“We call them mobiles over here,” Nathan said bossily. “Mum’s got one but it’s old and she says we can’t afford two.”
“I can’t afford two sets of bills,” I said. “Skye, you would not be doing me a favour if you’re thinking of giving him one.” I put the roll of twenties we hadn’t spent into her hand. “You’ve been very kind, but rich relations can be too expensive.”
She stared at the money in astonishment. Then she closed her hand over it and tucked it safely into her handbag. “Okay, okay. But I’ve got two phones and they have lots of cool applications. Want to play a game, kid?”
I watched them poring intently over the phones, two curly heads close enough to touch. Nathan’s love of technology has been obvious since he first tried to feed his cheese sandwich into the VCR slot, so he didn’t take long to master Skye’s phone. I kept my mouth shut, but I was proud of him.
Suddenly I was content. I was drinking good coffee and eating a fresh Danish with my clever son and my unfamiliar sister. I was not counting pennies and rationing time. Worry went on holiday.
“Can I go, Mum?” Nathan was tugging my sleeve, his eyes alive with fun.
“What? Where?”
“Just down the end there.” Skye pointed to the far end of the mall. “He’ll have my phone and be in touch at all times. You don’t need to worry.”
“I’m Nathan Bond, secret agent.”
“I don’t know,” I began, but exactly then Skye turned her face away from Nathan, towards me, and I saw with dismay that she’d begun to cry. So I let him go.
“Gimme a minute.” She blotted her eyes on her fur-trimmed cuff. “That’s a terrific kid you got there. I guess you musta done something right.”
“What happened to you, Skye?”
“Mr. Bo died a year ago. He was shot by some country cops in a convenience-store raid. Stupid bastard. I wasn’t with him—hadn’t been for years—but we kept in touch. That’s when I started to look for you. I thought if he was dead, you could forgive me.”
“Oh, Skye.” I took her hand. Just then I heard my son’s voice say, “Nathan to HQ—I’m in position. Can you hear me?”
She picked up her phone. “Loud and clear. Commence transmission. You remember how to do that?” She held the phone away from her ear and even in the crowded food court I heard the end of Nathan’s indignant squawk. She gave me a watery smile but her voice was steady.
He must have started sending pictures because she forgot about me and stared intently at her little screen. Then she said, “HQ to Nathan—see that tall man in black? He’s got a black-and-red scarf on. Yes. That’s the evil Dr. Proctor.”
“Skye?” I put my hand on her arm but she shook me off, got up, and moved a couple of steps away.
I got up too and heard her say, “... to the men’s room. Wayne will be there. He’ll give you the goods. Can you handle that?”
“No, he can’t handle that,” I shouted, grabbing for the phone. “What’re you doing, Skye?”
She twisted out of my grasp. “Let go, stupid, or you’ll wreck everything. You’ll put your kid in trouble.”
I took off, sprinting down the mall, dodging families, crowds, balloons, and Santas, cracking my shins on push chairs, bikes, and brand-new tricycles.
I arrived, out of breath and nearly sobbing with anxiety, at one of the exits. There was no Nathan, no tall man in black, no Wayne. I saw a security uniform and rushed at him. “Have you seen my son? He’s wearing the England strip, red and white boots, and a black hoodie. He’s nine. His name’s Nathan.” I was jumping up and down. “I think he might’ve gone into the Gents with a tall man in black and a black-and-red scarf.” Terror gripped the centre of my being. “I don’t know where the Gents is.”
“Kids do wander off this time of year,” the security man said. “Me, I think it’s the excitement and the greed. I shouldn’t worry. I’ll go look for him in the toilets, shall I? You stay here in case he comes back.”
But I couldn’t wait.
He said tiredly, “Do you know how many kids there are in England strips this season? Wait here; you aren’t allowed in the men’s facility.”
I couldn’t wait there, either. I pushed in behind him, calling my son’s name. There were several boys of various ages—several men too—but no Nathan, no Wayne, and no man in black.
“Don’t worry,” the security man said, although he was himself beginning to look concerned. “I’ll call this in. Natty ...”
