A Side of Sabotage

by C. M. Surrisi

  There’s a creaky sound, then a slight cracking noise around the edges as the window opens. We have access.

  I boost a grumbling Zoe onto the nearest trash bin, and hoist myself up. The bin stinks like dead fish. On the other side of our lucky window, we find a mudroom and broom closet area.

  I whisper to Zoe, “Move quickly and carefully. Look for anything that might be incriminating.”

  “Like what?” she whispers back.

  “I don’t know!” I say. She has no instincts for this stuff. “You just have to look at everything with an eye for a connection to Gusty’s. And if you find anything unusual, call me. Don’t touch it. It could be evidence. Got it?”

  She squints. “Not really.”

  Dominic is already picking through a broom closet cabinet filled with soaps, detergents, and mops. I tiptoe through the mudroom in search of the pantry or the desk where they pay the bills. Zoe sticks her head into the kitchen.

  My breath catches when I find a small office. I carefully move papers around a messy desk, my hands shaking, as I search for anything suspicious. I jump when my pocket vibrates with a text.

  Ella: Light on upstairs!

  Oh, no. I rush to find Dominic and tell him to hide, then speed to the kitchen to grab Zoe, who is . . . looking at spice bottles in an upper cabinet. And smelling one of them! What the heck is she doing? I pssst to her, and she puts it away and walks over. I pull her down behind the end of a row of cabinets.

  A second later, feet thump on the stairs, and a figure saunters into the kitchen. It’s dark but not so dark you can’t make out Hubert. With the moonlight shining through the windows, those ears are a dead giveaway. He makes his way to the refrigerator and yanks open the big door, breaking the suction with a pffft. The fridge’s interior light floods over him, casting a wide beam across his bald head and the prep island behind him. He’s wearing boxer shorts and a stretched out T-shirt. He stares, yawns, and scratches his chest.

  Zoe and I squeeze farther back into the shadows. He shouldn’t be able to spot us now—but if the overhead light goes on, we’re busted. I’m worried he can hear my low, slow panting. Zoe is digging her fingertips into my arm.

  Hubert reaches into the refrigerator, takes out a large plastic bag filled with crabs, and sets it on the island. Then he reaches for the half gallon of milk behind it. With one hand, he takes off the cap, and with the other he glug-glug-glugs at least a quart of it. There’s milk on his shirt, his face, and the back of his hand when he’s done. The refrigerator’s compressor kicks on, telling Hubert he should shut the door. He does, putting the carton back into the fridge but leaving the crabs on the counter.

  Going by moonlight once again, he starts making his way around the kitchen, but this time, he’s heading in an opposite direction—our direction. I don’t know if I’m actually going to spontaneously combust, but it feels like I might. I clamp my hand over Zoe’s mouth and feel her hot breath. We can’t make ourselves any smaller.

  Hubert’s halfway around the kitchen island when he stops, grabs a spray bottle, and turns back in the other direction, toward the stairway. Just before he goes upstairs, he pauses in front of a potted herb plant and spritzes it with water.

  When the apartment upstairs goes quiet, we beat it out of there.

  As we pound down the beach on the way home, I assess what we found out—nothing.

  But at least I can call this a clean getaway.

  15

  By the next afternoon, Ella, Dominic, Ben, Zoe, and I have worn ourselves out talking about the lack of evidence against Hubert, so the five of us decide to go sailing. We have Ben’s uncle’s boat and Zoe’s parents’ boat, everything we need for a race around the Maiden Rock Tidal Pool.

  We’re piling things into the boats before the race begins, and Zoe and I are laughing about Hubert’s milk mustache, when we hear a sound you rarely hear in Maiden Rock—a siren.

  We all turn to see an ambulance in full emergency mode fly down Mile Stretch Road, followed by Mom’s squad car, its lights flashing too. We run to the other end of the dock and watch as the vehicles screech to a halt in front of Restaurant Hubert. We abandon the sailboats and sprint to the scene of the action. Mom’s getting out of her cruiser as we arrive.

