Defender Read online

  As the crowd cheers, with the sky on fire, we start kissing. And can’t stop. I lead Stick over to our nest.

  Hidden away in the tent and cocooned together in a sleeping bag, we don’t stay cold for long. Our height difference doesn’t matter here—we find a way to fit.

  The world falls away. I lose myself in a fever of forgetting.

  And we make our own fireworks.

  IT’S A NEW year, but the same old chaos over at Stick’s place. On one side of the living room his foster mom, Miss Diaz, is watching TV with the volume cranked up to battle with the hip-hop blasting at the other end, where Vega is fixing up a scooter salvaged from the garage where she works.

  “This isn’t a parking lot, Vega,” Miss D says. “Can’t you do that outside?”

  “If I leave it out back it’ll get ripped off. Trust me, I used to be in that business.”

  “Don’t get grease on the floor.” Miss D nibbles from a box of Goldfish crackers.

  “That’s why I laid the tarp out. Don’t worry, it’s just for a few days while I make this new again. I already got a buyer lined up.”

  Me and Stick are in the kitchen, where he’s digging deep in the freezer to find some lunch.

  “Hey, Ma,” he says. “All these Pizza Pops are expired.”

  “Don’t mind that. ‘Best before’ dates are for rich people. Just a scam. Can’t go bad if it’s frozen.”

  “Ghetto trash wisdom,” he mutters to me.

  “I heard that,” Miss D calls.

  “Sorry, Ma.”

  “And we’re not trash. We’re trashy.”

  Stick rolls his eyes, tossing half a dozen Pizza Pops into the microwave. I look at the photo gallery covering the cupboards. This is Miss Diaz’s legacy, her life’s work. Dozens of kids she fostered over the years, from toddlers to teens, every color and race. “My United Nations,” she calls her family. Stick and Vega are all that’s left, with Miss Diaz getting too old to chase kids around anymore.

  Stick loads up a plate of the steaming pops and we head for his room, stepping around the tarp where Vega has laid out scooter parts.

  She’s right about not leaving it out back. If something’s not locked down tight, it’s gone. The big red dot that covers our block on the crime map reminds me of something I saw on a field trip to the planetarium downtown. The solar system was projected on the big dome, and they showed Jupiter with its Great Red Spot, which is actually a giant never-ending hurricane the size of Earth. With the smash-and-grabs in the parking lot and the midnight traffic of junkies in the alleys, we’re a one-block storm that never ends.

  “Girl, you’re a skyscraper,” Miss Diaz says as I pass by. “Every time you come over you’ve stretched up some more. You ever gonna stop?”

  “Hope so.”

  I remember asking my doctor the same thing when I was twelve. When do I stop growing? Enough already.

  Stick’s got a room to himself now. He used to share it with whatever crowd of kids was passing through. The more kids Miss Diaz took in, the more money she got. They call it foster farming. She played the system, but she was a solid mom.

  Stick clears some space on his cluttered desk for our feast. There’s a stack of college scholarship forms Miss Diaz is bugging him to finish filling out. He’s applying for every kind of assistance since he’s eligible for different programs. Stick’s a multiracial dream candidate: black, Latino, with a little Irish mixed in (that’s where he gets his electric-blue eyes). He’s poor, a foster kid, hardship case, ward of the state. He can use all that, dreaming and scheming his way out.

  He wants to go into advertising. Stick’s a natural at selling himself. He learned early how to read people so he could fit in quick, whatever new place they sent him to. Got a knack for knowing what they want to hear, and getting them to buy him.

  But he’s taking a break from applications while we get back to work on our investigation.

  We’re following up on how Celia thought that the girl in our sketch might have lived in the Weeds. If she was local, she must have gone to one of the schools in the area.

  So here we are, me with my tablet and Stick on his laptop, searching for any digital footprint she left behind. All the city high schools have websites, and most have their yearbooks online. You have to pay to access the new ones, but the old ones, going way back, are free.

