The Sleuth Squad (eBook)

The Hidden Current

LaTonya T. Dudley (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
468 Seiten
Publishdrive (Verlag)
979-8-9938512-8-0 (ISBN)

Infos

The world's tides are failing, and only Zoe Harper can hear the Flow's call. With her friends beside her, she journeys into the planet's hidden current to heal the bond between land, sea, and sky-the breathtaking finale to The Harbor Glen Mystery Adventures.

Textauszug

Chapter 1 — The Tide That Wouldn’t Come Back

The morning started wrong. Everyone in Harbor Glen could feel it. The sea had pulled away from the shore overnight, retreating so far that boats sat stranded on wet sand. Starfish glistened in tide pools. Seaweed hung from the pier like green ribbons. And out beyond the rocks, where the water should’ve glittered blue and endless, there was only silence.

Zoe Harper stood barefoot on the pier, her hair tangled by the wind. The compass around her neck felt heavy and cold. She’d never known the sea to be still. Even in the quietest dawns, there was always motion — a pulse. Now there was nothing.

Milo whimpered beside her, nose pressed toward the horizon.

“Yeah,” Zoe murmured. “I hear it too.”

Behind her, Leo scrambled down the dune, arms full of newspapers. “They’re calling it the Receding Tide,” he said breathlessly. “It’s not just here — it’s everywhere. Japan, Alaska, Chile — the oceans are… backing up.”

Amira arrived next, her backpack full of sensors and her expression tight. “It’s the Flow,” she said before anyone asked. “I ran comparisons last night. The pattern inverted. It’s not sending energy outward anymore. It’s drawing it in.”

Zoe’s stomach turned cold. “Drawing it into what?”

Amira met her eyes. “The planet.”

Dr. Reyes came jogging down the pier, radio in hand. “Tidal sensors show the same anomaly. Whatever’s happening is global, and it started here — at Harbor Glen.”

Everyone stared out at the distant line where the water had stopped retreating.

For a long time, no one spoke.

Then the sea shuddered.

It wasn’t a wave, exactly — more like a heartbeat that made the sand tremble. A deep, low note rolled across the shore, vibrating through every board beneath their feet. The compass in Zoe’s hand flickered once and went dark.

Leo swallowed. “I vote we call that a bad sign.”

Zoe nodded. “The Flow’s not just retreating. It’s reversing.”

The note came again — deeper this time, echoing off the cliffs.

And beneath the sound, Zoe thought she heard words.

Not from above. From below.

“The memory unspools.”

Even before sunrise, the Harbor Glen pier hums with the strange electricity of bad weather and historic days. Zoe stands at the threshold of the wood, pale toes lined up along the final plank of the boardwalk, Milo’s muzzle pressed cold and damp against her calf. The dog’s ears are back, his tail lowered—not in fear, exactly, but as if bracing for something large and impolite to move through him. Salt air twines Zoe’s braid into knots, stinging any skin not shielded by her navy windbreaker. She pulls the hood up, though it does nothing to block the whistle of wind or the rattling hush of what’s left of the sea.

Most mornings, Leo would already be out at the end of the pier, hands sticky with bait, boots one misstep from disaster. Today he’s hunched halfway down, boots caked in black mud, sleeves shoved to the elbows as he and his father wrestle the lobster pots over onto the exposed mudflat. The water’s edge isn’t where it should be. Instead of a gentle lap against the pilings, there’s a dragging sound like carpet torn from the floor. The harbor drains by degrees: exposing rocks and bottle shards, stranding dinghies at absurd angles, uncovering mysteries best left buried. No tide chart in living memory has ever predicted this—yet Leo, soaking wet and flushed with cold, grins like he’s just unlocked a new video game level. “You seeing this?” he calls up, voice pitching over the distance. “It’s gone full Atlantis out here!”

Amira crouches at the third piling from shore, the green light of her custom-built sensor flickering across her glasses. She’s so intent on calibrating the readout that she doesn’t flinch when a knot of gulls launches overhead, shrieking disapproval at their disarranged kingdom. “Numbers don’t make sense,” Amira mutters, not for the first or even tenth time this morning. “Temperature spike, drop in salinity, then nothing at all. It’s not even on the scale.” Her breath smokes out, barely visible in the clammy air. She taps furiously at her screen, recalibrates, checks again. Milo abandons Zoe for Amira, nudging under her arm, paws braced against the slick wood. When Amira finally looks up, her mouth forms a tight line, more math than smile. “We’re in the trough between two impossible waves.”

