Saltwater Secrets - Cindy Callaghan Page 0,20
work at the Smoothie Factory?” I asked, but it was kind of obvious.
She twirled a band out of her hair and let it fall down. “Yeah.”
“Well, we were wondering if you were hiring?” I asked.
Josie added, “Looks like you’re super busy.”
The girl looked at Josie, acting friendlier now. “I love your accent. Australian?”
“Yeah,” Josie said. “Usually people guess British first.”
“Well, you sound just like a man who’s friends with the owners of the Smoothie Factory. He’s in town for the week and at the store all the time. I love listening to him.” Then she asked, “Maybe you know him?”
Josie said, “Uh, I don’t know everyone in Australia, but maybe if I saw him, I’d recognize him.”
“Wouldn’t it be funny if you and him dock your boat at the same place or something?”
“So funny,” Josie said.
The girl offered, “They’re totally hiring. You interested? Because if you know that guy, you’d totally get the job.”
“We’re looking at our options,” Josie said. “Do you like it there? How late do you work? Do you have to do stuff besides make smoothies, like make deliveries, or take deliveries, or do stuff in the basement?”
All of her questions made the girl pause. I explained, “She hates basements. Weird phobia.”
The girl relaxed. “I like it. We work till about ten o’clock. And sometimes we take deliveries and clean the equipment. The cleaning isn’t too bad, except for the big machine, which is in the basement, so you’d hate that. And it’s a lot of work.”
“What’s the machine for?” I asked.
“Sorry.” She giggled. “It’s a secret that only certain Smoothie Factory employees know.”
“For real?” I asked, as if the idea of a secret made me all sorts of excited. “Me and my sister are really good at keeping secrets.”
“You’re sisters?” She looked at me: dark hair and eyes, New Yorker. Then she looked at Josie: blond, blue-eyed, Aussie. “How is that possible?”
“Half sisters,” Josie clarified.
The girl looked at me. “You drew the short straw on the accent, huh?”
I smiled at her rude comment only because I wanted to know the secret; if not for that, I probably would’ve shown her how loud a New York accent can get.
The girl laughed at her own joke and kept going. “Sorry, but unless you’re inside the Smoothie Factory trust cocoon, I can’t tell you that.”
Trust cocoon?
She swiped her hair behind her ears. “I gotta go. But if you want, stop in and fill out an application. You can write down that I referred you. My name is Lydia.” She picked up her pace, and that clearly ended our convo.
“Well, that wasn’t helpful,” I said.
“No, but she wasn’t the sharpest swordfish in the school, if you know what I mean.”
I did.
“We could try to intercept her again at this time tomorrow and tell her you were hired, and that I actually do know that Aussie mate, and get her to tell us the Smoothie Factory secret.”
“Not a bad idea,” I said.
On our way to pick up snorkel equipment from the Water Sport Adventure stand on the beach, I asked, “Secret machine in the basement?”
“Yeah. Do you think that’s true, or is it some high-tech dishwasher, and she doesn’t know it? Maybe her coworkers told her that the dishwasher, or whatever it is, is a big secret, to make cleaning it more exciting.”
I laughed a little. “You might be right. A secret machine is way more interesting.”
* * *
I’d gone snorkeling with Josie before, so I knew the drill. We put on masks and flippers. She swam under the pier, and I followed. Swimming with flippers is so much easier than without.
I didn’t really know what we were looking for—heck, half the time I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. I was surprised and sad to see trash down there: bottles, a tire, a chair. It felt like humans had invaded a world they didn’t belong in. Talk about careless and lazy. Why throw a bottle into the ocean when we can recycle it?
While I assessed human disregard for the ocean, Josie investigated other things. And she made two interesting discoveries.
Twenty Stella
Police Station
June 25 (Continued)
Santoro picks up his pen and asks, “What kind of discoveries?”
“We’ve snorkeled under the pier lots of times, so we know what it looks like. The pier is held up by wooden pylons, which are like telephone poles cemented into the ground. The pylons are coated with something to protect them. I don’t know what it is, but it looks like wax. Well, Josie noticed that