by Susan Vaught
My pulse jumped. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said too fast. Then his shoulders slumped a little more, and he kept staring at the wall. “The—ah, City Council wants to meet with the mayor and me on Monday.”
“With you—or about you?” I started choking my armrests. “About the hacker and stuff?”
“A few of them think maybe it would be better if I took some time off, until all this settles down.” He rubbed the back of his neck like he had a cramp. “Maggie wants to get together on Sunday to talk about our options.”
My thoughts hopped around until they landed on truth, but I didn’t want to believe what I was thinking. Take time off. They couldn’t mean—
“So, options?” I asked. “What are they? And do they mean time off like a vacation?”
“A mandatory variety, yes.”
I rolled right up to Toppy and looked at the side of his face, at the edge of his frown. “They can’t suspend you because some butt-face is running his mouth online. That’s not right.”
“Don’t call people butt-faces.” He finally faced me, him and dozens of green Grinch faces. “Anyway, it may not be right, but it is expedient. You know what that word means?”
“Practical. Convenient? Oh.” I tapped my head against my headrest. “They want the headlines and social media stuff that’s hurting their businesses to stop.”
“As fast as possible, especially now that he’s actually done something—and at the school, no less. If I’m out of the picture, our hacker friend doesn’t have me for a target anymore.”
“He’ll just go full-out on the mayor then,” I said. “Wait. If they decide to suspend you, can’t she veto that?”
“Maybe,” Toppy said, but he stopped talking when somebody knocked on the kitchen door.
Toppy’s head came up, and his hand moved to his hip, where his weapon would have been if he’d been wearing his uniform. Since Grinch pj’s don’t come with a holster, his service pistol was locked in a safe upstairs in his room.
“Max,” Toppy said as he straightened up and managed to look fierce despite his festive pajamas. “Want to roll on out of the kitchen please?”
“Chief?” came a familiar voice from outside. “It’s Captain Coker. I’ve got duty this morning, and I think you’ve got company.”
I stayed in the kitchen, and Toppy walked over to the door and opened it.
Captain Coker stood outside in full State uniform, complete with a green lined coat with brown fake fur around the edges and black sunglasses propped on top of one of those winter hats with ear flaps, dark green and labeled TSP like all the rest of her clothes. She blinked at Toppy for a moment, taking in his holiday pj’s and me sitting in the background. She rubbed her black-gloved hands together, and then waved at me.
“Hi, Max. I took morning shift in the car we’re keeping with you and the chief at all times. And about cars, Chief, there’s a car that pulled up outside your house about ten minutes ago, but the woman inside, she’s just sitting there.”
My entire mind shorted out in a single sound, a zzaapp right between my ears, because I knew. I didn’t want to know, but who else could it possibly be?
For a second I only heard snips and snaps of conversation.
“It’s an old red Tercel . . .”
“Yes, it’s . . .”
“California tag, 6ZQ . . .”
“My daughter . . .”
Heat blazed through my entire body.
“I’m outta here,” I mumbled.
“You stay right where you are,” Toppy ordered. “Don’t you dare hole up in that room and refuse to speak to your mother.”
Captain Coker kept her mouth firmly shut and managed to look anywhere but at me or my grandfather.
Toppy left the kitchen.
Mom.
Mom was here.
I got so hot I had to be sweating everywhere. My hands shook. My jaw clenched. I wanted to scream and break stuff, but I didn’t want to scream and break stuff.
Toppy said—
But—
“Whatever,” I hollered.
Then I fired up my chair, whizzed to the back door, opened it, and blasted down the house’s back ramp.
14
Despite the bright noon sun, it was so cold on the front porch of Thornwood Manor that I thought my lips would turn to ice and break straight off my face.
“I am not stubborn,” I told Captain Coker and Lavender, who were busy freezing to death with me, one on either side of my chair, our backs to the scary door owls holding the scary door thorns. “The school and my therapist said I was impulsive, that I get mad too easy, and I stomp on people’s feelings. BUT I AM NOT STUBBORN.”
