Page 28 of Reckless

I hummed.

“Red Joe says there’s a man who might want to build a hotel. A hotel.”

I hummed again. If Mavis was looking for an ally at the council meeting, she could keep looking. She was always complaining about the feral goats getting into her garden and eating everything, telling the whole island they were mine. They weren’t. Mine were stabled at night when the ferals liked to raid the gardens in town, and Mavis knew it. Kat always said that Mavis wasn’t happy without something to complain about, and she was probably right. I supposed everyone was just looking for some way to feel good.

I hauled the second churn in and wondered what Mavis would say about mine, if she knew. It would sure as shit give her something to talk about apart from goats.

“Did you hear about the new doctor?” Mavis asked me, her eyes bright with delight at sharing some new gossip.

I shook my head, my stomach clenching. Had someone found out about him and me? If anyone could, it was Mavis.

“Well, he’s hired someone to help around the place, hasn’t he? Cleaning and whatnot.” She pursed her lips disapprovingly, but couldn’t hide the sparkle in her eyes. “And it’s Button John Barnes!”

“Jesus,” I said. I didn’t say much, usually, but Button John? Hadn’t anyone warned Alastair?

Mavis nodded. “Young Harry Barnes is running the book. Round Robbie Hooper has twenty dollars on Button John starting a fire and burning the old mill house down, and Buzzy Pete’s gone for electrocution, which if you ask me is an unfair advantage since he knows the state of the wiring.”

I felt a pang of sympathy for Button John, with the whole island betting against him, but he had the track record for it. And at least he seemed to take his failures in his cheerful stride, which was more than you could say for me.

“Maybe he’ll do fine,” I said with a shrug.

Mavis snorted. “And maybe pigs will fly.”

When I was finished delivering the milk, Gerty and I headed back out of the village. The sun warmed my shoulders, and I shrugged my jacket off. I dozed on the way back to the farm—I didn’t need to use the brake going uphill, and Gerty knew the way. I thought about Newcastle, and about Alastair, and whether it was any business of his what I did there. He’d offered himself as a sort of alternative to the rough treatment I liked to get in that club on the mainland, but it didn’t mean anything. At least, I figured it didn’t, but what the hell did I know? This thing with Alastair, whatever it was, wasn’t like anything I’d experienced before. I thought of that time at McDonald’s in Newcastle when the guy had laughed at me because I didn’t know how to work the touchscreen menu. But how was anyone supposed to know anything unless someone explained it to them? And Alastair hadn’t explained anything much at all. Maybe, like the guy who’d laughed about the cheeseburger, he thought it was the sort of thing that everyone just knew. But I didn’t. There was a whole world full of shit I didn’t know, starting with what the fuck I even wanted.

If Alastair could tell me that, he’d be miles ahead of me.

I spent the day working around the farm. One of the chicken pens needed repairing because the wire had come away from the posts. There were no real predators on Dauntless, but chooks weren’t the smartest birds, and if any dogs turned up and gave them a fright, they’d take forever to round up again. I sorted out the pen, gently nudging curious chooks away with the toe of my boot when they tried to supervise, and then went to the vegetable garden to fix one of the trellises that had fallen over in the last storm. My thoughts kept drifting to the mainland, and then back across the waves to Dauntless and Alastair.

In the afternoon, Buzzy Pete trotted up to the house like one of Elias Dinmore’s dogs, and I gave Kat a look and said, “I’m going into the village.”

She looked too flustered to ask me why.

Dusk fell as I walked down into the village. When I made my way to the harbour, the lights were on at the Tourist Information Centre, and I remembered Mavis had said there was a council meeting tonight. I didn’t put much stock in the idea of someone wanting to build a hotel here on Dauntless—that idea had been floating around since Short Clarry was mayor and nothing had ever come of it—and I wasn’t really curious enough to go inside and find out. But the meeting must have been ending as I walked past, because people began to spill outside onto the street.

“Robbie,” Young Harry Barnes said as he spotted me. He took a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, looked at them, then put them back.

I nodded and jammed my hands in my pockets.

“Oh, hi, Robbie,” said Eddie Hawthorne, a notebook tucked under his arm. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Did you come down for the meeting? We’ve just finished.”

“Nah,” I said.

Red Joe Nesmith strode out behind him. He nodded at me. “Robbie.”

I nodded back.

Red Joe was the mayor. He hadn’t wanted to be, but nobody else had put their name in, so he got voted in. He hadn’t put his name in either, but he was a Nesmith, so someone had done it for him. The Nesmiths had been in charge on Dauntless, more or less, since the mutiny over two hundred years ago. It was just the way things were.

“I appreciate that, Mavis,” the copper, Dominic, said as he stepped outside the door with Mavis right on his tail, “but it’s not a police matter. I can’t enforce local laws. If you’ve got a problem with one of Elias Dinmore’s dogs coming into your shop, that’s for the council to deal with.”

Of course Mavis wasn’t happy. “It’s stealing my chips! That’s theft. If you can’t do something about theft, what’s the good of you?”

Dominic knew better than to laugh in her face. He kept his expression serious. “Unfortunately, dogs can’t be held criminally responsible for shoplifting. A roaming dog is a council issue. You need to talk to Red Joe, not me.”

Red Joe let out a long sigh as Mavis turned her attention to him, and Dominic shot him an apologetic look and hurried away.

Eddie beamed and opened his notebook.