Enchanted August Read Online Free PDF Page B

“I’ve already—”
    Before Rose could finish her warning, Lottie had pulled the cord a half-dozen times. The air was pungent with the smell of gasoline and Rose knew the engine had flooded. Then Lottie pulled the handle a half-dozen times more, just to make really sure they’d go nowhere.
    â€œYou flooded it, Lottie. Do not pull it again for at least ten minutes. If it doesn’t start, we can sleep in the car if we have to. Or we can go home. We can just go home.”
    â€œYou need a hand?”
    A figure appeared on the landing. The halogen light made him seem ghostly in the rain. He walked down the ramp toward them and Rose saw he wasn’t ghostly at all. He was solid and competent-looking, and very male.
    â€œOh my God, yes,” said Rose.
    â€œSounds like you flooded the engine. I’ll take you over in the ferry if you don’t want to wait it out.”
    The male voice belonged to a kid. He couldn’t have been more than twenty, twenty-two.
    â€œBut the ferry isn’t running now.”
    â€œIt is when I’m drivin’ it.”
    He walked around to the far end of the dock and they heard an engine burble to life with one turn of a key. Lottie gathered her bags and Rose’s and clambered out of the Whaler, and they followed him onto the
Eleventh Hour
, a large, generous, stable, covered double-decker boat. They stood clutching the railings, mercifully sheltered as the rain poured down. The water was choppy and the ferry bounced, but it cut through the water as if it knew by instinct how to get to the other side.
    The journey seemed endless, although Robert had said Little Lost was no more than two nautical miles from the dock. Nautical miles were longer than regular miles—Rose knew that much, but even if someone had given her the formula for calculation, her brain was too numb to figure it out. The boat slowed appreciably. “We’re here, Rose,” Lottie said, and the ferry driver drew them up alongside a dock, dimly illuminated by a couple of floodlights, and cut the engine.
    â€œCan we leave our bags? I don’t think I can manage.”
    â€œCan’t leave ’em in the ferry.”
    If anything, it was raining harder now, yet their nameless helper swept up their bags with a sure hand and carried them up a ramp and along the dock to the island itself. “I’ll get you a cart.” The way he said it sounded like “caht.”
    â€œA Maine accent!” Lottie whispered.
    â€œThis is yours,” he told them, proffering a large, wet, plasticky wheelbarrow that did not seem quite in keeping with the idea of a precious Maine cottage. “See, it says Hopewell. You stay on this boardwalk, up the hill, all the way to the top. I’ll lend you a flashlight.” He took a small, battered, rubber-covered flashlight out of his jacket pocket. “When you get to the top of the hill, shine the light and you’ll see a sign that says Hopewell and Grundys. Keep on the path for Hopewell. The door’s open.”
    Before they could thank him or even ask his name, he turned and was gone.
    It was a long, hard, wet slog up the hill with their heavy bags and they slogged it in silence, sometimes pushing the cart, sometimes pulling it. When they tentatively rounded the last bend on the path to the cottage, Lottie commented that she’d left the Laphroaig in the Whaler. But by then they didn’t need a drink; they needed sleep. Lottie steadied the cart at the base of the wooden steps as Rose walked up to the small screened back door. The rain had let up for a moment, and the clouds parted enough for a slender moon to shine through. Rose remembered reading there would be a blue moon this month, which she’d planned to watch rise on the east side of the island. Ha! If I stay that long, she thought. Now, in the darkness, their struggling flashlight barely illuminated a sign that read HOPEWELL COTTAGE , the letters