Charlie's Key (16 page)
“In my shoe, I thinks,” says Nick, looking at me hard.
There’s more banging. “You need help in there?”
Nick lets go of the button and the door slides open, with three of four people standing on the other side.
“Friggin’ hospital elevators,” says Nick, putting his hand out so I can walk in front of him. “Broke down half the time, and slow as cold spit the other half.”
He walks beside me as I head for my room, slow on the crutches.
“So where are they, Charlie—those shoes? I see they ain’t on yer feet.”
We’re almost at the room now. I look ahead and see Nurse in there—she must be finished her call—hanging up my shirt in the wardrobe. My jacket’s sitting on the bed, and the sneakers are there, right beside it.
I stop before we reach the room, which Nick doesn’t know is mine.
“Well,” he says, “you got them? Up here in yer room? Or are they downstairs to Property?”
Just then Nurse pipes up, “Charlie, my luv, I’m just after putting your clothes away, so they’ll be all ready for you when you leave.”
Nick’s eyes light up soon as he hears Nurse, and he moves toward the room. But just then the stairway door bursts open beside us, and out tumbles Tubby, all red-faced and bent over.
“Friggin’ hospital elevators,” he says, staring down at the hallway tiles as he works hard to catch his breath, hands on his knees. He looks up at me, looking at him, and I turn away to see where Nick is.
But he’s gone.
While Tubby catches his breath, Dezzy comes round the corner with Miz right behind him—the old gang, all coming to talk to me. Which they do a couple a minutes later when I’m sat up in bed, my clothes and sneakers tucked away in the closet. Looking up at those three staring down at me, I think that somewhere, somebody has definitely decided something.
“Charlie,” says Dez, “we’ve got a bit to talk about this morning. About what’s going to happen to you in the next while. But before we get into that, Sergeant Grimes wants to ask a couple of questions. Okay?”
I figure that’s one of those questions with just one answer, like, “You do want to pass grade four math, don’t you?”
“’Kay.”
“Now,” says Tubby, getting his notebook out. “First off: Who helped you make your getaway from the funeral home?”
“What you mean ‘getaway’?” I ask.
“He means when you left the funeral home without permission,” says Dez.
“Didn’t know I needed permission. You guys aren’t my dad.”
“No,” says Dez, “but you’re smart enough to know you shouldn’t leave someplace without telling a grown-up where you’re going.”
“Well,” I say, “I still didn’t know I needed to ask anybody’s permission.”
“Forget this permission crap,” Tubby butts in. “Nobody asks permission to escape, and that’s what this was—an escape you planned out before. More than that, you had some help, because you can’t tell us you just walked into the bathroom and figured you could hop up on the toilet and make a break.”
“I didn’t plan anything,” I say. “I just kinda panicked thinking about those ashes. So I took off.”
“Without any help?” says Tubby.
I nod.
“So how’d you end up on Signal Hill?” he says.
“Took a bus.”
“Buses don’t run out by the funeral home.”
“I walked till I found one.”
“You mean you walked for miles down the highway looking for a bus, right when half the RNC was out looking for you.”
“I never saw any cops.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me,” says Dezzy.
“So,” Tubby goes on, ignoring him, “you got on this mystery bus and it took you where?”
“Downtown.”
“Where downtown?”
“Don’t know. Just downtown. Near those jellybean houses.”
“So you’re downtown, by yourself…at what? Three in the afternoon? Four? Suppertime?”
“I don’t know.”
“So how’d you end up on Signal Hill? Take a bus up there too, did ya?”
“No. I walked.”
Tubby gives a snort. “So you’re downtown, by yourself, don’t know the city, don’t know anybody in it, and you decide to walk up to the top of Signal Hill in the dark?”
“Wasn’t dark when I started.”
“But it was late afternoon—the sun was starting to go down. And you decide to head off to the top of the hill?”
“I saw the tower up there—Cabot Tower.”
“And what?” says Tubby. “You thought it was a hotel?”
