Page 67 of The Summer Show

Was a goose smarter than a fifth grader?

I was about to find out.

With a gasp, I pointed to the other side of the yard. “Look!”

Murder Goose bored a hole directly through my skull with her glare, then, slowly, she turned to look where I was pointing.

While she was distracted, I ran for my life, vaulting over the gate before she could take a bite out of my shins.

Librarian: 1

Murder Goose: 0

Did I felt let down when she just waddled away without protest? A bit. All that effort and she couldn’t have cared less that I’d fled. With a ruffle of her feathers, she turned away and returned to harassing the goats with her goose friends.

Something told me I had been psychologically bested by a bird. So who was the real winner here?

The immediate problem I discovered once I l escaped the yard was that I had no idea where Irini One lived. The talking map lady on my phone was useless because Nera wasn’t an island of addresses. Its off-season population was so small that everyone knew everyone. All the postman needed was a name to deliver the mail.

What I had in my arsenal was a first name and no last name. According to Ana, contemporary Greek women kept their last names. Irini One was Schrödinger’s Stamou. She was one of them, but she wasn’t.

How many Irinis were on the island?

Five at a bare minimum.

I was worrying about nothing, as it turned out. At the first sign of me standing stupidly at the street corner, wondering how I would find Waldo, I was approached by a gaggle of children who wanted money. They were followed by an angry woman with a broom, who chased them away for begging. When she was done screaming at them and they’d gone to hide in a tree—terrible hiding place, by the way, because they stood out like blood on white pants—she turned to me with a huff. She said something, but I’d never know what because there was a limit to how fast I could learn a whole language, or even chunks of one.

“Irini One?”

I didn’t say Irini One, of course. I said “Irini Ena,” which was Greek for the number one. Probably because Nera’s people were used to dealing with tourists with limited vocabularies, she instantly understood what I was asking.

“Irini’s house?”

Sweet relief. “Yes!”

Thank the heavens she spoke more English than I did Greek, otherwise who knew where I’d end up?

She pointed down the long dirt road. “Go there. Stop when you see a donkey with three legs. The house next door with the stupid person inside is Irini One’s house.”

Three-legged donkey. Stupid person. Got it. I thanked her for her help and set off along the dirt road.

Once again I was struck by how Nera felt like a different world. The dirt roads, the wild trees, the chickens crossing the road willy nilly, with nobody stopping to question why. The sun was brighter, the light whiter, and everything moved at half the speed. Except for that shoe over there flying through the air.

Someone screeched. The shoe had found its target.

I walked along counting donkey legs. I never did get to the three legged donkey, because sitting on the ground outside a steel picket fence that I assumed belonged to Irini One, was Nick. His knees were pulled up part way to his chest, his forearms resting on the patellas and his head lowered. Sitting beside him was a toolbox.

His good looks were a gut-punch.

Following the gut punch came a wave of empathy and other more complicated emotions. I regularly comforted small children, so I was no stranger to giving hugs, but I’d never wanted to hug anyone harder than I wanted to hug Nick Merrick right now.

He was radiating anxiety.

Without speaking, I sat next to the toolbox and placed one of the two thermoses between his feet.

His head jerked up. His eyes were unfocused, wild, worried. A breeze skittered past us, followed by a turkey.

“Kathleen?”