“Remington, that’s a pathetic excuse,” Mr. Moore responded icily. Julianne held her breath, waiting for Remi’s response. She couldn’t help but feel that Mr.
Moore was being unduly harsh—it wasn’t like he’d walked in and found Remi playing Wii on the job. He was cleaning up after a work accident and heading back to his crew. Clearly there was some precedent for this sort of thing; why else would these trailers include showers in their bathrooms?
“I’m sorry you feel that way, sir,” Remi replied.
Julianne felt herself soften, detecting the tiny tremble in his voice.
“Listen, Remington,” Mr. Moore continued. “It’s about time you grew up and learned to handle responsibility. How am I going to trust you to take over my business when you can’t stay on top of one project crew?”
“But—” Remi began to protest.
“But nothing.” His father charged on. “Are you on the site supervising your crew, or are you hiding in this trailer like some spoiled celebrity?”
Julianne gasped at Mr. Moore’s nastiness and clapped her hand over her open mouth. She hoped that the sound was muffled by the wall of the trailer. She felt the sting of recognition as Mr. Moore continued to lay into Remi—after all of her faux pas on the site over the past few weeks, she knew all too well what it felt like to get called out for an innocent mistake.
“You can’t expect your crew to respect you,” Mr.
Moore concluded solemnly, “until you give them a reason. I challenge you to earn their respect, Remington.
And mine.”
“Yes, sir,” Remi answered. Julianne was shocked that Remi wasn’t fighting back—anyone could see how well-respected he was around the site. Guys two and three times his age, who had been in this business longer than Julianne had been alive, asked Remi’s opinion on pretty much everything. The newbies looked up to him as an authority. Hell, she’d hoped against hope that he would just disappear into thin air, but even Julianne had to respect the job Remi did. He was that good. And, what’s more, Julianne noted in spite of herself, he did it all without ever tearing any of the other guys down or trying to make them feel small—which was more than she could say for his father.
Julianne felt the little hairs on the back of her neck prickle and stand up as an uncomfortable thought worked its way into her brain. Maybe Remi really didn’t have anything to do with the construction of his parents’ McMansion. Mr. Moore seemed sort of …
tyrannical. It was impossible for Julianne to imagine him asking anyone’s input, especially someone he treated the way she’d just heard him treat Remi. Clearly, she had some more detective work to do.
✦ ✦ ✦
When Julianne got home from work that evening, the house was empty. Dad was at his monthly meeting of
local children’s book authors, and Chloe had left a note saying that she’d be home from the hospital around ten o’clock.
Julianne tossed her things onto the living room sofa and headed upstairs to her room. When she logged on to her Gmail account, she saw one new message. She hoped it would be a long, newsy update from Kat in Spain, but instead the message was from Chloe, reading simply, “How did it go?” Julianne moved the message into her trash folder and turned on her Internet browser.
After a few minutes of distracting herself with home-made bags, prints, and jewelry at etsy.com, Julianne logged on to MySpace. Before she knew it, she was back at Remi’s profile, combing it for clues.
As Julianne embarked upon her first solo MySpace
“recon” of “the subject,” she got a little twisting feeling in her stomach. Was she taking this too far? The guy on this MySpace page wasn’t some sort of teenage Donald Trump. MySpace Remi listened to good music, and read good books, and had lots of funny friends who wrote clever comments about the time he’d been in an ostrich race or the time he’d built an exact replica of someone out of toothpicks.
Consciously, Julianne knew that she needed to do whatever she could to take the fuel out of the Moores’
assault against her family and their beach. But the tiniest of tiny pangs at the bottom of her gut kept complicating things. Julianne was so surprised by her own inkling of a thought that she swatted at her head to chase it away.
She knew what side she was on. She needed to do what was right for her family, and nothing was going to get in her way. She logged out of MySpace quickly. But, before she could clear her head, she clicked into Google and entered the search term “Barton Moore.”
Chapter Ten
Julianne was close to discovering the perfect color of blue. She was covered from head to toe in various shades of blue oil paint—battle scars from struggling to finish her mom’s painting. As she swirled her brush on the palette, she felt the tension and frustration of the past few weeks begin to melt away. She traced circles in the sand at her feet with her big toe while she mixed her paint and hummed to herself. Her oversize sunglasses were perched on top of her head, and her hair was pulled back into two braids, all of her speckled with at least three different colors of blue.
She tried to shrug off the last few weeks of confusion.
It was all she could do to keep focused at work with Remi around every corner. And, as every super spy knows, being undercover is exhausting. The hardest part for Julianne, though, was coming home and feeling like she wasn’t able to snap out of her Remi-induced work-day funk. Every time she took out her mother’s painting, something didn’t feel quite right. The light was off,
