“Hey! Let me out! Let me out!
I waited for two minutes and screamed again. Giving up, I raised the ax, then froze when I heard someone fumbling with the lock. The door opened and I blinked at the sudden brightness.
“Well, hello,” a deep voice greeted me.
“I told you to be careful,” said another voice — Nick’s.
“There could be an ax murderer inside.”
I lowered the ax and stepped into the fresh air.
Nick looked amused. “What were you doing in there?”
“Building a boat.”
He laughed and turned to the man next to him.
“Recognize her, Frank?”
“Barely,” his uncle replied. “You’ve grown up, girl. You’ve grown up real nice. Welcome home, Lauren.”
“Hey, Mr. Frank. It’s good to see you again.”
“Please, just Frank,” he told me. “Don’t make me feel any older than I am.”
I grinned. His face was lined from all the sun he got and his hairline receding, but his eyes were just as bright and observant, and his smile was the same.
“How did you get locked in there?” he asked. “You couldn’t have done it yourself.”
“Nora helped.”
Frank looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“She asked me to get some fishing line so she could tie up her plants.”
“You mean she set you up? She trapped you?”
“Oh, come on, Frank,” Nick said.
“It’s hard to tell with her,” I replied.
Frank shook his head. “Jule has got to get that girl some help.”
“Let’s not get on that subject again,” Nick told his uncle.
“But it’s true, Nick,” I said. “Nora has become really strange.”
“She’s crazy,” Frank declared. “One of these days she’s going to do some real damage.”
“She’s harmless,” Nick insisted.
“Sorry, kid, but she’s out of touch with reality, and that’s dangerous.”
“Well, if she asks me to get this ax,” I said, “I think I’ll say no.”
Frank laughed. I set the tool inside, beneath the light chain, then closed the door. Frank put the padlock on and returned the key to its hook.
“Seriously, Lauren,” he went on, “you need to convince Jule to get Nora to a shrink. Jule’s got to stop acting so irresponsible.”
I winced; I didn’t want to think the godmother I had adored for so long was anything worse than lax. But in relying on Holly to figure out how to pay the bills and denying Nora’s need for help, she was letting them carry burdens that shouldn’t have been theirs.
“Maybe they can’t afford a doctor,” Nick pointed out.
Frank’s cell phone rang.
“If Jule sold that land of hers, she could afford a lot of things” he replied and plucked the phone from his pocket.
“Hello. You got me. Who’s this?. . Well, is it now? How much riverfront?” He gave Nick and me a salute and headed back to his house, talking real estate and prices.
“Still making those deals,” I observed.
“Seven days a week,” Nick replied, walking with me along the edge of the river toward Aunt Jule’s dock. “I’ve been painting his living room — you know Frank, he likes cheap help — and he’s been using every opportunity to talk me into a double major in business and pre-law. According to him, a law degree is better than a million lottery tickets, if you know how to use it.”
“Meaning it’s the road to riches?”
“If you know how to use it. He’s probably afraid I’ll turn out like my parents.”
I laughed. Nick’s father was an artist, his mother, a poet and professor at Chase, the local college. I remembered their house as a cozy shore cottage stuffed with books and smelling of linseed oil and turpentine. Nick’s father and Frank had grown up in that home, the sons of a waterman with very little money. But Frank had gone on to marry a wealthy woman who owned the house and land where he now lived. She had died several years after he’d completed law school. They didn’t have any children and he never remarried. Having become a prosperous lawyer and real estate developer, I guessed the only thing he had in common with Nick’s parents was their love for Nick.
“So are you turning out like them? Do you still write and draw?”
“Yeah, but I don’t do anything personal or profound. My parents take life way too seriously. I like to make people laugh. I had a regular cartoon feature in the school paper and created some for the yearbook. Social satire stuff. I’ve done a couple political cartoons for Wisteria’s paper and just got one accepted in Easton’s, which has a much bigger circulation. Impressed?” he asked, grinning.
“I am,” I replied. I didn’t point out that cartoons can be profound and personal, especially if he was doing political and social satire.
“So explain to me,” Nick said as we walked toward the dock, “how you can ever meet guys at an all-girls school.”
“There aren’t a lot of chances,” I admitted, “but I like it that way.”
“You do? You’re kidding. You have to be.”
“No. We have an all-boys school nearby, and there’s a regular dating exchange going. I take guys to dances, like escorts, but I don’t want to date — not till I’m in college. I don’t want to get hooked like my mother did and become dependent on some guy to make me feel like a person. I’m getting my life and career together first.”
He looked me as if I had just landed from Mars. “That doesn’t mean you can’t date,” he said. “I’m not getting hooked, either, and I’m dating everybody.”
I laughed. “And breaking a few hearts along the way?”
He peeked sideways at me. His lashes were blond. I always knew that, but I had never thought much about his golden lashes, or his green eyes, or the way they brimmed with sunlight and laughter. Now, for some reason, this was all I could think about.
“How can you be so sure,” he asked, “that you’re not breaking hearts by not dating guys?” He turned toward me, blocking my path. “How do you know you’re not breaking my heart?”
His sudden nearness took my breath away. I stepped around him. “I’m not worried about you, just Holly, who’s really looking forward to the prom.”
He thought about that for a moment, then caught up with me. “I’ll always be grateful to Holly,” he said. “If she hadn’t shown mercy, I’d be taking my mother to my last big high school event.”
“What happened to all those others you’re dating?” I asked.
“Well, Kelly invited me to the prom and I said yes. Then Jennifer asked me to the senior formal. And I said yes. I didn’t know they were the same thing.”
I laughed. “Moron!”
“Now neither of them is speaking to me, and their friends, of course, must be loyal. That kind of narrowed the playing field.”
“You got what you deserved,” I said, grinning. “Holly should have said no.”
“Hey, does my stupidity give you the right to bruise a tender heart?”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m bruising a heart made of Play-Doh.”
He laughed, then turned toward the water and whistled sharply.
I had been looking toward the house, my eyes avoiding the dock, but now I saw a dog in the river. He swam toward us, stood chest deep in the water, then came bounding forward.
“Put on your rain slicker!” Nick cried.
