Chapter 1

The purple octopus floating to my right pointed an orange cupped tentacle towards the school of mermaids swimming towards me. “Here comes your escort to our kingdom.”
The silver dolphins who were towing me through the water stopped and turned me over to my new guardians.
I had to get to the kingdom of Poseidon before my air ran out. I had to learn something important from him and I was running out of time.
The mermaids closed around me in a protective phalanx. We moved through the water at supersonic speed. Finally, we arrived at a beautiful Ivory castle. The walls were made from the insides of oyster shells and the doorknobs of giant pearls. There were giant vases lined up along the path to the door. They were amphorae.
A large manatee guarded the door. It looked like a mastiff dog guarding the front of the castle. Like a dog, the manatee swam over and licked my face. Its tongue was like a warm cloth going over my face. The mermaids shook me. “Molly, can you hear me?”
Hear them? They weren’t talking! I was really confused. Where was my dad? Why was I diving alone? What was it I had to learn from Poseidon? Nothing made any sense.
The manatee was licking my face harder now and slapping me gently with a flipper. The mermaids were now shaking me so hard that my head felt like it was going to fall off my shoulders.
“Molly, wake up. Come on, girl. I need you to focus. Wake up!”
I wasn’t sleeping; I was diving with the pretty mermaids, dolphins, and the octopus.
Slowly, the undersea scene faded away. I tried to hold on to it because I wanted to know what Poseidon was going to tell me, but my eyes fluttered open before I could catch hold of the scene.
***
Grainne was slobbering all over my face and my dad was slapping me, trying to wake me up.
“What happened?” My head hurt a little, and I was really groggy.
My mom helped me to sit up. There was a police car with flashing lights parked next to the van we’d seen following us. The police had two men in handcuffs splayed out over the hood of the cruiser. It was the guy who had grabbed me and the one we’d seen him with at the ruins!
I remember now. I had walked around the back of the dive shop, and someone had grabbed me. I’d felt an arm go across my throat and then something pinched my arm. The next thing I remembered was Grainne licking my face.
Oh, my gosh! They had tried to kidnap me!
The police chief was there again. The poor guy had been making it a habit to respond to calls for him to rescue us. I was really grateful.
“Apparently, these guys tried to grab you and force you into the van. It looks like they injected you with a drug to knock you out. I was sitting on the deck writing when Grainne knocked over her x-pen and ran full throttle toward the dive shop. I tried to follow her, but she got here way before I did. When I got here, she had one guy trapped in his van and the other one, she had down on the ground, sitting on his back. She was growling, and she bared her teeth. I don’t think I would have messed with her.” Dad rubbed my back while he explained just what was going on.
The police chief interrupted. “Your dad called me. I was just coming from Pepe’s house, so I was only a few yards away. I came running over with Pepe. We grabbed the two men while your father called off your dog. A police car came, and we cuffed both men. You woke up shortly afterward. The two men kept yelling something about how they just wanted the book. What book?”
Dad, Mom, and I looked at each other. It was time to tell the truth.
We explained to him how we found the book at Hermanos Graham. Dad told him he had scared off these same two when they showed up in the middle of the night to dig up the book. He then explained we had intended to find the diamonds and turn them over to whomever the men had stolen them from. We also told him that we’d found the empty bag and assumed these two had already found the diamonds. Then we threw the book away. If they were still looking for the book though, that must mean they hadn’t been the ones to dig up the diamonds after all. Now we had a new mystery. Who actually had the diamonds now?
“What’s going on here?”
Uh oh, it was our nosy neighbor, Roger. He and his wife Sandy hadn’t been here when we first arrived. Our neighbor Helen told us the two lived half the year in Barrow, Alaska, and half the year at Paamul. They had just gotten back a few days before Christmas. They’d not been back for more than a few hours when Roger came over yelling at my dad because we had a dog. Roger hates dogs.
Dad calmly explained to him that Grainne was my service dog, and she was very quiet. She rarely sang the song of her people. When she did, we just told her to be quiet, and she was. Roger didn’t care; he went to the front office to have us moved. Management said, “no way.” They told Roger he could move if the dog bothered him so much. We’d had strained relations ever since.
I looked around. We had drawn quite a crowd. Just about everybody living on the dive shop side of the park had come to see what all the excitement was about. Some from our side of the park were there, too. I saw Moonie and Sunlight. They looked a little different… not so much like hippies. He had his hair pulled back into a ponytail, and she was wearing a normal dress.
It looked like the police chief didn’t like Roger much, either. He rolled his eyes when Roger showed up. He didn’t even try to hide his eye roll. I’d love to hear the story behind that!
“These men tried to kidnap this young seǹorita here. We captured them, and are hauling them off to jail.” The chief shoved the men into the back of the police car and told his men to take them to the police station in Playa del Carmen.
After the kidnappers and police left, the crowd broke up quickly.
The police chief stayed for a few minutes more. “Seǹor O‘Hare, I’m going to want to talk to you a little more about those diamonds and this book that everyone was talking about. I’ll be out to your bus sometime tomorrow to take a statement.” With that, he got into his car and left.
My head still hurt. I guess it was left over from whatever drug they stuck me with.
“Hey, I just realized, Grainne is a hero again. You’re always saving one of us, aren’t you?” I grabbed her around the neck and gave her a big kiss. Who knows what those men might have done to me if my dog hadn’t come to the rescue?

