Summer Days and Summer Nights (2 page)

The only place that did real business year round was the Dairy Queen, despite the Stewart's only a few miles away. But why Annalee had chosen to set up shop in Little Spindle instead of Greater Spindle was a mystery to everyone but her.

Gracie didn't head straight for the DQ that day—not at first. In fact, she got all the way home, tossed her bike down in the yard, and had her hand on the screen door before she caught herself. Eric and her mom liked to spend Saturdays in the backyard, just lying next to each other on plastic lounge chairs, snoozing, hands clasped like a couple of otters. They both worked long hours at the hospital in Greater Spindle and hoarded sleep like it was a hobby.

Gracie hovered there at the door, hand outstretched. What could she really say to her mother? Her weary mother who never stopped looking worried, even in sleep? For a moment, at the edge of the lake, Gracie had been a kid again, but she was fourteen. She should know better.

She got back on her bike and pedaled slowly, meditatively, in no direction at all, belief seeping away as if the sun was sweating it out of her. What had she actually seen? A fish maybe? A few fish? But some deeper sense must have been guiding her, because when she got to the Dairy Queen she turned into the half-full parking lot.

Annalee Saperstein was at a table by the window, as she always was, doing her crossword, a Peanut Buster Parfait melting in front of her. Gracie mostly knew Annalee because she liked listening to the stories about her, and because her mom was always sending Gracie to ask Annalee over for dinner.

“She's old and alone,” Gracie's mother would say.

“She seems to like it.”

Her mom would wave her finger in the air like she was conducting an invisible orchestra. “No one likes being alone.”

Gracie tried not to roll her eyes. She tried.

Now she slid into the hard red seat across from Annalee and said, “Do you know anything about Idgy Pidgy?”

“Good afternoon to you, too,” Annalee grumped, without looking up from her crossword.

“Sorry,” Gracie said. She thought of explaining that she'd had a strange start to her day, but instead opted for “How are you?”

“Not dead yet. It would kill you to use a comb?”

“No point.” Gracie tried to rope her slick black hair back into its ponytail. “My hair doesn't take well to instruction.” She waited then said, “So … the monster in the lake?”

She knew she wasn't the first person to claim she'd seen something in the waters of Little Spindle. There had been a bunch of sightings in the sixties and seventies, though Gracie's mom claimed that was because everyone was on drugs. The town council had even tried to turn it into a tourist draw by dubbing it the Idgy Pidgy—“Little Spindle's Little Monster”—and painting the image of a friendly-looking sea serpent with googly eyes on the
WELCOME TO LITTLE SPINDLE
sign. It hadn't caught on, but you could still see its outline on the sign, and a few winters back someone had spray painted a huge phallus onto it. For the three days it took the town council to notice and get someone to paint over it, the sign looked like the Idgy Pidgy was trying to have sex with the
E
at the end of
LITTLE SPINDLE.

“You mean like Loch Ness?” Annalee asked, glancing up through her thick glasses. “You got a sunburn.”

Gracie shrugged. She was always getting a sunburn, getting over a sunburn, or about to get a sunburn. “I mean like
our
lake monster.” It hadn't been like Loch Ness. The shape had been completely different. Kind of like the goofy serpent on the town sign, actually.

“Ask that kid.”

“Which kid?”

“I don't know his name. Summer kid. Comes in here every day at four for a cherry dip.”

Gracie gagged. “Cherry dip is vile.”

Annalee jabbed her pen at Gracie. “Cherry dip sells cones.”

“What does he look like?”

“Skinny. Big purple backpack. White hair.”

Gracie slid down in the booth, body going limp with disappointment. “Eli?”

Gracie knew most of the summer kids who had been coming to Little Spindle for a while. They pretty much kept to themselves. Their parents invited each other to barbecues, and they moved in rowdy cliques on their dirt bikes, taking over the lakes, making lines at Rottie's Red Hot and the DQ, coming into Youvenirs right before Labor Day to buy a hat or a key chain. But Eli was always on his own. His family's rental had to be somewhere near the north side of the lake, because every May he'd show up walking south on the main road, wearing too-big madras shorts and lugging a purple backpack. He'd slap his way to the library in a pair of faded Vans and spend the entire afternoon there by himself, then pick up his big backpack and trundle back home like some kind of weird blond pill bug, but not before he stopped at the DQ—apparently to order a cherry dip.

