Unforgettable

by Caroline B. Cooney

  Whose receiver lay separated from the phone.

  Mr. Senneth hung it up. “Whom did you dial?” he said conversationally.

  “Nine-one-one, of course,” said Hope, glaring at him. “That’s a regular phone line! And it dials regular shore numbers. And they’ve heard every bit of this.”

  “Kill them both,” said Mr. Senneth to Kaytha. “Then we have to leave. The limousine is still in the hotel parking lot. I believe we have sufficient time.”

  “They’ll track you,” said Mitch from the floor. “They’ll have your names. They’ll have—”

  “They’ll have nothing,” said Mr. Senneth. “We have never used our real names. Get rid of him, Kaytha.”

  About all Ben could wake up enough to do was call his parents. “You live near here?” said Susan. “Did I know that?”

  “No,” said Ben, “I never talk about my family.”

  “Why not?” said Susan. “Are they embarrassing?”

  “They’re rich. Embarrassingly rich. We live on Louisburg Square. You’re going to love it, Susan. You’ll get me and millions, too.”

  “You’re fibbing, aren’t you?”

  He grinned. “From here to San Francisco. We live in a third floor, shanty walk-up in the worst part of town. You want millions, you’re going to have to go back to Mitch.”

  “Mitch, ugh. He got us into this. He—”

  “Mitch!” said Ben Franklin. “That’s what we have to do. Make sure Mitch and Miss Amnesia are okay.”

  He grabbed the phone again.

  “I personally,” said Susan, “think Mitch deserves whatever he gets. How happy were you out there in the water waiting to drown?”

  Ben grinned. “Somebody has to be best man at my wedding.”

  Why had he been so passive? What on earth had made him lie there as if he himself were the well-trained collie?

  Mitch spun around, flinging Kaytha against Billy’s feet. Grabbing Billy’s ankles, he gave a tremendous jerk. The gun went off, Hope screamed, Kaytha swore, and Billy fell. Hard.

  Mitch couldn’t see the gun. Where had it fallen?

  Kaytha definitely knew where the knife was. She raised it.

  He remembered thinking to himself, I could whip this girl with a restaurant toothpick. The knife was nothing but a very long toothpick. Leaping back out of her range, Mitch simply took the thick foam padding off the ledge, doubled it over, and used it for a shield. The knife pierced his foam rubber easily, but stayed there. Mitch disarmed her.

  It took a few moments. He was aware that he was vulnerable to Billy, the gun, Mr. Senneth, and Edie. But nobody attacked him. Panting, as he held Kaytha, he looked around—and saw nobody.

  “They left,” said Hope.

  Mitch cut the bathrobe sashes that held her down.

  The little tan handcuffs that had been too small for Mitch were exactly right for Kaytha.

  Hope and Mitch went up on deck.

  No police arrived.

  No rescue services appeared.

  No sirens screamed.

  “Did you really telephone 911?” said Mitch.

  Hope nodded.

  “What do you bet you got a wrong number?” They both laughed.

  “This whole thing has been a wrong number,” said Hope.

  When the boat docked, a single small person came up the steps onto Lady Hope’s deck. It was Derry. “Derry, the deckhand,” said Mitch tiredly. “You missed the action, kiddo.”

  “I’m not a kid. I work with a museum in Paris and I’m trying to locate the Renoir painting the Senneths stole last year.”

  Hope could hardly believe it. Was there anything the Senneths had not done? Any museum from which they had not pulled off thefts and substitutions? “One of us really was a spy?” marveled Hope. “Derry, you didn’t add things up fast enough. The show is over and the cast left town. They took Edie. They were right about her a week ago—she was coming apart, she’s just a liability. Kaytha’s been left behind, but nobody will get anything out of her. I can’t tell you where the Renoir is. Nobody mentioned paintings around me.”

  “Where are Ben Franklin and Susan?” said Derry anxiously.

  The adrenaline rush that had allowed him to overpower Kaytha and Billy vanished. Mitch was overpowered again, but this time by grief. Oh, Ben! he thought, mourning his friend. Oh, Susan! And it’s my fault, my fault!

