Hoax for Hire

By Laura Martin

Goonies meets the humor and heart of Gordon Korman in this new adventure full of nonstop action and spot-on humor from the critically acclaimed author of Float.

The McNeil family has always been professional hoaxers—tricking bystanders into believing they’re seeing legendary creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster.

Unlike the rest of his family, twelve-year-old Grayson hates hoaxing and wants nothing to do with the business—even when the McNeils land a huge job and must pull off four sea monster hoaxes in a week.

But when things go disastrously wrong and Dad and Gramps go missing, Grayson and his brother, Curtis, are the only people who can finish the job and save their family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Aug 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9780062803825

Laura Martin

Laura Martin is a mom by day and a middle grade author by night, although in her heart she will always be a seventh-grade language arts teacher. She lives in the Indianapolis area with her family. You can connect with her on Instagram @LauraMartinBooks or at lauramartinbooks.com.

Book preview

Chapter One

"Should 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.

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 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.

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 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 wild-goose chases while simultaneously funding their own hunts. They staged sightings, made footprints in mud, 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 ex-wives 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 cryptid-hunting 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 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.

Chapter Two

Within 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 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.

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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