Bay Crazy -

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I think I’d like to find out.”

The sheriff squinted. The jacket could have washed up. The book could have drifted. But he didn’t say that. He’d seen too much to believe in nothing. bay crazy

“Maybe,” the sheriff said. “What did she want?” “I don’t know,” he said

“She was here,” Leo said.

Nobody laughed when Leo told these stories anymore. Not because they weren’t funny, but because the line between his delusion and the town’s reality had become a suggestion, not a border. Old Mrs. Halvorson started leaving out saucers of milk for the ghost of her cat, which was fair because the ghost of her cat still left dead mice on the porch. Jimmy Dufresne, who ran the bait shop, began wearing a tinfoil crown because he said the herring were transmitting secrets about the school board budget. The herring, he insisted, had a PAC. The book could have drifted

Leo pointed. A single pink jacket was draped over a broken piling, still wet. Beside it, the paperback, now open to a random page, its spine finally broken.