Eleven and Holding (12 page)

“So if she said he didn't steal it, they'll let him go, right? Can we go get him?”

“No, the judge won't release him unless he goes back to his foster parents or until another foster placement can be located.”

“Sounds like Switch has been through them all already,” I said.

“I know,” Chuck said. “So, if you don't mind, I'm going over there now to check on him. Then I'll take you home.”

“Okay,” I said.

“One condition, though,” he said. “You're calling your mother every five minutes until we reach her. Got it? I've got my cell in the van,” he said, motioning behind him.

I nodded in quiet agreement. I'd agree to anything at this point to avoid becoming a permanent resident of Boomtown. I followed Chuck's long strides down the sidewalk.

“Have you eaten anything since lunch?” he asked.

“No, but I'm not hungry,” I said. I was actually famished and could have eaten the jeep we'd just passed, but I wouldn't let him know it. He could take me home, but that's where I drew the line.

“S'too bad,” he said, fumbling for his keys. “I brought you and Switch some takeout. Thought we
could all have a bite over there together. Might be his last decent meal for a while.” He unlocked the passenger door and opened it for me.

But I stood staring at the side of his van; gaping, really.

Gaping at the drawing of Buster's “little lima beans” all over the side panel of Chuck's van, which weren't lima beans at all—but big, brown coffee beans, tumbling all over the “fancy and loopy” writing that spelled . . .

“Caffeine Nana's.”

After the day I'd had, it made only perfect sense that I was about to climb into the getaway van with Mr. McDougall's kidnapper.

I
climbed into the front seat holding my breath, like any second I might trigger the Pesky Kid Trap and a giant net would fall over my head. I chanced a quick look over my shoulder in the event that Mr. McDougall was sitting in back, bound and gagged and, hopefully, tail still wagging.

No such luck. The back was filled with about a dozen giant burlap sacks of coffee. At least I hoped they were sacks of coffee! Maybe Caffeine Nana's was just a front for his real business—stealing pets from old ladies for ransom! Even worse, maybe he sold the animals to those research hospitals that liked to test makeup and new drugs. Twee said she saw a special about it on TV. They'd put, like, eighty coats of mascara on a cat's whiskers to see what would
happen. Or they'd splash perfume in a rat's eyes to see if it made it go blind. If not, bottle it up and send it out for sale.

There was a large picnic basket right behind my seat that was putting out some potent kid-seducing aromas. I smelled barbecue ribs—one of my major weaknesses. I loved ribs so much I could probably eat them raw. Did Chuck know? How? There was only one answer. It wasn't enough that he took Nana's restaurant from our family. Now, he was working on getting
Mom
.

But what he didn't know was that I was on to him. He didn't know that I now knew he was a
dognapper.

Oh, he was lower than low. He was subterranean despicable. A hairy, infected wart on a tick's butt!

My head was swimming with rage, hunger, and exhaustion. And the smell of those ribs was making me crazy. I think they had been marinated in Cajun sauce, which I totally adore.

Chuck reached into the center console between our seats and popped it open. I caught my breath as he pulled out a small, dark 45-caliber snub-nosed—

Cell phone.

“Call your mom.”

I tried to will my heart still with my mind. Chuck was busy maneuvering into traffic, so I stole a quick
look at the numbers he'd recently called. Wanted to see if he'd really been trying to call my mom. That's when I noticed the number that belonged to this phone. It was a number I'd just studied less than five minutes ago: (555) 555-0190.

It was Ginger's number! Weakened with hunger, I blurted before I could stop myself. “This is Ginger's phone! What are you doing with her phone?”

Chuck glanced over at me, puzzled. “That's not Ginger's phone, it's mine.”

I ripped Mr. McDougall's collar off my wrist and jangled it near him, like a prosecutor with the smoking gun. “Oh,
yeah
? Then why is it the same number that is on Mr. McDougall's collar?” I thrust it under his nose.

He took it from my hand, looked at it, and then tried to swallow his rather large Adam's apple. He exhaled and laid the collar across his thigh. Rubbed his thumb across the tag. “Where'd you find this?”

“It was in the sidecar of Ginger's bike, under the pillow,” I said, still triumphant. “So, tell me, Mr. I'm Such a Nice Guy, how do you explain
that
?”

“Mr. McDougall was my dog,” he said. “Mine and Phillip's.”

“Who the
heck
is Phillip?” I yelled.

Chuck looked over at me, gauging me a bit.

“Phillip,” he said, his voice straining over the name, “was my life partner.” He flicked on the headlights in the dusk. “And Ginger's son.”

Silence struck me, and I circled over all this shiny new information, like a crow trying to decide which piece to pick up.

I kept trying to pass over the “was” in “was my life partner.” I tried to ignore the deep sadness that was suddenly thick as fog inside the van. But I couldn't.

