Rita buried her head in her hands. What was she going to do? She lifted her hands and looked at each of the three girls standing in front of her, they were looking to her to know what to do. She wiped the tears off her face and swallowed hard. She stood up taking a deep breathe, making sure the lump in her throat was gone, "We have to find her."
"But how?" asked Serena.
"I don't know exactly," Rita admitted, "but we will. We can't leave her, she's in trouble."
"but she left us remember?" Nixie said, "Maybe she's just fine, we could all be worrying for nothing."
Rita looked down at her hands, carefully choosing her words. "She's family Nixie, you don't leave family and I need to find her so that I can tell her that." Nixie nodded, understanding, she felt that they had all become a family too. "Okay now," Rita clapped her hands together, "let's start looking shall we?" She placed a big book in front of them. It took the girls a few moments to realize Rita meant looking in the book. When they caught up, they all took turns looking through the large book for an answer, some way to help them locate Ava.
"Nothing," Lyla announced as she flipped over the last page in the book, "it doesn't tell us how we can locate a mermaid or a land person."
"Maybe we just have to start looking." Nixie suggested.
"I guess that maybe we can ask if anybody has seen her." Serena suggested. Nobody found this to be a particularly efficient idea but since nobody had a better one, they decided that it was worth a try. Lyla swam down to the café to find Zac to help them. Zac readily agreed to help and they both quickly swam back to Rita's.
Rita handed out shells to each of the girls and Zac, the shells were special, they could be blown and alert the others if they found anything important or if they got into trouble. They were to all split up so that they could cover the most ground.
One by one they each jumped into the water and began searching. But, before Lyla could jump in Zac grabbed her hand. They were the only two left standing by Rita's pool, Zac had planned this so he could talk to Lyla.
"I don't want you going by yourself." He told her.
"I'm fine," Lyla said inserting her independence, "We need to cover as much ground as we can." She moved to jump into the pool but Zac once again grabbed her and held her back.
"No Lyla not this time, we're going to stay together, I want to make sure nothing happens to you. We don't know what happened to Ava, something or someone could have grabbed her." Lyla sighed, she knew Zac wasn't going to give this up. She agreed to searching together, they held hands as they jumped in.