by C. L. Stone
Arms open.
She went to him and opened her arms too, and hugged him. Fully. Chest to chest. Like great friends who hadn’t seen each other in a long time.
I studied her as she hugged him, darker freckles dotted her cheeks. Her hair was pulled back in a short braid, some white mixing in at the temples and wrinkles around her eyes.
“Boy, you don’t visit like you promise you’d do. I haven’t seen you in a year.”
“It’s been a very busy year.” He backed away from her to motion with a wide swinging arm in my direction. “Mrs. Rhodes, this is Miss Sang Sorenson.”
Her lips puckered with a smile and she came toward me, arms open and looking wide-eyed and expectant. “Girl, you are always welcome here.”
Heart melted instantly. There was something about her, the wide eyes, the way she made someone feel very calm in her presence, that you were wanted. I walked forward, still feeling a little intimidated in the new place, but understood a hug was expected.
Her hug was strong, comforting. I blinked rapidly, wanting to tear up.
Feeling that this was something I lost not having family like other people did.
This was supposed to be normal.
And for once, surprisingly, I didn’t hesitate. Like when I’d been hugged by girls before and suddenly felt so uneasy and uncomfortable. This was completely opposite. I wasn’t totally sure why. I wondered if it wasn’t just her demeanor, something special about Mrs. Rhodes that made her comfortable to be around.
She released me and tugged me by the arm toward the table. “Are you hungry? We were just sitting down to dinner.”
The table was ladened with homemade lasagna, a fruit salad, and grilled parmesan zucchini.
The kids were... different from each other and not what I was expecting. In my mind, I thought they were Mr. Buble’s kids for some reason, even if he said otherwise. One was taller than the others, perhaps taller than me but he was sitting down. The youngest and the tallest sat next to each other. The other two sat opposite facing them. Only one girl, one of the twelve-year-olds.
Different but the same wide, expectant eyes that hesitated showing any emotion at all until Mrs. Rhodes invited us to sit for dinner. Their expressions changed nearly instantly. Warmer smiles, curious tilts of their heads. Once the older woman approved, it seemed the others followed.
“Then we did get here just in time,” Mr. Blackbourne said. “We’ve brought dessert.” He went immediately to where Mrs. Rhodes was sitting and touched the back of the chair as if to hold it out for her. “Unless you’re going to head out.”
“I’ll stick around for a few minutes,” she said. “Jon won’t fuss if I’m a little late.”
“Your husband is very generous,” Mr. Blackbourne said.
Mrs. Rhodes sat heavily in the chair at the end of the table. The large table could easily fit three more. Mr. Blackbourne quickly moved to a spot aside the youngest sitting at the table then pulled the chair out and looked at me expectantly.
I sat quietly where he directed, yet I wished I had a moment to compose myself a little. Who was she? Where were we? Who were the kids? Didn’t Mr. Buble say there were only three of them?
While Mrs. Rhodes started to encourage the others to help themselves to the food and to eat, Mr. Blackbourne went to cabinets in the kitchen, opened one, pulling out plates and finding the silverware to make us the additional place settings, complete with cloth napkins and placemats. He did it all before he sat next to me and without asking where anything was.
And from where I was sitting, there was a more formal dining room within view, through an archway nearby. I could also see the front door, a set of stairs going up to the second floor, and the open door under the stairs that led down... a basement? I hadn’t seen a basement anywhere I’d visited here, and not since Illinois.
Mrs. Rhodes talked to Mr. Blackbourne while the others helped each other cut out portions of lasagna and dole out food. “I heard about your unexpected promotion at work. How they picked a teenager to be in charge...”
“I’m a little older than you remember,” Mr. Blackbourne said. He undid the buttons on his sleeves, rolling them up neatly, like how Victor would often wear his shirts. He took up the dish of fruit salad that was at the end that he could reach. He silently offered to plate for me. I silently accepted, and he gave some to me and himself before trading serving bowls with the tall kid across the table.
