At Last (The Idle Point, Maine Stories) - By Barbara Bretton Page 0,19

pets."

"I like badly spoiled house pets," she said.

"You like anything with fin, fur, or feathers," Doctor Jim said, shaking his head. "I don't know how I got so lucky."

Gracie went about her business, opening blinds, checking for messages, making sure to feed the goldfish in the waiting room. She and Doc had been down this road many times before. She needed both the money and the experience working at the animal hospital afforded her, more than she needed beach parties and proms. This was her ticket to the future.

"A woman needs her own," Gramma Del had been telling her since Gracie was a little girl. Her own home. Her own money. Her own future right there in Idle Point, working side by side with Doctor Jim one day as his equal.

Doctor Jim didn't know it, but sometimes she managed to sneak away at lunchtime to her secret spot, a crescent of beach tucked away beyond the lighthouse where nobody but Gracie ever went. Her friends all rowed across the inlet to Hidden Island or drove up the coast to one of the fancy resort towns that dominated the economic landscape. The adults spread their blankets on the smooth sands of the town beach. Nobody bothered with the forbidding curve of coastline she'd claimed for her own. The current was strong there and the rocks were so slippery and forbidding that Gracie always had the place to herself. She'd perch on an outcropping of rock, wrap her arms around her knees, and look out toward the horizon. Sometimes she brought a book with her or a sandwich. Most times she brought nothing but a deep sense of belonging.

Idle Point was home.

#

The last time Noah Chase spent a summer trapped in Idle Point he was five years old and too young to know any better.

He was seventeen now. He'd spent summers in Florida, Arizona, Paris, London, Los Angeles, Hawaii, Montana, and that was just for starters. If his father hadn't had a second heart attack in May, Noah would have been on a ranch in Colorado right now instead of heading over to the animal hospital to pick up his mother's brand new furball.

Some welcome home. He wasn't in the house five minutes before Mary Weston sent him out to play driver for a mutt. Not that he had anything against mutts. He'd spent most of his childhood praying for a dog of his own. He would have settled for anything—a cat, a hamster, a ferret—but a dog was special. There had always been some reason why he couldn't have one. His father's allergies. His mother's concerns for the help. The fact that by the time he was six years old, he really didn't live there anyway.

He didn't like thinking about those first few years at St. Luke's Boarding School in Portsmouth. Back then he'd been smaller than the other students and scared of his own shadow, a mama's boy who didn't know his butt from a hole in the ground. He'd spent grades one through three getting the crap beat out of him until he finally got smart and learned how to fight back.

Maybe he'd learned too well.

He'd started last year on probation for being caught shoplifting from the school bookstore. "You have an unlimited account," the headmaster had said to him during one of those intense, we're-in-this-together chats he hated. "You don't need to steal." The headmaster had fixed him with a stern look. "You don't have anything to say for yourself?"

"Nope," said Noah. He didn't have anything to say the time he disappeared for a weekend or the time he was caught driving the science teacher's car up and down the main drag.

He'd been grounded, forced to work cleanup in the dining hall, threatened with expulsion. Nothing worked. All it took was another check from his mother and life at St. Luke's went back to what passed as normal among snotty rich kids just like him.

This time, though, he had struck pay dirt. That party outside of town would go down in Portsmouth history.

So would the arrests.

They knew how to manipulate the system at St. Luke's. Cover up. Erase. Expunge. Until you finally pushed too hard that even St. Luke's of the Bottomless Benefactor Slush Fund had enough of you. Plenty of time to think about how to tell his parents he'd been asked not to return to St. Luke's. He had all summer to do that.

It still bugged the shit out of him that his mother had finally