Sullivan left, and a momentary silence fell over the three of us. “Well, I thought we’d make homemade pizza for dinner. I have some games, and Project Runway is booted up, and, uh...we could go for a canoe ride, if you want.”
“A canoe ride?” Poe said. “Are you serious? I’ll pass.”
“Um, me, too,” Audrey said. “Maybe another time. The mosquitoes are fierce this time of day.”
“Good point,” I said. “Well, who likes what on pizza?”
“Pizza’s too fattening,” Poe said, dropping her eyes to her phone to text her mysterious friends from Seattle.
Great. There was no way Audrey would eat pizza if Poe the Gazelle had just deemed it fattening. My jaw tightened with anger at my niece.
“I like tomatoes and sausage,” Audrey said, and my head whipped around at her.
“Great!” I said. “Me, too. How do you feel about mushrooms?”
“Love them.”
“Poe, why don’t you make a salad?”
“No, thanks.”
“Let me rephrase. Poe, please make the salad. Everything’s in the fridge.”
With a martyred sigh and a long, long pause, Poe stood up, shrugged out of her leather jacket to reveal her tank top and delicate shoulder blades. There was a fresh tattoo on her back—angel wings, the perfect skin still red from the needle.
I wanted to hug her, wash her face and send her to bed.
“What can I do?” Audrey asked, and I gave her plates to set the table.
She chattered sweetly as we worked, talking about her job at the boatyard, how she loved to fish, what she might do this summer. “My dad said we could go somewhere for a long weekend,” she said. “I kind of want to go to a big city, since I’ve only been to Boston a few times. Maybe New York. Or, um, Seattle? I’ve heard it’s cool out there.”
We both waited for Poe to respond. She didn’t, just cut up scallions as if the knife weighed forty pounds.
“Seattle’s beautiful,” I said.
“Oh, are you an expert because you’ve been there three times?” Poe asked.
“Five, and yes. Audrey, the Space Needle is—”
“For idiot tourists,” Poe said.
“—weird looking from the outside, but you can eat up in the high part, and the view is fantastic. The food there is great. I mean, I’ve never had a bad meal in Seattle. Salmon and crab in everything, fresh seafood, I mean, not that we don’t have that here. But—”
“Can we change the subject?” Poe asked.
“Sure,” Audrey said. “What would you like to talk about?” She smiled at my niece, who returned with a pained look.
“I don’t know, Audrey,” Poe said. “How about Girl Scouts? You must be a Girl Scout, right?”
“Not anymore,” Audrey said. “But it was pretty fun while it lasted.”
Touché, Poe. Audrey would not let her good mood fade, and God bless her for it.
So the evening went. Audrey, lovely but a little nervous, as if I’d send her home if she were anything but Little Miss Perky. Poe, on the other hand, stayed determinedly miserable. We played Apples to Apples, watched Project Runway, ate food. Well, Audrey and I did, though I noticed Audrey kept looking at the pizza after eating her one slice. Poe chewed a piece of spinach from the salad and left everything else on her plate.
By the time I announced it was bedtime (11:30 p.m., a respectably late enough hour, I thought), I was exhausted. I showed them to their rooms and told them to sleep well. Poe closed her door immediately.
“Sorry about her,” I whispered.
“I heard that,” Poe said.
“She speaks!” I said. “Sleep well, honey.” No response. “You, too, Audrey.”
“Thank you so much for having me,” she said. “I’ve never slept on a houseboat before.” She gave me an impulsive hug, then, blushing, went up to her loft.
I felt guilty for liking her a hundred times more than I liked Poe. “Come on, Boomerang,” I said to my dog. “One more pee, and you can come to bed.”
I let my dog out and walked down the dock a few paces as Boomer loped into the woods to sniff and do his business.
The stars were a glittering swipe over the cove tonight. No wind, the slight, almost-unnoticeable bob of the dock as the tide slipped in. The pine trees were silhouetted in black against the dark plum of the sky, and I breathed in deeply, imagining the island air scrubbing my city lungs clean. Though I loved Boston, it did have some pretty nasty smells—the exhaust of belching trucks on the Mass Pike and the swampy, human-excrement smell from the Back Bay; the Orange Line, which always smelled like urine; the sulfuric smell of North Station in winter.
Here, the air was so pure you could feel your lungs turning pink.
“Come on, Boomer,” I called softly, in case the girls were already sleeping. My dog loped obediently onto the dock. “Good boy,” I said, scratching his head. “Thank you, good boy.”
Just as I turned to open the door, I saw something.
A tiny light from the woods glowed orange, then faded.
Someone was out there, smoking a cigarette. As soon as I thought it, I could smell the smoke. The orange glowed again as the person took another drag.
Boomer growled.
I didn’t own this land. This wasn’t my property, so I couldn’t call for trespassing. I did, however, go inside, then locked the doors and closed all the windows and pulled all the shades. Checked on the girls, who were both asleep.
I texted Sullivan. Someone is smoking in the woods on the north side of my dock.
The phone screen showed three dots waving reassuringly. He was awake and he was answering.
Lock the doors.
Me: Already done.
Sullivan: I’ll call my brother right now.
Then I went to my room and took out my Smith & Wesson 1911, went back to the living room and waited, staring at the door.
If someone came in—if Luke Fletcher came in—would I shoot him? Kill him with his niece upstairs? Could I actually pull the trigger? Would it be enough that I was here with a big dog and a gun, or would I have to fire? I could shoot him in the leg. I didn’t want to kill him.
The other guy—my personal terrorist—yeah. I might kill him. But he didn’t know I was here. There was no public record that had me moving here to Scupper. Was there? My rental agreement? Was that public information?
A second later, my phone rang, and I jumped like I’d been stabbed. “Hello?”
“It’s Sullivan.”
“Hi.”
“Luke said he was taking a walk in the woods. Didn’t mean to scare you.”
I took a breath, aware that my heart was thudding. “Right.”
“I told him to leave you alone and go back to the boatyard.”
My shoulders dropped four inches with relief. “Thanks, Sully.”
“Excuse me?”
“Thank you.”
There was a pause. “You want me to swing by?”
I did.
But I also remembered lying on the street, the Beantown Bug Killers mascot looming over me, thinking I wasn’t the person I wanted to be, and now my chance was over.
I cleared my throat. “No, I’m fine. I’ll see you tomorrow. Hey, I have to take the ferry to Boston...why don’t I drop Audrey home on my way?”
Another pause that made me wonder if he heard me clearly. “No, she can walk to the boatyard,” he said. “She’s working there tomorrow.”