Chapter 19: Four to One

Wyatt's POV

"No," Joan said.

She said it into the microphone, plainly, with her glasses in her hand.

The clerk wrote it down.

The man next to her said no.

The woman next to him looked at the second row, at the leather folder, and said no.

The fourth commissioner looked at the lawn for a long moment, and said no too.

The fifth was a heavy man in a Landry Shore cap.

He said, "Aye," into the quiet, then looked around at the lawn and sat very still.

"Four to one," the clerk read. "The motion fails."

Nobody cheered at first.

Then my mother stood up in the third row and shouted, "Yes!"

A gull took off from the roof of the harbor office.

After that the whole lawn came apart.

I knelt on the pier with both hands around Sadie's wrist and listened to it.

She had come up the ladder on her own, dripping and gray-lipped.

I had put my jacket on her before she'd finished the last rung.

"I'm cold," she said, through her teeth.

"I know."

"I'm so cold."

"It's a lake," I said. "That's what they do."

She started laughing, and then crying, and then laughing again, and I held her wrist and counted.

It was slowing.

Down the pier, a man was walking toward us with a leather folder under his arm and a gray face.

Mr. Landry stopped four feet away.

He didn't look at Sadie.

"You've made a mistake," he said to me.

"I've made a few."

"You people will regret this. I'll have the county tied up for ten years."

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