Life Guards in the Hamptons Read Online Free Page A

put on the light so I could yell louder. Then I looked at him. He had wet, raw wounds on both his front feet where he kept frantically licking, pulling the hair out. He didn’t stop to look at me, and snarled when I tried to nudge his mouth away from the ugly sores.
    Oh, shit. My dog had chiggers, too.

C HAPTER 3

    M IDWEEK, MIDMORNING, MID-SEPTEMBER, the Hampton Jitney was middling filled. Little Red got a seat of his own, out of his carrying case, without my having to pay for an extra ticket or hold him on my lap for over two hours. He got the window seat so he could look out, which kept the Pom too excited to gnaw at his toes. I’d put some of the anti-itch cream on his feet, then wrapped them in gauze and taped them so he wouldn’t lick off the salve. That was the best I could do until we got to the only vet I’d trust with the snarky, snappy little dog I’d come to love. Abused and abandoned, he couldn’t be blamed for being insecure and unsociable. We were working on it. Right now, for better or worse, we were going home to Paumanok Harbor, to Matt.
    Whose life I may have ruined.
    I wasn’t quite as excited as Little Red to be headed east.
    Before the bus had reached us at its last pickup spot on East 40th Street, between Third and Lex, some of the passengers—the ones whose thumbs or ears or mouths were not connected to one electronic device or another—chatted about the latest news from the Hamptons.
    More robberies had occurred last night, this time at the new 7-Eleven in Montauk, then the East Hampton Cinema’s box office. Ski masks, no arrests, no IDs. The bus passengers credited the thieves with great skills and savvy. They blamed the local police for great stupidityand sloth. I had my doubts about both, an uncomfortable feeling that something was not right about the crime scenes. Not that I’d ever written detective stories or researched police investigations.
    I made a mental note to pass on my father’s vague warning about someone named Stu to Uncle Henry in case there was a connection to the break-ins. Uncle Henry Haversmith was Paumanok Harbor’s police chief and not really my uncle, just an old friend of the family. He knew about my father’s forecasts and might take them seriously.
    Sure, and traffic might go the speed limit on the Long Island Expressway. No one gave credence to Dad’s premonitions except me, when I could figure them out.
    One woman on the waiting line said she’d left all her jewelry home as a precaution. Another said she had her cash and credit cards stuffed in her bra. A tourist couple visiting their daughter in Hampton Bays worried about going out to dinner. The gang had already targeted a couple of the more expensive restaurants. A man in a last-summer’s fashion fedora thought they’d be safe eating in small, cheaper places where the cash register didn’t hold so much and the patrons’ wallets weren’t as fat.
    Two older men toting huge telescopes in well-padded cases thought the crime spree, which would be business as usual anywhere else in the country, was being hyped as part of a conspiracy to keep people out of the Hamptons, to keep the Patagonian prize avian for themselves.
    According to a blond young man with a ponytail, who heard from the girl he was going to visit in Montauk, the belligerent dolphins had turned the corner around the lighthouse. Last seen, they’d hassled a handful of paddle-boarders readying for a race to Block Island. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could stand up on a surfboard, much less paddle it all the miles across open waters. Or why they’d want to. Block Island was in a whole nother state.
    Now they couldn’t hold the race, due to the dolphins who stole the paddles and pushed the boards back to Gin Beach, the paddlers on top, willing or not. No onegot hurt, but, boy, did the race organizers get pissed when they had to return the entry fees. Half the paddlers got mad, too, but the rest of them were thrilled with the chance to