Riptide Read Free Page B

spray
     stinging Malin’s face delightfully.
    The boat sent back a creamy wake as it sliced through the ocean. There had been a massive storm the week before, but as usual
     it seemed to have settled the surface, and the water was glassy. Now Old Hump appeared to starboard, a low naked dome of granite,
     streaked with seagull lime and fringed with dark seaweed. As they buzzed through the channel, countless seagulls, drowsing
     one-legged on the rock, raised their heads and stared at the boat with bright yellow eyes. A single pair rose into the sky,
     then wheeled past, crying a lost cry.
    “This was a great idea,” Malin said. “Wasn’t it, Johnny?”
    “Maybe,” Johnny said. “But if we get caught, it was
your
idea.”
    Even though their father owned Ragged Island, they had been forbidden to visit it for as long as he could remember. Their
     dad hated the place and never talked about it. Schoolyard legend held that countless people had been killed there digging
     for treasure; that the place was cursed; that it harbored ghosts. There were so many pits and shafts dug over the years that
     the island’s innards were completely rotten, ready to swallow the unwary visitor. He’d even heard about the Curse Stone. It
     had been found in the Pit many years before, and now it was supposedly kept in a special room deep in the church basement,
     locked up tight because it was the work of the devil. Johnny once told him that when kids were really bad in Sunday School,
     they were shut up in the crypt with the Curse Stone. He felt another shiver of excitement.
    The island lay dead ahead now, wreathed in clinging tatters of mist. In winter, or on rainy days, the mist turned to a suffocating,
     pea-soup fog. On this bright summer day, it was more like translucent cotton candy. Johnny had tried to explain the local
     rip currents that caused it, but Malin hadn’t understood and was pretty sure Johnny didn’t, either.
    The mist approached the boat’s prow and suddenly they were in a strange twilit world, the motor muffled. Almost unconsciously,
     Johnny slowed down. Then they were through the thickest of it and ahead Malin could see the Ragged Island ledges, their cruel
     seaweed-covered flanks softened by the mist.
    They brought the skiff through a low spot in the ledges. As the sea-level mist cleared, Malin could see the greenish tops
     of jagged underwater rocks, covered with waving seaweed; the kind of rocks so feared by lobstermen at low tide or in heavy
     fog. But now the tide was high, and the little motorboat slid past effortlessly. After an argument about who was to get his
     feet wet, they grounded on the cobbled shore. Malin jumped out with the painter and pulled the boat up, feeling the water
     squish in his sneakers.
    Johnny stepped out onto dry land. “Pretty neat,” he said noncommittally, shouldering his satchel and looking inland.
    Just up from the stony beach, the sawgrass and chokecherry bushes began. The scene was lit by an eerie silver light, filtered
     through the ceiling of mist that still hung above their heads. A huge iron boiler, at least ten feet high, rose above the
     nearby grass, covered with massive rivets and rusted a deep orange. There was a split down one side, ragged and petalled.
     Its upper half was cloaked by the low-lying mists.
    “I bet that boiler blew up,” Johnny said.
    “Bet it killed somebody,” Malin added with relish.
    “Bet it killed two people.”
    The cobbled beach ended at the seaward point of the island in ridges of wave-polished granite. Malin knew that fishermen passing
     through the Ragged Island Channel called these rocks the Whalebacks. He scrambled up the closest of the Whalebacks and stood
     high, trying to see over the bluffs into the island.
    “Get down!” Johnny yelled. “Just what do you think you’re gonna see in all this mist? Idiot.”
    “Takes one to know one—” Malin began, climbing down, and received a brotherly rap on the head for his