Senseless Acts of Beauty by Lisa Verge Higgins Read Free Book Online Page A

customers, and started working on the business plan that she’d spent the last six months presenting to banks.
    But there was this thing about decisions, Riley had come to know. You think the hardest part is making one—taking the wavering temperature of your heart, weighing the pros and cons, choosing an option—but you’d be wrong. Making the decision was only the first tentative step. Once made, there was no knowing where that decision would lead you.
    “Listen to me.” Her mother leaned in, pinning Riley’s flitting attention. “Are you going to delay and delay until you’re so behind on taxes that the town—or the state—slaps a lien on this place? You know what happens when the government gets involved in any land situation around here. It’ll be just like Camp Abenaki—”
    “Mother.” Riley threw up a hand, trying to ward off the words.
    “—the whole place swallowed up by the land trust, every building torn down to the dirt, and every last dollar from the sale swallowed up by back taxes.”
    Riley turned her back on her mother, like she wished she could turn away from the image in her mind, of Joe and Geri Stenton—the longtime owners of Camp Abenaki—standing stunned, watching the bulldozers knock down their eighty-year-old home.
    “Closing your eyes won’t make that truth go away, Riley.” Her mother leaned back against the sink, stretching in an effort to make her meet her gaze. “You have to evaluate, like any good businesswoman, all of your options. And you have to do it while there’s still some value in the old place.”
    “Let me guess.” Riley turned, tugged the dishtowel out of her mother’s hands, and dried her own hands on it. “You have the business card of one of those options.”
    Her mother pushed away from the counter to zip open her purse. Riley heard a card hit the butcher-block table. “I met him at the nineteenth hole during the firefighter’s charity game last week. He said he’d still use Camp Kwenback as a resort. A different kind of a resort, but still a gathering place. He might even let you manage it.”
    Riley knew what the developers wanted to do. They wanted to chop down the wild woods that encroached on the back lawn, pull out the old slide as a safety hazard, rip up the obstacle course her grandfather had built through the forest, pull down the tree house by the beaver dam. They wanted to clear-cut twelve of the fourteen acres to build a golf course.
    She couldn’t explain to those developers any more than she could explain to the banks and credit unions what it meant to grow up running wild through the woods, playing manhunt amid the trees, making stick figures with acorns and milkweed, and watching birds teach their young to fly.
    She couldn’t explain to the developers that reviving Camp Kwenback was her Plan Z, and if it failed, she was out of luck, ideas, and a future.
    “Riley, my darling daughter, there’s no way to revive this broken-down place.” Her mother’s manicured finger tapped the business card. “Time has already passed it by.”

Chapter Five
    Y our turn, Mrs. Clancy.”
    Sadie dropped the dice into Mrs. Clancy’s hands, then stretched back in the cushioned wicker chair to feel the sun on her face. She felt like a snake warming herself on a rock, her belly full of the half quart of orange juice, a banana, and two bagels she’d eaten after rolling out of her soft bed at eleven a.m.
    Mrs. Clancy’s bracelets rattled as she tossed the dice across the board. “Hah! I crapped out. How much did I lose?”
    “You didn’t lose anything yet. You’ve got a five and a two.” Sadie glanced at the Parcheesi board, stained and warped, with two different colors of wooden elephants in a dead heat for the finish. “You can move both your pieces.”
    Mrs. Clancy raised her chin to peer at the board through her reading glasses. “Which one is mine, Sissy?”
    “The blue ones are yours.”
    Sadie didn’t bother to correct her name. This