Senseless Acts of Beauty Read Free Page B

shooting sparks up the chimney. Riley wished she could read the strange, fierce expressions flitting across this young girl’s face. There was only one way to get the truth out of her, and that was to ask.
    “Sadie,” Riley put the binoculars aside, “I’ve stumbled upon a lot of critters in the generator shed during the years I’ve lived here. Raccoons, possums. Once I found a nest of barn owls. But a teenage girl? That’s a new one. Is there anything you want to talk about?”
    The look Sadie gave her was one that Riley sometimes saw in the sparrows that gathered by the feeding table on the back lawn when she came out with a new bag of food. It was a steady, assessing look, a look that spoke of hesitancy, of burgeoning trust, but also fear at the approach of such a large predator. The birds crouched with their heads cocked, their gazes steady, while the little muscles under their feathers grew tight.
    Sadie reached down and unzipped her backpack. She pulled out a white hand towel. Seeing it, Riley had a moment of embarrassment for not being a good hostess. She realized that the girl could probably use a nice, fluffy hotel towel to dry her skin and hair, instead of being forced to dig for some well-worn towel in her soaking backpack. Riley was about to get up and fetch a fresh towel when she caught sight of the Kwenback logo at the edge of Sadie’s towel.
    “Wow. Are you planning a future in cat burglary?” Riley reached over to tug the fringed end of the towel. “I don’t remember which origami crane went with that.”
    “I didn’t borrow this.”
    “Oh?”
    “I’ve had this towel my whole life.”
    Sadie spoke into the threads of the fading logo. Riley looked at Sadie’s face more closely, trying to see in it the features of any one of the sixty or seventy families who used to come to Camp Kwenback on a regular basis, when this resort had teemed from June to October, when the back lawn was the center for fierce badminton competitions, when the lake was full of canoes and rowboats, and every swing was going full tilt from six in the morning when her grandparents served coffee on the back lawn, to midnight when they launched fireworks off the dock.
    Riley had worked as the camp events director for six straight summers, herding the young ones for sack races and Red Rover, challenging the teenagers to shuffleboard competitions, playing bingo and Monte Carlo in the main lodge during the rainy days. Generations of families had spent summer weeks in the cabins that spread through the woods down to the lake. Riley could name every one of them, right down to the great-grandchildren, and some still sent Christmas cards. But she reasoned that Sadie was too young to remember any of that. It had been nearly fifteen years since Camp Kwenback had anything that looked remotely like a full house.
    Sadie’s shoulders rose and fell. A little line deepened between her young brows, and color darkened in her cheeks.
    Riley leaned forward. “Sadie?”
    “My birth mother,” Sadie blurted, lifting the towel. “My birth mother wrapped me in this when I was born.”
    The term birth mother skittered across Riley’s thoughts like a chip of flint sent flying over a lake, skipping in steps, spreading ripples in its wake, ripples that swelled as the implications became clear.
    “I was just wondering,” Sadie said, “what you were doing fifteen years ago, on August twenty-second?”

Chapter Two
    S adie had made a ritual of it. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror to brush her teeth, she’d find herself instead pulling her upper lip and noticing the two larger front teeth, the way the smaller ones on either side slipped slightly behind them. Or she twisted her head so that she could see the three freckles on the edge of her jaw. Or she pulled the little curls of her brass-red hair and watched them bounce back, noting the strands that were more gold than red, others more brown. Pressing close to the mirror to see her