Page 52 of The Magic We Made

I screwed up.

I screw up a lot, though. I’ll be the first to admit it.

I screwed up with my dad by telling him about the intervention beforehand, thinking he’d do the right thing and be a man and check himself in, and not what he actually did, which was clean out the bank account, charter a private jet, and take off to play golf in Arizona.

I screwed up just after college graduation by telling Nicole I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to get married or have kids, which more or less drove her into the arms of Henry, my best friend and now Nicole’s husband and father of her cute four-year-old twins.

And I screwed up everything here in West Harbor, not only by saying Mrs. Baumgarten imagined buying those groceries that later got stolen, and initially denying her a refund, but by even renting out the house for the summer. Maybe if I’d taken occupancy of the place earlier, Emma would have found me already.

And I wouldn’t have screwed up everything with Frankie.

It seems weird to call her Frankie when she’s such a Francesca. But that’s what she wants to be called. And all of our neighbors call her Frankie—I know because I spent the afternoon going up and down the street, introducing myself to them.

I guess it sounds weird, a grown man knocking on his neighbors’ doors and introducing himself.

But if I’d only done this a few months ago when Emma first went missing, maybe some of them would have remembered seeing her—providing Emma was even in the area back then—and been able to tell me something to help find her. Their memories would have been fresher, the story of Emma’s disappearance more front of mind.

It wasn’t that hard to get them talking today, though, because I was right: they do all think of me as the guy who denied his Summer Person a refund, then got the cops called on him.

I told them that’s why I was stopping by to introduce myself. I said I wanted to reassure them that the cops weren’t there for me—they were there for the missing girl Frankie had found outside my house.

This instantly made me a hero in their eyes. Mrs. DeLong even gave me a loaf of banana bread from a batch she was baking, and said I was a “good boy,” and that my mother had raised me right. “Do you have a girlfriend?” she’d asked.

“No, ma’am.”

“Don’t worry; you will soon.”

When I asked how she knew, she’d only laughed knowingly and said, “This is West Harbor, isn’t it? I’m a witch!”

But despite being a witch, Mrs. DeLong didn’t have any information about Meg Boucher or the other missing girls. Neither did my other neighbors. They hadn’t told the cops anythingduring their house-to-house earlier that day because none of them had seen anything... none of them except possibly Mr. and Mrs. DeLongs’ grandkids, who are only ten (Eddie), seven (Robby), and five (Sammy), but still insist they saw a “strange boat” at my dock around six when they went down to the lake to go fishing.

“You mean the wooden boat?” I asked. “No, that’s mine. I had it put in dry dock for the winter, and they only delivered it a few months—”

“Notthatboat,” Eddie scoffed. “That’s a twenty-two-foot Chris-Craft Deluxe Utility. This was alittleboat. We saw it at your dock this morning.”

“But it wasn’t tied up,” Robby informed me. “That’s probably why, later, it was gone.”

“If you don’t tie up your boat,” Sammy said solemnly, “it can float away.”

It’s always hard to tell if kids are simply imagining something, or if it really happened.

I feel like the mystery boat that appeared and then disappeared from my dock might be made up for dramatic purposes, but then again, you never know with kids.

As a token of my gratitude for their services, I sneaked the boys a couple pieces of bubble gum I bought yesterday at the grocery store. At the time, I didn’t know why I was buying it. I don’t even like gum.

But today I know why that gum found me: to ingratiate me to the DeLong kids, who were so impressed by my gift that they promised faithfully to report any further boat sightings.

I try not to think too much about Francesca—I mean Frankie—for the rest of the day. I try not to even look over at her house. Iknow the sister with the weird hair showed up late in the afternoon, wheeling an overnight bag. She must have had a fight with her husband. I’ve seen him around Francesca’s place from time to time, helping out with things like fallen tree branches, especially right after Dr. Dick packed up and left. He’s usually wearing some kind of green uniform, like a forest ranger. He definitely has a forest ranger’s big muscles and long, straggly beard. He must have screwed up pretty badly to make his wife so upset that she packed a suitcase and left him.

But when I look toward Frankie’s house a few hours later, I see that both her little red Priusandthe sister’s car are gone from her driveway.

This is big. Francesca—Frankie—almost never leaves her house. Why should she, when she works from home? Sure, she has to go buy food once in a while, but not that often since that brother of hers stops by almost every other day with takeout from the restaurant.

It’s only on Sunday afternoons that she disappears for hours, but that’s to go to what she calls dinner—but is really a late lunch—at her mother’s house. I know because I was once standing out on my deck and overheard Dr. Dick telling Frankie he couldn’t join her for “Sunday Gravy” at her mom’s because he was stuck at the hospital with a suicidal patient.

But he said this to her while on his cell phone out on the back deck of their house, wearing yoga clothes and smoking a massive blunt.

I know it’s strange and even potentially stalkerish that I know my next-door neighbor’s schedule so well, especially considering the fact that I don’t even really live here. But I’m an observant guy, and Francesca Giovanni is definitely worth observing.