Evie’s voice calls out as she jogs up behind me, “Stop! Wait. I was only kidding, cuz. Come back—you don’t have to, uh, get my lunch. We can take a break together when Anna clocks in and takes over the register.”
Heart racing, I glance at her, then out the window, where the Karrases are driving away. Oh God. I wish Evie wouldn’t have stopped me … and I’m so thankful she did.
Coward. Liar. Wimp.
I’m a mess. I’m a great big ball of anxiety and anguish. This is all so screwed up.
Mom doesn’t seem to notice. Her face softens as she says, “Evie’s right. The town will be talking about the broken window, and even if you didn’t do it, you were there. Rumors are going to fly about you and Lucky, so maybe it’s best you stick around the shop and lay low. Just for a couple of days, until this whole thing dies down.”
“Will it die down?”
“Sure,” Evie says.
“Absolutely,” Mom agrees, nodding enthusiastically.
So why don’t I believe them?
NICK’S BOATYARD: A hand-painted warehouse sign hangs over the office doors of a harbor-front business. The two-story brick building was once a historical dry dock to repair cargo ships sailing from Canada and Europe in the early 1800s.(Personal photo/Josephine Saint-Martin)
Chapter 6
Evie and Mom have severely underestimated this town’s interest in a broken window, because the hubbub over my crime doesn’t quote, unquote die down.
In fact, it’s all anyone talks about online for several days.
Photos of the broken window are posted to the Town Crier, Beauty’s social media account for town-related activities, tourism, and community-interest items—which this is, apparently. The pictures are recaptioned and spread around by a bunch of kids from Beauty High, and next thing I know, it’s being memed and used as ammunition against the Goldens from the private academy, then volleyed back and forth as both a symbol of smashing privilege on one side and proof of blue-collar delinquency on the other, and now I’ve somehow started a low-key class war?
Only, I’m not in the middle of it.
Lucky is.
This is going to send me to an early grave. I’m bad at lying,bad at secrets, and I’m dying to know what happened with Lucky and the arraignment. So after several queasy, restless nights of no sleep—and Evie being no help whatsoever, telling me over and over that it’s too late to confess—I make up my mind to sneak away from the bookshop and talk to Lucky about this whole sordid debacle.
Unfortunately, the only time I ever see his red motorcycle there is when I’m working at the bookshop, and escaping my shift at Siren’s Book Nook takes some work, but Evie lets me know when Mom heads out to drop off the shop’s daily bank deposit—which always takes extra-long, because of her whole superstitious aversion to Lamplighter Lane.
That’s my moment.
After borrowing a floppy sunhat from Evie and a pair of big, dark sunglasses that practically swallow my face, I make a beeline outside and wait for a break in the traffic to jog across the street. The boatyard’s office window has the blinds cracked, and it’s hard for me to see inside, but I think I spy Lucky’s mother at a big desk and one of several mechanics that work for the Karrases. No Lucky, though.
I slink down the sidewalk and head into the side alleyway that leads around to the boat docks and the back of the building, where a couple of large work bays are open. A few small speedboats are inside the bays—there’s a welder working in one—and the bigger boats are lifted by a crane into a drydock area off a private pier.
You can see the entire harbor back here, crystal clear and robin’s egg blue, and it’s so startlingly pretty, with the sun glinting off thewaves and the wind blowing through my hair, that I can almost pretend that nothing’s wrong.
Shooing away seagulls, I scan the concrete boatyard for either Lucky’s dad, Nick, who’d I’d like to avoid, or Lucky, but I see neither Karras. Not until I glance up and spot a pair of crossed legs wearing scuffed black boots. My nerves get a little jangly at the sight of them.
Lucky’s lounging on the narrow sundeck of a small boat that’s been pulled up onto the concrete and is now parked on wooden blocks like an old car that doesn’t run. Making sure no one is looking my way, I approach a rolling ladder at the base of the boat. “Psst. Hey.”
He peers down at me over the deck railing, a purple lollipop on a white stick tucked behind one ear. He’s wearing a navy button-up mechanic’s shirt with his name embroidered in a vintage font on the pocket next to a number thirteen, and he looks startled to see me at first—but that vanishes in a blink.
“You look so familiar,” he says, voice full of sarcasm. “I mean, I can tell from your big hat and glasses that you’re hiding from the paparazzi, but I can’t quite place your face … ?”
I frown. “Can we talk? Please?”
“Josie Saint-Martin. The poor, shy little lamb who got hauled into jail with the big, bad wolf by pure accident. What a scandal. However did she get caught up in that? He probably roped her into it against her will. Sounds like something nefarious and sexy went down.”
“What? That’s not what people are saying!”
Is it … ?
