Red Kayak

by Priscilla Cummings

  RED KAYAK

  Also by

  PRISCILLA CUMMINGS

  Saving Grace

  A Face First

  Autumn Journey

  RED KAYAK

  Priscilla Cummings

  DUTTON CHILDREN’S BOOKS NEW YORK

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2004 by Priscilla Cummings Frece

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cummings, Priscilla, date.

  Red kayak / Priscilla Cummings.—1st. ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Living near the water on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, thirteen-year-old Brady and his best friends J.T. and Digger become entangled in a tragedy that tests their friendship and their ideas about right and wrong.

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-0050-6

  [1. Conduct of life—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Boats and boating—Fiction. 4. Death—Fiction. 5. Eastern Shore (Md. and Va.)—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.C91483Re 2004

  [Fic]—dc22 2003063532

  Published in the United States by Dutton Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group

  345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  www.penguin.com

  For William

  “Truth is always the strongest argument.”

  —SOPHOCLES

  RED KAYAK

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  After all this time, I still ask myself: Was it my fault?

  Maybe. Maybe not.

  Either way, I wonder what would have happened if I’d called out a warning. Or kept my mouth shut later. Would J.T. and Digger still be my best friends? Would the DiAngelos still be living next door?

  One thing’s for sure: If none of this had happened, I’d be out there crabbing every day, baiting my pots in the morning and pulling them in after school. Fall’s a great time for catching crabs before the females head south and the males burrow into the mud. I could fix the engine on the boat easy if I wanted. It’s not broken like I told Dad. Probably nothing but some air in the lines from settin’ there so long. I could bleed the engine tonight, set my alarm for 4 A.M., and be on the river before the sun was up over the tree line.

  Don’t think it didn’t bother me, the way those traps sat all summer, stacked four deep against the back of Dad’s toolshed. Some never even got hosed off, they were stashed in such a hurry. Be a lot of work to clean ’em up and rezinc them, too, so they don’t corrode. In just a few days, though, I could have four rows of twenty-five sunken pots out there, each one marked with a fresh-painted orange buoy, and all one hundred of those pots soaked and baited with razor clams. Afternoons, I could be hauling in crabs hand over fist, and right now, a bushel of big number-one jimmies would fetch me seventy dollars from the wholesaler—maybe even more, since the price of crabs has gone through the roof.

  But this is all so complicated. I can’t go back out on the water. Not yet anyway. I can’t help it; I keep asking myself, What if this, what if that? And then in my mind I see that red kayak…

  My dad says stop thinking that way. “You be lookin’ backward all the time, Brady, you’re gonna have one heck of a crook in the neck.” He smiles when he says that. But I know what he means deep down, and it’s not funny. You can’t keep dwelling on the past when you can’t undo it. You can’t make it happen any different than it did.

  My cousin Carl comes over a lot. He’s a paramedic and sees a lot of gross stuff, so he knows about getting things out of your head. “Talk it out there, boy,” he keeps telling me. “What? You think you’re alone? You think other people don’t have these feelings?” But even Carl admits he’s never been in quite the same position as me.

  Mom has helped a lot, too, although I know it was really hard for her, because of my sister.

  Mostly, I wish I could just stop going over it in my mind. But it replays all the time. Like waves breaking on the narrow beach down at the river. Sometimes, after school, I walk down there to sit on the bank and do nothing. Just let the sun bake my face and listen to those waves hitting the shore, one after the other.

  Tilly always follows me and I let her. Tilly’s my yellow Lab. She lays down with her head on her paws and knows to leave me alone when I’m thinking. Despite everything, I still marvel at how all those tiny ripples in the water can catch the sunlight and make the river shimmer like a million jewels were strewn on the surface. Deceptive, how other times the same water can seem as smooth as glass. You’d never know that underneath, the currents run so hard and so fast.

  It’s a pretty river, the Corsica. But it doesn’t have a heart…

  CHAPTER TWO

  In some ways, it started over a year ago. But I want to get the worst over first, so I’m going to start with what happened six months ago, in the spring. That morning, we were waiting, my two friends and I, for the ambulance to come, and J.T. took a swig from his bottle of green tea. I remember this because Digger was trying to pick a fight, and it all started with J.T.’s green tea.

  No one was hurt—that’s not why the ambulance was coming. My cousin Carl had this old ambulance that the county still uses for a backup, and when he had the early shift, he would swing by and give us a ride to school. School’s only a couple miles away, but it’s a forty-minute ride on that dang bus because we’re first pickup on the loop. Besides, it was pretty cool getting a ride in the ambulance.