  “Which one you want to take?” Stick asks, stuffing a Pizza Pop in his mouth.

  We’ve got two high schools she could have gone to.

  “I’ll take Queen’s Cross,” I say, which is the one Stick and I go to.

  We set our searches around the year when she was sealed up in the shaft. We’re guessing her age from fifteen to nineteen—hard to tell with a teenage mummy. Who knows what grade she might have been in? We start clicking through pages of high school yearbook photos, thousands of students.

  “Wow,” Stick says. “This is like time travel to the land of bad haircuts and fashion disasters.”

  “We all look like fashion victims, seen from the future. I shock myself in the mirror now.”

  We keep searching, and the faces start to blur together. I have to slow down so I don’t miss any potential matches.

  One familiar face stops me. Dad. In grade ten at Queen’s Cross. He’s so impossibly young. Grim and serious, as if he’s posing for a mug shot. I can read the sadness and worry in his frown, from living with Mad Dog. I wish I could go back and tell him things would get better, that he’d survive.

  When I was heading out this morning, I heard him in the living room, snoring. He was slumped in his chair—the giant’s chair, Squirrel calls it, built for our bigness. I stood in the doorway for a minute, watching him sleep. His face was scrunched up, whether in anger or pain it was hard to tell. His whole body was rigid, fists clenched tight on the armrests, like that wasn’t a recliner but an electric chair.

  The old bear’s snore, such a familiar sound to me while growing up. One of my earliest fuzzy memories is of being held close in Dad’s arms, falling asleep with him, my ear pressed to his chest, listening to that deep rumble, like the resting purr of some powerful beast. This morning, standing there, I saw his face flinch and his fists tremor, like he was trapped in a nightmare. Looking at his features contorted in such pain or rage, like I’ve never seen them before, he seemed even more a stranger. What’s haunting you? What are you fighting? What have you done?

  Then he gasped and stopped snoring. I froze, holding my breath, waiting for him to open his eyes and catch me watching him. What would I see in those eyes? What raw, unhidden emotion? Who is he really? Down deep, what’s he capable of? And for a sickening moment I felt scared of him, for the first time ever.

  But his snoring started up again, and I could finally breathe. I backed out of the room.

  I never want to feel that fear again. It was a second of doubt that left me shaken, questioning whether Dad might have played a part in the killing. I don’t want to go there. I keep clicking through the class photos, on and on. I pull another year from the archives.

  By the time Stick has emptied his plate and gone through a dozen pudding cups, I catch myself nodding off and glance over at the bed, wanting to crawl in there and sleep.

  “Hey,” Stick says, startling me.

  “What?”

  “Think I’ve got her.”

  “No way.” I slide my chair over to see his screen.

  The page shows some casual snaps of kids goofing around at school and making faces for the camera. Stick points to a picture in the corner. Two girls laughing, arms around each other’s shoulders. One’s a black girl with braids, the other’s a long-haired Latina with a wide smile—and a chipped tooth. I grab our sketch and compare the two faces.

  A shiver spider-walks up the back of my neck. Our digital drawing is like a ghost twin to the girl.

  “That’s her,” I say. “Who is she?”

  The caption on the photo says Laughing it up in the caf with Rayanne Blake (left) and Lucy Ramirez (
right).

  “Lucy,” I say.

  Turning to the pages of individual head shots, we find her listed as No Picture Available with the grade elevens.

  “Guess she didn’t make it to photo day,” Stick says. “Maybe she was dead by then.”

  We go back to the laughing shot. Strange to see her happy, living and breathing. With a wide-open dark gaze, warm and shining.

  “We got a name,” says Stick.

  “And maybe more.” I tap the girl with Lucy. “If they were friends, she might know something. We know where Lucy ended up. But where is she now?”

  WE CATCH A break and it takes us only twenty minutes to find Lucy’s classmate online. Rayanne Blake-Turret has a Facebook page with pictures that match her younger self in the yearbook. She’s a librarian with the Toronto Public Library.

  After calling around, we find out she works at the main branch downtown.

