“Of course, Ian. I’d love to,” she said. It looked like we were going to be seeing a lot more of Miss Wren in future. I remembered all the rumours about Mr Owen and Miss Lovelace, and I prayed the other kids at school didn’t find out she was going out with Dad, or we’d never live it down.
************
So now life’s chugging along very comfortably for us all. Dad’s got money in the bank at last and a regular salary from Holtech as a consultant. He’s started on his AI project, but it’s all top secret at the moment. Nobody’s allowed into his workshop, except Miss Wren of course. She comes round quite often after school and at weekends, and although we call her Miss Wren at school, at home she’s just Lucy. She’s good for Dad. He’s tidied up his appearance, and he’s started to pay more attention to what’s going on around him.
Donna still spends time with Kath and her friends sometimes. She treats her like a sort of foster mother. When we heard the council was going to turn a derelict church into a hostel for homeless people, Donna was as thrilled as Kath and her friends. “Me and Rocky, we’re both getting on,” Kath said to us when she heard the news. “We need a proper home for our twilight years, don’t we?” Rocky thumped his tail in agreement.
So far, apart from Kath, the only person outside the family who knows what happened on the pier on the night of the storm is Emerald. I was really worried when Donna said she’d told her, but she swore on her mother’s grave not to tell a soul, and so far she seems to have kept her promise. The next time I saw Emerald, she asked me if I’d changed my mind about fortune-telling. Even though everything she’d predicted had come true, I didn’t want to admit that she was right. “It might just be coincidence,” I said. “You can’t prove it wasn’t.”
She gave me a knowing smile. “And you can’t prove it was, can you?” Then she added, “I’ve moved on from fortune-telling. Now Nan is teaching me how to read people’s minds. Soon I’ll be able to tell what you’re thinking.”
I must have looked alarmed, because she laughed and said, “Don’t worry. Only kidding. But be careful what you say in front of Hamish. If your Dad’s half as clever as you say he is, Hamish’ll be able to read your thoughts one day, and then you won’t be able to keep anything secret!”
I hope she’s wrong.
Eye Spy Page 13