“Nathan.”
“We’ll find your boy in no time. Wait here and ...”
But I was off and running back to the food court to find Skye. She had the other phone. She knew where Nathan was.
Except, of course, there was no sign of her.
I found our table. No one had cleared it. Under my seat was the carrier bag containing Nathan’s old shoes, his ordinary clothes, his gel pens, and my CD. I lifted his sweater to my nose as if I were a bloodhound who could track him by scent alone.
My heart was thudding like heavy metal in my throat. I couldn’t swallow. Sweat dripped off my frozen face.
The most fundamental rule in all the world is to keep your child safe—to protect him from predators. I’d failed. My family history of abuse and neglect was showing itself in my nature, too. Whatever made me think I could make a better job of family life than my mother? Neglect was bred into me like brown eyes and mad hair. There could be no salvation for Nathan or me.
I was fifteen when I lost Skye.
“We’ll start again in the Land of Opportunity,” said ex-jailbird Mr. Bo. “But we’ll go via the Caribbean, where I know a guy who can delete a prison record.” Skye sat on his lap, cuddled, with her head tucked under his chin.
“But my exams,” I said. “Skye, I’m going to pass in nine subjects. Then I can get a good job and look after us.”
“You do that.” She barely glanced at me. “I’ll stay with Mr. Bo.”
“Looks like it’s just you and me, kid,” he said to her, without even a show of regret.
I was forced to borrow money from Skye for the bus fare back to Crack House. I had a nosebleed on the way and I thought, she’ll come back—she won’t go without me. But I never saw her again.
I sat in a stuffy little office amongst that morning’s lost property and shivered. They brought me sweet tea in a paper cup.
Skye had lent Nathan her sexy phone and I’d watched him excitedly walk away with it. It looked so innocent.
She was my sister, but I knew nothing about her except that childhood had so damaged her that she experienced the control and abuse of an older man as an adventure, a love story. Why would she see sending my lovely boy into a public lavatory with a strange man as anything other than expedient? She’d been trained to think that using a child for gain was not only normal but smart.
I was no heroine—I couldn’t find him or save him. I was just a desperate mother who could only sit in a stuffy room, drinking tea and beating herself up. My nose started to bleed.
“Hi, Mum—did someone hit you?” Nathan stood in the doorway staring at me curiously.
“Car park C, level five,” the security man said triumphantly. “I told you we’d find him. Although what he was doing in the bowels of the earth I’ll never know.”
“Get off, ” Nathan said crossly. “You’re dripping blood on my England strip.”
“Nathan—what happened? Where have you been?”
“Don’t screech,” he said. “Remember the black Jeep—Sierra, Charlie, Delta? Well, I found it.”
“Safe and sound,” the security man said. “No harm done, eh? Sign here.”
Numbly I signed for Nathan as if he were a missing parcel and we went out into the cold windy weather to find a bus to take us home. There would be no limo this time, but Nathan didn’t seem to expect it.
On the bus, in the privacy of the backseat, Nathan said, “That was awesome, Mum. It was like being inside of Xbox. I was, like, the operative except I didn’t have a gun,
but we made him pay for his crime anyway.”
“Who? What crime?”
“Dr. Proctor—he hurts boys and gives them bad injections that make them his slaves.”
“Do you believe that?” I asked, terrified all over again.
“I thought you knew,” he said, ignorant of terror. “Skye said you hated men who hurt children.”
“I do,” I began carefully. “But I didn’t know she was going to put you in danger.”
“There hardly wasn’t any,” said the nine-year-old superhero. “All I had to do was identify the bad doctor and then go up to him and say, ‘I’ve got what you want. Follow me.’ It was easy.”
I looked out of the window and used my bedtime voice so that he wouldn’t guess how close I was to hysteria. “Then what happened?”
“Then I gave him the hard drive and he gave me the money.”
“The what? Hard ...”
“The important bit from the inside of computers where all your secrets go. Didn’t you know, either? You’ve got to destroy it. It was the one big mistake the bad doctor made. He thought he’d erased all his secrets by deleting them. Then he sold his computer on eBay but he forgot that deleting secrets isn’t good enough if you’ve got enemies like me and Skye. She’s a genius with hard drives.”