  “Stay back, kids,” she orders. People are jostling each other to get out of the restaurant. A paramedic team rushes in with a stretcher and comes out a minute later carrying a man who won’t lie still. He’s holding a plastic bag and heaving. A minute after that, the wild parade disperses and cars pull away, leaving the restaurant empty of patrons. We peek through the open front door and see Hubert slapping his head and yelling at Slick, who is screaming back at him. Chairs are turned over. Servers dressed in black pants, gray shirts, and dark red ties stand idle.

  We head to Gusty’s, where customers have wandered into the parking lot, standing around speculating about what just happened up the road. Dad’s among the crowd, on his phone, no doubt talking to Mom.

  “We saw it, Dad,” I tell him.

  “I guess someone got sick, huh?”

  “Oh yeah, and an ambulance came, and people were running out of the restaurant.”

  “It was crazy,” Ben says.

  “Awful,” says Zoe.

  “Kind of cool,” says Dominic.

  Dad walks back into the café. “That’s too bad.”

  I’m on his heels. “Well, it sure cleared out Hubert’s.”

  “Heck of a way to do it.” Dad shakes his head. “Come on, you guys must be hungry.”

  I groan. “You didn’t see what we saw.”

  * * *

  Ben reminds us the boats are waiting, so we head back to the yacht club. The planks on the pier are warm under my feet, and flies are buzzing around a dead fish that’s smacking against the dock, reminding us that we’d better get going or the tide will go out and ruin our adventure. Zoe’s parents’ boat rocks as I step into it, and the sight of the poor heaving man flashes through my mind. “I wonder what made him sick?” I say.

  “The raw beets?” says Zoe.

  “The poaching liquid?” says Ella.

  “The beam of light?” says Dominic.

  It’s a lazy, hull-bumping, name-calling couple of hours. I lie back and look at the sky and feel the cool sunny air blowing across my skin. Dominic and I are in a boat with Zoe, and Ella’s in the other boat with Ben, and all is calm for this suspended moment. As I close my eyes and float along, I feel a tickle on my wrist. I don’t have to open my eyes to know that Dominic is running his finger along the top of my hand the way he always does.

  A text interrupts the joy of the moment.

  Mom: Home now. ASAP.

  My heart does a double beat. OMG—what’s happened?

  Zoe gets a similar text from her mom, telling her to report to my house—to my mom—and then immediately home.

  She freaks. She can’t get the boat back to the dock fast enough. Once we’re there, we half walk, half run.

  “This has to be about last night,” Zoe says. “It has to be.”

  “No, it doesn’t. Stop. You’re getting me freaked out.”

  We’re two doors away from my house when Hubert bursts out of our front door and lets it slam shut behind him.

  We shriek simultaneously and stop in our tracks.

  He jumps in his car and speeds away, his rear tires spitting up gravel and sand all over us.

  Okay. Maybe Zoe’s right. It’s possible that, just maybe, this could be about last night. My mind traces our steps from the time we eased open the window until the time we pushed it shut. I can’t think of anything we did that could have exposed us.

  I feel Mom before I see her. She’s radiating anger from her office all the way to our front steps. We find her in her sheriff’s chair, her back to us, looking at her computer. I don’t really want to announce that we’re here, but I have to. “Mom?”

  She doesn’t turn around. “Is Zoe with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Com
e here.”

  “There?”

  “Yes. Come look at my monitor, right now.” Her voice is steely.

  Zoe and I hold hands as we walk toward her. I haven’t reported to a parent in this posture in a very long time.

  Mom motions us into the office’s two guest chairs, then starts a video.

  It’s dark. I can’t make out anything for a second. Then my eyes adjust, and I swallow hard. There’s moonlight. There’s Hubert’s kitchen. There’s the top of my head as I sneak into the office. There’s Zoe. At first, she’s skulking around with her head at countertop level as she looks in the lower cabinets. Then, as she moves through the room, she stands up taller and taller until she’s just casually walking around, opening cupboard doors and looking at things. There’s an especially good angle on her sticking her nose into a bottle of some spice. If there was any doubt that the footage caught me sneaking into the Restaurant Hubert office, it definitely captures Zoe’s massive, unmistakable ponytail in the kitchen.

