Blink & Caution (12 page)

“Wow. Really?”

“I know. Such a bitch.”

“So . . .” you say, leaving lots of space for her to jump in. “So?”

“So that’s why I remember that wall. The one behind him in the ransom video.”

“You can see a chicken noodle soup stain on the chipboard?”

“Well, no. Not so much. Okay, not at all. But it rang a bell. And his hands are in front of him, right? Like they’re resting on a table? Do you see what I mean?”

You’re not sure. Is this wishful thinking or what?

“I have to find out,” she says urgently, her voice dropping in case anyone else might hear her other than you. You can imagine her leaning forward, clutching her cell phone tightly, her blue eyes trained on you, pleading. “I have to know, Blink.”

“I don’t get it,” you say.

She kind of growls and then apologizes, and you think maybe you are really stupid, because this probably makes perfect sense, just not to you.

“It’s what you
said,
Blink. Don’t you get it? What you implied.” She’s whispering now. “If my daddy’s in on it; if he, you know, arranged this thing; well, I can’t — cannot — tell the cops.”

“But why would he?”

She makes an impatient sound. “There might be a reason. Something . . . a possibility. But there’s no way I can talk about it on the phone. Can you get here?”

“Where?”

“Kingston.”

You don’t want to tell her that you have no idea where Kingston is. You remember the license in her father’s wallet, and it was an Ontario license, so — okay — Kingston is in Ontario and, hell, Ontario is only about as big as Europe. But you have money. Some. And you want to go. That’s the thing. You want to. But it’s still totally —

“Blink?”

“Uh, I guess so.”

“Oh, great. Thank you. Thank you so much!” You can hear her sigh of relief, and it sounds real. “Oh, and Blink? You can drive, right?”

“C
ome hunting with me, Spence,” she says.

“I can’t,” he says. “I’m busy.”

“No, you’re not. You’re moping.”

“I am not moping. And nothing’s in season, so you can’t hunt.”

“Rabbits are in season. Nuisance rabbits. And Rory says he saw one that had already turned white. Why does that happen, Spence? Turning white when it’s still summer?”

“It’s called the lethal gene, Kitty. Now, will you please leave me alone?”

She backs off. He’s sitting at his computer. There’s a screen saver of a starry sky. She watched him go to screen saver as soon as she came into his room. Barged into his room. “You’ve got to stop doing that,” he’d said. He’s hiding something from her, and he’s never done that before.

“You and Melody had a fight, huh?”

“We did not have a fight.”

“Then why’d she leave here in tears?”

Spence turns to her. He tries to take her hand, but she pulls back. “We did not have a fight, Kitty. Just leave it alone, okay?”

Kitty’s at the door now. “Are you going to break off the engagement?”

Her brother throws himself back in his chair. “Don’t you ever stop?” he says.

“You are, aren’t you?” says Kitty. Her hair is loose, and she has to hold it back from her face, like curtains.

“We have things to discuss. That’s all. Period. Full stop. You wouldn’t understand.”

And that’s when she knows something is really wrong. He’s home from school. He just graduated. He and Melody are supposed to be getting married, and something is up he won’t tell her about.
You wouldn’t understand.
Spence has never said that to her. Not ever — not once. She’s fifteen and he knows she can understand anything. Anything he’s willing to explain to her.

When Caution wakes up this time, she is completely disoriented. She thrashes out of the bedclothes, as if trapped. Then she sits up, breathing hard, trying to make sense of this little room tucked under the eaves.

Her mouth is caked with crud. She can barely swallow. She gets up, falls back down. How long has she been out? She gets up again, more carefully, and makes her way to the kitchen. Two o’clock? She’s been asleep for over six hours.

She gets a drink of water from the tap. Wayne-Ray must have put something in her coffee. He didn’t trust her to stay put.

It’s not anything you think. It’s not any more sermons . . . It’s way more important than that.

She sits at the little table. There had been this brightness in his eyes when he’d said it, something that looked awfully like hope. She didn’t have any faith in hope, but she had to have faith in Wayne-Ray, didn’t she? Maybe not. If this thing was so important, why hadn’t he told her right off ? As the sleep clears from her brain, she could answer that easily enough. Maybe he’d wanted to tell her last night but didn’t get the chance, what with her beating the shit out of him and all.

What could it be?

As far as she can see, she has two choices. One, she could take off for who knows where — Vancouver, maybe. Australia. That way she wouldn’t have to be let down by whatever it was he had to say. Or two, she could hear him out and
then
take off for Vancouver, China, or Timbuk-fucking-tu. Her head is clear enough to know that she can’t stay in Toronto. And she can’t go home.

But there is something she can do. She can make Wayne-Ray dinner. He’d asked her just as he left if she needed anything, if she had any money. She’d managed not to choke with laughter. She was fine, she told him, and shoved him out the door. He told her where the nearest grocery store was as she closed the door on him. So what would she make? Steak, she thinks. Shrimp. Surf and turf, with spaghetti on the side. That’s the kind of meal Wayne-Ray likes.

She kneels on the old Raymond parlor couch and peers down at the street. No magicians out there as far as she can tell. Then she takes the extra key and skips down the stairs to the outside world.

It’s four by the time she gets back. Her cousin was going to be home by five thirty. And the thing is, he will be home when he said he was going to be. Merlin came and went as he pleased without a word to her. The thought of him makes her weak in the knees, and she has to sit down. Weak in the knees but not in a good way.

