hand up for inspection to the light from my now-crooked headlamp. My scuba glove was mangled and my hand was bleeding from a few small puncture wounds, but all my fingers were still there, and considering I’d just been bitten by a sea monster, I was going to consider it a win.

I turned and swam for shore, my injured hand held tight against my chest.

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CHAPTER THREE

I

actually expected some sympathy when I dragged myself dripping and half frozen out of the river, bleed-

ing hand held piteously against my chest. Which just goes to show that a prolonged lack of oxygen can really do things to your brain.

“Took you long enough,” Curtis said, grabbing the tank off my back.

“You’re kidding,” I said. “And here I thought the empty air tank, impending hypothermia, and mangled hand were just perks of the job.” I gingerly worked my shredded glove off my hand and held it up to see the damage. It had started to swell and turn an impressive purple color, although my skin had a blue tint to it from 17

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the cold so it was kind of hard to tell. My insides felt like one big frozen block of ice.

Curtis glanced at my hand, confirming that it was still there, I guess, and slung my air tank over his shoulder. “You’ll live. Now hustle. The EWs could be back here any minute, and you aren’t exactly inconspicuous.”

I considered telling him that I could give a sea monster’s backside about the eyewitnesses and whether or not I was inconspicuous after my near-death experience, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. I’d spent the majority of my life swallowing the things that I wanted to say, and today wasn’t the day to change that habit.

Sometimes I imagined myself as one of those gigantic dormant volcanos: peaceful on the outside but lots of hot angry lava hidden away on the inside.

I was just turning to give the darkening river one last dirty look when something moved in the bushes off to my left, and I froze. Gramps always said there was nothing worse than an unaccounted-for eyewitness, although after almost dying at the bottom of the river, I found that hard to believe. I waited to see if something moved again. Was my mind playing tricks on me, or had I really just seen a pair of eyes? Should I call Curtis back? If someone was watching, we would have blown the biggest sea monster job Dad had ever been 18

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lucky enough to land. I blinked the last of the water from my eyes and stared at the bushes. A moment later a squirrel came running out of the underbrush, and I sagged in relief. It was just my oxygen-deprived imagination seeing things like blond hair and binoculars. Behind me Curtis let out a shrill whistle to hurry it up, and I turned and jogged after him on numb legs toward our van.

The van was one of those long white, windowless eyesores favored by kidnappers, drug dealers, and my dad, and Curtis already had it running by the time I managed to finally haul myself into the front seat. He’d turned the heat to full blast, and I almost groaned as the hot air hit my frozen skin. Before I had a chance to peel off my wet suit to really get the thawing-out process started, Curtis was gunning the van backward through the trees and away. It was a rule that you never hung around the scene of a hoax in case any EWs decided to come poking around, but I still found myself caught off guard as I was thrown forward, barely avoiding a head-on collision with the front windshield.

“Easy,” I yelped, fumbling to secure my seat belt with my good hand as he took a turn way too fast.

Curtis didn’t respond. His blue eyes held no hint of their usual humor. I knew he’d been nervous about pulling off this hoax without Gramps and Dad, but 19

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I’d underestimated how serious my normally easygoing brother could be when he suddenly found himself in charge. Curtis’s mouth was pressed into a grim line that made him look a lot like our mom used to. Even though she’d been gone for years, I could still remember her wearing that exact expression, usually when Dad was explaining his next hoaxing job or when he’d come home with bullet holes in the back of the van.

A few minutes later Curtis pulled into a gas station and parked. “Let me see your hand,” he said.

“Don’t start acting like you care now that we are away from your precious EWs,” I said as I struggled to remove the wet suit that had welded itself onto my body.

This must be what a snake feels like when it’s trying to shed its skin, I thought as I twisted and flapped my arms in an attempt to free them. Curtis reached across and gave the suit a firm yank that popped my arms free. I breathed a sigh of relief as the van’s heat finally hit my bare skin.

Curtis grabbed my arm and held up my injured hand, examining it like he actually knew what he was doing, which he didn’t.

“What the heck happened?” he said.

“Altie bit me,” I said. “Hard.”

Curtis raised an eyebrow at me. “Altie bit you?” he repeated. “As in, our fake sea monster decoy?”

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“No, I ran into the real thing down there,” I said, cold and wet and irritable. “Don’t be dumb.”

“I’m not being dumb,” Curtis said. “You could have.

Gramps swears he saw the real Altie when he was my age.”

“Right,” I said dryly as I poked gingerly at one of the deeper wounds. If this injury ruined my chances at the Culver photography scholarship, I was going to personally turn that Altie decoy into mulch.

“Flex your fingers,” Curtis commanded. I complied, wincing as the movement made a few of the punctures bleed sluggishly. I could probably still type, I reasoned.

No one said I had to draft all my essays by hand before I typed them up. But my final piece was due to the scholarship board in less than a week, and between getting hauled across the state for the Altie job and now this, it would be a minor miracle if I finished it on time.

Curtis was still examining my hand, and I sighed and raised an eyebrow at him. “Feeling guilty that you cared more about the EWs than your brother’s hand?” I asked, wondering if I should tell him about my moment of panic when I thought I saw someone in the bushes, before deciding against it. What was there to tell? That I saw a squirrel? I was already looking pretty stupid for letting a fake sea monster bite me.

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“Not feeling even a little guilty,” Curtis said, letting go. “Just wondering how the heck you’re going to explain this to Gramps without getting a lecture and his boot up our you-know-whats.”

I groaned. I hadn’t even thought of that yet, although Curtis was exaggerating. Not about the lecture—that was a sure thing—about the boot. The only thing Gramps stuck his boot up was a very tricky Yeti suit he’d had to wear in Tibet once. Now that Curtis had freed my hand, I sat up and started working at the bottom half of the wet suit. The sooner it was off, the sooner I’d be able to feel my frozen butt cheeks again. The temperature gauge on the car said it was fifty degrees outside, and I knew in the big scheme of things that wasn’t that cold, but I was a Georgia boy, and we didn’t do cold.

Not really.

“I wouldn’t take that all the way off if I were you,” Curtis warned.

I glanced up at him and frowned. “Why’s that?”

“Because you’re just going to have to put it back on again in a few hours so we can disassemble Altie and pull the anchors. And there’s nothing worse than putting back on a cold, wet wet suit.”

I held up my mangled hand. “I beg to differ.”

Curtis snorted. “It’s your own stupid fault if Altie bit you.” I stuck my tongue out at him as he climbed 22

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past me into the back of the van to get on his own wet suit and check out the remaining air tanks. Hurt hand or no hurt hand, disassembling Altie was a two-man job. Feeling resigned, I leaned my head back against the battered seat of the van and shut my eyes as I let the top half of my body bake in the glorious blast of the heating vents while my lower half stayed frozen in soggy misery. Man, I hated sea monster jobs.

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