Death at Devil's Bridge Read Free Page A

work?”
    â€œOkay,” I answered, opening the refrigerator door, then pouring a glass of milk. “I guess you heard about the car.”
    â€œSuch a waste,” Mom said, shaking her head. “I almost fainted when Chief Widdiss told me how much a car like that costs. He says it’ll never run again after being in the saltwater all night.”
    â€œDid he tell you I was the first one to see it?” I asked, grabbing two cookies from the jar on the counter.
    â€œNo more of those,” Mom warned. “You’ll spoil your dinner. I’m making tacos.”
    â€œCool,” I said. “Is Barry coming over?”
    â€œNot for dinner,” Mom answered. “He’s too busy with all the holiday-weekend rentals. He might stop over later.”
    There was a time when I’d have been really happy to hear Barry wasn’t coming for dinner. I even used to have a secret nickname for him: Barry the Bozo. But I didn’t call him that anymore. I’d changed my mind about Barry during last year’s fishing derby, when he was the one who proved that Freddy Cobb had cheated by adding mercury to his big striper to make it weigh more. Barry had saved the whole tournament, and Pop’s record for the biggest striped bass ever caught on the island. Once I stopped being mad at Barry for not being Pop, I began to think he was okay.
    Besides, since Barry had been around, Mom’s eyes didn’t have that sad, haunted look they’d had for so long after Pop died. I was grateful for that, even though it was kind of embarrassing to see a guy acting so big-time crazy about my mother.
    Mom went on talking as she stirred onions and hamburger meat in the frying pan. “Yes, Ed told me you found it. That must have been a surprise.”
    She looked at me. My mouth was stuffed with cookies, so I just nodded.
    â€œWell, anyway, the police found the owner and talked to him. Apparently, his son drove here from Connecticut for the weekend. I can’t imagine letting a sixteen-year-old boy do that.”

    Big surprise. After Pop died, Mom had worried so much about something happening to me that she’d just about wrapped me in tissue paper and put me under her mattress for safekeeping. She was getting better, but I still figured I was going to be lucky if she ever let me drive around the block.
    Judging from what Mom had just said, Donny had been right about the driver being a wealthy kid from off-island in his father’s car. Believe it, Daggett , Donny had said. And the rich kids who come here thinking they’re better than us—they’d best believe it, too . I wondered what that was supposed to mean. Jeff had acted as if he knew, sitting beside Donny and high-fiving him back.
    I thought about how I’d reacted to seeing Jeff and Donny driving around together, and felt kind of embarrassed. What was I, a jealous girlfriend or something? But it was weird that Donny was hanging around with Jeff. Donny was sixteen. The three years’ difference in our ages hadn’t mattered so much when we were younger. I remembered a time when Jeff and I crashed one of his model planes out in the middle of Menemsha Pond. We didn’t have a dinghy or any way to get it, and we were too little and too scared to swim. Donny swam out, got the plane, and brought it back in his mouth like a dog retrieving a stick. He even came over to us and pretended to wag his tail, then shook like a dog when he dropped the plane at our feet. I’d just about choked to death, I was laughing so hard.
    I remembered another long, rainy afternoon at the Mannings’ house when Donny had been there, too. We took Magic Markers and drew on all the faces in a deck of cards, and played stupid card games in which three-eyed jacks, kings with boogers, and queens with bad hair were wild.
    Then there was the time a whole bunch of kids—boys, girls, all different ages—were at the beach in the summer.