15

By the next afternoon, Ella, Dominic, Ben, Zoe, and I have worn ourselves out talking about the lack of evidence against Hubert, so the five of us decide to go sailing. We have Ben’s uncle’s boat and Zoe’s parents’ boat, everything we need for a race around the Maiden Rock Tidal Pool.

We’re piling things into the boats before the race begins, and Zoe and I are laughing about Hubert’s milk mustache, when we hear a sound you rarely hear in Maiden Rock—a siren.

We all turn to see an ambulance in full emergency mode fly down Mile Stretch Road, followed by Mom’s squad car, its lights flashing too. We run to the other end of the dock and watch as the vehicles screech to a halt in front of Restaurant Hubert. We abandon the sailboats and sprint to the scene of the action. Mom’s getting out of her cruiser as we arrive.

“Stay back, kids,” she orders. People are jostling each other to get out of the restaurant. A paramedic team rushes in with a stretcher and comes out a minute later carrying a man who won’t lie still. He’s holding a plastic bag and heaving. A minute after that, the wild parade disperses and cars pull away, leaving the restaurant empty of patrons. We peek through the open front door and see Hubert slapping his head and yelling at Slick, who is screaming back at him. Chairs are turned over. Servers dressed in black pants, gray shirts, and dark red ties stand idle.

We head to Gusty’s, where customers have wandered into the parking lot, standing around speculating about what just happened up the road. Dad’s among the crowd, on his phone, no doubt talking to Mom.

“We saw it, Dad,” I tell him.

“I guess someone got sick, huh?”

“Oh yeah, and an ambulance came, and people were running out of the restaurant.”

“It was crazy,” Ben says.

“Awful,” says Zoe.

“Kind of cool,” says Dominic.

Dad walks back into the café. “That’s too bad.”

I’m on his heels. “Well, it sure cleared out Hubert’s.”

“Heck of a way to do it.” Dad shakes his head. “Come on, you guys must be hungry.”

I groan. “You didn’t see what we saw.”

* * *

Ben reminds us the boats are waiting, so we head back to the yacht club. The planks on the pier are warm under my feet, and flies are buzzing around a dead fish that’s smacking against the dock, reminding us that we’d better get going or the tide will go out and ruin our adventure. Zoe’s parents’ boat rocks as I step into it, and the sight of the poor heaving man flashes through my mind. “I wonder what made him sick?” I say.

“The raw beets?” says Zoe.

“The poaching liquid?” says Ella.

“The beam of light?” says Dominic.

It’s a lazy, hull-bumping, name-calling couple of hours. I lie back and look at the sky and feel the cool sunny air blowing across my skin. Dominic and I are in a boat with Zoe, and Ella’s in the other boat with Ben, and all is calm for this suspended moment. As I close my eyes and float along, I feel a tickle on my wrist. I don’t have to open my eyes to know that Dominic is running his finger along the top of my hand the way he always does.

A text interrupts the joy of the moment.

Mom: Home now. ASAP.

My heart does a double beat. OMG—what’s happened?

Zoe gets a similar text from her mom, telling her to report to my house—to my mom—and then immediately home.

She freaks. She can’t get the boat back to the dock fast enough. Once we’re there, we half walk, half run.

“This has to be about last night,” Zoe says. “It has to be.”

“No, it doesn’t. Stop. You’re getting me freaked out.”

We’re two doors away from my house when Hubert bursts out of our front door and lets it slam shut behind him.

We shriek simultaneously and stop in our tracks.

He jumps in his car and speeds away, his rear tires spitting up gravel and sand all over us.

Okay. Maybe Zoe’s right. It’s possible that, just maybe, this could be about last night. My mind traces our steps from the time we eased open the window until the time we pushed it shut. I can’t think of anything we did that could have exposed us.

I feel Mom before I see her. She’s radiating anger from her office all the way to our front steps. We find her in her sheriff’s chair, her back to us, looking at her computer. I don’t really want to announce that we’re here, but I have to. “Mom?”

She doesn’t turn around. “Is Zoe with you?”

“Yes.”

“Come here.”

“There?”

“Yes. Come look at my monitor, right now.” Her voice is steely.

Zoe and I hold hands as we walk toward her. I haven’t reported to a parent in this posture in a very long time.

Mom motions us into the office’s two guest chairs, then starts a video.

It’s dark. I can’t make out anything for a second. Then my eyes adjust, and I swallow hard. There’s moonlight. There’s Hubert’s kitchen. There’s the top of my head as I sneak into the office. There’s Zoe. At first, she’s skulking around with her head at countertop level as she looks in the lower cabinets. Then, as she moves through the room, she stands up taller and taller until she’s just casually walking around, opening cupboard doors and looking at things. There’s an especially good angle on her sticking her nose into a bottle of some spice. If there was any doubt that the footage caught me sneaking into the Restaurant Hubert office, it definitely captures Zoe’s massive, unmistakable ponytail in the kitchen.

