A side door burst open, and in strode a determined man, followed at a distance by a cursing Will Kroft.
“Reese. We’ve had a breach of trust. Will denies any part in the matter, and I want to believe him, but—”
“What the hell is the breach? I never touched your damn phone.” Will waved off Mr. Loumans, turned, and stomped back toward the door. “You’re a joke. This place is a joke. What do I want with your piece of junk?”
I closed my eyes and imagined reaching for the IV. I felt it, grasped it. Time to yank.
“You’d like to call her,” I said quietly, and took a seat. “You’re going to use this man’s phone to call her, because Mom, I mean Susan, won’t take calls from your cell anymore.”
I didn’t look up, but basked in the glow of his silent shock. “Addy’s more than you deserve, but for some reason she gives you the time of day,” I scoffed. “Then again, she’s a sucker for hard-luck cases. She takes in stray dogs, brings in sick birds. I’m not sure into which category of animal she places you, but she does endure your calls. But all that will change. I’ll make sure of it.”
I cleared my throat and glanced around the room. All stared at me, except for Will, who had not yet turned. I would have paid good money to see his face.
Mr. Loumans rested against the counter, his face deep in thought.
“So,” I continued, “what’s not clear about the phone incident? Do I need to go into detail? The first time you took this man’s phone, Jude answered. The Monster gave you to Addy, and you talked for about two hours. About yourself.” I paused. “Little side note: ask a girl a question here and there, and then shut up and listen. They like that. But back to your eternal call, Addy had to go, but you called her right back—like you always do, never taking no for an answer, right?” I steamed, clenched my teeth, and kept going. “You need a phone for that. You need his personal phone. Because every call that goes into Adele’s house goes through her mom, and her mom won’t answer any more solicitations from Hope Home, and fortunately, Addy is smart enough not to have given you her cell number. At least not yet.”
Will slowly spun, and I looked at him square. “What does she see in you anyway?”
He glanced around, and exhaled slowly.
“Give the man his phone back,” I said. “Or do you want to hear more? I’ve got the rest of the story.”
• • •
That Basil’s father was a cop held distinct advantages. That he occasionally bent the rules for us, even better.
It was during one of those rule benders when I first met Will.
I was sixteen, and Basil had asked if I’d like to run “the route” with his dad. Not one to admit I had no idea what that was, I agreed.
At seven thirty, Basil and his father pulled up in the police truck.
“It’s a sad duty—a necessary duty, but a sad one,” Officer Dewey said as we chugged downtown.
We spent the next three hours doing pickups. Officer Dewey threw, or helped, fifteen homeless into the back of the truck, and took them to Mary Kay’s shelter.
Number sixteen didn’t go so smoothly.
Number sixteen was Will.
Dewey pulled beneath the Washington Bridge, and there he was, leaning back against the concrete and surrounded by shattered glass.
He wasn’t alone.
A lump buried beneath a blanket rested on his lap. Another someone.
Squinting in the light, he waved Dewey off as he approached. I had to hear and cracked the window.
“You can’t sleep out here, son. I have two beds left, and one has your name on it.”
“No, sir. I won’t come with you. But take him.” He nodded down at the shape. “His feet are really bad off.”
Will and Dewey helped the old man into the truck. “Listen,” Will said, “I’ll move on. I’ll find someplace. But you got two more down by the river—one a girl about my age, and I don’t think she’s going to make it. You’ll need an ambulance.”
Dewey ran to the riverbank, and I watched Will disappear into the night. It was the last I figured I’d see of him.
When he resurfaced years later, I decided, there was no way some homeless drifter was going to set his paws on my sister. Heck, he might have killed that girl by the river.
But Will had been homeless. The fact would end up being a terrible trap for my sister. Empathy had always been Addy’s one imperfection.
• • •
“Dresser,” Will said. “Third drawer down. In a black sock.” He exhaled slowly, his eyes narrowing.
“You can go, Will.” Mr. Loumans placed his hand on Will’s back. “I somewhat appreciate your honesty.” He guided Will toward the door through which they’d entered minutes earlier, and then turned to me.
“And you are . . .?”
“Cr— Shane.”
He looked at Reese, who smiled and commenced more lip biting. “This is the applicant I mentioned. He impressed me. My friends consider me a good judge of character. His name is Shane, and, well, you knew that.”
“The Shane.” Mr. Loumans stepped forward and shook my hand. Reese handed him my application. He looked it over. I did, too. It was filled out. Complete. It sure didn’t look like a guy’s writing.
“The spelling of your last name, O-W-E-N, is that a correct spelling, son?”
“That’s right.”
Mr. Loumans pitched the app in the garbage.
“Shane Owen. My new family assistant teacher.”
• • •
I derived great pleasure from crushing Will. Having lived through his frequent phone attempts once before certainly gave me an upper hand. But my victory felt empty, like scoring a C in biology when you alone know you cheated.
Mr. Loumans didn’t seem to consider it a victory. We walked in heavy silence to a small cottage shielded from the main house by a row of pines.