  J.T. almost always waits for the bus with me. He lives next door on his family’s chicken farm. A soybean field between my house and his has a path worn down through the middle of it we’re back and forth so much. And Digger is across the road, not too far the other way. Sometimes, he walks over to join us—that, or his father will drop him off from his dump truck on his way to a job.

  So we were in the driveway that morning, waiting for Carl to pick us up. Backpacks on the ground. Hunched in our parkas because it was chilly. Taking turns throwing the tennis ball for Tilly, who never quits. And Digger snatched the bottle of green tea out of J.T.’s hands and started laughing. “What the—”

  “Shhhhh!” I’m always having to tone down Digger. “My mom can hear!” And she can’t stand to hear us cuss.

  We cast a glance back at th
e house.

  Digger held the bottle up, out of J.T.’s reach. “Green tea with ginseng and honey?” He sounded disgusted.

  It made me uncomfortable, the way Digger talked to J.T. sometimes. And after all those years we spent growing up together.

  But J.T. just laughed. He’s pretty easygoing. And he swiped the drink back. “Hey,” he said. “It’s loaded with antioxidants.”

  “Anti who?” Digger screwed up his face.

  “You wait, Digger,” J.T. warned him. “You and Brady—especially Brady ’cause he’s always out in the sun—you’ll be all old and wrinkly by the time you’re fifty, and I’ll have, like, this perfect skin.”

  “Yeah, like a baby’s ass,” Digger retorted.

  I wanted to tell him to shut up, but I didn’t. I could tell when Digger was in one of his moods.

  “You’re just jealous,” J.T. quipped.

  “Of what?” Digger demanded.

  “Guys!” I called out, stopping everything like a referee’s whistle. When they looked at me, I pivoted and flung the ball for Tilly. We watched it land and roll downhill toward our dock. At the same time my father’s band saw started up in the old tractor shed, which Dad has transformed into his woodworking shop. Where we live used to be a farm, but it’s not anymore. The barn and the farmhouse burned down years ago—before my parents bought the property and built a one-story brick rancher. My dad is a waterman half the year, a boat carpenter the other half, and even though crabbing season started April 1, he’d been working Mondays in the shop because he was making more money building cabinets than crabbing, especially now that crabs were getting scarce.

  Last year, the state legislature cut Dad’s workday from fourteen hours down to eight. Then the governor took away the month of November, and it hurt us financially. My mom had to put in extra hours at the nursing home, and Dad was pretty ticked off. “They’re blamin’ the wrong people!” he railed. “Pollution and development—that’s what’s killin’ us. Bay be right smart of crabs if it weren’t for all the damned condo-minions going up!”

  I don’t know. We had a little argument about it after a scientist came to school. He said my dad was only half right—about the pollution and all. “We’re fishing the bay too hard,” that guy kept saying. “Too many crab pots, too many trotlines. You have to take the long look.”

  When Dad’s noisy band saw stopped, I glanced at J.T. and Digger and wondered which way the conversation would go.

  “What’s your dad working on?” J.T. asked.

  “Dr. Finney’s sailboat,” I said, glad to move off the subject of J.T.’s green tea. “Thirty-foot Seawind ketch. Twenty-five years old—fiberglass hull but a lot of solid wood trim topside.”

  J.T. arched his eyebrows. “Wow. He’s got his work cut out for him.”

  “He’s completely gutting it,” I said. “Dr. Finney’s going to put in this incredible electronics system. GPS. Flat-screen TV. Security.” I knew this would make J.T. drool because he loves all that technical stuff.

  But it only made Digger angry. He kicked a rock in the driveway. “Some people got too much money for their own damn good.”

  When a pair of noisy mallards flew over, we looked up. Even Tilly dropped the ball and started barking. In the west, I noticed dark clouds piling up across the horizon, like a distant mountain range.

  “If the weather didn’t look so bad, I’d say come on over this afternoon. We could take a little spin down the river.” I felt bad for Digger sometimes. On account of his family.

  “Can’t go,” he mumbled, still kicking his toe in the dirt. “I gotta help my old man haul gravel.”

  “Yeah, me neither,” J.T. said. “I erased my entire hard drive last night. I need to load everything back on and rewrite that essay for English. Hey, Brady, remember those oxymorons we talked about in lit the other day?”

  “Jumbo shrimp?” I asked.

  “Yeah—and military intelligence,” J.T. reminded me.

  I grinned.

  “Well, I got a good one for you,” J.T. said. “Microsoft Works.”

  Even Digger lifted his head and chuckled. “A perfect idiot,” he added.

  So there we were, all of us laughing because we’d knocked out four oxymorons smack in a row—and that’s when we first saw the red kayak.

  From where we stood, you could see down the grassy slope behind our house, on past Dad’s shop and the dock, to the creek. And out there, heading our way, was Mr. DiAngelo’s new red kayak.