“I’ll remember to destroy mine,” I said. “What happened next?”
“You haven’t got any secrets, Mum,” Nathan Bond said. “After that I gave the money to Skye and hid in the bookshop till she and Wayne went away. Then I followed them.”
“What bookshop?” When I ran after Nathan to the end of the mall there had been shops for clothes, cosmetics, shoes, and computer games. There had not been a bookshop. I explained this to him. He was thrilled.
“You didn’t see me. Nobody saw me,” he crowed. “I did what spies do—I went off in the wrong direction and then doubled back to make sure no one was following. You went to the wrong end of the mall.”
“Is that what Skye told you to do?”
“No,” he said, although his eyes said yes. He turned sulky so I shut up. I was ready to explode but I wanted to hear the full story first.
When the silence was too much for him he said enticingly, “I know about Sierra, Charlie, Delta.”
“What about it?” I sounded carefully bored.
“You know I was supposed to look for it but I never saw it? That must’ve been a test. You know how I know?”
“How do you know?”
“’Cos Skye knew where it was all along. She and Wayne went down to level five in the lift, and I ran down the stairs just like they do on telly. You know, Mum, they get it right on telly. It works.”
“Sometimes,” I said. “Only sometimes.”
“Well anyway, there they were—her and Wayne—and they got into the Jeep and the other driver drove them away. I looked everywhere for the limo, but I couldn’t find it. I thought maybe it was part of the game—if I found it we could keep it. I wish we had a car.”
“We couldn’t keep someone else’s car.” I put my arm round him but he shrugged me off. He was becoming irritable and I could see he was tired. All the same I said, “Describe the man who drove the Jeep.”
I was shocked and horrified when he described Mr. Bo. But I wasn’t surprised.
Later that night, when Nathan had been deeply asleep for an hour, I crept into his room and laid his bulging scarlet fur-trimmed stocking at the end of the bed. Then I ran my hand gently under his mattress until I found the shiny new phone. Poor Nathan—he was unpractised in the art of deception, and when he talked about wanting to keep the limo, I saw, flickering at the back of his eyes, the notion that he’d better shut up about the limo or I might guess about the phone. I hoped it wasn’t stolen the way the limo and Jeep almost certainly were.
I rang the number Skye gave him. I didn’t really expect her to answer, but she did.
“Hi, kid,” she said. Her voice sounded affectionate.
“It’s not Nathan. Skye, how could you put him at risk? You’re his only living relative apart from me.”
“Did he have a good time? Did his little eyes sparkle? Yes or no?”
“If you wanted him to have fun, Skye, you could’ve taken him to the fun-fair. Don’t tell me this was about anything other than skinning a rabbit.”
“Well, as usual, you’ve missed the point. It was about making a stone bastard pay for what he’d done. Nathan was the perfect lure. He looked just like what the doctor ordered. And he’s smart.”
“If I see you anywhere near him again, I’ll call the cops on you—you and Mr. Bo. You’re right Nathan is smart. He followed you, too.” That shut her up—for a few seconds.
Then she said, “Tell me, Sis, what present did you buy yourself with my money?”
She’d probably looked in the bag when I went running after Nathan so there was no point in lying. I said, “A CD—The Best of Blondie. What’s so funny?”
She stopped laughing and said, “That was Mr. Bo’s favourite band. He taught us to dance to Blondie numbers.”
I was struck dumb. How could I have forgotten?
“Don’t worry about it, Sis,” Skye said cheerfully. “On evidence like that, if you never qualify, and you never get to hang out your shingle, you can comfort yourself by knowing you’d have made a lousy psychotherapist. Oh, and Happy Holidays.” She hung up.
Eventually I dried my eyes and went to the kitchen for a glass of wine. I sipped it slowly while I opened my books and turned on the computer. I will be a great psychotherapist—I can learn from the past.
Lastly I put my new CD on the hi-fi. It still made me want to dance. Mr. Bo can’t spoil everything I love.