I’m starting to feel the way that sick man at Hubert’s looked.

Zoe’s breathing hard, like she’s wearing scuba gear.

Mom shuts off the footage and sits quietly. This must be some kind of interrogation technique—wait for the suspects to crack. It works.

Zoe starts blubbering.

I decide to be patient, just like Mom, and see what happens. Technically, I haven’t done the thing she expressly prohibited me from doing—going around accusing Hubert of sabotaging Gusty’s.

Finally she says, “I laughed.” I relax a little. She continues, “I laughed at Hubert Pivot when he told me that you kids had broken into his kitchen and sabotaged the food and that’s how the man got so sick today—”

I try to interrupt, “We didn’t—”

“Be quiet, Quinnie. I laughed when he said this because I knew that was ridiculous. Impossible. Inconceivable. I laughed until he handed me this footage from his surveillance camera and told me to play it.” She’s speaking precisely in that way that leads to one of her rare flip-outs.

“But, Mom—”

“Then I did play it.” She isn’t even trying to control her anger.

Zoe’s hanging her head, dripping tears on her shirt. “I just smelled some stinky spice!” she cries.

“Hubert’s saying that whoever we see in this footage, messing around in the kitchen, has made his patron ill and damaged his reputation,” Mom says. She digs a pad out from the pile of papers on her desk and picks up a pen. “Let’s talk about how this happened.”

She’s serious. Mom’s not just peeved at a couple of dumb-acting kids. She’s a sheriff, about to take a statement from her suspects. My belly has never sunk so low.

“Zoe, you start,” Mom says. She’s going for the weaker of us first. The one most likely to spill her guts. I’m helpless until it’s my turn. “Who all is involved? Tell me blow by blow: who, what, when, and where.”

Zoe starts to fidget, looking at me like she thinks she might have said something wrong—and she hasn’t even started. Of course, she can’t help herself. “We pushed open an unlocked window and crawled in,” she says. “It was the broom room. Dominic stayed there.”

“Hold it. Dominic was there with you two?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What about Ella and Ben?”

Zoe hesitates a second and then says, “They weren’t there.”

Mom tilts her head like she’s trying to decide if she believes this, then picks up her phone and calls Dad. “Is Dominic at the café? Good. Send him to my office. I’ll text his parents in a minute. Thanks.” She turns back to Zoe. “Okay, keep going.”

Zoe takes a deep breath and continues. “Quinnie went to the office, and I went into the kitchen. I walked around and looked at things. The only things I touched were the spice bottles and the handles on the cabinets. Then we heard footsteps, and Quinnie and I hid down by the end of the cabinets.”

I am itching to jump into this, but I don’t dare.

Zoe speeds up. “Hubert walked down in his underwear and went to the refrigerator and—”

Mom’s jaw is dropping.

“—and he opened the refrigerator and drank from the milk carton and wiped the milk off his mouth and slapped his stomach and squirted a plant with water and went back upstairs.”

Mom swallows. “Did you touch any food?”

We both say, “No!”

“You two better hope he doesn’t want to press charges,” Mom says, “because what you did was trespass, even if you didn’t touch any food. And you better hope the man who got sick gets better. A sick customer could drive a restaurant out of business. And Hubert could say that the Buttermans are responsible for monetary damages.”

Zoe crumples with her head in her hands.

My mind is going over the scene again and again, frame by frame, trying to think of what we might have touched. The refrigerator door? No. The bag of crabs? No. The carton of milk? Wait. The bag of crabs! He didn’t put it back in the fridge.

“Mom, Mom—”

“Hold on, Quinnette.” She puts her hand out to quiet me. “Zoe, did Hubert come down to the kitchen before or after the video I just showed you on the screen?”

“After. It happened after, and then we left.”

“Mom. Mom. Mom—”

She turns to me. “Okay, your turn.”

“He took something out of the refrigerator and didn’t put it back.”

“What?” Mom asks.

“A big plastic bag of crabs. And he didn’t put it back.”

“What time was this?” She’s interested in this.

“It had to be about two a.m.”

She makes a note. “Was the air on in the kitchen?”

Good. Now I know she gets it.

“No, Mom, it was warmer inside than outside. It was cold last night.” This is the truth about summer in Maine. It still gets chilly at night, even after the sunny warmth in the daytime. “So those crabs sat out in the kitchen all night, and he cooked them and served them to that man. That’s what made the guy sick.”

She’s mulling this over when I go for it. “Mom, we were only looking for evidence. Hubert’s behind the bad stuff happening at Gusty’s, believe me.”

“Quinnie, stop it. You’ve got all the trouble you need right now. Go up to your room. Zoe, go home.”

As Zoe and I leave the room, Mom picks up her phone, dials, and waits for an answer. “Hubert, this is Margaret Boyd. I want the last twenty-four hours of footage. Unedited.”