Senseless Acts of Beauty Read Online Free Page A

was nothing left at the bottom but thick, oversweet syrup. Her friend Izzy had been right. She’d been an idiot to think that when she skipped out of school, stashed her textbooks, and headed to the train station, that her birth mother would just be there, waiting, at the end of it.
    “The camp has had the same logo since nineteen twenty-two.” Riley passed the pad of her finger over the dark green threads of the three pine trees, two small ones nestled against a taller middle one. “My grandfather paid a lawyer to have it trademarked a long time ago.”
    Sadie knew that much was true. She’d saved up grocery money to pay for an online logo search two years ago, and up popped Camp Kwenback in Pine Lake, deep in the Adirondack Mountains.
    Riley asked, “You said your birth mother wrapped you in this?”
    Sadie tightened her grip around her knees. She supposed she’d opened the door to questions once she asked if Riley was her birth mother. She couldn’t exactly shut it tight now. But there were risks in telling too much, so she weighed the truth carefully.
    “My parents kept that towel in a box with my other baby stuff.” Sadie remembered the little porcelain shoe from the Ohio hospital, painted with the date and time of her birth, along with a first-year calendar full of her mother’s silly comments about emerging teeth and when she first rolled over. “My parents saved all the stuff from the hospital, including that, which was underneath it all.”
    “Wow.” Riley made a choking little laugh. “All my parents saved in my baby box was the knit hat that the hospital gave me. That’s the hazard of being the sixth kid. But this…this is kind of nice, isn’t it?” Riley brushed her hand over the towel. “To have something that you know your birth mother gave to you?”
    Sadie shrugged. “It’s just a clue.”
    “So I take it that your adoption was a closed one?”
    “Of course.” Why else would she be sitting here, making such a fool of herself in front of a stranger?
    “You haven’t seen your birth certificate.”
    “You’ve got to hit the magical age of eighteen before the wizards will unseal it.”
    “And your parents?”
    Sadie’s jaw tightened. “They told me everything they knew, which wasn’t a lot.”
    “Well”—she raised the towel—“you’re quite the resourceful one.”
    You don’t know the half of it. Sadie let go of her knees and dropped her feet flat to the floor. “So,” she said, “even though you’re not who I thought you were, maybe you can still help me out.”
    Riley didn’t answer right away, absorbed in smoothing the towel while a wrinkle deepened above her brows. Adults thought they were so slick in hiding their feelings, but Sadie could read people. When Sadie had gone to the train station to buy a ticket, she’d taken one look at the faces of the three tellers and knew immediately which one wouldn’t blink an eye about selling an unattended kid a train ticket for someplace five hours away. When she loaded up at the local grocery store, she knew which cashier wouldn’t ask pesky questions about why she was buying so many groceries and how she got the money to do so.
    So right now, looking at Riley, Sadie could tell the woman was hesitant about the idea of helping her.
    Well, she didn’t come all the way to the middle of nowhere for nothing.
    “Fifteen years ago,” Sadie ventured, “a woman must have visited this camp. I’d bet she was pregnant with me.” She gazed up at the rafters again, knowing that once, a long time ago, her mother had stood under them, too. “Someone who maybe even gave birth here, in one of the rooms—”
    “I was in college fifteen years ago, Sadie, but I can tell you that the only story of a woman giving birth in this lodge dates back to Prohibition.”
    “If you were in college, how would you know it didn’t happen?”
    “Pine Lake is a small town.” Riley lifted a brow. “Something like that would have made the rounds