“You saw the main residence: that’s where Amy and Thomas stay, my family. The boys, too, of course. We have eight of ’em now, and I know the facility was built for ten.” He peeked at me. “You seem to know Will from another life, so you can appreciate our need for help.”
He unlocked the cottage door, stepped in, but did not turn on the light.
“Shane, my wife and I are the religious type. We’ve been praying for help for some time without success. Then you showed up with knowledge you should not have, could not have. The Good Book speaks of strangers and angels—”
I held up my hand. “It also mentions devils and demons, so I wouldn’t jump to conclusions.”
Mr. Loumans flipped on the light and searched my eyes. “I’m a simple man, Shane, and so I will ask directly. Might you be one of them? I have never seen Will respond to a mortal like he responded to you.”
I laughed aloud, my shock turning it to a chuckle, then finally trailing off completely. I stared at Mr. L.
“You think I’m an angel.”
“I think the possibility exists.”
I was dumbfounded. I’d been called many things but never an angel.
“I ran the background check, as I must in these cases. You do not exist. There has not been a Shane Owen near the Twin Cities metro area for nearly five years, and that Shane being a young girl, now deceased.”
I froze. I knew her. I was her. My jaw dropped, and I tried to speak. Mr. Loumans face broke into uncontained joy. “I can see my words have hit a mark, and I can’t tell you how glad we are that you’ve come. The boys, as you know, needy one and all. Perhaps the most needy being our own.”
Mr. Loumans walked into the small kitchen. “This is his food in here. He sometimes does homework in the cottage.” He paused and laughed. “Look at me, telling you what transpires. Forgive me.” He gestured around the room. “But I’ll have him clean things up.”
Mr. Loumans walked toward the door. “I do not kn
ow the privacy policy by which you operate, and I can’t help feeling I discovered your nature by fortunate happenstance. So even though your presence here would bolster the faith of my son, I will keep it under wraps, except to Amy, of course.” He winked. “And of course we can overlook the ‘failed’ background check.”
“We’re still on the angel thing?” I lifted up a finger, but I had no words. It was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard. Well, aside from a soul-mind inhabiting a thirteen-year-old girl and an eighteen-year-old guy, and being sent back in time by the embodiment of Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup bottle while the real soul sleeps next to the Lifeless vegetable of its former body.
Next to that, being an angel sounded rather tame.
Mr. Loumans slipped out into night.
I puffed out air and wandered over to the fridge, opened it, and stared. It felt right standing there, looking inside.
Must be a guy thing.
“Nothing.” I moved to the cupboard. Thirty, maybe forty cans of tuna. “Do angels like tuna?” I smirked, and then frowned. “Does Shane like tuna?” I reached for a can and rummaged through the drawers. I found an opener, removed the lid, and winced.
“Okay, that reeks.” I rushed the can out the door and whipped it down the path.
“Dang!”
A kid rounded the corner clutching his head. He reached the steps. “Move over, I need ice.”
I stepped back and he pushed through, flew into the kitchen, then soon plopped onto the La-Z-Boy, a ziplock bag of ice resting on his head.
“I came out to say hello.” He grimaced. “I didn’t know you had a tuna vendetta.”
I eased down on the coach across from him. “Sorry ’bout that. Stuff is out to get me.”
He switched hands on the ice pack. “I’ll get it out of here. It’s mine. I’m Thomas, by the way. I’d shake your hand but—”
“Mr. Loumans’s son. Good to meet you. He said you came out here on occasion.”
“He’s being generous. I live out here. It’s a zoo in there.” He winced and set down the ice pack. “How’s it look?”
“Beside the blood spattered across the forehead?”
“Yeah,” he chuckled. “Other than that.”
“Don’t suppose your mother will disown you.”
The feelings, they were mine: Crow’s. But the words. They came out different. Something male controlled the meter of my words, the tempo of my tongue. I could think girl. But I could only speak guy.
“I don’t know what you told Dad out here, but he was sure excited when he got back to the house.” Thomas shook his head. “He grabbed Mom and went into the back room, and she screamed. A good scream, you know? Then she whooshed me out to say hello.”
“And I tuna’d you in the forehead.”
He was quiet.
Do guys chat? Do they just sit? This one couldn’t handle it.
“So what’s my job?” I asked. “What exactly do I do?”
Thomas touched his bluish bump and exhaled. “You’ll go to school with the guys. Central High. We all go there. You’ll have a cubicle in the guidance office. The idea is that you’ll be a liaison between the school and the guys and my dad—and the police.”
“So . . .I babysit grown boys and squeal on everyone.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much it.”
“And get paid in tuna fish.”
“No.” Thomas set down the ice. “The pay and the job, they’re not so bad. The guys are crazy.” He quieted.
“And Will. He’s the worst of them, right?”
Thomas shrugged. “You know, a guy lives on the streets for a few years, I guess a reputation follows him, but . . .” He shook his head. “I’ve lived with him now for a time, and he’s not what you think. The guy’s room is filled with books, books with titles I can’t pronounce. Outside, with the others, yeah, he can be a pain, but alone he’s actually pretty quiet.”
I frowned. “A pretty quiet thief, and least judging from the phone incident.”
