“Are you sure?” Nick said. “Does that even make sense?”
“They all knew where you were staying,” I said. “Elliot had you checked out, remember? He hired a private investigator. He must have followed you to the warehouse.”
“But Earl saw him the day before the robbery,” Nick said. “How does that help?”
“It proves that someone not only knew where you lived but was actually there—maybe the day before the robbery and the day of. When you came back from the hotel that afternoon, you didn’t see a crowbar anywhere, did you?”
Ben gave me a baffled look.
Nick shook his head. “But I didn’t look for one, either,” he said. “I dug out my bag and headed out to meet Beej. She insisted I come to her place when she found out where I was staying. So I took my stuff over there. Then I—.” He hesitated and looked at Ben. He’d been going to say that then he went to my dad’s place and climbed onto the roof. “Anyway, I slept at Beej’s that night. On the couch. The cops showed up the next day and arrested me.”
Beej came back downstairs.
“Have you seen Henri’s studio?” She was clearly impressed. “She said I was welcome to come over anytime. She probably doesn’t mean it, right?”
“Of course she means it. Henri loves people who love art,” I said.
Beej sank down onto a chair to digest this.
“I still don’t get it,” Nick said. “If Earl’s right, why did that guy at the mall try to scare me into handing over the coins? Why did he attack you for the same reason?”
Ben looked at me. “You never said anything about that guy wanting stolen coins.”
“I didn’t want to worry you,” I said, even though that wasn’t the real reason.
“You think he was trying to make sure I looked guilty?” Nick said.
The thought had occurred to me. Now I wasn’t so sure.
“I think someone’s looking for those coins and really believes you know where they are,” I said. “I think that’s why Beej’s place was broken into.”
“What?” I hadn’t told Nick about that. I guess Beej hadn’t, either. He looked at her, concerned.
“Someone trashed my place,” she said. “No big deal. It’s not like we had a lot of expensive stuff or anything.”
When Nick frowned, I explained. “You were found with just a few coins on you—the least valuable ones. The rest of the coins weren’t recovered. Someone must have thought that you stashed them. When they didn’t find the coins, they threatened you.”
“So now what?” Beej said.
“We should call the police,” Ben said.
“We don’t have anything credible to tell them,” I explained gently, “except that Earl, who knows Beej, who’s a friend of Nick’s, says he recognizes a jacket that he saw near the building before the theft even happened. But there must be something we can do.”
“Like what?” Beej said.
We all looked at one another. No one said a word.
Eventually Beej had to go. “But you know where to find me if you need me, right, Nick?”
Nick nodded.
Ben glanced at his watch. “I have to go too. I’m supposed to babysit my sister. Are you coming, Robyn?”
I shook my head. “I promised my dad that I would stay here.”
Ben looked across the table at Nick. I could tell he didn’t want to leave me, but what could he do? I walked him to the door.
Henri, Nick, and I had an early, awkward dinner. Henri was talkative, as usual. Nick was polite, but he directed all of his comments at Henri and didn’t look at me once. After eating, he offered to clean up. When he finished, he retreated to his room. Henri gave me a look but didn’t say anything. I stayed at the table and thought about what Earl had seen and what Isobel had told me. I thought about Mr. Schuster too and wondered what would happen if Elliot couldn’t find Orion a good home. What would Mr. Schuster do then? Would he really refuse to go to a home?
I wondered if anyone had taken Orion for a walk that day but couldn’t imagine that Elliot had managed to find a dog walker so quickly. Orion was probably cooped up in the basement again. Poor, poor Orion...
That gave me an idea.
It was only seven o’ clock. If I hurried, I could make it. I called to Henri that I was going out for a while. Nick came out of his room and watched me pull on my coat.
“Going to hang with the boyfriend after all, huh?” he said.
“No. I’m—”
“It’s okay,” he said. “You don’t owe me any explanation.”
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I said. “You’ll still be here, right? Because I need you to be here, Nick. It’s important.”
He nodded curtly.
“I’d take you with me now if I could,” I said.
“Whatever.”
“Please be here when I get back, Nick.”
“I said I would be. What’s the matter? Don’t you trust me?”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
N
ick was in Henri’s living room flipping through a magazine when I got back an hour later. He didn’t look up as I came through the door.
“I’m going to need your help a little later,” I said.
He stopped flipping pages.
“I wouldn’t ask,” I said, “but this is something I can’t do by myself.”
“Why don’t you ask what’s-his-name?” he said.
“Because it’s something only you can do.” I could tell he wanted to ask what it was, but his pride wouldn’t let him. “It’s been a long day, and my arm hurts. I’m going to take a nap. I’ll knock on your door when I’m ready. Okay?”
He didn’t say yes. But he didn’t say no, either.
Nick was fully dressed when he answered my knock later that night. He didn’t ask why I wanted his help. He didn’t even say a word until we got back, and then the only thing he said was, “Are you sure Henri won’t mind?”
“Pretty sure,” I said. “Nothing ever throws her. ’Night, Nick.”
“Robyn?”