I knew sad. It had taken up residence in me the day Nana died. And I knew when it was real. Like I knew Ginger's sadness the day I first met her. And now, was I getting to know . . . Chuck's?

“He's dead,” Chuck said, answering the question I didn't want to ask. He stopped for a red light and then looked out the window, away from me. “Phillip died about three years ago.”

I knew what “life partner” meant. Mom explained it to me a while back. I knew it meant two people who were the same sex who loved each other enough to get married.

“I'm sorry,” I said in a small, confused voice.

He picked up Mr. McDougall's collar and studied it a second. “Phillip and I adopted Mr. McDougall from the shelter when he was just a pup. He was our baby. We were crazy about him.”

“Why'd you name him Mr. McDougall?” I asked dumbly, because I didn't know what else to say.

He smiled with one corner of his mouth. “It was just a funny name Phillip and I used to call each other when one of us would do something goofy or clumsy. The first day we had our puppy, everything he did was a ‘McDougall.' He kept stepping right smack into his food and water bowls, or he would run up to them and send them flying across the room. It seemed a perfect name for him.”

“So how come Ginger had him, then?” I asked.

“After Phillip died,” he said, and I knew that had to be the hardest string of words in his vocabulary, “Ginger went to pieces. She and I both did, but he was her only son, her beautiful Phillip. She'd been a single mother, so he was all she had. I wanted to do something, give her something, anything, to make the hurt less.”

He stopped a moment, and I wondered if he'd continue. After a pause, he did. “So, I gave her Mr. McDougall, who Phillip adored.” Chuck blew out a deep, shaky breath. “I told her I was going to be too busy with the café to take care of him anymore. Which wasn't true, but it was the only way she would have taken him from me.”

“But wasn't that hard?” I asked, afraid of the answer.

He looked over at me, his face full of grief. He nodded. “It almost killed me,” he said, and his voice cracked. “It was like losing Phillip twice.”

I thought about how that must have been for Ginger—losing her son and then having his dog come up missing. Losing them both, she must have been—

“Ohhh,” I said, breathless, as pieces fell softly together. The food, the clean hair-free furniture, that neighbor boy's story of Mr. McDougall being “kidnapped.”

“Mr. McDougall died at Ginger's house, didn't he?”

Chuck nodded his head slowly.

“And you,” I said, my voice halting. “She called
you
, and you went to get him so you could bury him.” I pressed my lips together hard. I had to keep asking until I could make it real. “Was Ginger
there
when Mr. McDougall died?”

“Yes.”

“But she won't remember it, will she?”

Chuck wiped his eyes on the collar of his shirt. “I think she can't. She can't take any more. It's just too much.”

I nodded, knowing. Knowing that place she had found to go when things just got so hard. In that place, you just stopped seeing. Even the things that were right in front of you.

Like with Dad. There was something Mom knew. Something Twee saw. Something wrong with him I never wanted to face. And so, I guess, I just didn't see it.

I hung my head. Tears ran a course down my face then, leaving a big wet spot on my shirt, right over the place of my heart.

T
he scariest thing about county juvenile hall wasn't the sound of the heavy metal doors that clanked behind us or even the three burly boys in orange jumpsuits mopping the floor. It was the look my mother gave me when she came to fetch Chuck and me from the guard's station. It was combustible. That look could launch rockets out of NASA. And after the day I'd just had, you'd think nothing would surprise me. But having Mom come out of the locked-up side of juvie with her eyes lasered on me was like a knee to the solar plexus.

I tried to swallow. “Hi, Mom,” I squeaked, mouse-like.

She crossed her arms over her chest.

We waited while a uniformed officer with a tree
trunk for a neck searched through Chuck's picnic basket for contraband. He took out the plastic knives and forks and then dropped them into a bin below his desk. Just in case Chuck and I decided to help Switch dig his way out of the joint with a white plastic knife, I guessed.

“Okay, clear,” the guard said, giving my mom a nod.

“Follow me” was all she said.

We took up behind her down a long hallway with a very shiny floor. Chuck gave my shoulder a quick squeeze, and I prepared myself for the biggest mess of trouble I had ever cooked up in my life.

Mom pressed her badge into a metal plate next to a door that read “Mediation.” It clicked open, and she held the door as Chuck and I passed through into a room with a giant, long table. Occupied by one buzz-headed kid.

“Switch!” I started to head over to him, except that Mom reeled me in by the back of my shirt. “No sir, young lady. No sir.”

“Oh man, Macy, I'm glad you're okay!” Then he looked over at Chuck. “Thanks for picking her up and everything.” He took a long deep breath and then dropped his head between his hands for a minute.