  I’m starting to feel the way that sick man at Hubert’s looked.

  Zoe’s breathing hard, like she’s wearing scuba gear.

  Mom shuts off the footage and sits quietly. This must be some kind of interrogation technique—wait for the suspects to crack. It works.

  Zoe starts blubbering.

  I decide to be patient, just like Mom, and see what happens. Technically, I haven’t done the thing she expressly prohibited me from doing—going around accusing Hubert of sabotaging Gusty’s.

  Finally she says, “I laughed.” I relax a little. She continues, “I laughed at Hubert Pivot when he told me that you kids had broken into his kitchen and sabotaged the food and that’s how the man got so sick today—”

  I try to interrupt, “We didn’t—”

  “Be quiet, Quinnie. I laughed when he said this because I knew that was ridiculous. Impossible. Inconceivable. I laughed until he handed me this footage from his surveillance camera and told me to play it.” She’s speaking precisely in that way that leads to one of her rare flip-outs.

  “But, Mom—”

  “Then I did play it.” She isn’t even trying to control her anger.

  Zoe’s hanging her head, dripping tears on her shirt. “I just smelled some stinky spice!” she cries.

  “Hubert’s saying that whoever we see in this footage, messing around in the kitchen, has made his patron ill and damaged his reputation,” Mom says. She digs a pad out from the pile of papers on her desk and picks up a pen. “Let’s talk about how this happened.”

  She’s serious. Mom’s not just peeved at a couple of dumb-acting kids. She’s a sheriff, about to take a statement from her suspects. My belly has never sunk so low.

  “Zoe, you start,” Mom says. She’s going for the weaker of us first. The one most likely to spill her guts. I’m helpless until it’s my turn. “Who all is involved? Tell me blow by blow: who, what, when, and where.”

  Zoe starts to fidget, looking at me like she thinks she might have said something wrong—and she hasn’t even started. Of course, she can’t help herself. “We pushed open an unlocked window and crawled in,” she says. “It was the broom room. Dominic stayed there.”

  “Hold it. Dominic was there with you two?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What about Ella and Ben?”

  Zoe hesitates a second and then says, “They weren’t there.”

  Mom tilts her head like she’s trying to decide if she believes this, then picks up her phone and calls Dad. “Is Dominic at the café? Good. Send him to my office. I’ll text his parents in a minute. Thanks.” She turns back to Zoe. “Okay, keep going.”

  Zoe takes a deep breath and continues. “Quinnie went to the office, and I went into the kitchen. I walked around and looked at things. The only things I touched were the spice bottles and the handles on the cabinets. Then we heard footsteps, and Quinnie and I hid down by the end of the cabinets.”

  I am itching to jump into this, but I don’t dare.

  Zoe speeds up. “Hubert walked down in his underwear and went to the refrigerator and—”

  Mom’s jaw is dropping.

  “—and he opened the refrigerator and drank from the milk carton and wiped the milk off his mouth and slapped his stomach and squirted a plant with water and went back upstairs.”

  Mom swallows. “Did you touch any food?”

  We both say, “No!”

  “You two better hope he doesn’t want to press charges,” Mom says, “because what you did was trespass, even if you didn’t touch any food. And you better hope the man who got sick gets better. A sick customer could drive a restaurant out of business. And Hubert could say that the Buttermans are responsible for monetary damages.”

  Zoe crumples with her head in her hands.

  My mind is going over the scene again and again, frame by frame, trying to think of what we might have touched. The refrigerator door? No. The bag of crabs? No. The carton of milk? Wait. The bag of crabs! He didn’t put it back in the fridge.

  “Mom, Mom—”

  “Hold on, Quinnette.” She puts her hand out to quiet me. “Zoe, did Hubert come down to the kitchen before or after the video I just showed you on the screen?”

  “After. It happened after, and then we left.”

  “Mom. Mom. Mom—”

  She turns to me. “Okay, your turn.”

  “He took something out of the refrigerator and didn’t put it back.”

  “What?” Mom asks.

  “A big plastic bag of crabs. And he didn’t put it back.”

  “What time was this?” She’s interested in this.

  “It had to be about two a.m.”

