Seventeen Against the Dealer by Cynthia Voigt Read Free Book Online

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    The land spread out around her, flat under the broad sky. Fields lay empty, trees raised naked branches, the scrawny tops of loblollies looked even scrawnier than usual, and the few houses she could see from the road had a closed-in winter look to them. Dicey was warm enough, since Sammy had tinkered the truck’s heating system into working order.
    She didn’t mind driving—the machinery did all the work. In a boat, you had wind and waves, tides, too, to work with or against; in a boat, you had things constantly changing, perpetual small changes that you needed to respond to, if you wanted to do it right and keep on getting where you wanted to go. In a boat, the sailor did half the work. It was a lot like living, sailing was, much more so than driving was. Driving, you got onto the track and steered along—accelerating or braking as the occasion demanded, but mostly you did what the signs told you to do. Driving was more dangerous, that was all, and it was dangerous because of the other cars and their drivers; maybe also, she thought, more dangerous because it was easier.
    She kept an eye out, on the road ahead and the road behind, on crossroads, and let her mind work: It was a question of whether she should buy the wood Ken had called about. She’d brought her checkbook with her, so she could do that. Ken Forbeck knew wood, so if he said this was worth looking at, it would be.
    â€œClose to nine hundred board feet,” he’d told her, “and I’ll let you have it for only what it cost me, five hundred and ninety dollars. That’s a good price, Dicey.”
    â€œWhy so cheap?” she’d asked. “Isn’t it rift sawn?”
    â€œOf course—the only reason I called is I haven’t got any room to store it. I picked up a job lot. A shop in Carolina went out of business, and I bid on the inventory. He’d stocked Philippine mahogany, and some teak—this larch was in that. I won’t need it. You’d be a fool to pass it up, Dicey.”
    If she spent $590, that would get her bank account down to just over $700, $706.87 to be exact, which brought her time limit down to three or four months, March or April. But if she built a boat over the winter and sold it in the spring . . . and in the spring there would be more repair work around, if she could get it . . . that was an awful lot of ifs to be banking on. Banking on ifs wasn’t any too smart.
    Not taking opportunities wasn’t any too smart, either.
    After Cambridge, and the long, low bridge over the Choptank River, the land opened out again. Dicey pulled the visor down to keep the sun out of her eyes. Cornfields, cropped to stubble, farmhouses with smoke rising out of their chimneys, and an occasional abandoned farm-produce stand—she passed by them without really seeing them, the speedometer needle steady at fifty. She couldn’t believe what Claude Shorter had asked her that morning on the phone.
    His call had interrupted her in the middle of hefting the dinghiesaround, which was no easy job. Moving boats was a two-man job. But the paint was still tacky and she wanted to get to work at least caulking on the next boat, so she’d been shifting them around to fit the two broadside on the rack, when the phone rang. At least, she’d thought, hearing Claude identify himself on the phone, he had been too lazy to come see her in person. She wasn’t going to have to wait for him to talk himself out before he’d leave.
    Claude Shorter was her landlord, but that didn’t mean he thought she’d make a go of the business. He’d rented the shop to her because she offered to pay rent, and he hadn’t decided whether he would be selling the property or not, now that he’d built himself a new shop, about four times as large as his old one. What he wanted from her that morning was to contract out some work to her. “I’ve got this order for