CHAPTER TWO

BAILEY

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Mailboat towered over me, all two decks painted navy and white. Lake water splashed along the hull and churned against the pier posts. My heart pounded. Jumping off and getting the mail in the box was the easy part, everybody knew that. But getting back on board? Good luck.

The boat never stopped.

If you didn’t gather your courage in time, you could end up standing on the pier like a piece of deck furniture. You might find yourself stupidly watching the windows flash by, filled with the faces of tourists eager to see the show or the splashdown. There was nothing to focus on. Where did you put your hands? Where did you put your feet? Not to mention that gaping maw that was three feet of roiling water between the boat and the pier.

But once the mail was in the box, you just had to go for it.

I’d never done this before.

All these terrors flashed through my mind in the time it took a cricket to breathe. I inhaled deeply and clenched my fists. Bounced on my heels. I could do this. I could do this! I took a step back, winding up for the spring, then pounded across the decking and flung myself over the watery gap between the pier and the boat.

Time slowed. Sunlight glinted off hungry, chomping waves, waiting for me to miss, to slip, to plummet into the ravished belly of the lake.

My fingers found the handrail, cold metal pressing into the grooves of my palms. My sneakers hit the rub board and its gritty, slip-proof surface. My body crashed into a window with a rattle of its metal casing. I’d made it. I’d made it! I paused half a second to soak in the shock and the glory of it all. As the Mailboat rocked gently in the water, me sticking to its side, relief washed down my spine. Maybe I could do this after all. Maybe I could be a for-real Lake Geneva mail jumper. A smile as wide as the lake spread across my face.

“You’re doing it wrong,” said a voice behind me.

I started and turned, facing a pier which the boat had never left behind—never left behind because it wasn’t going anywhere—wasn’t going anywhere because this wasn’t a tour. And I wasn’t a mail jumper.

But Baron Hackett was, the boy who’d coolly informed me I was screwing up my own dearest dream. He stood there, tanned as a sailor, arms like masts, a glittering diamond in his ear and all. His neck was almost too thick for the knotted leather strap he wore around it, a creamy cowrie shell fastened to the center. He was everything a mail jumper should be: cool, calm, athletic.

And me? I was the concessions girl. Right now, I was supposed to be stocking the Mailboat’s snack bar for a private charter. Instead, my handcart sat on the pier, the frost on the sides of a dozen ice cream cartons slowly melting and running down.

On the shore beyond the pier, the Riviera Ballroom sat like a squatty old fortress, its arched and pillared windows blinking sleepily at the unfolding drama, just one of a million it must have witnessed over the past eighty years. It had already seen all the action. This was where the jazz bands used to come up from Chicago and the flapper girls used to swing the night away. Tied up all around me were the other boats of the cruise line fleet, steam launches and stern-wheeled paddle boats old enough to remember the Charleston and the Cakewalk before that and even the Virginia Reel. I doubted any of them cared that I wanted to shrivel up inside a clam shell right now and sink to the bottom of the lake.

Baron combed spiky black bangs out of his eyes, deep and mysterious as underwater caverns but glinting with humor like treasure you didn’t expect to find. Maybe he thought my efforts at mail jumping were laughable. “You trying out tomorrow?” he asked.

I slid off the rub board onto the pier and backed up against a pier post. “Tryouts?” I rubbed my arm nervously. “Um… maybe?” At the start of every summer, the kids who worked at the cruise line had a chance to compete for a place on the elite mail jumping team.

Baron motioned toward the boat. “You’ll hurt yourself doing it like that.”

I didn’t get it. “Huh?”

God, this conversation was weird on so many levels—besides me being an idiot. Baron didn’t talk to people. He was way too cool for that. He was the quarterback on our high school football team at just sixteen, a year older than me. He was in the National Honor Society. His family owned a mansion on the lake—one of the newer ones on the South Shore that probably had an AI for a butler. “Jeeves, turn on the lights.” You know, like that. His sister had been a teen star in a hit TV series. I’m not even kidding. Her first month at school, she brought her own security guard, until her family figured out this was Wisconsin and the crowning of Miss Cheese Days at the nearby Green County Cheese Fest was still a big deal.

And did I mention Baron was a mail jumper? Around here, that was bigger than homecoming king.

