Page 61 of Piece By Piece

The pies had arrived early.

There were sixty of them in boxes stacked three high on folding tables, and these tables were definitely not designed for sixty pies stacked three high.

The tables bowed in the middle, like they were praying to stay together.

SuAnn stood in front of them with her hands on her hips and a look that said she was one small setback from having a complete meltdown.

“Janine! Janine! We need more tables!”

“We don’t need more tables, Mama. We need fewer pies. This is crazy.”

“You can’t have a pie-eating contest with fewer pies!” she said, throwing up her hands. “Well, that’s like having a wedding with fewer guests. It defeats the purpose. It needs to be a spectacle.”

Janine closed her eyes for a moment with the patience of a woman who’d been trying to manage her mother’s grand visions since childhood.

“The purpose is to raise money for the scholarship. We could have done that with thirty pies.”

“Thirty pies is a bake sale, Janine. This is a contest.”

A seagull landed on the end of the nearest table and looked at the key lime pie with clear intention.

SuAnn waved her arms.

“Shoo! Get away from here. That pie cost me $12.”

The seagull did not shoo.

It grabbed the edge of the pie tin with its beak and tried to drag the entire thing off the table in one smooth motion.

And then it did.

The pie hit the ground with a splat that would have been funny if SuAnn hadn’t looked like she was witnessing someone commit a felony.

“And it was one of the good ones. That bird just stole my pie!”

Janine picked up her phone and started taking pictures.

She was laughing so hard she couldn’t hold it steady.

“Mama, this is definitely going in the newsletter. It’s the best thing that’s happened all week.”

“It is not the best thing. This is a tragedy. We are down to fifty-nine pies!” SuAnn screeched.

Liza watched from across the square and felt something she hadn’t felt in a long time.

The joy of belonging in a place where a stolen pie was the biggest crisis of the day.

It was four in the afternoon when Grant’s phone rang.

He was in his shop, packing up the last of the scavenger hunt prizes into bags, small little tangram keychains that he’d ordered in bulk from overseas, when the screen lit up with a number he recognized.

Jonathan Webb, Meridian Games.

He stepped into the back room and closed the door behind him.

“Hey, Grant, hope you don’t mind me calling you directly.”

“How did you get this number?”