It only took moments, but I never touched my plate and it filled up with everything there was to eat. A cup appeared, filled with ice water, beside it. I hadn’t even noticed the girl at the table had gotten up to go get them for me and Mr. Blackbourne.
I ate when everyone else ate, too stunned to talk or pay much attention to anyone else. I was way too involved in listening to Mr. Blackbourne and Mrs. Rhodes reminisce and trying to piece together what this was.
“Did he tell you to come?” she asked him.
“In a way,” Mr. Blackbourne said.
She eyeballed me and then nodded in my direction. “Are you joining us? Are you one of my new ones?”
“Temporarily,” he said.
She laughed shortly. “That’s what they said about you, and you kept trying to tell me but you didn’t want to go at the end.”
I stared hard at my food.
When Mr. Blackbourne was young, his mother died... I hadn’t wondered what happened to him after. Some part of me, in the back of my brain, maybe assumed there was other family... or the Academy...
But there was a before the Academy time, before they knew him and recruited him. What’d happened then?
♥♥♥
Mrs. Rhodes left before dessert, not having eaten anything except to nibble on some fruit salad.
I learned several things during that forty minutes: Mr. Blackbourne had lived here, this was a home for foster children, the newest one arrived that afternoon without Mr. Buble being aware yet, the youngest.
And for the few hours after Mrs. Rhodes left to go to her husband, Mr. Blackbourne and I cleaned the kitchen and watched a movie with them in the living room. We didn’t talk too much about ourselves, just about the movie. Mr. Blackbourne didn’t ask questions. The kids mostly made jokes and laughed.
Soon, we were upstairs and the kids were getting themselves ready for bed, putting on pajamas. Upstairs, there were three large bedrooms which had two beds each, two dressers, etc., and a master bedroom where Mr. Buble slept
One bedroom was empty, beds stripped of everything. The youngest had decided to room with the tallest one. The other two, the boy and the girl, slept in the same room together. I made an assumption they were siblings.
A whirlwind of confusion and other emotions overwhelmed me the whole time and I just followed along. Mr. Blackbourne set up the routine, blindly accepting the new addition to this group without question and letting them decide who slept where.
Weren’t I and the others supposed to sleep here? Wasn’t there supposed to be bunkbeds? I didn’t see any, and Mr. Blackbourne also didn’t invite me to get ready for bed, either.
The kids weren’t fully in bed yet when Mr. Blackbourne motioned we should head downstairs. “We’ll leave you to finish,” he said. “But we’ll be in the other upstairs room.”
“Aw,” the tall one said. “Really? I was wondering who was getting that one. I thought we’d get it.”
Mr. Blackbourne wished them goodnight and followed me downstairs.
I hesitated now in the front hallway facing the door. There was a formal dining and parlor room here near the front. I’d assumed prior to Mr. Blackbourne saying anything that perhaps we were meant to go into the basement. However, he said other upstairs room.
Mr. Blackbourne reached gently for my wrist, tugging. “This way.”
This time, he didn’t release my arm for a full couple of minutes, when it got too awkward to walk next to him as we passed through the kitchen again back toward the short hallway by the back door.
He opened
a door, and there was a set of stairs. Just like Kota’s house, there was a finished room over the garage.
In fact, when we went up the stairs, it looked almost identical, with windows facing the front of the house and the side where we’d parked and an attached bathroom and closet next to each other on the left. Instead of a single bed though, there were two bunkbeds, and even those appeared to have roll away beds underneath the lower bunk. There were two short dressers up here but not much else, no décor.
“Spare room for us in the Academy and older refugees,” Mr. Blackbourne said.
“How long ago did you live here?” I asked him.
“Immediately after my mother died.” He looked toward a window on the far side of the room. “Before Mr. Buble took over, but I was still here when he arrived. Mrs. Rhodes seems to have always been here.”
