Mystery Man. Diana Palmer

child of Neanderthals.”

      “Did you know that the h in Neanderthals is silent and unpronounced? It was written wrong. It’s a German word,” he continued.

      She held up a hand and her glare grew. “I don’t need lessons in pronunciation. I need peace and quiet!”

      “Okay, I get the message! I’ll go out and fish for sea serpents.”

      She didn’t even glance his way. “Great. If you catch one, yell. I’ll take photos.”

      “It would serve you right if I did.”

      “Yes. With your luck, if you caught one, it would eat you, and I’d spend the rest of my life on this beach with a lantern like Heathcliff roaming the moors.”

      “Wrong storyline. I’m your brother, not your girlfriend.”

      “Picky, picky.”

      He made a face and opened the sliding glass door.

      “Close it!” she yelled. “You’re letting the cold air out!”

      “God forbid!” he gasped. He turned back toward her with bright eyes. “Hey, I just had an idea. Want to know how we could start global cooling? We could have everybody turn on their air conditioners and open all their doors and windows…”

      She threw a legal pad in his general direction. Not being slow on the uptake, he quickly closed the sliding door and walked down the steps of the deck onto the sugar-white sand on the beach.

      He stuck his hands into his pockets and walked toward the house next door, where a skinny young girl sat on the deck, wearing cutoffs with a tank top and an Atlanta Braves hat turned backward. Her bare feet were propped on the rail and she looked out of sorts.

      “Hey!” he called.

      She glared at him.

      “Want to go fishing for sea serpents?” he asked.

      Her eyebrows lifted. She smiled, and her whole face changed. She jumped up and bounced down the steps toward him. She was blond and blue-eyed with a fair complexion.

      “You’re kidding, right?” she asked.

      He shrugged. “Ever seen anyone catch a sea serpent around here?”

      “Not since we got off the plane,” she said.

      “Great!” He grinned at her, making his freckles stand out.

      “Great?”

      “If nobody’s caught it, it’s still out there!” he whispered, gesturing toward the ocean. “Just think of the residuals from it. We could sell it to one of the grocery store tabloids and clean up!”

      Her eyes brightened. “What a neat idea.”

      “Sure it is.” He sighed. “If only I knew how to make one.”

      “A mop,” she ventured. “A dead fish. Parts of some organ meat. A few feathers. A garden hose, some shears and some gray paint.”

      A kindred soul. He was in heaven. “You’re a genius!”

      She grinned back. “My dad really is a genius. He taught me everything I know.” She sighed. “But if we create a hoax, I’ll be grounded for the rest of my life. So I guess I’ll pass, but…”

      He made a face. “I know what you mean. I’d never live it down. My parents would send me to military school.”

      “Would they, really?”

      “They threaten me with it every time I get into trouble. I don’t mind boarding school, but I hate uniforms!”

      “Me, too, unless they’re baseball uniforms. This year is it, this is the third time, this is the charm. This time,” she assured him, “the Braves are going to go all the way!”

      He gave her a long, thoughtful look. “Well, we’ll see.”

      “You a Braves fan?” she asked.

      He hadn’t ever cared much for baseball, but it seemed important to her. “Sure,” he said.

      She chuckled. “My name is Karie.”

      “I’m Kurt.”

      “Nice to meet you.”

      “Same here.”

      They walked along the beach for a minute or two. He stopped and looked back up the deserted stretch of land. “Know where to find a mop?” he asked after a minute.

      Blissfully unaware that her young brother had just doubled his potential for disaster, Janine filled her computer screen with what she hoped was going to be the bare bones of a new mystery. Some books almost wrote themselves. Others were on a par with pulling teeth. This looked like one of those. Her mind was tired. It wanted to shape clouds into white horses and ocean waves into pirate ships.

      “What I need,” she said with a sigh, “is a good dose of fantasy.”

      Sadly there wasn’t anything on television that she wanted to watch. Most of it, she couldn’t understand, because it was in Spanish.

      She turned the set off. The one misery of this trip was missing her favorite weekly science fiction series. Not that she didn’t like all the characters on it; she did. But her favorite was an arrogant, sometimes very devious alien commander. The bad guy. She seemed to be spending all her productive time lately sighing over him instead of doing the work that she got paid to do. That was one reason she’d agreed to come to Cancñaun with her parents and Kurt, to get away from the make-believe man who was ruining her writing career.

      “Enough of this!” she muttered to herself. “Good heavens, you’d think I was back in grammar school, idolizing teachers!”

      She got up and paced the room. She ate some cookies. She typed a little into the computer. Eventually the sun started going down and she noticed that she was short one twelve-year-old boy.

      She looked at her watch. Surely he hadn’t gotten the time confused? It was earlier here than in Bloomington, Indiana, where Kurt lived with their parents. Had he mistaken the time, perhaps forgotten to reset his watch? Janine frowned, hoping that she hadn’t forgotten to set her own. It would be an hour behind Kurt’s, because her apartment in Chicago was in a different time zone from Kurt and her parents’ in Indiana.

      He was in a foreign country and he didn’t speak any more Spanish than she did. Their parents’ facility for languages had escaped them, for the most part. Janine spoke German with some fluency, but not much Spanish. And while English was widely spoken here in the hotels and tourist spots, on the street it was a different story. Many of the local people in Cancñaun still spoke Mayan and considered Spanish, not English, a second language.

      She turned off her computer—it was useless trying to work when she was worried, anyway—and went out to the beach. She found the distinctive tread of Kurt’s sneakers and followed them in the damp sand where the tide hadn’t yet reached. The sun was low on the horizon and the wind was up. There were dark clouds all around. She never forgot the danger of hurricanes here, and even if it was late September, that didn’t mean a hurricane was no longer a possibility.

      She shaded her eyes against the glare of the sun, because she was walking west across the beach, stopping when Kurt’s sneakers were joined by another, smaller pair, with no discernible tread. She knelt down, scowling as she studied the track. She’d worked as a private eye for a couple of years, but any novice would figure out that these were the footprints of a girl, she thought. The girl Kurt had mentioned, perhaps, the one who lived next door. In fact, she was almost in front of that beach house now.

      The roar of the waves had muffled the sound of approaching footsteps. One minute, she was staring down at the tracks. The next, she was looking at a large and highly polished pair of black dress shoes. Tapered neatly around them were the hem of expensive slacks. The legs seemed to go up forever. Far above them, glaring down at her,