because I’m getting really tired. I wonder if he has kids, maybe a daughter. He doesn’t smile much. I think maybe he’s so used to trying to be scary that he forgot how not to. And he is… scary, that is. I’d prefer it if he’d smile. I wonder how Stella is. I hope she’s okay. She’s had a rough year; she doesn’t really need this drama.
“How did this all make me feel?” I ask myself, because I figure that would be the detective’s next question. “I was really happy that we were both excited to find out what was going on in Whalehead—the pier, the Three Ts’ secret trips under the boardwalk, the machine in the Smoothie Factory basement.”
Detective Santoro pushes a corner of his lip up, but it looks like it takes great effort for him to do it.
“I felt good that Stella and I shared an interest in this adventure.”
“That’s nice. Thanks for sharing,” Detective Santoro says. “But can we talk about things that happened? You know, the facts.”
“I guess I wanted you to have the whole picture,” I say. “Just before the basement door closed, I stuck my hand in it. To hold it open. Then we froze there for three winks. When it seemed like the girl wasn’t coming back, I pushed the door open and peeked inside. No one was there, so I said to Stella, ‘Let’s go in and look around.’ ”
Detective Santoro closes his flippy notebook, leans back in his chair far enough that the front legs lift, and rocks a bit. He stares at me like I’ve confused him.
I clarify. “Stella didn’t want to go inside, but I told her she was a wimp if she didn’t.”
He raises his eyebrows a little at that. “It was your idea to go inside?”
“Right. All me.”
“And you told Stella that she was a wimp if she didn’t?”
“That’s right.”
“I talk to a lot of people; I can usually spot the troublemakers. And you don’t seem like the type to sneak into a place,” he says.
“Sneaking? No. We’ve gone in through that door hundreds of times. We just wanted to look around. It wasn’t really sneaking.”
Thirty-One Josie
Under the Boardwalk
June 22 (Continued)
We’d been in this basement lots of times when it was Water Ice World, because it’s easier to get back to the boardwalk by cutting through the store, rather than walking out to Thirty-Fourth Street and going around. Plus it was just more fun to take a shortcut. And sometimes Yasmina would give us free water ice.
While lots had changed upstairs in the main section of the store, the basement looked pretty much the same as when it had been Water Ice World. Lots of boxes, piles of cups, lids, and cleaning supplies. Except for one thing: A big machine was in the middle of the space, just like Lydia had mentioned.
The contraption hissed and squirted water out its bottom. The drainage flowed into a hole in the basement floor, in order to prevent flooding.
“What is it?” I asked Stella.
“It ain’t a dishwasher.” She looked at the drain in the cement floor. “Where d’ya think that goes?”
I said, “Same place all the local runoff goes—” Just as I was about to give her specifics, we heard voices headed our way from upstairs.
Stella tugged me by the sleeve to follow her behind a cardboard mountain, and she put a finger to her mouth, signaling me to be quiet.
It was Lydia and an older woman who I recognized, because Stella and I had seen her talking with Mayor Lopez when we were jogging. Actually, they hadn’t been talking—she’d been yelling at him.
Lydia said, “It’s going to be the highlight of the summer, Mrs. Gardiner. I can’t believe you were able to arrange it.”
There was the sound of the walk-in refrigerator opening as the woman, Mrs. Gardiner, said, “A promotional event with Meredith Maxwell is going to put the Smoothie Factory on the map. And that map covers the whole country.”
“Will she actually come here?” Lydia’s voice dipped as she entered the refrigerator. “Like, can I meet her? A photo op?”
I had to struggle to hear the rest. “As long as it’s okay with her people. She probably has to be careful. She has security and all,” the woman, who I’d now pegged as the manager, or more likely the owner, said. Then she directed Lydia: “Just a few scoops. We don’t have an endless supply.”
Lydia asked, “Where do you get this—”
My cell phone vibrated with my alarm reminder to