  Derry called the museum first, and the police second. Nobody arrived very speedily. Hope was not reassured. When you called the police, shouldn’t they instantly round the corner on two wheels?

  Ben and Susan got there first … by taxi.

  Mitch bellowed with joy and relief, beating on his chest like Tarzan. He hugged Ben so hard he nearly crushed ribs.

  “I hope you have money, Mitch,” said Ben, removing himself from the hug, “because I don’t have anything with me to pay the taxi fare. I didn’t drown, but my wallet did.”

  Mitch hugged Susan, a little less hard.

  “Taxi fare,” he muttered, dragging it out. “If I had written a script,” said Mitch, “there would have been much more drama than a taxi at the end.”

  “A huge fire,” agreed Hope. “A massive explosion. Lady Hope sinking like the Titanic, her jewels lost forever and ever.”

  Mitch paid the driver and started to put his wallet back into his pants pocket, but Susan stopped him. “You’d better have lots and lots of money,” said Susan, “because I’m suing you for sixty trillion dollars for emotional pain and suffering.”

  Mitch hugged her once more. “I’m sorry. Are you ever going to talk to me again?”

  “Not in this lifetime, buddy.”

  “She holds a grudge,” Ben Franklin explained.

  “How about if I take everybody out to dinner? We’ll get a pizza.”

  “Walter and I are not settling for pizza, Mitchell,” said Susan.

  You knew you were in trouble when they called you Mitchell. He said, “Who’s Walter? I thought I knew the cast, but—”

  “Me,” said Ben Franklin. “I’m going by my real name now.”

  “Then who was Rusty Corder?” said Hope.

  “More to the point,” said Ben Franklin, “who was Hope?”

  “Hope was Kaytha’s mother and Mr. Senneth’s wife. She died last year. There was a passport for Hope Senneth, and she looked thirty-five in it because she was thirty-five when the photo was taken. Mr. Senneth just kept his thumb over the birthdate and Mitch and I were too dumb to think of checking that. I was so dizzy I thought maybe I really was Hope.”

  “She is dizzy,” Susan said to Mitch. “I don’t know what Ginger is going to say about her.”

  Mitch thought of all the things Ginger would say, and grinned. The good part was going to be bringing Hope into his real life, getting off stage, throwing away roles. Being themselves.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, finally getting around to a very important fact. “Hope—who are you?”

  “I want you to keep calling me Hope,” she said. “I love the name Hope.”

  “So do I,” he said. “But I have to know who you really are. It matters.”

  “But I’m really boring.”

  Mitch shook his head. He gave her his world-class grin. “This weekend has been a lot of things, but boring isn’t one. Unforgettable is closer. And when you come to school in Boston, you and I will have a totally non-boring love life. Promise.” He kissed her hair and cheeks.

  “I promise. But I still want to be Hope.” She kissed his ears and throat.

  “No. We’re going to go to your college interviews, you’re going to go to school here, so we can date, and I’m dating whoever you really are. That’s that. Non-negotiable.”

  “I agree,” said Susan. “The name Hope is ruined for me. Who are you really?”

  She didn’t want to come all the way off the stage. She had loved parts of Hope. The wealth, the classiness, the splendor of it. The fabulous hotel suite, the yacht named for—

  Not named for me, she reminded he
rself. Nothing there was named for me. Hope Senneth is dead, and she was a desperate, sad woman with a dreadful family. Whereas I am alive, and very very lucky to be alive, and I’m a happy person with a wonderful family.

  “Lynne Cook,” she said at last. “Dull, boring, reliable old Lynne Cook.”

  Susan rolled her eyes. “Whatever else you are, Lynne Cook, you are not reliable, dull, or boring. Forget it. You are a ditzy nutty crazy piece of work.” Susan laughed suddenly. “And a terrific actress.”

  Of course what interested the police and the museum most—once they realized they weren’t going to find Kender Senneth on the yacht or in The Jayquith—was the necklace.

  “It’s in your train station locker?” said the chairman of the board of the museum. He was deeply humiliated because he had been the one to name Kender Senneth to the board. Judge of character had not turned out to be his strong suit.