“Never run straight at the boat,” he explained. “You gotta run at an angle. Because of momentum, you know?” He hovered a palm mid-air and pushed it forward like a little ship through the waves. “The boat’s moving this way, right?”

I nodded. “Okay.”

The first two fingers of Baron’s other hand became a tiny person, running toward the pretend boat. “If you run straight at the boat and grab on, you’ll swing backwards like a door on a hinge and slam into the side.” The finger person rotated and banged into his thumb. I remembered how I’d smashed into the windows, even with the boat sitting still. “You’ll be black and blue all over. Right? So you have to get your momentum going with the boat.” The finger person tried again, this time running parallel to the boat a few steps before jumping on. “Run at an angle, see?”

I nodded and rubbed my arm some more, trying to massage away my nerves. Now that he explained it, I felt like an idiot. Did good mail jumping candidates automatically know this stuff? Maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a mail jumper.

And yet it was all I wanted in the world.

A hearty laugh rang out from the next pier over. Already dying of embarrassment, I was relieved for an excuse to turn my eyes away from Baron. On the other pier, talking with our boss, stood a man in a white shirt with gold and blue stripes on the shoulders. Tommy Thomlin. His uniform was navy-smart, the creases in his sleeves and shorts no doubt measured with a ruler. But just as predictably as his strict attention to detail was the smile on his face as he laughed at something our boss had said, or just as likely, something he had said himself.

He’d been captain of the Mailboat almost fifty years, as reliable as the mail itself. It blew my mind. I’d lived in foster care since I was five, and in my world, people dumped you for any reason. Maybe I colored on the wall; wouldn’t eat my veggies; came down with the flu and threw up in the car. I wasn’t their child. They weren’t obligated to keep me. A simple phone call magically made me somebody else’s problem. My own parents had opted to let me be somebody else’s problem. And now my mom was dead and my dad just a nameless, faceless, non-figure in my life.

I wasn’t sure why, but I lived for those few tours I got to ride the Mailboat with Captain Tommy, sitting behind the snack bar with my chin in my palm and listening to his steady voice like a calming rain. I’d never had a real dad or a grandpa or even an uncle—but if I had, I’d want him to be like Tommy. All last summer, I’d dreamed of the day I would finally be eligible to try out for mail jumping.

And now that day was almost here and I didn’t know sticks.

“So, are you going to be here tomorrow morning?” Baron asked. His voice jerked me back to reality like a hand reaching into the lake, pulling me to the surface. I’d basically forgotten I was in the middle of a conversation with anyone.

I looked up at his brawny form, his bright yet strangely veiled eyes. Maybe I wasn’t tough enough to be a mail jumper. Maybe you needed to be strong and smart and popular like Baron. Maybe you needed to be somebody—and all my life I’d been a nobody, invisible to everyone, and frankly, I liked it better that way.

But still, I’d spent a whole summer selling peanuts just so I could try out as a mail jumper. So… was I going to be here?

I scrunched my sleeve in my fist and bit my lip. “I guess?”

Baron laughed and shook his head, his eyes dipping down. I noticed he had long, dark lashes—but that kind of detail only mattered to fashion models and Olympians, the kind of girls who were actually eligible to talk to Baron Hackett. The kind of girls who mattered.

“Well, I think you should try out,” he said, his lashes sweeping up again in the way girls-who-mattered would notice. “Any kid who practices dry runs on the dock clearly wants to be a mail jumper.”

What a funny idea. I should be a mail jumper because I wanted to be? I was the bobber on somebody else’s fishing line—pulled this way and that by fish and by angler. When had I ever been allowed to want anything? But maybe that was the difference between Baron and me. He was allowed to want things, and then he just went and did them. Maybe that was how he was always in the school newspaper while I vended snacks.

Baron lifted his backpack from the pier to his shoulder. “Well, hope to see you tomorrow.”

He turned to go. As he did, something small and white fluttered down from an open pocket on his backpack. As it flipped and flopped, I caught glimpses of a magnetic strip on one side. The card sailed towards the cracks in the pier.

“Hey!” I shouted more to the card than to Baron. I pounced forward and clapped both hands over it. Relief washed over me as I felt the plastic pressed firmly between my palms and the wooden boards.