  So we show up with a cover story and a bunch of questions. We call first, and she agrees to talk to us after Stick explains that Lucy is his long-lost aunt—his mother’s sister. His family lost track of Lucy years ago and now he’s trying to find her.

  Rayanne meets us on the ground level of the towering library. The place feels like a hive, with a hollow core, so you can look up and see all ten floors circling the center. There’s a low-level hum to the place as hundreds of library worker bees and studying drones speak in quiet voices. Rayanne joins us by the indoor fountain, whose soft gurgling adds to the white-noise hush.

  “Wow, Lucy,” she says, sitting on the edge of the fountain next to us. “That was so long ago. I haven’t thought about her in years. We were friends for a while, back in grade eleven or twelve, before we lost touch. I don’t remember her having a sister. Not a real one, anyway.”

  “What do you mean, a real one?” Stick asks.

  “Well, you know, she lived in a foster home with a bunch of other kids. Not her real family. Her mother had given her up.”

  “Right, of course,” he says. “And she was living down in the Weeds?”

  Rayanne nods. “Awful place. Good thing they tore it down. Lucy was a sweet girl. Don’t know how she survived that place. But I really can’t help you. I lost track of her before we even graduated.”

  “Why is that?” I ask. “She move?”

  “Not sure. I never knew what happened. But before she left, I remember she was really excited. She’d met some guy and she was talking about getting out of the Weeds, how he was going to take her away from there. Save her from all that.”

  “Did you know the guy?”

  “No. Never met him. It was all super secret. I think he was older, maybe married or something. Who knows?”

  “How much older?” I ask, thinking about Slimy.

  “No idea. She wouldn’t say, only that she wasn’t supposed to tell anybody anything. It was all kind of weird, sudden and strange. And then…”

  “Then…?” Stick nudges.

  “Well, I don’t know if this will help you any? And I never knew for sure, but I think he was hurting her.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “She started getting bruised all the time, on her arms and wrists. I noticed some more on her neck, and they looked like choke marks. Sorry, this is probably more than you need to know.”

  “No, it’s okay,” Stick says. “I mean, anything you can give me might help us find her.”

  “All right. Well, she said it was nothing, that she just bruised easily. Then she showed up one day with her finger bandaged. I asked her what happened. She said it was something he did for her, like it was a gift.”

  That’s when she got the brand. Her memento mori, her reminder of death.

  “I think it might have been a tattoo,” Rayanne says. “But I never saw it. Soon after that she was just gone. No goodbye or anything, just never showed up at school again. When I called her place, at first they said they didn’t know where she was. Then they told me she’d been sent to another foster home. But I don’t know if I believed them.”

  “And she never told you the guy’s name?” I ask.

  “No.”

  “Or anything about him? What he looked like, where he lived?”

  She shakes her head. “Only that she was crazy in love with him. And he had a plan for them. I think there was something he wanted her to do for him. Then I guess they were going to run away. Which maybe they did. Who knows?”

  “She have any other friends she hung with?”

  “No. Lucy was really shy. And she got moved around a lot, placed in different homes. I think she was only at the Weeds for about a year.”

  Stick glances to see if I’ve got anything else and I give him a little headshake.

  “Well, thanks for all your help,” he says.

  “Sorry, I don’t have a clue where to find Lucy now. But you could try checking with some of the other foster kids she was living with back then. They might have some idea where she ended up. There was a white girl with her at the Weeds, a couple of years older than us. She went to Queen’s Cross too. Think her name was…Rosie? But they called her Tank. She was a large girl. Not big like you.” Rayanne smiles at me. “She was seriously heavy. Cruel name. But school was always cruel.” She gets up to go. “Anyway, hope you have some luck finding Lucy. And I hope things worked out for her. She was a sweet thing.”

  I force a small smile as Rayanne waves and heads back into the beehive. Stick and I stand staring at the fountain.