I turned to face him. He looked at me for what seemed like an eternity.
“What’s wrong with me?” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Is it because I’m broke all the time? Is that why you didn’t wait for me? Or would you have gone for him anyway, even if I hadn’t left?”
“I didn’t know where you were, Nick. You just took off. You told Beej you were going. You even told Mr. Schuster. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Didn’t tell you?” He looked baffled. “What are you talking about? It was all in the letter.”
“Letter? What letter?”
“The one I wrote you. The longest thing I ever wrote.”
“Why didn’t you just call me?”
“I thought you’d get mad—I knew you would. You would’ve told me not to go. But I had to.”
“So you wrote a letter?”
“Yeah.”
“I never got it.”
He stared at me. “But I took it to your house myself. I wanted to make sure you got it as soon as you got back from your trip.”
“I never got any letter, Nick. My mom would have told me.”
“I went to your house. I was putting it in the mailbox when this man came out.”
“Man? You mean Ted?”
“He didn’t say who he was. He looked like a handyman. He said he was doing some work for your mom.”
“Zeke.” Zeke had been doing odd jobs for my mother since before she and my father separated. She’d hired him to install built-in bookshelves and cupboards in the basement as part of her continual quest to have a place for everything and keep everything in its place. “Big man, gray hair, paint-splattered overalls?”
“That’s him,” Nick said. “He said he’d put the letter inside where it’d be safe.”
“What did it say?”
“That I had to go out west for a while and that I wasn’t sure how long I’d be gone. I left a num
ber where you could call me when you got back—you know, after you got over being mad. But you never called.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
He looked down at the floor.
“No more lies, Nick, remember?”
“I would’ve. But I got locked up.”
“Locked up? What for? What did you do?”
His eyes flashed as they met mine again. “See? That’s what I wanted to avoid—you talking to me that way, assuming I must have done something wrong.”
I tried to calm down, but it was hard because he was telling the story in bits and pieces instead of just laying it all out.
“Why were you locked up, Nick?”
“It doesn’t matter anymore. Not when I’m probably going to end up there again.”
He started to close the door. I pushed it open and stepped inside.
“It matters to me,” I said. “Tell me.”
“Joey called me,” Nick said.
Joey. Nick’s stepbrother. It figured.
“See? There you go,” Nick said. “You always get that same look on your face when I mention Joey. I know you don’t like him, Robyn. But he’s my brother.” Joey was in prison, but that didn’t matter to Nick. Nick would do anything for Joey, no matter what kind of trouble it might land him in. “That’s why I didn’t want to tell you where I was going. I wanted to see how things worked out first.”
“Okay, I’m sorry,” I said. “What did he want?”
“He said he needed my help.”
I had to struggle to keep that same look off my face. The last time Joey had asked Nick for help, Nick had almost ended up in jail himself.
“He said that the last couple of times he talked to Angie, he got the idea something was wrong, but she wouldn’t tell him what.”
Angie is Joey’s girlfriend. She’d been pregnant when Joey went to prison. She lived out west with their baby son.
“Joey asked me to go out and check on her. To make sure she was okay. I didn’t know how long I’d be gone. I mean, if something was wrong, if Angie needed help...”
“Is she okay?”
“She is now. She finally found a place she could afford. But when I got there, she was living with her sister and this creep brother-in-law who was always giving her a hard time. Always drunk and calling Joey a loser and telling Jack terrible things about him. She didn’t want Jack growing up like that. The guy told her to move out if she didn’t like it. She wanted to. She was looking. But it takes time, you know? And it’s hard with a little baby.”
His hands clenched as he told the story.
“Anyway, I went out there and the sister let me sleep on the couch. But her husband started in right away, giving me a hard time too. I kept my cool—well, much as I could. But I talked back to him one time when Angie and her sister were out and it was just me and Jack and him at the house. He took a swing at me—and ended up with a black eye. I got arrested. He accused me of stuff I didn’t do, Robyn. Then I got jammed up because I have a record. They said I could only be released to an adult relative, but I didn’t have any out there.”
“What about your aunt? Couldn’t she have done something?”
“I didn’t tell them about her. She would just have got mad at me. She didn’t even know I was gone. I told them the truth, Robyn. I said I lived on my own. Anyway, there was no one to release me to, and they needed to be sure that I’d show up for my court date. So they detained me. They said I could call my family or my lawyer. Anyone else had to be on an approved list, and you weren’t. Angie offered to call you for me, but I was afraid you wouldn’t understand.”
“Haven’t I always believed in you, Nick?”
He bowed his head for a moment.
“Angie told me that you never called. I was afraid maybe you’d already given up on me. Anyway, Angie finally got her brother-in-law to withdraw the charges. I called you as soon as I got out”—the garbled phone message—“and when you didn’t call back...” He shrugged. “Anyway, that’s all in the past now, huh?”
“What about the girl who gave you that money?” I said.