What a silly credit card, trying to get away like that. It would have spent the rest of its life at the bottom of the lake, and what good would that have done it? Peeling back my hands, I looked at the plastic escapee, expecting to see either the magnetic strip or the string of numbers.

Instead, I saw the emblem of a sailboat inside a circle—the same image on the city’s flag. Printed around the circle were the words CITY OF LAKE GENEVA POLICE DEPARTMENT. I flipped it over and looked at the magnetic strip again. What was this thing? It looked like the key cards they give you in hotels…

Baron’s lips were parted in a little O and his thin black eyebrows arched, the way you would look if you were both surprised and embarrassed, as if the injured baby bunny you were hiding in your backpack had hopped out in the middle of chemistry class. (Not that I speak from experience.)

“Oh wow,” he said, “thanks for catching that.” He thrust his hand out.

“What is it?” I asked, standing, staring at the card still in my hands. What did it mean, police department…?

“It’s nothing,” Baron said. He snapped it out of my fingers and shoved it into his back pocket. “Uh… my dad uses a meeting room at City Hall.”

Oh, well that made sense, I guess. City Hall and the police station were in the same building. And Baron’s dad was the kind of guy who knew every politician, every financial big-wig, all the important people. I could see him needing to meet with the local lawmakers often enough to have his own key card to City Hall.

But then why did Baron have the card? And why did it say “Police Department” and not “City Hall”?

“Gotta run,” Baron said. “See you tomorrow.” He waved and made long strides down the pier.

I watched him jog away, my head still swimming with questions. Then I stared at the boat. It had suddenly transformed into a bargeful of intimidation. What was I doing, hoping to be a mail jumper? What was I doing, wanting anything at all? I didn’t even notice Tommy walk down the pier and stand next to me.

“I think it’s soft enough to scoop now,” he said.

I jerked my head around. “Huh?”

He grinned and nodded at my hand cart. The cardboard ice cream tubs were going slouchy. I let out a little wail and dashed to pull off a lid. The pecan praline was swimming in pools of its own melted goo. My heart sank. A good mail jumper needed to be sharp—and I couldn’t even keep ice cream frozen. Would this be counted against me tomorrow?

Tommy chuckled. “If you hurry, I think it’s salvageable.” He nodded to the aft deck of the Mailboat. “Go put it in the freezer.”

I crammed the lid back on and hurried to shove the hand cart up the ramp. On board the small, enclosed rear deck, I knelt on the floor behind the snack bar, flung open the little freezer, and began unloading ice cream. From the corner of my eye, I saw Tommy arranging tables and chairs on the main deck, a short flight of stairs below me.

A ring tone jingled. Tommy took his cell phone out of the holder on his belt, looked at the screen, and picked up the call. “Well, good morning, sir,” he said cheerfully. “What can I do for you?”

There was silence as the other person talked. I knocked a chunk of ice off the side of the freezer so I could fit one more tub of ice cream.

“Last night?” Tommy said, as if repeating the caller’s words. The tone of his voice had changed. All of a sudden, it was really heavy and serious, like a stone dropped into the lake. I peeked around the counter. Tommy had stopped arranging chairs and stood in the middle of the deck. He listened a while longer, a hand on his belt, then pulled a chair out from a table and sat down. “Is she okay?”

This sounded serious, whatever it was. Maybe a friend was sick? A family member?

Tommy shook his head at whatever his friend was saying. “No, I haven’t heard the kids say anything. But I’ll keep my ears open.” He waved his fingers slightly, as if brushing a thought away. “Oh, don’t mention it.” As his friend continued to speak, Tommy’s brow went heavy. His lips parted slightly, but his jaw went tight, as if he were ready to bite something off. I held my breath. It took something serious to get him mad, yet me and the other kids knew better than to cross him. He ran this boat like it was the Navy. “Wade, don’t be ridiculous. None of these kids would break into a police station, much less attack a dispatcher.”

Attack a dispatcher? Wow, that was pretty serious.

Wait…

Ice shot through my veins, and I was pretty sure it had nothing to do with the ice cream. I ducked back behind the snack bar and leaned against the shelves, my heart beating fast.

Baron…?

No, what was I thinking? This was Baron Hackett we were talking about. He was the golden boy. The top student in his class—in the entire school. The future President of the United States, for gosh sake. He wouldn’t.

But he had a key card. And it said Police Department, not City Hall…