Mom pulled me by the shoulders, swinging me around until I was facing her. She squeezed me hard
against her and then whispered for my ears only. “I have never been so scared or so glad to see anyone in my entire life.” Her voice wobbled at the end, and she cleared her throat hard.

“I'm sorry, Mom. I—”

“
Later.
We're going to sort all this out. Okay?” She gave me a little shake and then buried her face in my hair for a second.

I nodded, and she straightened herself up.

“You two could be sisters,” Switch said. “I would have never guessed mother and daughter.”

“Can it, Terrance,” Mom said. She put her hands on her hips and blew out a breath. “I hardly know where to begin with you two.”

“How about with dinner?” Chuck asked. “These kids need to eat, Elise. It's been a very long day.”

She nodded and squeezed the bridge of her nose while Chuck set out paper plates and opened boxes of baby back ribs, steak fries, and barbecued beans. And an entire half slab of chocolate cake. Switch and I leaped at the food, like a couple of wolverines.

While Chuck and Mom talked together in hushed voices at the back of the room, Switch whispered over a rib. “Would it have killed you to let me know your mom was a probation officer? And mine in particular?”

I shoved a load of beans into my mouth and
shrugged. “Guess before you take a girl off on a crime spree, you should at least find out her last name.”

Switch looked at me across the table with that nervous kind of look someone gets when you've made a horrendous mess on your face. They're hoping you'll catch on soon before they have to tell you.

I mopped my mouth with a napkin, which came away bright red. If you hadn't known it was Cajun barbecue sauce, you might have thought I'd just suffered a gunshot wound to my face.

“Sorry,” I said. “I'm starved.”

Switch smiled and loaded his spoon with a chunk of chocolate cake. “Hey, any chance I'm going to find a key baked in here?”

“Sorry, I didn't make the cake. I was kinda busy today.”

I studied him a moment while he ate. He looked worse than I did. He'd apparently spent a couple of hours in the Dumpster before the cops nabbed him.

“Terrance, Macy?” Mom called. “We're going to step out into the hallway a moment to make a call. Finish your dinners. But I'm standing right here.” She tapped on the door's window letting us know she'd have one eye on us the whole time.

“
That's
gotta be tough,” Switch said, pointing his chin in Mom's direction.

“I suppose there are worse things.”

“So? You still haven't told me about your dad. Did you find him or what?”

I got up and threw my paper plate into the corner wastebasket, under a huge American flag. Wiped a few crumbs from the old polished finish of the long table. Studied a framed copy of the Bill of Rights posted on the wall.

“You going to answer me any time today?” Switch asked, wiping his index finger carefully with his napkin.

I shrugged.

“Okay, guess not.”

“What do you think is going to happen to you?” I asked. “I mean, how long could they actually keep you here?”

“They can keep me as long as they want, if they think there's a danger that I'll run away again. Since I'm a ward of the court, they get to call the shots.” He polished off the rest of his cake. “I don't care what they say. I'm not going back to the Gilberts' house, and I'm not going back to the Cosgrows, or the Reyburns, or the Thompsons, or the Fagens. And I am absolutely not ever, ever,
ever
going back to the Arnolds,” he said, the muscle in his jaw flexed. He clasped his fingers together until his knuckles were
white and his fingertips bright red.

I went and sat next to him.

He picked up his plastic spoon and snapped it in two.

I took it away from him.

“I've had it up to here with what people think will be good for me—tough love, outward bound, inward out, sports camp, young farmers, and all the other ‘fix the foster kid' programs.”

I wanted to pat him somehow, but I didn't know how or where.
Best to just sit,
I thought.

The door clicked open, and he sat back up straighter, feelings quickly erased from his face. Except the one that said,
What do I care what you do with me?

“I called the judge,” Mom said, looking at Switch. “I wanted to talk to her about our options. If you really don't want to go back to the Gilberts—”

“I really
won't
,” he said, his voice hard.

“Terrance, I hate to book you. You don't really belong here, but you're making this very difficult. It's my job to keep you safe. Sleeping on the Greyhound bus is not an option.” She tapped her pen hard against the table and now looked at us both. “You two are very, very lucky that Ms. Grady is not pressing any theft charges. Terrance, you don't even have a driver's
license, and you,” she said, shooting me a deadly look, “are grounded until your senior prom.”

A protest rose up, but I let it go.

She closed her eyes a moment. “When I think of what could have happened to either of you today—”

“But didn't, Elise. Nothing bad happened,” Chuck reminded her. “They're both safe.”

“I thought your sudden interest in the Green Angels was a little suspect,” she said. “I got the real story, or at least part of the real story, out of Twee first thing this morning. Did you two even go to Raging Falls? Your aunt Liv and I spent half the day there looking for you.”

Switch and I looked at each other, realizing we'd forgotten to get our stories straight.

“I think I'd like to take the Fifth,” I said.