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Blink & Caution

Page 26

by Tim Wynne-Jones


  When you are settled in at Nanny’s place, you try to write down everything you know; what Niven told you; what Alyson told you; what the newspapers have told you; and how it all weaves together. You made a deal with Niven that you wouldn’t go to the press, but you want to have it all written down, clear as you can make it, in case the police come calling again. They were here, Nanny said, when they were looking for that BlackBerry. Your mom must have told them you might be there. Anyway, if they do come back, you don’t want to stutter and stammer and lose your cool. Those days are over.

  More than the papers or the police, you wish you could contact Alyson and tell her that you didn’t steal her car and abandon it, that you carried out the mission she had set for you. You remember her cell phone number. It has long since been erased from your arm, but it is etched in your memory. You’d like to set the record straight. But something in you holds back. Something in you says enough is enough. No use tempting Providence, as Nanny would say. There might be something in that.

  Then, barely a week after your escape, Niven is in the news again. He’s been picked up on a road near Owen Sound. You look it up on a map: Owen Sound is nowhere near the hunting lodge. You’re not surprised. When he’s picked up, Niven says he has no idea where he is or where he was kept captive. SPOIL has driven him there blindfolded and let him go, he tells the police — just like that. Simultaneously, SPOIL sends out a news release stating that they feel they have made their point, and they want to show their goodwill by letting Niven free. But the speculation in the media is that things were getting too hot, that they let him go out of fear. The police are extending their search for the phantom terrorist organization. Meanwhile, there are those who believe the whole thing was phony.

  Ah, the story you could tell, Brent.

  You talk it over with Kitty. You e-mail back and forth to her. She reminds you of how close you came to getting your fool head blown off — except she doesn’t say it that way. She says she’ll back you, whatever you decide to do, but maybe it would be best to lie low. You wonder. But as you are wondering, you are learning how to read the business section of the newspaper; how to read the stocks. Queon is not doing well. You’re taking a course in business at high school. The teacher explains it to you.

  The protest up at Millsap Lake just won’t go away. The tide of public pressure has built and built. The government is willing to talk to QVD again about buying the land off them, but they aren’t offering nearly as much as they did before.

  And then in late January, you see on the front page of “Report on Business” in the Globe and Mail that QVD has been bought out by the Japanese company ANS. Niven has beenrelieved of his post as president and CEO but has been kept on as a consultant, whatever that means. In a sidebar, there is an interview with him. He needs a rest, he says. He needs time to be with his family. He needs to reconsider his options.

  And somehow, that is enough. You feel pretty much the same way, don’t you, Brent?

  In the spring, Kitty, her mother, and aunt drive down to Toronto with a baked ham for Wayne-Ray. He’s so busy now, balancing school and his job at the music store, that they bring Easter to him. He has been able to go back to school early. Kitty helped him decide.

  She is to drive because she knows the city better than her mom or Lanie. This is a truth she would rather not admit. They do not talk about the time she was gone, only that she is back.

  As they cross the top of North Bay, they pass the shopping center where she left the Jeep six months earlier. She half expects to see it there, but of course it is gone.

  The car veers onto Highway 11, heading south to “the Big Smoke,” as her mother calls Toronto. Her mom is sitting in the backseat. She leans forward.

  “Only was ever in the Big Smoke three times,” she says. “Once, when I was a kid for the Royal Fair, once with Byron for a little getaway weekend, and that one time we brought Spencer down to set him up in his new apartment.”

  Auntie Lanie is sitting in the front passenger seat, and she nods. And Kitty just holds tight to the wheel and thinks how strange it is that Spencer’s name can now be mentioned like this, as a passing fact in a conversation rather than the whole sad subject. She feels a hand on the side of her head and leans into it without taking her eyes off the road.

  “Look at you,” says Aunt Lanie, and chuckles.

  Kitty’s hair has grown back — well, three inches of it — the reddish color grown out. It’s in jaggy layers with lots of product. She had looked at her face in the mirror that morning, chubbier now, living at home. She is plumper all over. She warned Blink in her last e-mail. She hopes he will still find her pretty.

