D. MacHale: SYLO

“I understand,” Quinn said. “Continue.”

I had to keep from smiling. Laska may have been the law but Quinn was calling the shots.

“The Coast Guard’s leading the inquiry,” Laska said. “It’s their jurisdiction. So far they haven’t had any reports of a boat or a plane missing.”

“I don’t think it was either,” Quinn said.

“And what exactly do you think it was?” Doctor Carr asked.

“A UFO,” Quinn stated bluntly.

That got nothing but surprised gasps from our parents, and from me. Quinn hadn’t mentioned that before.

“What?” Quinn said defensively. “I’m not saying it was from Mars. But it was flying, and we couldn’t tell what it was. It didn’t look like any kind of plane I’d ever seen. Isn’t that pretty much the definition of a UFO?”

It was hard to argue with his logic.

“Whatever it was,” Laska said, “we believe you saw something. So does the Coast Guard and they’re going to figure out exactly what it was. So why don’t you all go on home and we’ll let you know if anything turns up.”

“What about the truck?” I asked.

“What truck?” Laska replied.

“The pickup I told you about that was parked out on the bluff a little way back.”

“Yeah,” Quinn said. “I told Donny all about it.”

“Deputy Donald,” the sheriff corrected.

“Whatever.”

“There’s no truck back there,” Laska said. “We checked that out first thing.”

Quinn and I exchanged looks. Of all the things we had witnessed, the lone pickup truck was probably the least strange—until now. Had something happened to it when the shadow exploded? Or had there been yet another witness on the bluffs who drove off after the fireworks?

“We’ll check it out,” Laska added. “Now head on home and let us do our job.”

Quinn’s mom put her arm around Quinn’s shoulder. She looked tired. So did her husband. I’d almost forgotten that they had been working late that night. I wondered if they had gotten the call from Quinn when they were in the middle of Marty’s autopsy. I did my best to shake that image.

“We still working tomorrow?” Quinn asked me.

I looked to my dad, who said, “That’s up to you guys.”

Quinn and I worked for Dad on Saturdays, helping out with his gardening business.

I shrugged. “Better than sitting around.”

After a few quick goodbyes, we got in our respective family SUVs and headed back toward town. I sat in back, fully awake, wondering if I could calm down enough to sleep. Ever.

“Are you okay, Tucker?” Mom asked.

I shrugged.

“Hell of a night,” Dad said.

“Understatement,” I replied.

“So you snuck out of the house to go riding in the middle of the night?” Mom asked.

There it was.

“I couldn’t sleep,” I said.

There was a long silence. There were two directions this questioning could take. I didn’t particularly want to follow either of them.

Dad said, “So it was a moving shadow? Then a flash of light and it exploded? Are you sure it was an explosion?”

The new direction was set.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It’s not like I’ve seen a whole lot of explosions outside of the movies. It was a big flash of light and a huge boom and we were knocked to the ground. To me that says explosion.”

Mom and Dad exchanged worried looks.

“Could be a naval exercise,” Dad said. “They do all sorts of things without making an announcement.”

“Maybe it’s some new secret weapon,” I offered. “Like a drone.”

“Could be,” Dad said thoughtfully. “If that’s the case, you can bet we won’t be reading about it in the paper. Five cents says we’ll never know.”

Mom wasn’t going to let it go as easily. Not the shadow-explosion, though; the after-hours tour.

“You shouldn’t be going out like that so late at night,” she said. “What if you got hurt?”

“I’m not a kid, Mom,” I argued.

“I don’t care how old you are, Tucker Pierce,” she shot back. “Traipsing around in the dark is dangerous.”

“I hear you. I’m not an idiot. I just wish you’d worry about something else besides me getting hurt all the time.”

She threw me a stern look over her shoulder and said, “Sorry. It’s my job.”

“And might I add that you’re very good at it,” I said.

That made Mom smile. Dad too.

It was indeed her job. After all I’d seen that night, I wanted to embrace that fact. I wanted my parents to take care of all the bad stuff and make it go away. I didn’t want to have to deal with un-explainable phenomena and police interrogations and mysterious witnesses, and most of all I did not want to have to deal with death. All I wanted was to hang out on my island home, play a little football, and help my father dig gardens.

Pemberwick was an incredible place to live… the kind of place that people chose to visit when they could go anywhere else. They came to my island to enjoy the warm days and mellow atmosphere and swim in the ocean and eat lobster and watch the sea grass sway while the sun sets over the rolling surf. For most people it’s an escape from reality. For me it’s home. I didn’t want to deal with disturbing events that made it seem like something other than paradise.

Was that too much to ask?

“Nots?”

“Not nots ,” said Quinn impatiently. “Knots. With a k , like they put on the front of knife for some reason I never understood. You can tell a lot about people by the way they tie knots.”

“You are so odd.”

Quinn and I were taking a lunch break from work. It was Saturday morning, the day after the game. Saturday was the day that football players rested up and healed. Most of them, anyway. I’d only been in the game for a total of five plays and didn’t need a whole lot of recovery. Any soreness I felt wasn’t from football. It hurts to get thrown off your bike by a mysterious exploding shadow.

Working for my dad meant grunt work. We raked leaves and mowed grass and pulled weeds and did any number of other brainless tasks that weren’t exactly fun, but Dad paid us pretty well and it was work he didn’t have to do himself, so everybody won.

“It’s true, Tuck,” Quinn continued. “Observe.”

We were sitting on a bench in the town square drinking canned iced teas, trying to stay cool in the shade. It was early September and hotter than it had been all summer. Across the street was a vintage Ford pickup making a delivery of live lobsters to Lesser’s Fish Market.

“How do you come up with these bizarre theories?” I asked. “Was it on one of those cable shows you watch at two in the morning?”

“No. I’m just a brilliant student of human nature,” he replied quickly. “Watch and tell me I’m wrong.”

A girl carrying a Styrofoam cooler strode out of the store, headed for the pickup. It was Tori Sleeper, a girl from our class. Her Saturday job was to help her father with his lobster business. Tori was cute, but odd. She had long dark brown wavy hair that she kept tied back in a practical ponytail. She usually wore equally practical jeans and T-shirts, along with a faded University of Southern Maine baseball cap. I never saw her hanging out with anybody our age, which was strange considering how small our school was. The few times I tried talking to her she answered in monosyllables. I couldn’t tell if she was brilliant, aloof, or brain-dead. I guess you’d call her an enigma.

I kind of liked that.

“And we begin,” Quinn announced.

Tori tossed the cooler into the back of the pickup next to a bunch of others and grabbed the edge of a bright blue tarp. She deftly yanked the tarp over the coolers, then grabbed a rope that dangled from a grommet and in one quick move threaded it through a tie-down hook. She snapped the line tight and expertly tied a…whatever knot to secure the whole rig. The procedure took less than five seconds.