Zoe nods, though she’s not sure what that means, precisely. Her own instrument is less scientific but, lately, more reliable than weather apps or logic. She fishes her grandmother’s brass compass from the front pocket of her jeans, thumbs off the cloth cover. The needle—normally steady and true, regardless of battery life or cloud cover—spins like a bug trapped under glass, then jerks hard left. She holds it level, breathless, half-expecting it to point to the sky or even herself. Instead, it spins up, freezes, and dies, the delicate pointer locked in place as if magnetized by invisible hand.

Zoe shuts the lid with a soft snap, the kind her mother would use to close an argument. She pockets the dead compass and scans the horizon, searching for movement. The surface of the exposed seabed is spongy and black, streaked with pale salt lines and the shuddering bodies of crabs too confused or tired to flee. The last working tide marker—an ancient, sun-bleached post with three hand-carved notches—stands at least two meters clear of any water. Behind it, the remaining sea seems an afterthought, a blue bruise pressed flat against the low sky.

By the time the others join her at the edge of the pier, Zoe’s feet are numb from cold but she refuses to put her shoes back on. The wood feels alive, vibrating through the arches of her feet with a low rhythmic pulse. She wonders if Amira’s instruments can read that—whatever it is, it’s older and less polite than the water. Leo slaps the rail, splatters a few crusty spots of mud, and flops down to sit cross-legged. “This is insane,” he says, less giddy now. “Shouldn’t we, I dunno, get to higher ground? Is this, like, what comes before tsunamis?”

Amira shakes her head, wiping mud onto the hem of her windbreaker. “No sign of any surge. It’s not a retreat-before-the-wave thing. It’s like the water is just… leaving.” She shoves her glasses up her nose, stares out. “And it’s happening everywhere. My networked sensors in Morocco, the Chilean coast, even the Aral Sea—they all just went dark.” Her finger trembles slightly as she swipes through the data, but she covers it by scrolling faster.

Milo whines, the sound rising with each pulse that comes through the pier. It’s subtle but relentless—a heartbeat, only not quite human, and too deep for the dog’s body. “He feels it too,” Zoe says. “Like it’s—” She hesitates, then: “—pulling, not just away, but in. Like the whole planet’s holding its breath.” She doesn’t add that her own lungs feel tight and shallow, as if she’s breathing through layers of static.

No one says anything for a moment. Then, from the far end of the pier, footsteps: heavy, confident, not the shuffle of fishermen or the light skip of town kids playing hooky. Dr. Reyes approaches with a rectangular satchel in one hand and a battered radio unit in the other, antenna extended to the length of her own arm. She stops just shy of the Squad’s circle, studies the ground as if searching for the most stable spot. “We are officially not alone,” Reyes says, voice pitched low. “Every instrument on the Artemis is picking up identical anomalies. And now I’m getting reports from the Navy—submarines running aground, shipping routes collapsed. Whatever this is, it’s not regional.”

Leo’s face goes serious, jaw twitching in the effort to process. “Are we talking end-of-days or just, y’know, super weird low tide?” His words float up, forced light, but his hands grip the splintered railing white-knuckled.

Reyes clicks on her radio, a crackle of static hissing from the speaker. “Global Monitoring Network. Repeat: global. All aquatic signals converging on…” She glances at Zoe, as if the answer is written on her face. “Converging on here.”

Amira’s eyes go wide. “Harbor Glen is the epicenter?”

Reyes nods, adjusting the gain on her receiver. “More specifically, the pier and lighthouse are the only points in the northern hemisphere where the signal is still readable. Everything else is—” She trails off, but the implication is clear.

Zoe tugs at the string of her windbreaker, scanning the faces of her friends. She expects panic, or at least a few creative swears, but there’s only a kind of silent, resigned awe. Like they’re standing at the event horizon of a new law of nature. “Do we do something?” she asks. “Or just… watch?”

“Both,” Reyes says. “Right now, the best thing is to observe and record. The Artemis will be on station, but—” She looks back at the drained sea, brow furrowed. “You three are the best sensors I’ve got. Stay sharp.”

Zoe feels a wild urge to laugh, to ask if Reyes means her personally or the dying compass in her pocket, but the scientist is already absorbed in her own instruments. Zoe pops the lid again, stares down at the needle. It’s stone still, even as a chill wind tears down the length of the pier. She holds it out for Milo, who sniffs the brass case, then licks it once with a slow, thoughtful swipe.

Amira’s sensor warbles, then emits a long, descending tone. “Signal’s gone,” she says. “The field just…...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 11.11.2025
• Reihe/Serie: Harbor Glen Mystery Adventures
• Illustrationen: Ai generated
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Kinder- / Jugendbuch ► Bilderbücher ► Religiöse Bilderbücher
• Schlagworte: environmental mystery • final book series • flow of life • hidden current • ocean fantasy
• ISBN-13: 979-8-9938512-8-0 / 9798993851280