  She is finishing high school by correspondence. There was no way she could return to school, where everyone knew her and what she’d done. There were kids her age who had known Spence, kids he’d coached in soccer. No, that was not something she could do. But she had noticed sometimes when she was in town that people would say hello to her. Just hello. And she was learning how to say hello back.

  There had been talk of her going to school up the road in Sudbury, living with her dad. But while she spent weekends with him now and then, she wanted to be at the house. She wanted the daily reminder of her brother. She wanted him nearby to talk to, out on the frosty meadow or down by the frozen lake. She didn’t want to trouble him anymore with her heartbreak and wretched guilt. So she tried to tell him things he would be interested in.

  “I finished Anna Karenina,” she told him one day. “I’m glad things work out between Kitty and Levin. Too bad about Anna. I didn’t ever really like Count Vronsky. Did you?”

  There were other books on his shelf she was tackling. If she could read a novel with over eight hundred pages, then she could read anything.

  One day, she sat at the end of the dock, where she had found him. She was tying on her skates. She told Spence about Brent. How when he jumped off the end of the dock into the boat, it had been, for her, this totally unexpected, wrenching experience. She had no idea why at first. She had screamed, she told Spencer. Luckily no one heard her.

  “Eventually, I figured it out,” she told him. “It was as if it were you, Spence. As if Blink were you. You, finally escaping the end of the dock, jumping into this silver boat . . . well, aluminum. It was like I was letting you go. I don’t know. Something like that.”

  She knows, of course, that she will never let him go.

  Her favorite things to tell Spence are about what Serina is up to. She e-mails regularly with Tamika, who sends pictures all the time. As soon as Wayne-Ray learned that Kitty had returned home, he insisted she get in touch with Tamika, because there was something important Tamika needed to tell her. Kitty figured it would be about the money again. All that money shoved through the mail slot in the dead of night with that pathetic little note.

  But that was not the most important thing Tamika needed to say to her, although the money had been a huge surprise. It was being held in a trust by a lawyer. One day, Kitty was going to have to claim it because Tamika wanted nothing to do with it. Kitty didn’t want anything to do with it, either. So Tamika suggested she might give it to some charity. That was something to think about. No, this was not the most important thing.

  Merlin would never see the money. He was in jail. Brent found out. He’d become a compulsive newspaper reader. Merlin had been nabbed for possession and resisting arrest. The police ransacked Merlin’s apartment and found enough drugs to keep him off the streets for a long time. But this wasn’t the most important thing, either.

  The most important information — what Tamika had not had the opportunity to say to Kitty on that terrible October night, with Merlin tracking her down — was that Serina was not Spence’s child.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Not his birth child is what I mean, Kitty.”

  “But —”

  “You listen to me, sister,” Tamika said to her, firmly but with such love. And she listened and learned.

 
Spence was the closest thing to a father Serina had. The real father had been an accident. He had no knowledge of the child he had sired. Spence had become friends with Tamika after she conceived and had been there through it all, right up to her labor. He was with her when the baby was born. He had been as close to the child as any father could be. The love that drew Spence and Tamika together grew more slowly, without Spence even knowing it at first. So Serina was his first love, and then he fell in love with the baby’s mother.

  Kitty had so wanted Serina to be her niece — her real niece — that at first this news almost rebroke her heart. If Serina were her real niece, it would mean that there was a part of Spence still left in the world.

  “I know,” Tamika had said in an e-mail. “It would be so convenient, wouldn’t it?”

  It had seemed to Kitty a cold thing to say, maybe even spiteful. But it wasn’t meant that way.

  “Oh, heavens, Kitty. Think, will you? You are the part of Spence still left in the world.” Kitty had never thought of that before. And she came to understand that Tamika wanted her for a sister and wanted her for an aunt for little Serina, as much as Kitty wanted those things.

  “I want the baby to know you and to know him through you. You get that? Is that clear?”

  And Kitty got it. It was clear.

  So on this road trip, they would visit Wayne-Ray and Tamika and Blink. Kitty’s mother wanted to meet the young man who had saved her daughter’s life.

  “Don’t blow it,” she told Blink on the phone. “Act like a hero.”

  He had laughed so hard.

  They are having a lady’s kind of high tea at Tamika’s when the doorbell rings. Everyone grins at Kitty.

  “That’ll be your gentleman caller,” says Auntie Lanie. Then she laughs and slaps her knee.

