I rowed harder. I let the current yank me, I felt the pull of the river like a strong man reached out to hug me. I saw animals on the riverbank, two deer with black eyes bowing their heads, solemn as angels, and an owl swooped low over us. That could be a good sign, an owl over open water, or a bad one, depending on who it was scrying the omens. Pop always said life isn’t so much what happens as who tells the better story about it later.

One way or the other, this would be a heck of a story to tell. Now it was up to me to make sure it had a happy ending, a boy and his pop back together, all the low-down scoundrels vanquished, nothing but glad tidings to sing and happy times to tell about.

Well, here’s to all that, I thought, and downriver I rowed.

4

IT WASN’T LONG BEFORE THEY caught wind of me, Cecily Bob and Mr. Hugo. They must have sniffed me out. One after the other their heads popped up to stare at me, and I swear in the moonlight I saw Pop writhing on the floor of the skiff.

I rowed hard as I could, my hands blistered from the oars and my hair damp with sweat. In the moonglow pale spiders scuttled by my feet, stowaways on the skiff’s floor. I was gaining on the other boat, somehow I was catching up. I didn’t know what I would do when I got there. Something. I had Pop’s knife after all, and maybe there was something special in his knapsack I had slung over my shoulder. I sure hoped so. I glanced behind me. I was close enough now I could see the snarl on Cecily Bob’s face, his bent and crooked nose. Mr. Hugo’s too. He was a squat man shaped not unlike a mole, with a top hat and bug eyes and a little mouth set in an O. I could hear them cursing and swearing at me, I could see the tattoos snaking up Cecily Bob’s arms, I remembered the gleaming knife he’d pulled on Pop, chipped and rusty from the blood of all the throats he’d probably sliced and the bellies he’d most likely spilled open.

I realized maybe I hadn’t planned any of this too well.

I saw Mr. Hugo fish in his pockets for a minute and pull out a small metal box. I heard him cuss and laugh a little, and I looked back over my shoulder in time to see something spark, and then spark again. He was fiddling with a tinderbox, that’s what Mr. Hugo was doing. Only what was he going to light with it?

I saw another sparkle, then the bright white burn of a fuse catching. More cackling, and then the burning thing plopped in the water right next to my boat.

It boomed. Water flew up in the air.

The men on the boat roared with laughter. I bet you could have heard them laughing for miles.