Also, I wasn’t hot anymore. Not even a little bit. One of the benefits of sitting outside at a haunted house, where my mother wasn’t.
“You don’t stomp on people’s feelings,” Lavender said. “Not anymore, except for your mom’s.”
I rubbed my eyes, noting that she didn’t argue with me about the impulsive-get-mad part. “Yeah, well, excuse me if being mean to Mom is a path to the Dark Side. That still doesn’t mean I’m stubborn.”
“I have evidence to the contrary,” Captain Coker said a little slowly, like her own lips had gone numb. “You absolutely would not wait in the kitchen for your mother like you were told, you drove that chair like an off-road vehicle across a field full of sticks and rocks and hay and up a big hill to sulk in front of a spooky house in freezing weather, you refused to speak to me until Lavender here arrived, and let’s not forget the part where you ran over your grandfather’s toes when he came up here and asked you to come home.” She paused, blew her breath into her palms, and rubbed her hands together. “I’d file all that under capital-S stubborn.”
“Thornwood may stink,” I admitted, “and the cold, too, but at least I’m not having to talk to her. And I won’t. Not until I choose to.”
Lavender shivered in her dance clothes covered by purple warm-ups covered by her purple coat, mittens, and scarf. “Max’s relationship with her mother is complicated.”
“I get that,” Captain Coker said, studying something way off in the distance. “My mother didn’t want a thing to do with me becoming a police officer. Thought it was too dangerous. She didn’t talk to me for two solid years when I went to the Law Enforcement Academy.”
“That’s harsh,” Lavender said. “How did you get past it?”
Captain Coker tilted her head like she was thinking. “Time, I guess. She got more proud than scared as years went by.”
“She should be proud,” I said. “You’re good at your job, I think. Right?”
“People make mistakes,” Captain Coker said. “Mistakes don’t have to be the end of the world—or even the end of relationships.”
Lavender laughed. “Nobody gets to end a relationship with their mother. She’s . . . Mom, and stuff.”
“Oh, you can end a relationship with anybody if you try hard enough,” Captain Coker said. “Even parents. You can close your mouth, your heart, your mind—you can blow up relationships, or starve them to death. Right, Max?”
I didn’t answer. My mind was too filled up with how Toppy kept patiently urging me to love Mom for Mom instead of expecting her to be someone else, and how when I blew up the circuit board, he said, You can’t always make something haul the load you want it to.
Lavender started rocking to make herself warmer. “But Max’s mother dropped her off here a few years after she got hurt, and she barely visited—still barely visits. And Max got freaked out two summers ago when they had a fire alarm, and Max couldn’t get down the elevator at her Mom’s place. Seems like Max’s mom is the one starving stuff to death.”
“Parents can make some of the biggest mistakes of all,” Captain Coker said. “Hard to stop loving them, though. And you couldn’t get out of her house in a fire?”
“A fire alarm, not a real fire,” I grumbled, hating it that I sounded like Toppy when he was huffing and pu
ffing and snorting around about something. “But I was scared it was real. When that elevator wouldn’t work, I was stuck.”
“I take it you don’t do stuck well,” Captain Coker said.
The laugh burst out of me, unexpected. “I can’t stand feeling like I don’t have options. That I’m just . . . controlled, or something. And she won’t move to a ground floor place. And Mom’s car—it doesn’t fit my chair, so she has to rent a van when I go to California. It’s like—it’s like—”
“Like she pretends you don’t live in a wheelchair?” Captain Coker glanced at me.
“Yeah!” I covered my frigid lips with my fingers, surprised they were still warm enough to make a difference. “I mean, yes, ma’am. Like my busted spine will just heal itself and I’ll jog up her stairs or jump in her car, or whatever. She won’t make room for me in her life—the me I am, I mean. Not the me she wants me to be.”
As if on cue, my watch timer beeped, and I pulled the weight off my left butt cheek and put it on the right one instead. Had I really just hollered that Mom wouldn’t love me for me, just like Toppy always hollered that I wouldn’t love Mom for Mom?