  Kitty makes her way down the narrow hallway with Serina toddling after her. There is no way to send her back to the others. The two-year-old holds out her arms to be picked up. Holding her close, Kitty decides that it is nice to have a beautiful shield with her.

  He has grown taller, thicker through the chest and shoulders. She isn’t sure if he looks younger or older. His hair is brown again; he has let his camouflage fade. He was so emaciated when she met him that he looked kind of bony and older. But he also looked like a frightened rabbit half the time, which didn’t help.

  “Hey,” she says, stepping out onto the porch and pulling the door closed behind her. She will invite him in, of course, but she wants this time alone with him — well, almost alone. She can’t really speak, she’s so tongue-tied.

  “Hey,” he says.

  And then they are kissing, which isn’t easy with a giggling child in your arms, squished between you.

  “This is Serina, right?”

  Serina beams and shows off her Easter-egg–yellow dress, which Blink tells her looks very nice. That is all the child needs, and the next thing Kitty knows the toddler is leaning out to Blink, her arms up.

  He takes her without hesitation. Figures out how to hold her, lets her feel his cheeks with her chubby hands.

  “Hey,” says Kitty again, chuckling, as if she had forgotten entirely how to talk. Her hand touches his hand, now full of shining, golden Serina. Her hand rubs his arm, and he finds a way around the toddler to kiss her again. He’s as tongue-tied as she is, but she can see words in his tea-colored eyes and almost hear them assembling on his lips. Deep inside her, words are forming, too, possibly the same words he is slowly putting together. Yes, she thinks that’s likely from the look in his eyes. His eyes. She touches his cheek and looks into his eyes, and he looks back at her, unblinking.

  AFTERWORD

  When I was sixteen, a friend of mine was shot and killed by his younger brother in pretty much the same way that Spencer Pettigrew was shot and killed. It was a freakish accident — a statistical improbability that was right off the scale. That death has always haunted me. And the fate of the person at the other end of the rifle has haunted me equally. Whatever anyone might try to tell you about how it’s people who kill people, not guns, they’re wrong.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to thank Kristina Watt, Xan Wynne-Jones, Geoff Mason, Martine Leavitt, Jim King, and Amanda Lewis — always Amanda — for various bits of help and encouragement they have provided. Oh, and Nicole Feret for the tonsorial advice.

  The stately hotel at the corner of Bloor and Avenue Road has gone under more than one name in the time I have known it and I have taken the great liberty of giving it another, fictitious name for the sake of this novel. (If Blink hadn’t been quite so hungry, he could have gotten himself a free and delicious lunch across Avenue Road at The Church of the Redeemer. They’ve been feeding street people really good food for a very long time.) I’ve also added an extra lake to the wild and beautiful countryside of Eastern Ontario. There is no Millsap Lake, but if there were, you’d have to be crazy to want to spoil it by putting a uranium mine anywhere nearby.

  TIM WYNNE-JONES has won numerous awards for his work, including an Edgar Award, the Governor General’s Literary Award, and a Boston Globe–Horn Book Award. He is a faculty member at Vermont College, teaching courses in the MFA Program in Writing for Children and Young Adults, as well as the author of more than twenty books for children and young adults, including the novel The Uninvited and the popular Rex Zero books. Tim Wynne-Jones lives in Ontario with his family.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2011 by Tim Wynne-Jones

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.

  First electronic edition 2011

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Wynne-Jones, Tim.

  Blink & Caution / by Tim Wynne-Jones. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Two teenagers who are living on the streets and barely getting by become involved in a complicated criminal plot, and make an unexpected connection with each other.

  ISBN 978-0-7636-3983-9 (hardcover)

  [1. Runaways — Fiction. 2. Crime — Fiction. 3. Emotional problems — Fiction. 4. Guilt — Fiction. 5. Canada — Fiction.] I. Title. II. Title: Blink and Caution.

  PZ7.W993Bl 2011

  [Fic] — dc22 2010013563

  ISBN 978-0-7636-5455-9 (electronic)

  Candlewick Press

  99 Dover Street

  Somerville, Massachusetts 02144

  visit us at www.candlewick.com

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Part 2

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  C
hapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Later . . .

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

 

 

 


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