  “Well, no, actually, it’s not,” said Lynne Cook, blushing. “I thought it was junk. It’s very very ugly. It’s incredibly huge, and the stones aren’t cut neatly like diamond engagement rings, and the gold is so thick and ropey I knew it had to be fake, and who on earth would ever wear a thing like that anyway? It was tacky and pathetic.”

  The museum director closed his eyes.

  “I thought it was pretend. Halloween jewelry. For if you want to dress up like a princess. Stuff you’d buy at a tag sale from some person with really bad taste.”

  “And?” said the museum director.

  “It was heavy,” said Lynne.

  “Meaning?” said the museum director.

  “I stuck it in the Salvation Army bin. I thought maybe somebody would want to pay a quarter for it and I didn’t want to keep carrying it.”

  They were helplessly laughing. Queen Isabella’s necklace, for whom they all might have died, too tacky to carry around.

  “Good thing you had the fake one,” said the museum director.

  “So the Senneths could never have done the switch anyway,” said Mitch.

  “No, but, Mitch, if Kaytha had realized that, if I had admitted it, she’d have dropped us overboard in a heartbeat.”

  Mitch doubted it. Dropping people overboard was too easy for Kaytha.

  The police were not able to follow the reasoning that had led Lynne Cook into this adventure. “I guess because there was no reasoning,” she said, unable to meet their eyes. “I didn’t reason. I just acted.”

  “Your real parents must be worried sick,” said one cop.

  “No, because I promised to call Sunday night. Even though so much has happened, it’s only Sunday dawn. They haven’t even gotten around to worrying about me yet.”

  “You are truly an idiot,” said the policeman. He stared at her with narrow eyes, memorizing her idiocy, so he could teach his own daughter not to act like that.

  “I know,” said Lynne Cook humbly.

  “But you met me that way,” said Mitch. “We wouldn’t have met if you hadn’t been an idiot. I like idiots.”

  The policeman said, “There is nothing more annoying than love at first sight.”

  “It runs in our family,” Mitch told him.

  They actually went to the concert.

  She had her date: her Boston Pops concert at Symphony Hall.

  They sat at little round tables on little rickety chairs, as if they were visiting a maiden aunt and having tea on the sun porch. The musicians gathered on a stage whose massive floral arrangements could probably be seen from Mars.

  “What’s your order?” said Mitch.

  “What’s my order?” she repeated. “I must be very punchy. After all, we haven’t had any sleep in so long. Do you tell John Williams what you want him to perform? In that case, I’ll have a Jurassic Park and an Indiana Jones please.”

  Mitch laughed. “Food, baby. Food before music.”

  From a form lying on the table, Mitch checked off roast beef sandwiches, two each, lemonade, and raspberry chocolate cake. A waitress in a cute little black and white outfit dashed over.

  A symphony concert where you ate at the table. “I have definitely never been here before,” she said. She thought of all the new things she would do with Mitch. As Lynne Cook.

  “I bought you a present,” Mitch said, as they devoured their food. All around them, people ate delicately, nibbling little crumbs off ladylike portions. Mitch and Lynne did nothing of the sort. They gobbled.

  “When did you have time to go shopping?” she cried. “Mitch! You’re a wizard.” She ripped off the pretty paper.

  Mitch loved that in a present-opener. When you opened neatly and slowly, you weren’t having enough fun.

  She yanked off the lid of the little white box and stared down into the layer of white cotton. “Mitch. I don’t have pierced ears. You’ve been kissing them. You should have noticed that.”

  Sure enough, she did not have pierced ears. “Hmmm,” said Mitch. This was familiar. He must be a slow learner.

  She hung the earrings from the top buttonhole of her shirt. She was that kind of girl—she’d make anything work.

  John Williams crossed the stage. The applause was deafening.

  They moved their little chairs even closer together. They held hands. Lynne Cook, thought Mitch. I like that. It’s a solid name.

  But in secret, in his heart, part of her would always be Hope; for Hope, and the adventure she had given him, was unforgettable.

