He thought of Davonn and Isaiah. If Isaiah, Austin’s shape and weight, but not his color, were to take this route, people would look up. Police would be called. Neighbors would react as if Isaiah were ten gang members at once. Isaiah would have to prove he had a right to be there. Aus had no right to be there, but nobody cared.

Clouds scudded in, darkening the sky, and by the time he reached the end of Shell Road, Mr. and Mrs. Macey had put on all the lights in their kitchen. If Macey was at their house, she wasn’t in the kitchen with them.

He wanted Macey to be there, and he wanted to march in the door and say, “How come you weren’t where I wanted you to be? I saved your life! You could at least read my mind and wait for me when I expect you to!”

This sounded like the sort of sentence that had damaged his parents’ marriage, so Aus decided against it.

He walked out onto the curl of beach that vanished into the waves, and it was so impossibly beautiful that he decided Lucky Devil’s Cake was the right recipe for anybody who lived on Shell Beach. Except he’d have been a much luckier devil if Macey Clare had cared enough to meet him after school.

Town hall was a labyrinth of teeny offices with little signs sticking out sideways into the corridors. Eventually Macey found the right clerk. “I want to see if a particular person was registered to vote in 1959,” Macey explained.

She was amazed and proud of herself. She hated going up to people and asking for things. She couldn’t bring herself to sell grapefruit for the school band even when she had the list of people who had courteously been buying it for years. Mom refused to help her sell it on the grounds that Macey had to get brave and do it herself, but Macey never did, and her parents didn’t want her on record as a total loser, so they bought it. All winter long, Alec and Cordelia Clare gnawed away at boxes of grapefruit from Florida.

And here she was: a young woman walking straight into town hall, calmly requesting voting records. Way to go, Mace.

“Wish I could help,” said the clerk. “But we clean out. A person who hasn’t voted in five years gets removed from the record, and 1959 is practically forty years ago. There isn’t any record.”

“In an information age, we don’t keep information?”

The clerk laughed. She was a pleasant woman, hair pulled back in a ponytail. It bounced cheerfully as she talked, as if connected to her speech. “We’d drown in paperwork if we kept everything.”

“It’s not even on a computer? Or microfilm?”

“Not that I know of. Not our town, anyway.”