“What's wrong with him?” asked Annalee.

It was too hard to explain. Gracie shrugged. “He's a little bit the worst.”

“The cherry dip of humans?”

Gracie laughed, then felt bad for laughing when Annalee peered at her over those thick plastic frames and said, “Because you're the town sweetheart? You could use some more friends.”

Gracie tugged at the frayed end of her newly cut shorts. She had friends. Mosey Allen was all right. And Lila Brightman. She had people to eat lunch with, people who waited for her before first bell. But they lived in Greater Spindle, with most of the kids from her school.

“What would Eli Cuddy know about Idgy Pidgy, anyway?” Gracie asked.

“Spends all his time in the library, doesn't he?”

Annalee had a point. Gracie tapped her fingers on the table, scraped more of the chipped lilac polish from her thumbnail. She thought of the story of the green-eyed baby and the river god. “So you've never seen anything like Idgy Pidgy?”

“I can barely see the pen in my hand,” Annalee said sourly.

“But if a person saw a monster, a real one, not like … not a metaphor, that person's probably crazy, right?”

Annalee pushed her glasses up her nose with one gnarled finger. Behind them, her brown eyes had a soft, rheumy sheen. “There are monsters everywhere,
tsigele
,” she said. “It's always good to know their names.” She took a bite of the puddle that was left of her sundae and smacked her lips. “Your friend is here.”

Eli Cuddy was standing at the counter, backpack weighting his shoulders, placing his order. The problem with Eli wasn't just that he liked to be indoors more than outdoors. Gracie was okay with that. It was that he never talked to anyone. And he always looked a little—damp. Like his clothes were clinging to his skinny chest. Like if you touched his skin, he might be
moist
.

Eli planted himself in a two-seater booth and propped a book open on the slope of his backpack so he could read while he ate.

Who eats an ice cream cone like that?
Gracie wondered as she watched him take weird, tidy little bites. Then she remembered those shapes moving in the lake.
Sunlight on the water,
her mind protested.
Scales,
her heart insisted.

“What's
tsigele
mean?” she asked Annalee.

“‘Little goat,'” said Annalee. “Bleat bleat, little goat. Go on with you.”

Why not? Gracie wiped her palms on her shorts and ambled up to the booth. She felt bolder than usual. Maybe because nothing she said to Eli Cuddy mattered. It wasn't like, if she made a fool of herself, he'd have anyone to tell.

“Hey,” she said. He blinked up at her. She had no idea what to do with her hands, so she planted them on her hips, then worried she looked like she was about to start a pep routine and dropped them. “You're Eli, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I'm Gracie.”

“I know. You work at Youvenirs.”

“Oh,” she said. “Right.” Gracie worked summer mornings there, mostly because Henny had taken pity on her and let her show up to dust things for a few dollars an hour. Had Eli come in before?

He was waiting. Gracie wished she'd planned this out better. Saying she believed in monsters felt sort of like showing someone the collection of stuffed animals she kept on her bed, like she was announcing,
I'm still a little kid. I'm still afraid of things that can curl around your leg and drag you under
.

“You know the Loch Ness monster?” she blurted.

Eli's brow creased. “Not personally.”

Gracie plunged ahead. “You think it could be real?”

Eli closed his book carefully and studied her with very serious, very blue eyes, the furrow between his eyebrows deepening. His lashes were so blond they were almost silver. “Did you look through my library record?” he asked. “Because that's a federal crime.”

“What?” It was Gracie's turn to scrutinize Eli. “No, I didn't spy on you. I just asked you a question.”

“Oh. Well. Good. Because I'm not totally sure it's a crime anyway.”

“What are you looking at that you're so worried people will see? Porn?”

“Volumes of it,” he said, in that same serious voice. “As much porn as I can get. The Little Spindle Library's collection is small but thoughtfully curated.”