  A Biography of Caroline B. Cooney

  Caroline B. Cooney is the author of ninety books for teen readers, including the bestselling thriller The Face on the Milk Carton. Her books have won awards and nominations for more than one hundred state reading prizes. They are also on recommended-reading lists from the American Library Association, the New York Public Library, and more. Cooney is best known for her distinctive suspense novels and romances.

  Born in 1947, in Geneva, New York, Cooney grew up in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where she was a library page at the Perrot Memorial Library and became a church organist before she could drive. Music and books have remained staples in her life.

  Cooney has attended lots of colleges, picking up classes wherever she lives. Several years ago, she went to college to relearn her high school Latin and begin ancient Greek, and went to a total of four universities for those subjects alone!

  Her sixth-grade teacher was a huge influence. Mr. Albert taught short story writing, and after his class, Cooney never stopped writing short stories. By the time she was twenty-five, she had written eight novels and countless short stories, none of which were ever published. Her ninth book, Safe as the Grave, a mystery for middle readers, became her first published book in 1979. Her real success began when her agent, Marilyn Marlow, introduced her to editors Ann Reit and Beverly Horowitz.

  Cooney’s books often depict realistic family issues, even in the midst of dramatic adventures and plot twists. Her fondness for her characters comes through in her prose: “I love writing and do not know why it is considered such a difficult, agonizing profession. I love all of it, thinking up the plots, getting to know the kids in the story, their parents, backyards, pizza toppings.” Her fast-paced, plot-driven works explore themes of good and evil, love and hatred, right and wrong, and moral ambiguity.

  Among her earliest published work is the Fog, Snow, and Fire trilogy (1989–1992), a series of young adult psychological thrillers set in a boarding school run by an evil, manipulative headmaster. In 1990, Cooney published the award-winning The Face on the Milk Carton, about a girl named Janie who recognizes herself as the missing child on the back of a milk carton. The series continued in Whatever Happened to Janie? (1993), The Voice on the Radio (1996), and What Janie Found (2000). The first two books in the Janie series were adapted for television in 1995. A fifth book, Janie Face to Face, will be released in 2013.

  Cooney has three children and four grandchildren. She lives in South Carolina, and is currently researching a book about the children on the Mayflower.

  The house in Old Greenw
ich, Connecticut, where Cooney grew up. She recalls: “In the 1950s, we walked home from school, changed into our play clothes, and went outside to get our required fresh air. We played yard games, like Spud, Ghost, Cops and Robbers, and Hide and Seek. We ranged far afield and no parent supervised us or even asked where we were going. We led our own lives, whether we were exploring the woods behind our houses, wading in the creek at low tide, or roller skating in somebody’s cellar, going around and around the furnace!”

  Cooney at age three.

  Cooney, age ten, reading in bed—one of her favorite activities then and now.

  Ten-year-old Cooney won a local library’s summer reading contest in 1957 by compiling book reviews. In her collection, she wrote reviews of Lois Lenski’s Indian Captive: The Story of Mary Jemison and Jean Craighead George’s Vison, the Mink. “What a treat when I met Jean George at a convention,” she recalls.

  Cooney’s report card from sixth grade in 1959. “Mr. Albert and I are still friends over fifty years later,” she says.

  Cooney in middle school: “I went through some lumpy stages!”

  In 1964, Cooney received the Flora Mai Holly Memorial Award for Excellence in the Study of American Literature from the National League of American Pen Women. “I always meant to write to them, and tell them that I kept going!” Cooney says. “I love the phrase ‘pen woman.’ I’m proud to be one.”

  Cooney at age nineteen, just after graduating from high school. (Photo courtesy of Warren Kay Vantine Studio of Boston.)

  Cooney with Ann Reit, her book editor at Scholastic. Many of the books Cooney wrote with Reit were by assignment. “Ann decided what books she wanted (for example, ‘entry-level horror, no bloodshed, three-book series,’ which became Fog, Snow, and Fire) and I wrote them. I loved writing by assignment; it was such a challenge and delight to create a book when I had never given the subject a single thought.”