Free The Incident on the Bridge by Laura McNeal

you still weren’t west enough to round the buoy that Barnaby called the mark. Plus, Fen kept tipping over while the Ted girl watched. She’d gotten into a boat with a bright orange-and-silver sail and zoomed past him like a wasp.
    He trimmed poorly and he didn’t pinch enough, apparently. He still didn’t know what the hell
reach
meant. Barnaby stayed nearby in a motorboat the whole time, circling him like a killer bee, telling him things he didn’t understand until finally Fen had to say flat out that he’d never sailed before, which he was pretty sure came as no surprise whatsoever to Barnaby.
    Far off at the edge of the golf course, where the bay opened out and started flowing toward the bridge, the girl sailed back and forth.
    When they finally got back to the dock, Barnaby was forced (because it was his job) to show Fen how to wash the boat Fen couldn’t sail, then wheel the boat in a dolly to a parking spot, and Fen was forced to shake hands, say sailing was very, very fun, awesome, in fact, and thank you very much. Only then could he sit alone at a snack bar table.
    “Fen-omenal!” his uncle said. His face was always so cheerful. An annoying characteristic just now.
    “Hey.”
    “How was it?”
    “Horrible.”
    “Really?”
    “Why did you say I knew how to sail?”
    “I thought you’d be a natural.”
    “I’m not.” All those times he’d counted sailboats from the shore or the backseat of his parents’ car. It had looked like the most incredible thing in the world, the coolest and richest and awesomest.
What a crock,
he thought. Then,
I am an optimist an optimist an optimist.
    Silence. “Want a cheeseburger?”
    “No.”
    “I’ll get a couple.”
    You know who the optimist was? Carl. “Okay,” Fen said. The girl was back. If she tied up her boat, she might come this way. His fear that she’d say something about his sailing (or refuse to talk at all) made him want to run, but then he might not see her again.
    “I’ll get us some cheeseburgers, Fensterman,” his uncle said. “You’ll do great next time. You’re a natural.”
    Despite the crappy thing that sailing turned out to be, the water rocked everything, even the floating piers, and what rocked in it gleamed. People wheeled little yellow carts to yachts they probably knew how to sail, even if he didn’t. And now the Ted girl was coming toward them with her finely cut, sunlit shoulders. She definitely was. Or toward the snack bar. One or the other.

“L et’s go over the things we know,” R. P. Skelly said. “The awesome party house is rented to people with ugly pajamas. The Mooreheads are in Mexico, not answering the phone. Or we have the wrong number.” He was looking at the computer screen, not at Elaine.
    “So that doesn’t even count as a thing we know.”
    Skelly went on. “Clay sometimes lives aboard a boat called the
Surrender,
but not always, and not right now. So he’s either in Mexico or somewhere else—we have no idea where—or he took the tackiest car in the family fleet and jumped without leaving a note.”
    “He wasn’t the jumper type,” Elaine said. “More like a nascent international playboy.”
    “Nascent?”
    “Beetdigger Word of the Day,” Elaine said. Skelly had made the mistake of telling Elaine once that his high school mascot in Utah had been Digger Dan the Beetdigger.
    Skelly tapped his lip with a pencil. He was a habitual lip tapper. “Who do you know at the Yotta Yotta Yot Club? Any old prom dates who might do raft-ups with the Mooreheads?”
    “Just Carl Harris,” she said. “And I already asked.”
    Tap tap.
    “Maybe someone stole the car,” Elaine said.
    “And then the poor guy thought,
Why didn’t I steal a better one?
and jumped?”
    “The girl at the front office said you can’t open the auto gate without a clicker or a key. Can’t get out of the parking lot.”
    “Wouldn’t the clicker or key be in the car?”
    “I checked the front pretty well,” Elaine said.