Gracie snorted, and Eli's mouth tugged up a little.

“Okay, perv. Annalee said you might know something about Idgy Pidgy and that kind of stuff.”

“Annalee?”

Gracie bobbed her chin over to the booth by the window, where a nervous-looking man in a Hawaiian shirt had seated himself across from Annalee and was whispering something to her as he tore up a napkin. “This is her place.”

“I like cryptozoology,” Eli said. Off her blank look, he continued, “Bigfoot. The Loch Ness Monster. Ogopogo.”

Gracie hesitated. “You think all of those are real?”

“Not all of them. Statistically. But no one was sure the giant squid was real until they started washing up on beaches in New Zealand.”

“Really?”

Eli gave her a businesslike nod. “There's a specimen at the Natural History Museum in London that's twenty-eight feet long. They think that's a small one.”

“No shit,” Gracie breathed.

Another precise nod. “No. Shit.”

This time Gracie laughed outright. “Hold up,” she said, “I want a Blizzard. Don't go anywhere.”

He didn't.

*   *   *

That summer took on a wavy, loopy, lazing shape for Gracie. Mornings she “worked” at Youvenirs, rearranging knickknacks in the windows and pointing the rare customer toward the register. At noon she'd meet up with Eli and they'd go to the library or ride bikes to her cove, though Eli thought another sighting there was unlikely.

“Why would it come back here?” he asked as they stared out at the sun-dappled water.

“It was here before. Maybe it likes the shade.”

“Or maybe it was just passing through.”

Most of the time they talked about Idgy Pidgy. Or at least that was where their conversations always started.

“You could have just seen fish,” Eli said as they flipped through a book on North American myths, beneath an umbrella at Rottie's Red Hot.

“That would have to be some really big fish.”

“Carp can grow to be over forty pounds.”

She shook her head. “No. The scales were different.” Like jewels. Like a fan of abalone shells. Like clouds moving over water.

“You know, every culture has its own set of megafauna. A giant blue crow has been spotted in Brazil.”

“This wasn't a blue crow. And ‘megafauna' sounds like a band.”

“Not a good band.”

“I'd go see them.” Then Gracie shook her head. “Why do you eat that way?”

Eli paused. “What way?”

“Like you're going to write an essay about every bite. You're eating a cheeseburger, not defusing a bomb.”

But Eli did everything that way—slowly, thoughtfully. He rode his bike that way. He wrote things down in his blue spiral notebook that way. He took what seemed like an hour to pick out something to eat at Rottie's Red Hot when there were only five things on the menu, which never changed. It was weird, no doubt, and Gracie was glad her friends from school spent most of their summers around Greater Spindle so she didn't have to try to explain any of it. But there was also something kind of nice about the way Eli took things so seriously, like he really gave everything his full attention.

They compiled lists of Idgy Pidgy sightings. There had been less than twenty in the town's history, dating back to the 1920s.

“We should cross reference them with Loch Ness and Ogopogo sightings,” said Eli. “See if there's a pattern. Then we can figure out when we should surveil the lake.”

“Surveil,” Gracie said, doodling a sea serpent in the margin of Eli's list. “Like police. We can set up a perimeter.”

“Why would we do that?”

“It's what they do on cop shows. Set up a perimeter. Lock down the perp.”

“No TV, remember?” Eli's parents had a “no screens” policy. He used the computers at the library, but at home it was no Internet, no cell phone, no television. Apparently, they were vegetarians, too, and Eli liked to eat all the meat he could when they left him to his own devices. The closest he got to vegetables was french fries. Gracie sometimes wondered if he was poor in a way that she wasn't. He never seemed short of money for the arcade or hot pretzels, but he always wore the same clothes and always seemed hungry. People with money didn't summer in Little Spindle. But people without money didn't summer at all. Gracie wasn't really sure she wanted to know. She liked that they didn't talk about their parents or school.

Now she picked up Eli's notebook and asked, “How can we surveil if you don't know proper police procedure?”

“All the good detectives are in books.”