He waved the housekeeper away. “I’m fine,” he said carefully. He sounded a bit breathless and unsteady, but otherwise very sure of himself. To Gilly he muttered, “I have…I have something like a bruised rib. Nothing serious, but painful enough. So please don’t touch me…like that again.”
A bruised rib. It sounded so ordinary and reasonable. She tried to relax her jangled nerves. “Why didn’t you say so? Of course I won’t hug you.”
“Mrs. Fitzhugh, I want to talk to Gilly.” He motioned again for the housekeeper to leave, and Abigail finally departed, firing a last angry glance at her niece.
“Well, Gilly,” he said softly once they were alone. He took a few steps back into the room behind him, still holding his arms tight to his body. “You were so all-fired determined to see me. You’re seeing me. Happy?”
“No, of course not. That is, I didn’t mean to hurt you or anything.” She followed, peering at him. The big high-ceilinged room was shadowy and dark, difficult to maneuver in. As her eyes adjusted, she took a closer look at her surroundings. How very odd. “This used to be the ballroom, didn’t it?”
“Used to.”
Gilly sent him a mystified glance. “What are you doing living in the ballroom? And what is all this stuff for?” She motioned toward a series of tables cluttered with all manner of plants and leaves and small trees. “And why is it so dark in here?”
“As always, you’re full of questions.” Luke switched on an overhead light, but it glowed soft purple in the cavernous room. “Ultraviolet,” he explained. “And I don’t live here. It’s just…a garden. A nocturnal garden. A new hobby.”
“A nocturnal garden?” Was Luke playing with Venus’s-flytraps or something? And was this supposed to reassure her? She shook her head stubbornly. “You were never interested in plants. I can’t remember you ever even having a hobby.”
He shrugged. “So I have a hobby now. Things change.”
“Not that much, they don’t. Come on, Luke, spill it,” she demanded. “What’s really going on with you?”
“Could you please keep your voice down?” Edgy, he backed away, around the other side of an exoticlooking potted palm. “There’s nothing wrong with me, nothing to figure out. But I don’t suppose you’ll take my word for it, will you?”
She was still mulling over that “keep your voice down” crack. Her voice was raised a little, but not that much. Not enough for him to act as if she was shouting at him. “This is getting weird. I can’t hug you, I can’t talk to you…and you wonder why I want to make sure you’re okay.”
“Don’t I look okay?”
She lifted her gaze. “You look…fine.” She couldn’t help it; the word just came out that way, almost on a sigh. At least it seemed to have amused Luke. There was a new spark of humor in his sizzling blue eyes.
He raised an eyebrow. “That good, huh?”
“Oh, stop being so egotistical.” She couldn’t hold back a small smile. “It’s a no-brainer, Luke. I mean, you know what you look like.”
“Gill, I just got out of a cave. I do know what I look like and it isn’t pretty.” He looked at her speculatively. “I’ll say one thing for you. You may be a royal pain in the butt, but you’re loyal.”
Her smile widened and she said lightly, “Loyalty, equality, fraternity—that’s my motto. When you’re on my list of pals, you’re on forever. Which is why I’m here.”
He swept her with a jaded glance. “And why exactly are you here?”
“To get you out of exile, of course.”
“Gilly,” he said in a quiet but extremely firm tone, “it isn’t exile. It’s a vacation. I needed to take some time off to rest and recuperate. My life hasn’t exactly been a picnic lately.”
“Oh, come on.” She ran a hasty hand through her curls, sending them into even more disarray. “I know you, and your idea of rest and recuperation is to find the nearest war zone and start snapping pictures. Not hiding, not…suffocating. You should be out in the world, taking pictures. This isn’t like you!”
Turning abruptly, Luke stalked to the other side of the ballroom. She followed, determined to keep up with his long loose strides. The first thing she’d noticed about him, at the grand old age of nine, was how smoothly he moved, how those skinny, banged-up legs of his could eat up turf like nobody’s business. It had fascinated her then and it still did. Luke even breathed gracefully.
