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“Okay. Let’s have it. What’s eating you, Sheba?” Sam said as they bumped along, past a shadowy Burma-Shave sign. Long Island Sound peeked up behind the rise of a dune, shimmering in the newborn moonlight.
“It’s nothing,” Evie said on a sigh.
“That’s how I know it’s something. You never say that.”
It was everything. If Evie could’ve unbuttoned her skin to escape her own terrible restlessness, she would have. She angled herself toward Sam. “Do you think I’m selfish?”
Sam laughed. “Is that a trick question?”
“Forget I said anything.” Evie’s eyes pricked with tears. She lolled her head toward the window.
“Aww, Sheba. So you’re working for Evie. Honestly, who isn’t working for himself in this meshuga world? Some people just hide it better than others.”
“People like Sarah Snow?”
“So you read today’s ‘Rumor Has It.’ Okay, sure. Maybe. But honestly, name one person who isn’t selfish.”
Evie didn’t have to think long. “Mabel.”
Sam nodded. “Yeah. Mabel.”
“I wish I could be more like that. Like Sarah or Mabel.”
“Yeah? Between you and me, I don’t think you’d make it very long. The real you would come popping out like a showgirl hiding inside a plain vanilla cake. Just my two cents’ worth. Besides, you always come through for your friends in the clinch. So the Bible thumpe
r does a lot of good. You think she coulda faced down a demon like John Hobbes all by herself? You think she’d’a been able to take on those beasties chasing us through the subway tunnels?”
Evie whirled toward Sam again. “But no one will ever know I did that, so what good is it?”
Sam kept his eyes on the dark road ahead. “Oh, I see. It only counts if everybody knows about it. Don’t you get enough attention?”
“You asked,” Evie said, staring out the window again.
“Aw, Sheba. I didn’t mean anything by that. Look, I know I’m no egghead and I’m no saint. I can’t heal like Memphis or play the piano like Henry. And I sure don’t look like Freddy the Giant,” he said, exposing his own soft wound. “But I got my own kind of smarts, from the streets, and when I go after something, well, just try’n shake me off. I’m an odd fella, but I know I’m an odd fella. What I can’t figure out is why you gotta make yourself crackers trying to be somebody you can’t ever be instead of just letting yourself be the one and only Evie O’Neill.”
Because I’m not enough, she thought. That was the terrible echo shouting up at her: Fraud, fraud, fraud. She got drunk and talked too much and danced on tables. She had a temper and a sharp tongue, and she often blurted out things she instantly regretted. Worst of all, she suspected that was who she truly was—not so much a bright young thing as a messy young thing. There were a hundred fears Evie could list. She imagined palming every one of them into a big, ugly rock and watching that rock sink to the bottom of the Sound.
“Anyway. You can worry about new things, like being arrested by the Coast Guard, because we’re here.” Sam rolled to a stop behind an old shed. The car’s headlamps cast an eerie glow on a sardine row of cars parked along the curve of the beach. “Loyal customers,” he said.
They stumbled toward the shore, each trying to get there first. A narrow slipper of a motorboat was stashed up on the beach. “A little help?” Sam asked, and then he and Evie were pushing the boat toward the water. “By the way,” he grunted, “what’s that thing on your head?”
“It’s called a tam, if you must know, and it came all the way from Scotland. It’s very fashionable.”
“Does the poor Scottish shepherd know you took his hat?” Sam said, easing the craft into the water.
“You should talk. You dress like Trotsky. So where is this mystery ship?” There was nothing in the bay that Evie could see.
“The Kill Devil? About a mile or so out that way, hidden in that cove over there,” Sam said, pointing to a curved finger of high land jutting into the water on the other side of the Sound. “They’re risking it for sure. There’s a twelve-mile limit. Any boat caught inside that limit can be picked off by the Coast Guard—or pirates. I’m guessing the Kill Devil’s got some secret storage inside her to take that risk.”
“Are you saying we could be arrested?”
Sam shrugged. “Or shot.”
Sam helped Evie into the boat. It wobbled precariously as he hopped on board and took a seat himself.
“If this kills me, I’ll never forgive you,” Evie groused.
Sam leaned over with a pair of binoculars. “The list of things you’ll never forgive me for is long, Sheba. Just keep your peepers peeled for the Coast Guard. Ow!”
