R. Stine - Red Rain

“Where are you going?” Samuel turned to follow him.

“I’m going to explain to Ikey,” Daniel replied without turning back.

“Explain to him? But-wait!”

Daniel trotted to the sand. Samuel could see Ikey sitting hunched at the end of the short dock in a beam of sunlight. Feet hanging over the side, fishing pole dangling beside him. Ikey smiled and waved as Daniel approached.

“Wait, Daniel.”

Samuel sighed. He walked inside the shack and slumped to the damp floor. He scratched the sleeve of the starchy T-shirt. Mum seemed nice. She was pretty with that straight black hair and the shiny dark eyes. Almost like a movie star. But if all the T-shirts were this scratchy, it wouldn’t be heaven.

At least their new home was near water. The ocean and the bay, Mum had said. The place was called Long Island. That was good. Samuel had always lived on an island. Maybe it would feel like home right away.

What did that mean-feel like home? He’d never had a home. He’d never had parents. At least, not parents he could remember. Daniel was kind of his parent. Even though they were the same age.

Thinking this gave Samuel a bad feeling in his stomach. What kind of parent was Daniel? Very bad.

Samuel heard a short cry and a splash outside.

Oh no. Please, no.

A few seconds passed. Samuel sat up as Daniel strode back into the shack. He ducked his head under the fishing nets and dropped onto the cot. His face was a total blank. Eyes dull and lips pressed tightly together.

“What about Ikey?” Samuel’s voice came out shrill and tight. “Did you explain? What did you tell him?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Daniel said without any emotion.

“But what did you say? What did you tell him?”

Daniel shrugged. That strange smile played over his face again. “No more Ikey,” he said. His mouth did a strange quiver. Like a tic.

“Huh? No more Ikey? What do you mean?”

Daniel’s smile grew wider. “No worries.”

“But, Daniel-” Samuel couldn’t find the words.

“No more Ikey,” Daniel repeated in a singsong.

Samuel peered out the doorway to the dock. The dock was empty now. No boy sitting at the end. No fishing pole.

“No more Ikey,” Daniel said. “So, no worries. Come on, bruvver.” He jumped up and, putting a hand on Samuel’s shoulder, guided him outside. “Big smiles now. Come on. Sweet smiles. Sweet. Be excited, lad. Let’s go tell our new mum how excited we are.”

Here he was at the Bay Street Theatre, just across from the bay in Sag Harbor, Andy Pavano and Vince’s cousin Cora, in town from Bath, a little town in Maine, where she waitressed at a barbecue restaurant and took classes at Bowdoin, studying for a degree in social work.

Andy got all that info in the first five minutes when he picked her up at Vince’s house and drove into town on a foggy, drizzly Saturday night. She talked quickly, with a slight Maine accent he hadn’t heard much before, and kept tapping his shoulder as she talked, as if trying to keep his attention.

Cora wasn’t bad-looking. She had sort of a bird-beak nose, but her eyes were round and pretty. She had the kind of smile that showed her gums, a toothy smile Andy liked. She was small and girlish- except for her truck-driver laugh, he thought. But maybe she just laughed like that because she was nervous. She said she’d never been out with a cop before.

“It’s not really a date,” he said. “Vince just thought we’d have fun together.” Then he felt like a total dork for saying that. He could feel his face grow hot, but she didn’t seem to notice.

She had to be five or ten years younger than him. Thirty maybe. She dressed young, like a college girl, in black tights and a purple square-necked top that gathered at her waist and came down low like a skirt. She didn’t have much on top, he noticed. Her dark hair was short and layered.

Andy parked on the pier and they walked past a little lobster shack, closed for the night, and B. Smith’s, a large, bustling restaurant overlooking the bay. A crowd stood at the entrance, waiting for the outdoor tables. Enormous white yachts lined the pier along the side of the restaurant.

The aroma of barbecued chicken floated out from B. Smith’s kitchen, and Cora made a face. “Don’t take me near a barbecue place. Sometimes after I’ve been at work in the restaurant, I have to shampoo three times to get the smoke out of my hair. Dogs follow me home because I smell like pulled pork.”

Andy laughed. She had a good sense of humor about herself.

“You and Cora should hit it off,” Vince had said the night before. “You’re both in-tell-ect-u-als.” That’s how he said it, pronouncing every syllable. Was he being sarcastic? Probably.

Andy had told him he liked to read mystery novels and police procedurals, and Vince had teased him ever since, calling him Sherlock and telling him he should smoke a pipe.

Vince wasn’t a Neanderthal, but he pretended to be. He thought it was part of his role as a small-town desk cop.

Cora seemed to think she had to tell everything there was to know about her before they got to the theater. Maybe she just had a thing about silences. Andy knew he wasn’t keeping up his end, but it was hard to get a word in, and he was getting to like her soft schoolgirl voice.

She’d had a long affair with a guy in Bath she met at the barbecue restaurant. He said he was in the music business and seemed to know a lot about music clubs and new acts. But it turned out he sold jukeboxes and pinball machines, and he was married.

After she broke it off with him, he stalked her for a while, sitting outside the restaurant in his car and phoning her again and again, leaving threatening messages and muttering obscenities. When she changed her phone number, he finally went away.

“Did you call the police on him?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t think they’d do anything. Usually, the police don’t do anything in stalker cases till the woman is raped or stabbed in the chest.”

“Usually,” Andy agreed. “But sometimes a couple of cops can go to the guy’s house and-you know-reason with him a little.” Andy waved a fist.

Cora stopped outside the theater. “Have you ever done that?”

Andy stared at her. “Well, no. But I saw it on Law amp; Order .”

They both laughed.

The play was called Whodunnit? Cora accused him of only having one interest in life. “Do you only go to plays about cops and crime?”

“I don’t go to many plays.”

The play wasn’t great. It was supposed to be a comedy, but people weren’t laughing. The mystery was impossible to solve. The murderer could have been any one of the six people onstage.

Andy hated stories like that where you didn’t stand a chance of figuring it out. The culprit could even be the nearsighted police inspector hamming it up on the old-fashioned living room set.

Cora seemed to be enjoying it more than he was. She kept squeezing his arm every time something surprising took place. She laughed when the police inspector stepped on his eyeglasses and stumbled blindly over the tea cozy.

At intermission, Andy led Cora through the chattering crowd, out the doors to the walled terrace in front of the theater. Horns honked as traffic rolled by. The air smelled tangy, salty as the sea. He was about to ask if she wanted to skip the second act and go get a bite to eat when he saw Sari walk out of the theater.

Something pinged in his chest. A real physical feeling. Like a hard heart thump. Or an alarm going off.

Cora was saying something, tapping his shoulder, but he didn’t hear her. He heard a rushing sound in his ears like water washing over a steep waterfall. How could Sari still have this effect on him?