By five thirty she has everything ready: the spaghetti sauce is bubbling on the stove, there’s salted water ready to turn on for the pasta, a green salad in the fridge. The other stuff she’ll cook when he arrives.

She’s excited, impatient. She finds herself kneeling at the gable window again, looking down on the street, craning her head to see out to Roncesvalles, like she’s the little wifey in a fifties movie, waiting for her hubby to get home. And there he is, suddenly, filling out his voluminous white shirt, striding along the sidewalk. Her dear and wonderful cousin. And then she sees the Nissan.

“It’s impossible,” she says.

“You never talked about me,” he says. He’s sitting, holding her hands.

“Never!” She gets up to look out the window, but he stops her, pulls her back.

“He might see you,” he says, and he looks instead, while Caution throws herself down on the couch, shaking uncontrollably. She swears, the same word over and over again.

“There are lots of blue Nissan Sentras, you know.”

“Not with a rusted-out roof rack and a dent in the hood.”

Wayne-Ray looks again, says nothing.

“He hit the hood with a tire iron one day when he got a flat.”

Wayne-Ray grunts. “As far as I can tell, he’s just sitting there,” he says.

“I told you he was a magic man.”

“No, he’s not.”

“Then how do you explain that frigging car out there?”

Wayne-Ray throws out his hands, and they flap back down against his sides, helplessly. He peers again out the window and then sits beside her.

“What does he want, Kitty?”

She shakes her head. She can’t begin to explain.

“Okay, don’t tell me,” he says. “But he’s dangerous?”

She nods vigorously. She wants to scream at her cousin. Was he not listening when she said that about the tire iron? “I’ve got to get out of here,” she says. “I don’t know how he found me, but I’ve got to get out of here.”

She grabs Wayne-Ray’s arm, squeezing it hard. She’s lying to him, of course. She
does
know how Merlin found her. He was meant to find her. It was all part of the big picture in which Caution Pettigrew pays for her crime. Merlin is her death sentence. The minute she let him pick her up that freezing March day outside the Eaton Centre, with his shiny eyes turned up to ten and his cute little story about how good she looked in her fancy hat, she had committed herself to this sentence. It had all been a long, exhausting trial with the verdict already decided.

“Okay,” Wayne-Ray says. “I think I’ve got a plan.” She looks at him. His face is grim. “There’s a fire escape,” he says, “just outside my bedroom window.” She starts to rise, but he yanks her down again. “Listen to me,” he says. “Listen good.”

His eyes demand an answer. She nods.

“There’s somewhere I want you to go. Someone I want you to meet.”

She throws her head back. “I don’t want
help,
” she says.

“You do,” he says. “You just don’t know it.”

“Wayne —”

But she can’t even get his name out before he’s grabbing her by the shoulders. “Stop it!” he says, not loud, but with every fiber of his body, every ounce of his deep goodness.

She gives in, covering her face with her hands because she is such a horrible person and does not deserve this kindness.

He gets up and goes out to his bedroom, coming back a minute later with a piece of paper. There is an address on it. He pokes the paper at her hand, until she realizes it is there and takes it from him. It’s an address on Major Street.

“You know where that is?”

“The lower Annex?”

He nods. “Go there. Go straight there!”

She holds the paper with two hands. Suddenly she laughs. “I feel like we’re in some war movie, and this is a safe house.”

“Seems to me like this is a war,” he says. “Not just him,” he adds, gesturing with his head toward the window. “The whole thing.”

The whole thing. Spencer Pettigrew’s death, he means.

“So who is this . . . ?”

“Woman,” he says. “I’ll phone her and say you’re coming. But I’m going to let her tell you, okay?”

“Jesus, Wayne-Ray, give me a break here.”

“I am,” he says. “I’m giving you the biggest break I can. And I’m not trying to be mysterious or nothing like that.”

“What if she’s out?”

“I’m guessing she won’t be. If she is, phone me and we’ll figure out something else. She’ll have to decide whether she wants to tell you what she knows.”

Caution laughs, but there is not a shred of humor in it.

“It’s the best I can do,” says Wayne-Ray. And she sees how much that is in his eyes, even if she has no idea what he’s talking about. She owes him this much.

She sighs. He places his hand on the side of her face, and she rests her hot cheek against it, kissing his fleshy palm, salty with sweat.

He gets up and looks out the window. “Does this cat have a blond ponytail?” he asks.

C
aution moves like a cat down the rusted-out fire escape. But she didn’t leave without warning Wayne-Ray how dangerous Merlin could be. He dug a baseball bat out of his closet. He used to bat in the high three hundreds in Little League. That’s where he’d gotten the broken nose — sliding into home. The catcher was in the hospital for weeks.

She drops to the ground. There is a weed-choked backyard, a fence with a door that creaks alarmingly. Then there is an alley. She’s out on Roncesvalles in no time. She should head north up to Bloor. Major Street is only four subway stops away on the Bloor line. But she stands on the sidewalk in the new darkness so that people have to walk around her.

“Freak,” a man says, dodging to avoid making contact with her.

“You have a point,” she says, calling after him. Then she turns and heads south until she comes to the corner of Wayne-Ray’s street.

From behind a telephone pole, she can see the Nissan, three cars down. It’s empty as far as she can tell. The sidewalk is as well. She digs her keys out of her pocket and makes her move.