Page 4 of These Summer Storms

She whirled to face the words, and the man standing there. Tall, stern, long legs, rotted brain. Nice voice, quiet and deep. The kind of voice that made someone want to listen. Alice hadn’t noticed that before.

“Sorry?”

“I’m only saying it so you don’t think that I’m following you.”

It was a perfectly nice thing to say. But Alice Storm, third child ofTrailblazing Genius Franklin Storm, Dead at 70, had spent a lifetime being followed.

The train began to slow.

“That sounds like something someone following me would say.”

The corner of his straight, serious mouth tilted up. Barely. “Scout’s honor.”

Before she could respond, the conductor came through the automatic doors. “Wickford?”

It came out likeWickfahd,and Alice couldn’t help her smile at the sound of her childhood. “Yes.”

“Nice place for Labor Day weekend,” the conductor noted.

Her smile faded.

“Sure is,” the man who wasn’t following her replied.

“Gonna get some lobster?”Lobstah.

The train stopped and the doors opened with a heavy slide, a modern-day portcullis. “Sure are.”

Surprised by his use of the plural, Alice looked back. He wasn’t looking at her.

The conductor tipped his chin toward the train platform. “Lucky. Have a good weekend.”

“Thank you,” Alice said, stepping down onto the platform as her neighbor replied, “You too.”

The words were lost in the rhythm of the wheels, steady and reliable, already headed north. Alice hesitated, watching the train go and, for a wild moment, wondered what would happen if she ran after it, like in a movie, leaping from the end of the platform, catching the end of the last car. Riding it all the way to Boston.Hero shit,Gabi would say.

Alice sighed. The likelihood of her catching the back end of an accelerating train aside (zero likelihood, for the record), doing so would change nothing. The news would still be the same.

That, and her family was already expecting her not to show up, and she refused to give them the satisfaction of being right.

Alice’s phone showed two bars, thankfully, and she made quick work of summoning a ride. It was too far of a walk to the docks, and too late to wait inside anywhere—nothing in the quiet town was open past ten, even on the last week of summer.

She set her bags down in the cone of a bright yellow streetlamp—staying outside the light to avoid the potato bugs that danced around an enormousNo Litteringsign—and settled in for the twenty-minute wait for the driver she’d been assigned, watching as the handful of other passengers piled into cars lined up along the street. A few happy hugs and excited hellos and slammed trunks later, the street was empty except for two cars and an SUV parked on the far side, dark and quiet.

Leaving Alice alone.

Or, alone-ish. Thirty feet away, her neighbor stood under a streetlamp of his own—braving the potato bugs—phone in hand.

Looking her way, he lifted the rectangle as though it meant something. “My ride…isn’t here.”

“It’s okay.”

“I don’t want you to think—”

“That you’re following me.”

He nodded once. Firm. “Right.”

“You’re doing a good job of throwing me off the scent.”

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