How Not to Drown by Jaimee Wriston

Author:Jaimee Wriston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CROOKED LANE BOOKS

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It’s past dinnertime when Amelia opens the back door, stomach rumbling, head pounding. She’d sat in her car awhile after parking it in the garage, thinking about that owl. Uncanny coincidence? Portent? How, right before her dream or vision, whatever that was last night, she’d heard it flapping … hadn’t she? In the end she decided it was just an owl. Has she become the sort of person who believes in portents? No, of course not. And of course no dinner smells! She’d left take-out stroganoff in the refrigerator with instructions for Heaven to microwave, but the girl subsists on white foods, everything pale and fatty: cheese, macaroni, sugary cereals, fries. A high-protein dinner is a teaspoon of marinara sauce over a massive plate of noodles, slathered in parmesan; or cheese shreds on a slab of white rice. For tonight’s entrée she probably grabbed a bag of chips.

In the living room Amelia stops cold. Heaven and two Seahaven police officers, a man and a woman, are seated around the sectional sofa, a plate of Oreos on the coffee table, which no one besides Heaven seems to be touching. The cookies are clearly a Daniel move, her son either a dimwit or a genius, telling Heaven to serve Oreos to the police on Amelia’s designer china. The girl sits calmly munching, but in between stuffing cookies into her mouth she’s rubbing her legs, a sign, Amelia knows, of her stressing over something. Strange the things she’s begun to understand about this child, more than just the ways she’s like Gavin and the ways she isn’t—the ways she’s her own Heaven person, often an annoying one at that! Amelia looks out the window for their cruiser and sees it parked on the other side of the road; she’d been so intent on that owl she didn’t notice it. “For crying out loud, now what?”

“Amelia MacQueen-French?” Both officers stand up.

“You’re in my home so I suppose we can assume.”

“We need confirmation, ma’am,” the woman officer says.

Amelia nods. “I go by MacQueen since my divorce, sans French, and that’s been for quite some time. What’s this about?”

“You’re the guardian of Heaven French?”

“Temporary guardian,” Amelia and Heaven say at the same time, then stare at each other. Heaven calmly takes another bite of her cookie and Amelia frowns.

“Heaven was caught shoplifting from the Postee,” the woman says.

“From what?”

“It’s the nickname the local kids use for the Egypt Country Store,” the male officer pipes in. “They used to post mail from it, before the North Scituate post office branch was built.”

Amelia glares at the three of them. “A history lesson with some colorful local factoids, fabulous. What in Sam Hades is going on here?” This she directs at Heaven who shrugs, then reaches for another cookie. “Stop eating those bloody things! I want an explanation,” Amelia snaps.

“She was caught on a security camera,” the female officer says, “which confirmed what the manager witnessed. He said she stuffed various candies and packages of chips into her backpack.

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