Hush Hush by Erik Carter (best short novels of all time .TXT) 📗

always hated. Carlton had been insistent that Amber grow up, mature, but Gavin appreciated her relative innocence. Purity was not a bad thing. Amber might not have been the most highly intelligent person ever, but she had heart.

But these notes… What the hell could they all mean? What was she after, and how was she connecting her father’s District C11 to this children’s book?

Gavin realized that in order to understand, he was going to have to read the book.

He let the pages roll over his thumb, back to the front cover. He flipped past the title page and other front matter.

And began.

Chapter 1

A Pleasant Drive in the Country

Had there ever been such a sunny day?

Well, yes, surely there had. But certainly none so delightfully cheery. And Kara just kept on smiling as she sat in the passenger seat of the car, the aromatic sea breeze tussling her hair, the sun warming her right arm and her cheeks.

Grandmother had both of the front windows rolled down. The car was a beauty with curves and smells and textures of which Kara was unaccustomed, as it was an old thing, from the 1950s, Grandmother had told her.

Goodness! The ’50s! Kara hadn’t even been born yet.

But the car, like Grandmother herself, had proceeded beautifully through the years, both of them clean and precise, both with a charming dignity, both having a warm, comforting presence.

Kara stuck her face closer to the open window, felt the wind on the tip of her nose, tasted the Atlantic air. The sun painted the field outside a bright green. The water sparkled beyond, a long slice of a horizon below the sapphire sky. Summerford’s quaint downtown appeared in the distance, around the curve, at the bottom of the hill, right on the coastline. Little brick businesses and two-story Victorian homes, real-life dollhouses.

Yes, this was going to be a wonderful visit.

Gavin had been reading for half an hour. He’d smiled several times throughout, not so much because of the story itself but the memory of reading it with Amber. It was amazing how much of the story came back to him, so many years later and after having read to Amber so many Kara books and countless others.

The first few chapters saw Kara, kid detective, visiting her grandmother at the small seaside town of Summerford, Maine, with plans of going on many pleasant walks, many antiquing trips, and many visits to quaint restaurants and bookstores.

On her first night in Summerford, Kara and Grandmother stopped at Carlito’s Café for coffee and croissants before they were to attend a play. Grandmother had excused herself to visit the restroom, at which point Kara glanced across the street and saw a sinister-looking man with a disfigured face parked in a vehicle on the opposite side of the street, twisting around in his seat to look through binoculars at the docks at the far end of town. Kara thought this quite odd, especially with the awful feeling she got from the man—his bitter expression, the slicked-back, dark hair, and a scar that traced up his left cheek, over the corner of his left eye.

At first, Kara convinced herself her imagination had gone wild again, and she chastised herself for being so judgmental. But when the man suddenly exchanged his binoculars for a camera with a long telephoto lens, Kara’s junior detective instincts tingled.

The man spotted her staring in his direction, which made Kara quickly look away. Fortunately, this was right when Grandmother returned. The coffee and pastries were so delicious that Kara would have completely forgotten about the scarred man had he not driven by a few minutes later, looking in her direction with a dark stare as his car drifted past.

After the play, Kara thought she should look at what the scarred man was spying on, so, in a moment alone, she took out the opera glasses that she’d just used in the playhouse and peered down the street to the docks. The irony of her using the opera glasses just as the scarred man of whom she was so suspicious had used his binoculars did not escape her.

What she saw was confusing. Police officers. But they weren’t investigating; instead, they stood languidly by squad cars while civilian men loaded crates into a warehouse. Some sort of community support, no doubt. She didn’t think too much of it…

Until she spotted the scarred man again

There. At the docks. Among the civilians, helping to unload crates.

The next day, Kara scanned the Summerford Bugle and found nothing about the docks. Still, something was bothering her. So that afternoon, she rode into town on the bicycle Grandmother kept for her and went to the docks.

The foreman was a shifty, crude man, very off-putting indeed, and insisted that he didn’t know any scarred man or why a person like that would both spy on the docks and work there. When Kara was in the foreman’s grimy office, getting the lowdown on him, one of his workers pulled him aside, out onto the floor. This left Kara alone in his office.

Opportunity had arisen.

And Kara never let an opportunity pass.

A metal tray on the foreman’s desk held a stack of invoices. Kara flipped through them, found one from a company called Whitehead Incorporated dated the previous night, during the time the play was held. Whitehead, then, was connected to the crates she’d seen.

Another invoice showing a different company, Pearson Industries, bore the current date, with a time listed for that evening.

Kara slipped out before the foreman returned and went to the authorities, but she received a less than warm welcome from Summerford’s Chief of Police Warren.

Which was where Gavin found himself in the story…

“And what you need to understand, little Kara, is there’s an order to things. You don’t just come into a police station and ask to speak directly to the chief of police. First you should have spoken to the desk sergeant, then an officer, maybe then a detective, and only after that I might have gotten