I touched a forefinger to my thumb, rubbing them together. I wasn’t sure what to do. I assumed I’d be staying here, maybe with Victor if he got back. This whole day felt huge, too big to be one day.
“You should sleep,” Mr. Blackbourne said. His tone seemed to indicate that he’d go back downstairs, but he lingered where he was, looking at me.
“I drove Kota’s car and blew it up,” I said, one of a million things that was circling through my mind.
“I noticed,” he said, without an ounce of judgement.
“Erica hasn’t been at work when she said she was, especially on days when we saw Volto.” I don’t know why, but I kept going. I simply fell into report-giving mode.
“We’re working on a plan to follow her every time she leaves her house to identify where she’s going.” He shifted and motioned to one of the beds, indicating I should sit down. “Mr. North Taylor is taking care of it.”
I moved, continuing to talk. “I’m really worried about Victor. He needs his old clothes back but he’s being stubborn about wearing his Armani clothes. He says everything else is itchy.”
“He’s probably trying to figure out a new identity,” Mr. Blackbourne said gently.
I sat on the lower bunk of one of the beds, close to a ladder and was over enough Mr. Blackbourne could sit down with me, as I thought he was going to do.
Instead, he kneeled in front of me and nudged the back of my foot, indicating to lift it. When I did, he started taking off the sneakers I was wearing, untying them and easing them off my feet. “Were you just worried about our Mr. Morgan’s clothes?” he asked.
His motions felt so intimate, and time had slowed so much, that it felt like an eternity before I could focus on what he asked, and once I started talking again, I rambled as he continued to remove my shoes. “He told me about Brie. About how he started to think maybe he should lie to his mother about seeing her instead of me, but then after they got him drunk, he was changing his mind. I don’t really know what to do. I have this feeling about his mother, how she doesn’t like me.”
He finished removing my shoes, and instead of putting my second foot down on the floor, he held it in his hands, his thumbs smoothing over the surface, rubbing. “If it makes you feel any better, Mrs. Morgan doesn’t like me either.”
It was preposterous to think he was making light and a joke about this and my brain froze, my lips twitching with words that didn’t make any sense. Also, the sensation, the massage he was giving my feet, the whole situation seemed surreal. Had I just fallen asleep and this was a dream?
He continued, “Did anything else important happen today that you’re worried about? The situation with the librarian and Mr. Buble?”
I shrugged a little, still overwhelmed with what he was doing with my feet. “I don’t think I should drive again.” I didn’t really have an opinion about Mitch. While I was worried, I didn’t know the situation. Also, my mind was just jumping from one thing to the next.
He stopped massaging but held on to my foot with one hand and reached up, grasping gently at my arm and looking up at my face, those gray eyes sending hot waves through my body.
“You will, because I know you enough that you won’t let a little thing like that get in your way. You’re much stronger than that. You’re just a little rattled.”
He seemed so sure of this.
After a moment, he released my arm, continuing the massage. “Anything else on your mind?”
I hesitated. “Yes...”
He continued, looking at my foot and remaining silent, giving me the chance to take my time to answer further.
“I’ve been rambling and I never asked you how your day was,” I said. “And I don’t really get a chance to talk to you outside of the principal’s office anymore. And I never knew you lived here. I hugged Mrs. Rhodes. I didn’t feel weird about it.”
He did the familiar smile, the millimeter that nearly shifted into two millimeters. “Mrs. Rhodes is in the position she is in for that reason.” He held on to my foot, not doing anything but holding it and looking up at me. “And my day is immensely better with you in it.”
I think I stopped breathing completely. It was eons and a single moment all at once. It felt like a dream and not a dream at the same time.
In a quieter tone, he said, “Your complete exhaustion state is very interesting. You become much more honest and open. However, I hope you can get to sleep and also come talk to me, outside of school, much like this. Because I miss talking to you, too.”
I could only blush and nod ever so slightly, agreeing. I wasn’t even sure how I was doing this, just rambling on like I’d been.
