Free Seventeen Against the Dealer by Cynthia Voigt Page A

wouldn’t mind a bit working with Mina. “I can’t afford to hire anybody,” she pointed out.
    â€œWe can worry about that at the time. It’s still a couple of years before I’ll get a chance to fail to get into law school. By then, who knows? By then you may be the Sara Lee of boatbuilders.”
    â€œI wouldn’t count on it,” Dicey answered, smiling at the idea. She wasn’t aiming for that, not even close. Earning a living, that was what she was aiming for.
    After Mina left, Dicey turned off the lights and locked the door. She didn’t know why she was bothering. First thing in themorning, she’d need to get a pane of glass and set it in. Except for the glass itself, she could find whatever else she needed—putty and a screwdriver to pry apart the wooden window frame, and a hammer to put it back together with—at home. She went on home.
    Despite the hour, there was a light on in the kitchen. When Dicey had covered the larch with plastic sheets, she went inside. It was Gram who was awake, sitting at the table, drinking a cup of tea, wearing a faded plaid bathrobe. Gram had dark circles under her eyes. “You should be in bed,” Dicey said. “You shouldn’t have waited up.”
    â€œThat’s for me to decide, isn’t it. You sounded on the phone as if something unpleasant had happened. Are you going to sit down?”
    â€œNo.”
    If Dicey sat down they would talk for a while, and Gram should be in bed asleep, she should have been asleep an hour ago. “I’ll tell you in the morning,” Dicey said. “I’m back, as you see, home safe—and I expect to see you get up from that chair and go to your room.”
    Sometimes you just had to boss Gram around, she was so stubborn.
    As if she was pretending not to be doing what she’d been told, Gram got up, went to the sink, rinsed out the cup, and dropped the teabag into the garbage. Dicey just waited. She stood and watched and waited, not saying a word, until she saw the door to her grandmother’s bedroom close. Then Dicey went upstairs to her own room, to take a look at her checkbook and try to figure out where she stood, to revise her plans.

CHAPTER 6
    D icey awoke the next morning with the sense that she was ready to solve problems, the way you often do, as if the time of sleep were a long journey to a distant country where alterations in geographical formations, in light, in ways of living, in language even, enable you to see your own world more clearly.
    It was early. The sky outside her window shone dark, glassy blue. Night with its stars had traveled on, leaving the field of sky clear for approaching sunlight. But the sun had not yet arrived.
    She crossed the dark hall to the bathroom. All around her, the house breathed gently in sleep. When she returned she sat at the desk. There, she pulled out paper and worked the figures: $75 a month for rent, including utilities, plus about $20 for the phone. That gave her, in the bank, more than three months, without taking anything out for supplies. Even with supplies her bank account could cover the next three months. Her income was $75 a month, from storage fees—and she’d sent out the bills for December, so that money should be coming in—plus an extra $150 when she’d completed maintenance work on the three boats. Although, she’d have to subtract from that the price of whatever supplies she’d used up getting the boats ready. Even after subtracting, however, she could look forward to the extra hundred-odd dollars.
    That completed one column, one side of the paper. On theother side, she had more question marks than anything else. She would have to get some insurance, she guessed, and some way of shuttering the door. Plywood would do it, a piece of plywood hung down over the inside of the glass. It was too possible that whoever had robbed her once might return, the same way a crabber returns to