The Chronicles of Stinky Cove · Book 1

Barnacle

The Seal Who Fell from the Sky

Nobody asked Jordyn if she wanted to spend February at the end of the world. Nobody asked the seal, either.

Jordyn is nine, and she has been sent: to a great-aunt she barely knows, at the end of a dirt lane in Maine, in the worst month Maine has. A goose stands on her boots before she is out of the sleet. That night a sound comes off the water, thin and hoarse, going up at the end like a question.

At low tide she finds what made it. A seal pup, white as a marshmallow, alone in a pool of ice water, and she wants him more than she has wanted anything. So she keeps him a secret for one day. The wrong day. At first light an eagle comes down out of the sky.

What happens next takes a whole town: a shed, a stock tank, a plow at five in the morning, a phone that rings at six every night, and two words painted red on a piece of pine that Halftide has never taken down.