Lily and the Lost Boy Read Online Free PDF Page B

home when I do.” Jack stared at him, shrugged, and began to upend the tables. Paul turned over the chairs.
    â€œWe’ll get the pot and hide it,” Jack said.
    Again Paul said, “No.”
    Jack drew back his foot and kicked up the sand. “Why not?” he asked challengingly.
    â€œShe makes her living here,” Paul replied.
    â€œLiving!” he snorted. He looked at the upended tables and chairs. “It isn’t enough,” he said flatly.
    â€œIt is enough!” cried Lily. “You said you wanted her to know someone had been here. She will now. Paul, listen. Mom may get up and look for us. We ought to go.”
    â€œAll right,” he said. She saw him glance quickly at Jack. She suspected he was worried that Jack would think he did what she told him. “I was about to say we have to go. I have to get up early,” he said.
    â€œIt’s all the same to me,” Jack said quickly. “I have a long walk up the mountain. It’ll be dark as a pit.”
    â€œI’d be scared,” Paul said. He held out his hand as though to offer Jack something.
    â€œOf what?” Jack scoffed. “I’m not scared of anything. You have to be careful. That’s all. Some old English lady slipped on the pine needles up at the acropolis. And she fell into the sea. All she had to do was read the sign up there. People are stupid.”
    They left the shack and walked across the beach to the road. “You might step on a sleeping viper,” Lily said to Jack.
    â€œNot me. I’ve got eyes in the back of my head,” he said.
    â€œYou don’t have them in your feet,” Lily snapped.
    Their footsteps echoed along the road. Lily heard the tinkle of a bell. Sheep must be moving somewhere above on the hill.
    â€œDo you ever go to villages on the other side of the island?” Paul asked.
    â€œWe can go anywhere,” Jack replied. “We can go to Istanbul in a morning on my father’s motorcycle.”
    Lily imagined the motorcycle, snorting like a rhinoceros along the quiet mountain roads. She looked up at the star-strewn sky until she grew dizzy. What if, when she got home, she found her room torn up, the bedclothes on the floor, her books scattered beneath the bed, the lamp on its side? She’d be angry and, if she didn’t know who had done the damage, frightened. But perhaps the woman who owned the shack would only think—boys … boys up to mischief. Yet Lily was pretty sure that whatever the boys of Limena might do, they wouldn’t mess up a place where a person worked. Life was too difficult on the island. She didn’t know exactly when she’d begun to realize that, maybe watching the ancient woman painfully gathering up twigs in Stella’s yard.
    â€œNext time we’ll rent a boat,” Jack was saying. “There’s a sunken village an hour or two away from Limena. There was an earthquake years ago and a piece of the island sank down and took this little village with it. You row right over it, and you can look through the water at houses and a street and skeletons.”
    â€œHave you seen it?” Lily asked, interested despite herself.
    â€œI heard about it from a person I trust,” he answered loftily.
    â€œYour father?” she asked. Jack said nothing.
    â€œI’m going to Keramoti tomorrow with my friend Manolis and his father,” Paul said.
    â€œYou didn’t tell me that,” Lily said.
    â€œI don’t tell you everything,” Paul said sharply. He turned away from her to Jack. “His father makes those big jars almost like the old ones you see in the museum. He sells them on the mainland.”
    Jack yawned. “Sounds boring,” he commented.
    â€œHow are you going to let us know when we can row over that sunken village?” Paul asked timidly. “I’d better tell you where we live.”
    They had reached the crossroads where the stone farmhouse