“Sounds like your mother feels pretty bad about you getting hurt,” Captain Coker said, back to staring off into the distance. “She was driving when it happened, right?”
I turned my attention to the side of her face, to the smooth perfect lines of her cheek, and her “stern face” that I was beginning to realize was just how she looked, not necessarily how she was. If she had kids, she was probably really good to them.
“Yes, she was driving,” I said. “But that was a long time ago.”
Captain Coker raised one hand, palm up. “Probably not to her.”
I wondered what it would be like to have somebody strong and steady as Captain Coker for my mother. Sometimes I wished Ms. Springfield had been my mom, or Mayor Chandler. Anybody, really. Anybody but the mom I had, who was currently at my house, probably sitting with Toppy and Ms. Springfield, whining about how I never gave her a chance.
“I’m not sure she feels bad about anything except not having things exactly her way,” I said to Captain Coker. “Besides, she’s not the one who ended up in a wheelchair. Why can’t she get over the wreck? I did.”
“I’m glad you did,” Captain Coker said. “As for what your mom really feels bad about, I couldn’t say. I’m just a Statie and today, a bodyguard, not a therapist.” She pointed over her shoulder at the creepy carved doors. “So, you were in this place recently, right?”
“We checked it out a few days ago,” Lavender said. “Did Chief Brennan tell you about the lights and the footprint?”
Captain Coker nodded. “He also said there’s a big pit in the floor, and the place isn’t safe. He told me Junior Thornwood showed up right as all this mess started, but Mr. Thornwood isn’t interested in fixing up the foundation or the floor.”
“Mister Thornwood,” Lavender said with so much sarcasm I could almost see its sharp edges in the frosty air.
“Oh!” I clapped a frozen hand against my armrest. “Lavender! Ellis sent me an e-mail—you were right about Junior. He didn’t tell the truth about having money. His motorcycle dealership up North is up for auction.”
Lavender jumped up, groaned because her feet were so cold, and stomped them, shaking the whole porch. “I knew it! Mr. I’ve-got-plenty-of-bucks. What does he want from Mom? Money? Or maybe it’s just the publicity for the lot he wants to make, or revving up interest in Thornwood so he can sell the place. He just became Suspect Primo, seriously.”
She stomped her feet again, and the porch shimmied and gave a mighty POP!
That brought Captain Coker to attention. She put her hand on my chair’s push-bars like she could actually move it without the manual toggles engaged.
“Did you get any clear shots of Toppy’s crime boards?” I asked Lavender, not worried about the porch since Toppy had checked it out so thoroughly a few days ago.
“The pictures were blurry,” Lavender said. “But I’m feeding them through this blur-fixer app and I can almost make out a few names, and—”
The porch popped again, and Captain Coker hit her tolerance for old-spooky-collapsing-house. “Off this bunch of boards,” she instructed. “Come on. Let’s go.”
When we didn’t get in motion immediately, she got closer, dwarfing us both and treating us to her sternest police face. “Move.”
We moved.
Lavender went down the front steps as Captain Coker followed me down the ramp. Once we were clear of the house, she shot it a mean look, then turned her glare on Lavender and me. “So, crime boards. E-mails. What are we talking about here?”
Lavender glanced at me, and I looked at her. I felt guilty without really understanding why. “We, uh—” I started.
“We made our own corkboard for the hacker attacks,” Lavender admitted. Then she described it to Captain Coker, including admitting that she snatched a few quick shots of the crime boards in Toppy’s office, hoping to get a picture of some of the case information.
Captain Coker listened in silence, then stayed quiet a few seconds after Lavender stopped talking. “So what I’m hearing is, you two have been nosing into a police case, you have some theories, and a young friend of yours found dirt on Junior Hargrove faster than the Tennessee State Police.” Captain Coker shook her head. “We’ve got some serious restructuring to do in the Information Technology department, I think. That’s probably public record and everything.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It may not be available for everyone to know yet. Ellis is good at finding out things. Computers are his life, and Riley’s, and Bot’s. But you can’t tell anybody they have hacker skills. Especially not the TBI and stuff. Don’t get them in trouble for helping us.”