“See?” He held up a battered camera, pretending to aim it at a small pot of ghostly white blooms. “I haven’t abandoned my camera. I’m just taking different shots.”
“Of these weird plants? Why?”
“Listen, Gilly, I spent two weeks in a cave in the dark,” he said with obvious exasperation. “I got interested in what happens when living things are deprived of light, okay? Sort of a scientific exploration.”
The cave. Nocturnal. Ahhh… “Aside from the fact that you’re not a plant, that actually does make a warped kind of sense.”
“I’m glad something finally does,” he muttered. “Look, I’m really tired. You’ve seen me, right? You see I’m fine. So no more Gilly-on-a-mission, please?”
“I can see you’re pale and cranky and you definitely need to get outside into the fresh air.” But the light in his blue eyes remained stubborn and unconvinced. “Even your plants need some light, whether they’re nocturnal or not. And so do you. Being cooped up like this can’t possibly be good for you,” she maintained. “It’s like a mausoleum in here!”
Luke lifted a dark eyebrow.
“Okay, okay.” She couldn’t believe she was giving in this easily. “I’ll leave for now, but we’ll meet for dinner next week, all right? We can talk about old times, about St. Benny’s—did you know it isn’t St. Benny’s anymore, only Benny’s? Just up and lost its sainthood.”
“I know, Gilly,” he said dryly. “That happened five years ago. The archdiocese sold it to a group of lay investors just before you started teaching there, right? I was only out of the country for six months this last time.”
“Ten months,” she corrected absently, gingerly reaching out a finger to test the prickliness of a very ugly cactus with long skinny stalks. “What is that?”
“Night-blooming cactus,” he told her. “It has a very nice fragrance. You want to hang around till midnight and see it bloom?”
“No, I don’t think so.” It really was ugly, if no pricklier than Luke in his current mood. Quickly she abandoned the awful thing and returned to her favorite subject. “Benny’s is a great school, Luke, and we’re doing some wonderful things there. You’d be so proud of your alma mater,” she enthused, taking his free hand and giving it a squeeze.
Suddenly he looked pale and strained again. She knew she had a tendency to ramble on when she got on the subject of her beloved Benedict Academy, and if Luke really was tired, she didn’t want to overdo it.
“But listen,” she announced abruptly, taking a few steps back and narrowly missing impaling her bottom on a cactus frond. “We don’t need to go into that right now. Dinner next weekend, okay? It’ll be great. We can even go to the Tackle Box, that nasty little diner by the river you always used to like.”
“I don’t think so,” he murmured. “There are reporters everywhere—all looking for me.”
“Reporters be damned!” she said with spirit. “Luke, you need to get out of this place. It’s not good for you to—”
“No,” he returned flatly.
“The snow is beautiful,” she tried. “The river is frozen and people are skating—”
“No, Gilly. No.”
With a sigh she realized there was no way to convince him. “Okay. For now.” She leaned up to give him a quick kiss, noting his wince in response. Could a kiss on the cheek affect a bruised rib? She frowned, suspicious all over again.
“Close the door behind you, all right?”
She left him to his Venus’s-flytraps. Chewing the inside of her cheek all the way down the stairs, she gathered her coat from the banister before sh
e stepped resolutely out through the front door.
Halfway down the walk, she spun around and gazed back up at the tall shuttered windows of Blackthorn Manor. “You may have gotten rid of me this time, Luke, but I’ll be back,” she said softly. “You need to get out of all that gloom and face the world.”
She turned into the wind and began the long trek back across the river. “It’s for your own good, Luke,” she said stubbornly. “And we both know it”
Chapter Two
Gilly propped her feet on her desk, tapping a pencil on the armrest of her chair and gazing in the general area of the Friends of the Zoo calendar tacked to her cubicle wall. But she didn’t really see January’s polarbear poster boy.
No, her mind was otherwise occupied.
With Luke. Whose scowling face adorned the wall right next to the polar bear, where Gilly had taped up the newspaper article about his return.
For the past hour of her free period, when she should have been grading papers and going over the lesson for her two-o’clock French class, she’d been staring into space, thinking about Luke.
