Fire Works in the Hamptons : A Willow Tate Novel (9781101547649) by Celia Jerome Page B

dinner. While Piet played with Elladaire, I considered that the fireflies might not be guilty of the recent mischief. Elladaire only spit flames when she was upset, frightened, or hurting. Perhaps the lightning bugs did the same, like when Barry swatted at one of them and Buddy snapped at another. Both got burned. So maybe some kid thought it’d be fun to stuff one in a mailbox with no escape, the way adolescents tossed cherry bombs. Or crush one and throw it in a trash can to see what happened. Then the pranks escalated into something dangerous and nasty. Who hated Paumanok Harbor that much?
    I didn’t know. I tried to think about my writing instead while I took a shower. I still had no new ideas, rejected my old ones. That left something borrowed, something blue. What could I do with the Creature from the Blue Lagoon?
    Or with the hero who offered to give Elladaire a bath because I was afraid of drowning the slippery kid?
    Â 
    Dinner at my grandmother’s started fine. She made incredible vegetable lasagna, and wrapped Elladaire in a towel to keep her clean. She didn’t pick on me or interrogate Piet, not at first anyway.
    When I mentioned how we thought the fireflies had been forced to defend themselves, she told us that talk around town had them spotted out in the wetlands east of Paumanok Harbor. It was a flat stretch of land on the bay, intersected with drainage ditches to keep the area from flooding. Clams, mussels, and all kinds of shore birds made their homes in the muddy, brackish manmade creeks. Men made osprey nests on poles, too, to bring the fish hawks back from extinction. It was a wild, empty area, full of reeds and weeds and phragmites, the perfect setting for my swamp monster.
    â€œThey also say a beaver is out there, because of all the destruction some clammers saw.”
    â€œCome on, we haven’t had beavers on Long Island since Indian times.”
    My grandmother insisted one had been seen last spring in East Hampton, with a lot of gnawed and felled trees to prove it. The naturalists reasoned that one had swum or rode a log over from Connecticut. “There’s no reason that poor lonely creature couldn’t come east, looking for more of its kind.”
    â€œThere are no trees in the flood plains, nothing for it to eat or build a lodge out of. No beaver in his right mind would come there.”
    â€œI suppose you’re right,” Grandmother Eve said, passing around the salad bowl. “Besides, people are always swearing they see monsters out in the swamp. We used to tell children that the bogeyman lived there, so they wouldn’t think of exploring the sinkholes and stagnant water.”
    â€œSo what’s there now?” Piet asked.
    My new, old, borrowed idea. I lost my appetite.

CHAPTER 12

    S OME COOKS GET ORNERY when their efforts and artistry are ignored. Grandma Eve got even.
    â€œI suppose that father of yours told you about the hulking monster living in the marshes. And you believed him, didn’t you? If so you were the only child in Paumanok Harbor to take the fairy tale seriously after they turned ten. For that matter, you’re the only one who ever held stock in any of the doom and gloom that man spouts. We all swear that’s why you’re afraid of the dark and everything else.”
    â€œI did not believe a swamp monster lived in the lagoons—that is, the wetlands.” Then. Now I had my doubts. “Any more than I believe some poor beaver is hanging out there. And I am not afraid of the dark.” Lots of people slept with a night-light on. “And my father’s premonitions always come true, simply not in expected ways.”
    â€œHah!” My grandmother wiped Elladaire’s face so hard the kid had towel burn.
    â€œYour father is a precog, isn’t he?” Piet asked in an effort to fend off an obviously ongoing family argument, at least until he finished the best meal he’d had in