Copyright © 2010 by Liza Cody
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Fiction
THE ADVENT REUNION
By Andrew Klavan
Art by Jason Eckhardt
This new story began life in 2009 as an online performance piece (a video) rather than as prose fiction. The author has rewritten it for the page and created a fine Christmas ghost story. Andrew Klavan is well known for his internationally bestselling crime novels, which include True Crime, filmed by Clint Eastwood, and Don’t Say A Word, starring Michael Douglas. He’s been nominated for the MWA’s Edgar Award five times and has won it twice.
---1. Ghost Hunter---
I’ve wanted to tell this story for a long time. It began when I was a young man, during my junior year at Harvard.
To come, as I had come, from a crumbling house on a sandy lane in a dying town just west of nowhere to the aged brick and history, high culture and customs of one of the most prestigious universities in the country was a daunting journey for so inexperienced a boy. I spent my first year holed up in my room, buried in my books, working on my writing. Only after a very unpleasant summer break at home did I return to school determined to make friends.
I soon fell in with an aspiring composer named Jonathan Wilson and, through Jonathan, I found myself part of a little clique of brilliant artsy types—brilliant in our own minds, anyway. Among this group was a girl named Amanda Zane. She was blond and willowy and had a dreamy, wistful quality about her. She wrote songs and played guitar and sang. Her voice was high and clear and sweet, with a sad, yearning tone that just grabbed me by the heart. I was crazy about her pretty much on sight and, for some reason, she seemed to like me as well. We became a couple within the clique. It was the first truly happy time in my life.
No wonder that, as the Christmas break approached, I began to dread the thought of going home again. And when Jonathan came up with an alternative, I was delighted. His parents had decided to spend the holidays in Hawaii. Their house in rural upstate New York was going to be empty. Jonathan invited our little gang to spend Christmas there with him. Five of us accepted the invitation, David, Lucy, Rosemary, Amanda, and I.
It was, it turned out, a perfect setting for Christmas. The house was enormous, stone and stately. It
sat in a little valley with hills of forest on every side, everything white with snow as far as the eye could see. When we first arrived, we tried to behave with our usual pseudo-sophisticated pseudo-detachment but the spirit of the season very quickly overwhelmed us. Within an hour of tumbling through the front door, we were laughing and shouting like the excited children we were. We found decorations in the attic and spread them all about the house. We found sleds in the garage and raced each other down the slopes. We cut down a large pine tree at the edge of the forest, tied it up with stout ropes, and dragged it home over the snow. We hung ornaments on it and sang carols around the piano and basically had as much good, clean fun as it’s legal to have.
We were having so much fun, in fact, that I didn’t notice—none of us noticed—that Amanda had begun acting very strange. Shy and distracted at the best of times, she’d grown almost silent in our boisterous midst. More and more often, she withdrew from our festivities without excuse and went wandering on her own for hours.
Finally, one afternoon, when the others were planning a shopping excursion to the nearby mall, she asked me if I would remain behind. When we were alone together, she broke the news to me: She was pregnant.
She had actually managed to convince herself I might be happy to hear about the child. But how could I be? I had no money. I had worked like a slave, year after year, to win my place at school. I had ambitions—big ambitions—to become a writer, a novelist—not exactly a very secure profession, not something you can count on, not in the beginning, at least. I was in no position to take on the support of a wife and child.
I didn’t have to tell her any of this. Amanda took one look at the expression on my face and saw it all. The next moment, she was in hysterical tears, raging at me, completely irrational. I had never seen her like that before. She screamed that I was selfish. I was thoughtless. I was this and that and the other. And when I tried to reason with her, when I suggested there might be another, better time for us to have a child together, she lost control completely, took it in the worst way, practically accused me of being some kind of homicidal maniac.
Thankfully, the worst of it was over by the time Jonathan and the others returned from their outing. When they burst through the door, shouting and laughing, I was in the living room, sitting alone in an armchair by the fireplace, staring into the flames, torn between panic and despair.
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 01/01/11 Page 10