Our hippie dippy neighbors were sitting on our deck when we got back to the bus. He was drinking a beer, and she had something orange in her glass. My parents looked like they were going to explode. Normally, my parents are very hospitable people. They invite people to eat with us and they give a lot to charity. However, this was not the time for anyone to impose on us. Two men had almost kidnapped me.
“Hey man, is your kid ok?”
Dad answered through gritted teeth. “We don’t know yet. We think she’s fine, but we need to get her inside to check her over and make sure there aren’t any lasting side effects from the drug they gave her.”
Mom shooed me towards the bus door. She was going to let my dad handle our other nosy neighbors. Between Roger and the hippie dippy twins, we had quite a few busybodies around. Today was just not a day where we wanted to deal with them.

The drug wore off quickly, and I felt normal within an hour of waking up. People kept stopping by to ask if I was ok. I sat out on the deck, so we didn’t have knocks on the door every five minutes. I didn’t want to seem ungrateful, but it got old after a while.
We ate supper at home. Mom cooked a light meal. Though I felt better, my stomach still didn’t feel as if I could handle a big meal.
Afterwards, I helped Mom clean up, and we just sat down to relax. The Police Chief’s car pulled up in front of our bus. We thought he was coming the next morning. That was what he’d said a few hours ago.
“Hey folks, I know I said I’d be back in the morning, but I had to come back tonight to let you know what we got out of those two desperados.”
“Desperados?” Mom’s face blanched.
“I’m sorry, Señora, I didn’t mean to upset you. I use that term loosely. They think they’re big-time diamond thieves, but they don’t know anything about those diamonds. They found the book they’ve been trying to get back from you in a Pemex bathroom in Tampico. They buried it at the campsite where you found it until they could gather the money to go looking for the diamonds. When they got the book, the first page was readable, so they knew the book told them which ruins to go to. They just forgot the name.” The police chief laughed. “They were pretty incompetent diamond thieves, if you ask me. A dog and a little girl bested them. They intended to kidnap your daughter and hold her for the book as ransom. They didn’t know someone had already dug up the diamonds.”
“I’m glad the search for those stupid gems is over. It was becoming too dangerous. Before you know it, someone could have been seriously hurt. It’s bad enough that they tried to kidnap Molly! We shouldn’t have ever gotten involved with something so dangerous!” She gave a hard look at my dad and me.
“My Wife is right. I wish I’d never gotten involved. We should have turned the book over to the police as soon as we found it. I guess my daughter and I had visions of being heroes and returning the diamonds to their rightful owners.” Dad looked shamefaced, like a little boy caught misbehaving.
“Iz think youz heroez!” Grainne was smiling at my dad. “He camed and followed da Grainne and wuz ready to beatz dem up when he seed dat you wuz layin on da ground. I thought you wuz dead. I wuz ready to eat dem!”
I had to talk to her silently, since the police chief was still there. “I think you are a hero. If it hadn’t been for you, those men might have thrown me in the van. Thank you, my sweet girl.” I gave her a scratch behind the ears. She was going to get lots of extra treats from now on!
After telling my parents that he would send a police officer to take their written statements in the morning, the chief left.
I was sitting in a hammock chair facing the back of the deck and the beach. I noticed a shadow on the sand, around the corner of the bus. I saw someone move. I motioned to my dad to look quickly and find out who was eavesdropping on their conversation with the chief.
Dad moved silently and jumped off the deck to confront the eavesdropper. Our next-door neighbor, Moonie, was raking the sand behind our bus and his RV.
“What are you doing back here?” Dad demanded.
“Roger kicked up the sand back here when he took off in his truck, before you guys got here from bringing your daughter back. I was just straightening it out.”
“You don’t need to rake behind us. Thank you, but I can take care of our campsite.” Dad was pretty gruff. You could tell he didn’t like the man and was not happy to have him skulking around behind our bus. He knew our neighbor had been eavesdropping.