“Maybe. Except Dad had three hundred dollars in a clip beneath his phone. Will didn’t touch that. What kind of thief takes a phone and leaves three hundred in cash?”
I didn’t have an answer.
“Whatever he is,” Thomas said, “the girls, they follow him everywhere.”
I shifted forward. “They do, huh? Do you know an Adele Raine?”
Thomas rolled his eyes. “She’s a hard one to miss. Two grades down. Real smart. Real cute. I see Will and her together sometimes. They’re an odd couple.”
More confirmation that the tiny snowball had fallen off the mountain and was even now growing, gathering strength. It would become an avalanche and crush Crow if it could not be stopped.
• • •
It wasn’t as if I could see it coming.
The whole Addy/Will thing had taken me by surprise. There certainly was no precedent. In the years following Jude’s Mayday attack, Addy busied herself with volunteerism and extracurriculars.
Well, all except for the dating variety.
She had no interest in the multitude of young men who threw themselves at her, and those who did earn a second look were quickly scared off by me.
I didn’t mind. Her noninvolvement with everything male made my job easier. Until she returned from the kennel.
“I volunteered at the dog shelter yesterday.” Addy grabbed my arm and held me up at the bus stop. The bus rumbled away, and after a few good-byes the others dispersed.
“Yeah. I know. Bet you’re good with them.”
She shrugged. “There’s been a guy there lately, helping out with walking those dogs. His name’s Will.”
“Okay. There’s nothing unusual about that.” I shifted. “Is there?”
Addy smiled, and I rolled my eyes.
“Tell me about him.”
“I don’t know much. I don’t know where he lives or much of anything, really. He doesn’t say anything about himself. We just talk about those dogs and walk and . . . I don’t know, Crow. There’s something stray about him.”
“Maybe you should put him down.”
Addy laughed. “Crow. It’s not bad stray. It’s good stray. He doesn’t ask for anything. He doesn’t expect anything. Will just comes and goes.”
I frowned. “And you’re just talking about dogs.”
Addy threw her arm around my shoulder. “Yeah. So far.”
• • •
“Hello?” said Thomas.
I shook my head. “Sorry, what were you saying?”
“I asked how you knew Adele. She’s younger than you.”
I thought how much to show, how much to hold. “Her sister, Crow. I knew her pretty well, and so Adele was always there, you know?”
Thomas looked at me hard. “What do you mean, you ‘knew her’?”
I pushed my hand through my hair and stammered. “You know how it is. Over now.”
His jaw dropped. “That’s it. All hope is officially gone.”
“I’m not tracking here. Hope of what?”
“Nothing.” He fisted his armrest. “It’s stupid. I was stupid for even thinking . . . forget it.”
I hinted a grin, and Thomas whipped the ice at me, missing badly.
“Shut up. Fine. I was hoping you could help me a little. Crow’s tough. You start out on her wrong side, and she’ll chew you up. But an older guy like you? Maybe, I thought, if you and I hung out a little at school, she’d notice me, and that might lead to an introduction and—”
“You like her.” I couldn’t wipe the grin of my face.
“Don’t laugh at me, Shane. I’ve been pissed at myself too long.”
I stared at Thomas. Yeah, he’d been there. I remembered him, like a shadow, floating through school in my wake. He showed up in the strangest places but never said a word, and I nev
er learned his name. If I had lived to see my reunion, we would have shown up in different rental cars, pretended we had shared moments, and passed each other by.
It was harder to judge now, but he wasn’t a bad-lookin’ kid.
“You should say something. Ask her what she thinks about Voltaire. That’ll get her going.” I paused. “She’s not all that tough.”
“Easy for you to say. What’s really crazy is, I don’t even know what I’d do with someone like her. Where do you take her? I’m not looking for anything, you know? When I’m around her, I can’t even think.”
Oh, man. She would have liked you so much.
Thomas stood up, delicately touched his forehead, and walked toward the door. “If you don’t mind my asking, what happened between you two?”
My head thudded back against the wall. “We were together for a while. Then, suddenly, what we had became lifeless.”
He thought for a while, and then nodded. “Well, thanks for the tuna.” Thomas, like his father, disappeared into the night.
CHAPTER 14
THE THOUGHTS OF C. RAINE
Maybe one day I can have a reunion with myself.
Sebastian Bach
WHAT’S UP WITH SPECIAL ED TRANSPORTATION? You know, those little minivan-sized buses that scream, ‘Screwups inside!” They sure don’t build up a kid’s confidence.
One of those buggers arrived at Hope Home. We’d been waiting. Mr. Loumans saw to it that all were up nice and early. He thought the curb would be a nice spot to introduce me to the boys.
“First and last name for Mr. Shane.”
“Eddie Jackson”
“Sean Klaeburne, with an e.”
“Will.”
Mr. Loumans sighed. “Last name, Will.”
“Johnson.”
“His name is Will Kroft. Next?”
And on they went. Satisfied that we had been properly acquainted, Mr. Loumans then leaned over to me. “Is it appropriate to use some of your unique”—he frowned, and then lightened—“abilities for illustrative purposes?”
“I don’t know what you mean. What do you want me to do?”