All I got for that plea was a lifted eyebrow.
“They also fix broken computers and televisions,” Lavender added. “And they sell lots of cool stuff, and they really know superheroes.”
“Well, then,” Captain Coker said, “they have to be straight-up guys—unless they’re big fans of Deadpool. He’s not my favorite.”
“You were corrupted by the movie, weren’t you,” Lavender said, her serious tone undercut by her chattering teeth. “Max, can we go back to your house now?”
“Haven’t you stolen a key to Thornwood from your Mom yet?” I turned to look at the porch again, studying the door and its keypad. “We got most of the code when she kept punching stuff in.”
Lavender cleared her throat. “Ix-nay on the e-kay in front of the op-cay, kk?”
“We will not be going into any haunted ouse-hays today, ot-me, gay?” Captain Coker said.
“No haunted houses,” Lavender repeated. I almost did the same, because when Captain Coker made pronouncements, it was hard not to just salute or something.
“And why don’t we take the oad-ray.” Captain Coker pointed at the parking lot, to the street that wound away from the old mansion, down toward my house. “I’m not sure that chair’s up for another literal field trip. You and your grandfather are gonna be scraping mud out of your spoilers for a month or two as it is.”
“Fiiiine.” I powered up, started away from Thornwood Manor—and my chair suddenly shut off. It stopped so abruptly I rocked forward against my safety belt, and Lavender bumped into my push-bars.
I fiddled with the on-off switch and said, “Come on. Not this again.”
“Is it busted?” Lavender came around the side of my armrest and stared down at the dark light panel around my joystick.
“What’s wrong?” Captain Coker turned and faced us. “Is your chair not working?”
“I don’t know.” Panic poked at my insides, which made no sense, because we could flip the toggles in front of my big back wheels and convert propulsion to manual, and Captain Coker and Lavender could push me home—or they could call Toppy to come get me in the van. Still, when my chair refused to move, it was one of the only times I really, really noticed my paralyzed leg
s.
Holding my breath, I flicked the switch one more time.
The chair came on, lights flickering, like it had never been off. I turned it quickly and rolled it toward the road. With everything in me, I wanted away from Thornwood Manor, even if I didn’t really want to go anywhere else.
“Wait up!” Lavender hollered, jogging toward me. “Max. Hey, Max!”
But I couldn’t make myself slow down until I reached the far edge of the parking lot. Lavender and Captain Coker caught up with me in a few seconds, and together, the three of us headed toward the twisty road that would take us to my neighborhood, my house . . . and my mother.
“So,” Captain Coker said as we walked, “I suppose you two thought you’d escape the stay-out-of-police-business lecture, right?”
“Ugh,” I said.
“Yes?” Lavender’s voice sounded absurdly hopeful.
“Hate to disappoint you,” Captain Coker told us, and the lecture—firmer than any we’d received to date—commenced.
• • •
“Hey.” Mom looked at me with my grandfather’s eyes, green with gold flecks, wide and loving. Those eyes had kept me from hating her for years. How sad was that? To keep loving somebody just because they look like somebody else.
And Hey. Sigh. Not exactly the way to begin a deep conversation, but that was Mom. She was all about whatever was easiest.
It was just her and me in the kitchen, with everyone else in the living room. I had agreed to come in here with her, to “take our business private.” Because, why not make the day as awful as possible.
“Hey,” I said back, trying not to stare at her hair, which was long again, but she had gone full ginger. Like, flashing neon RED. That, plus her black jeans and black leather jacket, made me feel like I was talking to a member of a punk rock band. As much as I hated to admit it, it seemed sort of . . . right on her, somehow. But she looked young again, like that photo in the papers from right after the accident, and I didn’t like thinking about that.
“Did you hurt yourself driving through that field?” Mom asked.
