The Summer We Lost Alice Read Online Free PDF

lays down his fishing rod, cups his left hand over his right thumb, and he lifts it up, carrying his thumb with it. I have never seen anything so amazing in my life. He puts his thumb back, opens his hands and wiggles the thumb.
    "Good as new," he says.
    "How'd you do that?" I ask . He replies with a wink. I look over at Alice. She's grinning from ear to ear.
    I'll bet she could take off her thumb, too, if she wanted.
    I think about thumbs while we fish, which is mainly sitting and not doing anything. The silence is comforting because you don't have to come up with anything not-stupid to say and there's really no way to mess up sitting there with a fishing pole. At this moment, I'm as good a fisherman as anybody in Meddersville. My mind drifts. I think about thumbs. I know that there's no way to take one off without ripping out muscles and tendons and spilling a lot of blood, but I've just seen Uncle Billy do it. It must be a trick, but how did he do it? I can't figure that. My mind drifts.
    Pretty soon I look over and see Uncle Billy fishing with his eyes closed, and snoring. Alice and I smile at one another . I can hear the gears grinding in her head. What can we do while Uncle Billy's asleep, that isn't too wrong but that we'd never do under proper adult supervision ? (That's a phrase Alice used once. She got it from a pack of firecrackers.)
    While we're looking at one another and smiles are creeping across our faces, we see headlights not far away, a car driving up to the lake. It drives slowly, the headlights bouncing because the ground is rutted. Sometimes they light up the ground and sometimes the trees. It's a police car, but the lights on top aren't flashing. If it was an ordinary car we'd think that somebody else was coming fishing, but a police car in the dark of night, that's weird.
    We look at Uncle Billy . At the exact same instant, we let our poles drop to the ground. We run to investigate.
    We run through the willows and oaks and scrub brush that line the lake. When we get close to the police car, we hunker down and walk slow, like Indians on TV. If we had face paint, we'd darken our eyes and put stripes on our cheeks, it was that kind of a sneaky thing we were doing.
    We creep around as silent as snakes until we can see the police car real clearly. There's nobody inside that we can see. They've already gotten out. They've left a spotlight on, pointed toward the lake. We can't see anybody. Alice is about to sneak up closer when I hear something near the edge of the lake. It's somebody crying.
    We get down on our hands and knees and crawl over to the sound. My heart is beating hard. I would have gone back but Alice leads the way, fearless. I follow like a duckling follows its mother. I'm ready to turn and run and scream at the top of my lungs at any moment, no matter what anybody thinks, if anything happens. I'm not going to be one of those people who stands there going "Uh, uh, uh" while the psycho killer chops them up with a machete. If I'm going to die, I'm going to make some noise first.
    We get to the last bit of scrub brush before the edge of the lake and we see who's crying. Even in the near-dark we can see the police uniform. Alice nudges me and I almost yell.
    "That's Sheriff Morse," she says. "What the hell's he doing out here? And why's he crying?" I haven't heard Alice curse before so she's pretty surprised.
    Sheriff Morse clasps his face in his hands and keeps on sobbing. He's all hunched over, crouching in the mud beside the lake like his legs have given out on him, the sobs coming out of him like he's throwing them up. I've never seen a grownup cry before, although I've seen my mother with tears flowing down her cheeks, but even then she smiled up at me and said, "Hi, Ethan." What Sheriff Morse is doing is something else. Watching him is like watching somebody bleed to death, the blood flowing out between their fingers and there's nothing they can do to stop it. I tug at Alice's shirt.
    "Let's