She frowned at his handsome face. “Talk to me, will you?” No response from the tattered clipping. Typical.
But even if she didn’t get an answer until her dying day, she’d still be convinced that something was very wrong at Blackthorn Manor. It wasn’t the way Luke looked or talked, not even his weird plants or the darkened ballroom. No, it was more the hushed tones and chilly feeling, as if the whole house were sending out touch-me-not vibes.
Luke had always been independent, but not like this.
“Ms. Quinn?” someone asked from just outside the wall of her cubicle, breaking her concentration. “You in?”
“I’m in.” Quickly Gilly pulled her legs off the desk and adopted a more respectable pose, one befitting her status as the school’s sixth- and seventh-grade English teacher. Actually English was only the tip of the iceberg, since she also taught art to kindergartners through to sixth graders, and French, speech and drama to seventh and eighth graders. She had a very full schedule. “Enter.”
“Just me, Ms. Q,” offered Tony Fielder, one of her favorite students, as he poked his head and one scuffed-up sneaker around the edge of the doorway. “Sorry to bother you. But I need your keys.”
“My keys? Aren’t you a little young to take my car out for a test drive?” she teased.
Tony rolled his eyes, giving her an exasperated expression only another seventh grader would appreciate. “How am I supposed to know you even got a car, Ms. Q?” he asked in an aggrieved tone. “I never seen you drive. I just wanted the key to your apartment I wanna, you know, finish the mural today. Like now.”
Gilly raised an eyebrow, but she didn’t really mind the attitude. For one thing, she was used to it. And for another, she liked slender, dark-eyed Tony. He wasn’t one of her best students, but he had potential.
Although he was fairly small and showed no signs of sprouting, he was already a standout basketball player. At any other school he’d be getting recruited to play at one of the city’s powerhouse high schools, with promises of spiffy gym shoes and warm-ups and whatever else they could throw at him. At the Benedict Academy, he got none of those things.
Instead, he got pushed to concentrate on booklearning, which he dearly needed, as well as a chance to pursue his real love—art. Gilly had spotted him in her third-grade class back when they were doing collages with yarn and old newspapers. Even in that environment she’d recognized his talent. And she’d been doing her best ever since to keep him motivated. At the moment that included commissioning him to smear paint all over her living-room walls in whatever way he saw fit.
“You want to paint now? Don’t you have class?” she asked in a no-nonsense tone. She might like Tony, but she had no illusions about his willingness to skip class if he could get away with it.
“Nah, I don’t got class. Mrs. Benadetti is taking my last-period science class to the planet…planetarium,” he said slowly, picking his way through the long word. “And I ain’t goin’.”
“You ain’t, huh?” she asked dryly. “Why not?”
“My ma don’t want me to go,” he explained casually, “’cause that planet place is right by where my dad works, and my ma, she don’t want me seein’ my dad because he got busted again. She got, like a restraining order and he ain’t supposed to be within a hundred feet, and I guess maybe he would be if I went to the, you know, planet place. So I thought, as long as I don’t gotta go there, I could go over to your place and finish the mural. I could maybe finish it today with a coupla good hours.”
Whew. What a story, restraining order and all. Benedict Academy was full of them. If it wasn’t Tony and his deadbeat dad, it was somebody else getting their windows shot out or switching foster families for the third time. Life wasn’t pretty in the neighborhood of West Riverside, and try as Gilly might, there wasn’t a whole lot she could do about it.
“Let me think about it,” she said, making a mental note to call his mother and make sure everything was okay. The old Gilly would’ve gone running off to talk some sense into his rotten father, but she knew better now. Every kid at the school had a story like Tony’s, if not worse, and there was nothing she could do but pull them through Benny’s by hook or by crook and do her darnedest to send them off to college and a better life.
“I’ve always been there when you worked on the mural,” she told him evenly. “I don’t know about this, Tony. All by yourself? Is that really a good idea?”
“Aw, come on,” he pleaded. “I ain’t gonna do nothin’. You know me!”
