Long Shot Read Free Page A

in any amount of time, no matter how short.
    Then she looked closer at the poster.
    Leith. His brown hair longer than when she’d last seen him, wet and clinging to his forehead and cheek. His rugged face contorted in exertion, his body even bigger and more muscular than she remembered. He clutched a hammer in his great fists, thick arms sweeping the thing high around his head. The hammer wasn’t an actual hammer at all, but a large metal ball on the end of a long handle. The thrower twisted it around his body several times, then released it backward over one shoulder.
    In the picture, Leith looked powerful and focused. Badass. And he wore a kilt.
    Good God, a kilt.
    She’d seen him wear his family’s tartan before, back in high school when the whole town had turned out for the annual games. But a kilt on a boy was a much different thing than a kilt on a man. In the photo the wind had kicked up the hem, displaying the hard lines of his thigh muscles set in a wide stance. Black kilt hose—knee socks, she’d once called them and had been quickly corrected by Leith’s dad—showed off bowling balls for calves.
    None of the men in New York were
that
kind of gorgeous.
    The pseudoshrine out on Route 6 declared he’d last won the heavy athletics competition five years ago, the same date on the poster, which would age him in that photo at twenty-three. What did Leith look like now? Seeing how much he’d improved from age eighteen to twenty-three, the curve for hotness progression over time indicated he should be approaching godhood right about now, at twenty-eight.
    Her phone blared a warning heralding the time, and at first she didn’t recognize the sound. She was never late. Ever. She hurried down the street, past the half-filled Kafe, to the small brick house that served as Town Hall. Ringing the doorbell to the locked front door, she couldn’t help but feel like an underappreciated teenager all over again—as though she’d accomplished nothing in the past decade and had nothing to show for herself. It was an odd feeling and one she annoyingly couldn’t attribute, until the door finally opened and a silver-haired woman in braids, jeans, and a gigantic Syracuse T-shirt frowned down at her.
    That
expression Jen remembered with painful clarity.
    “Hi, Mrs. McCurdy.” Jen pasted on a smile.
    Mrs. McCurdy, Jen’s old manager at the ice cream parlor and also a former steady dog-walking client, looked Jen over with awkward appraisal. The mayor stepped back and opened the door wider, her fleshy arm jiggling. “Here. Let me show you the mess you’ve inherited.”
    Jen took a deep breath. “Um, great. Thank you, Mrs. McCurdy. It’s great to see you, too.”
    “It’s Mayor Sue now,” the other woman threw over her shoulder as she headed down the hall.
    “You . . . you want me to call you that?”
    “Everyone else does.”
    “I’m glad Aimee called me,” Jen said. “I would hate to see the games die.”
    “Well, you agreed to work for free and Aimee said you know what you’re doing.”
    The thing was, Jen knew Sue must have had some form of confidence in her, otherwise why would the older woman have continued to hire her in the past, job after job, summer after summer? Still, would it have killed her to say, just once, “Nice job, Jen. Thanks so much”?
    Sue turned in to what must have been a bedroom at one time, but was now a tiny corner conference room with a giant box fan whipping warm air around. A laptop sat on the table. Sue hooked loose strands of wiry hair behind each ear and spun the laptop around so its screen was visible.
    Jen bent over and squinted at the spreadsheet, specifically at the tiny number in the bottom right rectangle. “That’s what’s left? Where’d DeeDee run off to again?”
    “France, we’re told.” Sue snorted, and Jen wasn’t sure if the disgust came from the fact that the longtime organizer of the Highland Games had run off with a sizable chunk of the town’s money,