  She makes a note. “Was the air on in the kitchen?”

  Good. Now I know she gets it.

  “No, Mom, it was warmer inside than outside. It was cold last night.” This is the truth about summer in Maine. It still gets chilly at night, even after the sunny warmth in the daytime. “So those crabs sat out in the kitchen all night, and he cooked them and served them to that man. That’s what made the guy sick.”

  She’s mulling this over when I go for it. “Mom, we were only looking for evidence. Hubert’s behind the bad stuff happening at Gusty’s, believe me.”

  “Quinnie, stop it. You’ve got all the trouble you need right now. Go up to your room. Zoe, go home.”

  As Zoe and I leave the room, Mom picks up her phone, dials, and waits for an answer. “Hubert, this is Margaret Boyd. I want the last twenty-four hours of footage. Unedited.”

  16

  I’m not saying Zoe and I are totally let off the hook, because we did sort of, kind of, actually, technically trespass, but Mom does talk to Hubert again after she’s interviewed Dominic. I listen at her office door to her side of that call.

  “Have you looked at the footage?” Mom asks in her sheriff’s voice. “Well. I’m going to strongly suggest that you do that and then give me a call back.”

  After that comes the sound of Mom rocking in her chair. She must have ended the call. I guess she’s giving Hubert a chance to put two and two together and realize he may have cooked bad crabs.

  I go upstairs and text Dominic.

  Me: Where are you now?

  Dominic: At home, waiting to be sentenced. Want to sit on the steps?

  Me: Bad idea right now.

  Dominic: Come on, you have never not wanted to sit on the steps. There’s only so much step time left.

  This is killing me, and I’m not sure why I’m even saying no. I want to sit on those steps and touch shoulders and be less freaked out and have the last handholds of warmth, but that’s all just going to make me cry and look dumb. I don’t want to cry again. I need to stay focused. I’ve got to protect Gusty’s, and I’ve got to toughen up and get ready for lonely hands.

  Me: She told me to stay in my room.

  Dominic: Okay. Keep me posted.

  Ugh. I feel a little hurt from Dominic in that text.

  * * *

  At bedt
ime, I hear Mom and Dad talking in their room. The door is closed, so I creep up and, with my ear to the crack, listen to their worried conversation. Their voices are hushed and serious.

  “I’ll tell you what, Margaret, when I close the books for June, it’s going to be brutal. The inspection, the dishwasher, the cooler, the power, people eating at Hubert’s . . .”

  “There’s more traffic, right?” Mom asks. “I mean, the contest is bringing in more people. Isn’t it?”

  “Sure. But even with that, it’s a net loss this month.”

  “At least you’re not poisoning people,” Mom says. The bed springs squeak like she’s getting under the covers.

  “What the heck happened with that?” Dad asks. “What did Quinnie have to say for herself?”

  “After I told Hubert to look at the footage, he called me back. He’s backing off pressing any charges against the kids. I think he realized what happened with the crabs and that the girls saw it. Suddenly he wants the issue all over with, short and sweet. All I can say is, if the girls hadn’t seen him leave those crabs out, they would be in a world of trouble.”

  “I wonder how much this is going to cost Hubert,” Dad says. “I’m sure that will turn out to be an expensive dish of crabs.”

  “Never mind that—what are we going to do to Quinnie?” I can imagine Mom shaking her head as she says this. “I mean, I told her she couldn’t go out, but long term—what do we do?”

  “She’s got instincts for trouble, like her mother. Maybe she’ll go to college for law enforcement.”

  “Oh my gosh, Gus. She’s fourteen. First she needs to survive high school without getting thrown into a juvenile center or worse.”

  “Relax,” Dad says. “Sometimes kids just get into stuff, play pranks, you know.”

  “This wasn’t a prank. She’s worried about Gusty’s. And I’m worried about what she does when she gets worried.”

  The light goes off under their door, and I pad back to my room. Once I’m there, I open the window a crack and let the Atlantic air in. There’s something about the waves hitting the rocky beach at night. Even when clouds don’t let the moonlight through, the surf is still frothy white. It’s familiar. It’s normal. Unlike my life right now.