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Vic sat up, rubbing her face. “I don’t know. Nothing.”

Wayne gave her a dark and doubtful look.

He made his way out onto the dock in mincing, effortful steps, Hooper slouching along behind like a tame bear. Wayne carried a big, battered yellow toolbox, clutched the handle in both hands. A third of the way out, he lost his grip, and it dropped with a crash. The dock shook.

“I got the tackle box,” Wayne said.

“That’s not a tackle box.”

“You said look for a brown box.”

“That’s yellow.”

“It’s brown in spots.”

“It’s rusted in spots.”

“Yeah? So? Rust is brown.”

He unbuckled the toolbox, pushed back the lid, frowned at the contents.

“Easy mistake,” she said.

“Is this maybe for fishing?” he asked, and pulled out a curious instrument. It looked like the blade of a dull miniature scythe, small enough to fit in his palm. “It’s shaped like a hook.”

Vic knew what it was, although it had been years since she’d seen one. Then she registered, at last, what Wayne had said when he first walked out onto the dock.

“Let me see that box,” Vic said.

She turned it around to stare in at a collection of flat, rusted wrenches, an air-pressure gauge, and an old key with a rectangular head, the word TRIUMPH stamped into it.

“Where’d you find this?”

“It was on the seat of the old motorcycle. Did the motorcycle come with the house?”

“Show me,” Vic said.





The Carriage House


VIC HAD ONLY BEEN IN THE CARRIAGE HOUSE ONCE, WHEN SHE FIRST looked at the property. She had talked to her mother about cleaning the place out and using it as an artist’s studio. So far, though, her pencils and paints hadn’t made it any farther than the bedroom closet, and the carriage house was as cluttered as the day they had moved in.

It was a long, narrow room, so crowded with junk it was impossible for anyone to walk a straight line to the back wall. There were a few stalls where horses had been kept. Vic loved the smell of the place, a perfume of gasoline, dirt, old dry hay, and wood that had baked and aged for eighty summers.

If Vic were Wayne’s age, she would’ve lived in the rafters, among the pigeons and flying squirrels. That didn’t seem to be Wayne’s thing, though. Wayne didn’t interact with nature. He took pictures of it with his iPhone and then bent over the screen and poked at it. His favorite thing about the lake house was that it had Wi-Fi.

It wasn’t that he wanted to stay indoors. He wanted to stay inside his phone. It was his bridge away from a world where Mom was a crazy alcoholic and Dad was a three-hundred-pound car mechanic who had dropped out of high school and who wore an Iron Man costume to comic-book conventions.

The motorcycle was in the back of the carriage house, a paint-spattered tarp thrown over it but the shape beneath still discernible. Vic spotted it from just inside the doors and wondered how she could’ve missed it the last time she’d stuck her head in here.

But she only wondered for a moment. No one knew better than Vic McQueen how easy it was for an important thing to be lost amid a great deal of visual clutter. The whole place was like a scene she might paint for one of the Search Engine books. Find your way to the motorcycle through the labyrinth of junk—without crossing a trip wire—and escape! Not a bad notion for a scene, really, something to file away for further thought. She couldn’t afford to ignore a single good idea. Could anyone?

Wayne got one corner of the tarp and she got the other, and they flipped it back.

The bike wore a coat of grime and sawdust a quarter inch thick. The handlebars and gauges were veiled in spiderwebs. The headlight hung loose from the socket by its wires. Under the dust the teardrop-shaped gas tank was cranberry and silver, with the word TRIUMPH embossed on it in chrome.

It looked like a motorcycle out of an old biker movie—not a biker film full of bare tits, washed-out color, and Peter Fonda but one of the older, tamer motorcycle films, something in black and white that involved a lot of racing and talk about the Man. Vic loved it already.

Wayne ran a hand over the seat, looked at the gray fuzz on his palm. “Do we get to keep it?”

As if it were a stray cat.

Of course they didn’t get to keep it. It wasn’t theirs. It belonged to the old woman who was renting them the house.

And yet.

And yet Vic felt that in some way it already belonged to her.

“I doubt it even runs,” she said.

“So?” Wayne asked, with the casual certainty of a twelve-year-old. “Fix it. Dad could tell you how.”

“Your dad already told me how.”

For eight years she had tried to be Lou’s girl. It had not always been good, and it had never been easy, but there had been some happy days in the garage, Lou fixing bikes and Vic airbrushing them, Soundgarden on the radio and cold bottles of beer in the fridge. She would crawl around the bikes with him, holding his light and asking questions. He taught her about fuses, brake lines, manifolds. She had liked being with him then and had almost liked being herself.

“So you think we can keep it?” Wayne asked again.

“It belongs to the old dame renting us the house. I could ask if she’d sell.”