Actually she did know him. He was a good kid, with a mom who did her best to instill solid values in her son. Gilly made up her mind quickly—she was going to trust Tony.
“I wanna finish the mural so’s I can get paid,” he argued. “I need the cash, man.”
“All right, but only if you ask nicely, with no ‘ain’ts’ and no double negatives, and don’t call me ‘man.’ What did you say? ‘I ain’t gonna do nothin’? Jeez Louise, Tony.” She dug into her purse and pulled out her key ring, twisting off the right key and then dangling it in the air. “Come on, you can do it. You’re in my English class, kiddo. I can’t let you get by with that kind of talk.”
“Okay, okay. I promise that I will behave myself and not do anything that you would not want me to do,” he said precisely.
With a grin Gilly tossed him the key. As he caught it neatly, she warned, “You by yourself, understood? No friends. Anything you mess up, you clean up, and if you leave before I get back, lock the door and drop the key off with my neighbor, Mrs. Mooshman. Got it?”
He nodded and started to go, but Gilly stopped him.
“I’ll call Mrs. Mooshman and tell her you’re going to be there this afternoon so she can look in on you. So don’t think this is a party or anything.”
“Uh-huh, I got it.” But Tony swaggered a little as he left. Gilly shook her head. She hadn’t seen an attitude like that since the days another seventh grader, one Lucas Blackthorn, had strolled his way through these hallowed halls.
“Jeez, will you look at the clock?” She grabbed the lesson book for her French class, but she hadn’t even had a chance to get the book open before Suzette Dayton, the social-studies teacher who had just been appointed assistant principal, came running in, waving a sheaf of papers.
“I’m late to judge the sixth graders’ dioramas of ancient Rome,” she said hurriedly. “But I wanted to give you those articles I promised you about the casino project. Do you have your speech ready? Because you might want to work in a few of these numbers from Gamblers Anonymous. They’re pretty impressive.”
“Speech?” Gilly sat up, aghast. “Is that tonight?”
“Of course it’s tonight,” Suzette returned sharply. “The city council meets every other Wednesday at seven o’clock. I’ll be there, and Principal Sheffield will, too. A whole bunch of the teachers and parents are coming for moral support. Don’t tell me yo
u haven’t written your speech yet?”
“No, of course I haven’t. But don’t worry.” Gilly stiffened her spine. “I could do this one in my sleep. I mean, this is beyond nuts. We’ve been begging for urban renewal for years. And finally they promise they’re putting big bucks into the neighborhood, but for what?” She was getting up a good head of steam now, and she rose from her desk, waving a fist in the air. “So they can knock down St. Benny’s and half of West Riverside to put up a stinking casino and some sleazy bars? Well, if the mayor and his cronies think we’re going to take that one sitting down, they’ve got another think coming!”
“You tell ‘em!” Suzette said with a smile.
“I plan to.” Gilly pulled her datebook closer and flipped it open. “Tonight at eight. Got it. Right now I have a French class, and then I’m heading home to make sure the place is still in one piece after Tony gets through with it. After that I’ll go through your articles and make sure all my ducks are lined up. Don’t worry, Suzette. By tonight I’ll have enough ammo to flatten the bunch of them.”
“I hope so.” Suzette sighed. “Otherwise I’m afraid the Benedict Academy is history.”
Gilly sat back down. “I still can’t believe they would let it go that far. I mean, this place is an institution. Plus, we’re getting such good results. Finally. Last year, eighty-five percent of our seniors went on to college. Eighty-five percent—it’s phenomenal! They can’t bring in the wrecking ball now.”
“Sure they can,” her colleague said gloomily, “if it means a floating casino with hot and cold running cash. They’d sell every school in the city down the river for that.”
“Not this one,” Gilly vowed. “Not this one.”
With one last “Go get ‘em!” Suzette dashed out as quickly as she’d arrived, beating the bell by about three seconds.
Gilly grabbed her French book and ran for the hall. She spared one last glance at Luke’s picture. “Wish me luck tonight, Lucas,” she called back to the photo. “It’s your alma mater, too, you know.”
Touch Me Not Page 3