  Digger’s face lit up. “The Italian stallion,” he chortled, a dual reference to the heritage of our new neighbor, Marcellus DiAngelo, and his obsession with physical fitness. Cupping his hands around his mouth, Digger pretended to call out: “Paddle hard, you sucker!”

  He and J.T. exchanged this look I didn’t quite catch, and J.T. started laughing, too.

  But I shook my head. “He shouldn’t be going out there today. When he gets down by the point—he’ll fly down the river.” I was sure Mr. DiAngelo didn’t know about how the wind picked up once you left our creek and hit the open water. Not to mention the spring tides. Sometimes they were so strong they’d suck the crab-pot buoys under. I doubted whether Mr. DiAngelo knew that; he’d only had the kayak a few weeks.

  “Really, guys. We ought to yell something,” I said soberly. J.T. shook his head. “He’s too far away. He won’t hear you.”

  “Why should we anyway?” Digger asked with a scowl. “Just because you baby-sat for their little kid and you’re in love with his wife?”

  An overstatement if I ever heard one. Although I did take care of their son one afternoon when Mrs. DiAngelo had to go over the bridge to Annapolis for a doctor’s appointment. And she is a very good-looking woman—but even J.T. and Digger thought so.

  “Ben’s cool,” I said, trying to make light of it. “We did LEGOs.”

  J.T. chuckled and looked at his sneakers.

  Sneering, Digger stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Look, Brady,” he said, “if he’s stupid enough to be out there today, he can take what’s coming. Besides, he deserves it.”

  Tilly whined because she was waiting for me to throw the ball again.

  “That water is damn cold,” I said as I stooped to pick up the ball. It was only the middle of April, and the water temperature probably wasn’t even fifty degrees yet. “Exposure, you know? If he fell in, he could die in, like, twenty minutes.”

  Digger smiled. “Exactly,” he said calmly. “We’d all be so lucky.”

  At that point, I threw the ball so hard it landed in the marsh near the water. Tilly took off after it like a shot and disappeared into the tall grass.

  “Come on.” I made eye contact with Digger when I said it again: “Let’s yell something.”

  But we didn’t.

  Digger dropped his eyes and backed off. When he turned in profile, I glimpsed the hard lines of his scowl as he gazed out toward that red kayak. It was the first time I realized how much anger Digger had packed inside. I knew he was sore because the DiAngelos bought his grandfather’s farm, tore down the old house, and built a mansion up there on the bluff. But up until then, maybe I hadn’t realized how much it bothered him.

  Of course it didn’t help that we’d all been booted off the property a few days ago. But if you asked me, Mr. DiAngelo was pretty nice about it. He didn’t yell, or offend us, or anything like that. He merely asked us to leave because we were trespassing. And Digger did have that cigarette lit. I mean, Mr. DiAngelo had a right. For all he knew, we could have started a fire or something.

  But from Digger’s point of view, we were only hanging out under our cliff, where we hung out a million times over the last thirteen years. That cliff and all the property the DiAngelos now own was all part of our stomping grounds. We shot tin cans out on the cornfield. Built forts in the woods. Raced go-carts down the tractor roads. So you know, I did feel for some of Digger’s frustration.

  What I don’t understand is how Digger could have been so callous that morning: If
he’s stupid enough to be out there, he can take what’s coming… How Digger—and J.T., too—could have been so blind to the awful possibilities. Even after I reminded them : He could die in, like, twenty minutes…We ought to yell something…

  When, exactly, did they begin to feel shamed by it?

  Because it has always shamed me.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Carl never let us down when he arrived. He flashed the ambulance’s emergency lights and fired a quick whirring blast from the siren as he came up our long, flat driveway. Oyster shells crunched under the weight of the ambulance, and white dust trailed behind it like smoke.

  “Hey, guys!” Carl slowed the vehicle and called out his open window. “Need a lift?”

  Carl’s girlfriend, Mindy, dressed in her turquoise waitress uniform, was up front with him. She smiled at us.

  After Mom poked her head out the side door to yell good-bye and call Tilly in, we hopped into the back of the ambulance. There was a padded bench on each side of the stretcher. We dropped our books and sat down. Then, stealthily, J.T. reached into a compartment behind him, put on a stethoscope, and secretly tried to listen to the back of Digger’s head. “Nothing,” he said, shaking his head. “Absolutely no brain activity.”

  Digger caught it from the corner of his eye and pulled away. Then he reached up overhead and pulled off one of the elastic strips tied along the bar above the stretcher. The paramedics tie them around your arm when they need to take blood, but Digger used it like a rubber band and took aim at J.T.