  “So Lucy was a foster kid too,” Stick says. “There used to be lots of foster farms on the block. Might explain why she was never reported missing, how easily she vanished. Some places, they don’t keep track of when you come and go. And they’re used to runaways. It’s not like that with Miss Diaz. But some places, they don’t care because they get paid by the head, and if they report you gone they lose that money. So they keep quiet and keep cashing the checks.”

  When Stick talks like this, it hits me what crappy luck life has given him. I remember him showing me his room for the first time when we were little, and the apartment was crammed with kids. All Stick had was a bunk and a drawer to himself.

  “Wow. This sucks,” I said.

  And Stick being Stick, he just gave me his irresistible electric smile, and said, “You kidding? Look what I got. It’s like I won the lottery.”

  And he meant it. Because there were way worse farms than Miss Diaz’s. He’d been there. Looks like Lucy had too.

  But Stick finally found a place where somebody cared. He got his happy ending. Lucy never got hers.

  THE HOUSE IS a wreck, with a dirt and gravel lawn, peeling paint and some duct-taped lawn chairs on the porch.

  We climb the steps to the front door.

  Wasn’t hard picking Tank out from the school yearbook. She was a huge girl. Tank’s real name is Rosie Williams.

  It didn’t take long tracking her current whereabouts online.

  Rosie’s Classy Cats is what she calls her home-based business. She’s a breeder of the kind of fancy felines that look like they belong in royal palaces, or in the laps of evil geniuses bent on world domination. Pure-bred Purr-fection, it says on her website, showing long-haired fur balls like Himalayans and Persians.

  This run-down section of the burbs has a crackhouse vibe to it.

  Before we get to the door, I notice a chubby little girl sitting on the porch with a kitten in her lap.

  “Hi there,” I say.

  “She’s mine. You can’t have her.” The girl hugs the kitten close. “Mom says I get to keep her ’cause she was born wrong. Got a stub for a tail, so nobody will buy her.”

  I shrug. “Nothing wrong with that. Who needs a tail anyway? I do okay without one. You don’t have one, do you?”

  She looks at me like I’m nuts. “No.”

  “You’re great with kids,” Stick mutters, and I elbow him in the ribs.

  “Is your mom Rosie?”

  A suspicious nod.

  “She home?”

 
The girl gets up, keeping an eye on me as she pushes the door open.

  “Mom! Customers!”

  We wait in the doorway, peering in at a living room crowded with cages and carriers, with a barrier gate just inside to keep the felines corralled.

  “Sorry for the mess,” says Rosie, coming in from a back room to the howls of a Siamese in one of the cages.

  She’s not much different from her yearbook photo, still heavy, with small dark eyes and her face flushed red.

  “Did you call about the Persians?”

  “No,” Stick says, taking over to give her our cover story. “I actually came to ask for your help with something.”

  “Oh yeah? With what?”

  “I think you used to know my aunt. Years ago, back in high school when you were living in the Weeds.”

  Rosie pulls a tuft of fur off her sleeve, a frown creasing her forehead. “Who’s your aunt?”

  “Lucy Ramirez.”

  Rosie freezes up at the name before covering by straightening a stack of carriers. She still doesn’t meet our eyes.

  “Who?” she says.

  “Lucy.” Stick pulls out a copy of the yearbook picture he printed. “I heard you were both living in the same foster home back then.”

  Now she looks closely at him, and her suspicion is clear. She glances at the photo he’s holding out.

  “Who told you that?”

  “An old friend of hers from school said you and Lucy were there together, in the Weeds.”

  “Guess so. There were a lot of kids passing through that place.”

  “But you remember her?”

  “So? What do you want from me?”

  I want to jump in and start pressing her for info, but Stick’s got his act down, so I let him lead.

  “It’s just that my family has been trying to find her. They lost touch after she went into foster care when she was in her teens. Do you know what happened to her? Where she went?”

  “Can’t help you.”

  “Anything you can tell me that might help us locate her would be great. The last anyone heard, she was in grade eleven at Queen’s Cross.”

  Rosie crosses her arms.