Nick shook his head in disbelief. “That was weird. I was hitching home, and this guy let me off at a gas station along the highway. I had maybe five dollars in my pocket. And I found this purse. Just sitting there. I looked inside and found a name and a number, so I called. It turned out the purse belonged to this girl who had stopped there only about an hour earlier. She didn’t even realize her purse was missing until I called her. She drove back to the gas station.”
I waited for him to explain the thousand dollars in cash.
“Turns out she’s a model. You should have seen her. She looked like she belonged in a magazine. She was that pretty.” His cheeks turned pink. “Not as pretty as you, though.”
“Right.”
“Anyway, she was on her way back to town after visiting her mother. She had to catch a plane. She was on her way to Paris for a shoot. And, I don’t know, we got to talking. We had a lot in common.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. She had this terrible stepdad. She hated the guy. He’d hit her mom.” Nick’s stepfather had beaten his mother—so badly that the last time he did it, she died of her injuries. “Her mom finally left the guy. Sarah said now that she was making all this money, she was going to buy her mom nice things. Then she offered me a lift. When she found out I didn’t know where I was going and that I wasn’t sure I could get my old job back, she gave me a thousand dollars. Just like that, like it was nothing. She said I could pay her back when I got rich and famous. Crazy, huh?”
Nick was smiling when he finished the story, but then he grew serious again. “Would it have made a difference if you had got my letter?”
If I’d read Nick’s letter, I would never have agreed to go out with Ben. But it hadn’t worked out that way. And Ben had been so good to me. He’d even been willing to help me help Nick. I couldn’t pretend that he didn’t exist. I had to consider his feelings—didn’t I?
“Probably,” I said. “But—”
“But?”
“What I’m trying to say is—”
“It’s okay. It doesn’t matter anymore,” Nick said. “You have a real boyfriend now, someone who can give you things I never could.”
Ben was all that, for sure. But in my heart I wondered, Could he give me what I really wanted?
I got up early—well, earlier than Henri. Nick was already awake and was outside in Henri’s tiny backyard. He came in for a moment when he saw me.
“Are you sure you’re going to be okay?” he said.
“I’m just going to find out what’s going on,” I said. “I’ve got my phone. If anything happens, I’ll call 9-1-1.”
“I wish I could go with you,” he said.
“I’ll be fine.”
I grabbed one of Henri’s oatmeal-raisin muffins to eat on the way and left the house.
CHAPTER TWENTY
E
lliot answered the door. He was holding a piece of paper in one hand. His eyes kept skipping to it as he asked me what I was doing there.
“I know you think I lied to you,” I said. “And I know you don’t want me around. But I am a friend of your father’s—that part’s true—and someone has to walk Orion. You can come with me if you don’t trust me. Or Isobel can. But it’s not fair to keep Orion locked up in the basement because of something you think I did.”
“The dog isn’t here,” Elliot said.
“What do you mean? You didn’t send him to a shelter, did you?”
Isobel appeared at the door behind her father. “Someone kidnapped Orion,” she said.
“What? When?”
“Elliot, close the door,” said Claudia in a loud, shrill voice. “It’s freezing in here.”
To my surprise, Elliot didn’t slam the door in my face. Instead, he stood aside to let me into the front hall. Claudia was framed in the doorway to the kitchen. Connor was on the stairs, looking down at me.
“It was that friend of yours, wasn’t it?” Claudia said. “He took the dog.”
“Nick?” I said. “Why would he do that?”
“Out of spite,” Claudia said. “Because Elliot fired him. Because Elliot told the police where to find him.”
I turned back to Elliot. “When did it happen?”
“Last night.”
“You didn’t hear anything?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary,” Elliot said. “That dog barks so much I don’t pay attention anymore.”
“Have you called the police?”
Elliot held the sheet of paper in front of me. It was a ransom note.
“It says no police,” he said. “The kidnapper wants the coins. If he doesn’t get them, he’ll kill the dog. If I call the police, he’ll kill the dog. Do you have any idea what it would do to my father if someone hurt that dog? And you can bet that I’d be held responsible.”
“Why would Nick kidnap Orion and demand the coins as ransom?” I said slowly. “Are you saying that you don’t think that Nick stole the coins?”
“He stole them all right,” Connor said. “He was caught with them in his backpack.”
“Why would anyone think we know where the coins are?” Elliot said. “They were stolen from us.”
“From Grandpa,” Isobel said quietly.
“You should call the police,” I said.
“Robyn’s right,” Isobel said.
Elliot wheeled around to her. “Are you insane?” he said. “Do you have any idea what the police would think if they saw this note?”
Isobel’s voice trembled a little when she said, “They’d think that someone took Orion.”
“They’d think that someone in this house knows where those coins are,” Elliot said angrily. That’s exactly what had gone through my mind after I was attacked—if I said anything to the police, they would think that Nick knew where the coins were. “They’d think that someone must have done something that made these people think they could blackmail us by taking the dog and demanding the coins as ransom.” He waved the note in her face. She jumped back, startled. “And what do you think would happen when the police reported that to the insurance company? They’d think that I took the coins and filed a false claim. They’d think I was trying to defraud them. We’d never get the money.”
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