He released my foot and nudged me at the knee. “Get into the bed. I’m going to go check on the kids to make sure they are at least pretending to go to sleep. Technically, the first night with someone new in the house, they’re supposed to stay up all night sharing information and getting to know the new one until they fall asleep first. An adult checking on them while they think they’re being sneaky helps them feel comradery.”
I nodded and instead of getting under the covers, I just relaxed onto the bed.
I kept telling myself eventually I should get up and brush my teeth. His voice echoed in my mind, instead, distracting me. I know I watched him cross the room and head down the stairs.
That was all I remembered.
Bend
(Jazz term referring either to establishing a pitch, sliding down half a step and returning to the original pitch or sliding up half a step from the original note)
Victor
As they got into Mr. Buble’s car, Victor received a call from North. He answered quickly.
“We need to go over some details,” North said. “Are you free now?”
He checked with Mr. Buble. “I think so?”
“I’d like in on that meeting,” Mr. Buble said.
“Then meet us at the diner.”
They weren’t far from Bob’s Diner. The dinner rush was there. Mr. Buble had a difficult time finding a spot to park. It was odd to see it busy when the last time Victor was there it was so empty.
By diner, North actually meant they were in the little security trailer outside the diner.
Victor had been inside a few times but most of the monitoring inside was more than just for the diner, but also for the houses up the road. It was small, with two rooms with a single bathroom between them.
When Victor and Mr. Buble arrived, Victor was surprised to see not just North, Silas and Nathan, but Corey Henshaw, his dark web contact.
“Depth... I mean Corey.” He held out a hand to shake his. “What are you doing out here?”
Corey was tall, with blondish hair and wore a Mario video game T-shirt and jeans. He sat in one of their office chairs, rocking back and forth, as far as his legs would let him. “I guess I’m your backup since you’ve been busy.”
“It should be over now,” Mr. Buble said, shaking his hand. “So where are we with this?”
“The establish connection Victor made,” North said. “It’s supposedly the trunk that was stolen. I don’t know about the rest of the items.”
“I didn�
��t see any more offers to sell,” Corey said. “But it’s likely if they were, it might have been to pawn shops or online, and they’re too common to track down. This trunk might be our saving grace that they want to sell it. And so soon.”
“We have a location,” Victor said. “We need a time.”
“They want it to be the same night as a concert at that venue,” North said. “We’ve agreed.”
Victor was surprised. “Already?”
“If nothing else, we can monitor who shows up, even if we just set up cameras and are far away,” North said.
“That can get tricky,” Victor said.
“I’d rather see their faces,” Silas said. He and Nathan were sitting on the floor, as there were only two office chairs in the space, near the monitoring equipment. There was also a short stack of go bags and a couple of cots leaning against the wall. Silas continued. “Volto knows how to take out cameras too easy. We need to meet. Directly.”
“Then we go,” North said. “We might need cash. And we need people in the concert because this drop-off isn’t until near the end. Luckily, Dr. Green bought tickets.” He cringed a second and then looked at Victor. “Also, happy birthday, you’re going to a concert.”
Victor smirked and bobbed his head. “Cool. Do I still get to go? Or am I working during it?”
“We’ll get you to go,” North said. He glanced at Mr. Buble who had been silent. “What about you? Are you in?”
Mr. Buble nodded. “If you’d like. Where am I needed?”
“I’d actually like you to head it. You’re someone unexpected. You’re unconnected to the school and us.”
“Then why not me?” Corey asked.
“You’re not even supposed to be in town,” North said.
Corey grimaced. “Okay, that’s true.”
“I’ve also established profiles,” North said. “Jay and Karen are at the top. And their friends. Rocky. Anyone else they’ve talked to in the last couple of weeks.”
“Wil Winchester?” Victor asked. “Do you have him?”
At this, Corey sat up straight. “Wait, what?”
Victor was surprised by his interest. “I saw him talking to Rocky earlier today. Was sort of odd. They’re not exactly the same crowd.”
