Triple Witch Read Free Page A

silver spoon that I have put onto the mantelpiece a hundred times dropped to the tiled hearth with a familiar, communicative little
clink!
    Ellie looked assessingly at me. Her campaign to turn me from landlubber to sea dog was ongoing, but it had not escaped her that, under most circumstances, I would rather be anywhere but out on the water in her tiny wooden boat.
    This time, though, I was beginning to have a funny feeling, amplified by that spoon and that window shade, something like the intuition that makes you decide to buy a lottery ticket, and you end up winning fifty dollars.
    But my sense now that something was brewing didn’t feel a bit lucky. I’d have paid fifty dollars to get rid of it, in fact.
    And as it turned out, eliminating it cost more than that.
    A lot more, starting on Crow Island.

 
    5 At the dock, Ellie stepped easily from the pier to the foredeck of her boat, loading our supplies and a gas can, taking off lines and making sure the oars were properly shipped. Finally, checking that the flares and life cushions were stowed under the seats, she started the Evinrude engine.
    The decks of the bigger boats loomed like tall buildings as we motored between them: me in the middle, Ellie at the rudder, and Monday perched up in theprow, her pink tongue lolling and her eyes bright with adventure. The red bandanna tied around her neck looked dashing, and her joyfulness made me glad I had brought her.
    It was a glorious day, the cool breeze tangy with fish and pine tar and the water very clean so you could see right down to the bottom where sea urchins clung in clusters. Yellow sunshine poured from the azure sky and bounced from the waves, so that the air seemed to vibrate with an excess of light and energy.
    Turning back to Ellie, I found she was smiling at me with a look both knowing and mischievous. Getting me out on the water was like pulling teeth, but being out on it was dandy—until she hit the throttle and we shot from the mouth of the boat basin like something being rocketed out of a cannon. I gripped the gunwales, Monday gulped a faceful of spray, and Ellie laughed wickedly, like one of her rascal ancestors.
    Crow Island lay between the lighthouse point at Deer Island and Head Harbor on Campobello. From where I sat it was just a dot on the horizon, a rock and a clump of fir trees.
    “Want to shoot the narrows?” Ellie waved a freckled arm at Head Harbor, about half a mile off on our right. (Or starboard, as these boating types insist on calling it. If you want to remember which is which, the trick is this: the words
left
and
port
mean the same thing and have the same number of letters.)
    The lighthouse at Head Harbor was white and octagonal in the Canadian maritime tradition, with tall gabled windows and a red cross facing the Bay of Fundy. At low tide you could scramble to it by making your way across a great many slippery rocks, down a ladder, and across the tide flats.
    “No!” I called back to Ellie. “Just head straight out!”
    At high tide, it is possible to zoom between the island and the promontory upon which the lighthousestands—possible, that is, if you go very fast so your keel stays high on the water, and your aim is very true; otherwise the last thing you hear will be a loud noise, a sort of mingling of
kablooie
and
sayonara
.
    “Ellie,” I said quietly. I was not shrieking, I was very carefully not shrieking as the lighthouse loomed larger.
    Ordinarily, Ellie would not scare me this way, but she was angry about Kenny. The boat sat up smartly atop the waves, skipping over them with the heedless momentum of a hurled stone.
    Then suddenly she cranked the throttle down, the boat nearly swamping in the sudden backwash. I waited until the forward roll settled, listening to the rumble of the Evinrude churning in low.
    “I’m sorry,” Ellie said quietly.
    “That’s all right. Think of it as medical screening. I mean, if I didn’t have a heart attack just now, I probably never