“I didn’t really know what it was. It looked like an old castle—kind of empty up there, all alone. I figured maybe I could sleep up there.”
“So you walked,” says Tubby.
I nod.
“Now help me here,” he says, scratching the back of his head with the pen. “You walk up there, which makes it—what? Maybe seven o’clock, if you’re walking real slow. So how do we get a call about someone falling off a cliff at almost midnight?”
“Don’t know,” I say.
“What were you doing between seven and midnight?”
“Nothing.”
“You musta been doing something.”
I don’t say anything.
“Or maybe you weren’t up on Signal Hill all that time. Maybe you were off with somebody—your uncle maybe, or Frankie Walsh—grabbing a bite to eat. Well?”
“I wasn’t. I was by myself, up by the tower, just looking at everything. The city, the lights coming on, the ocean coming in through the rocks.”
Tubby lets out a big sigh. “So. You’re sitting up there, taking in the sights. In the dark. In the cold. So how’d you end up over the cliff?”
“It’s a bit fuzzy.”
“Sounds it,” says Tubby. “But think hard.”
“I guess I was hungry, because I never had any supper. So I went for a little walk to take my mind off of it. That’s when I musta fallen.”
“You went for a walk and fell off a cliff?”
“It was foggy…”
“So foggy you couldn’t see more’n a foot or two in front of you?”
“That’s right,” I say.
“Made everything invisible, I guess.”
“Yup.”
“So tell me,” he says. “How’d somebody manage to see you fall off the cliff, in the middle of all that fog?”
Soon as I hear it, I think that’s a good question. So good that I start to think maybe I figured Tubby for being a bit dumber than he really is. There’s no good answer to that question.
He asks again, “Maybe you didn’t hear. If it was so foggy you fell off a cliff, how could anybody who wasn’t right beside you see it happen?”
I feel my face getting hot, but I can’t think of anything to say.
Then, just when I figure he’ll start really pushing me, he snaps his notebook shut. Just like that. Snaps it shut, puts it in his pocket and gives me a long, long look, right in the eyes.
“That’s it for now,” he says, finally breaking off the stare. “I got everything I need.”
Then he’s off down the hallway, with Dezzy letting out a giant sigh soon as he’s gone.
“Sorry about that,” he says. “But better to let him ask his questions while Ms. Puddister and I are here, rather than him hauling you off to the police station. Anyway, that’s out of the way, so on to a happier topic.”
He sits down on the end of the bed.
“Charlie,” he says, “I got a proposition: how’d you like to come live with me. Just for a bit.”
I don’t know what to say to that.
“I mean, you’ve had a rough few weeks, with your dad, and now this”—he gives my cast a look—“so I just thought you might like to spend a few days out at my place, with my wife and me. Just while we’re waiting for a foster home. I’ve got a nice place, with a yard. No kids, but I think you’d like it. And like I say, it wouldn’t be forever—just till we get something sorted with a more permanent home. What do you say?”
“I don’t know.”
“I know it’s unexpected. I didn’t really think of it myself until a couple of days ago. And it’s not something you have to do. You could come out and have a look at the place first if you want.”
“And if I didn’t like it?”
Dezzy looks over at Miz, who starts talking. “We’d have no choice but to send you back to the training school in White Hills.”
“No way. I’m not going back there.”
“Maybe the Waterford Hospital?” she asks, looking over at Dezzy.
“The Mental?” I say. “No—not there either. Not The Hollow. Not the Mental.”
I look up at Dezzy.
“Your house,” I say. “That’d be okay. For now.”
Dezzy gives a smile and looks over at Miz.
“Good. Ms. Puddister has some paperwork for us to sign, and I’ll find a doctor to sort out your discharge.”
He stops in the doorway. “I think you’ll like my place. It’s quiet, right by the ocean—a neat spot for a kid from Alberta. It’s even got a neat name. Quidi Vidi.”
I can just see Clare’s house from the room I’m in.
“Your room,” Dez called it when he opened the door. Except I don’t want to call it that. Not that it’s a bad room—in fact, it’s the nicest room I ever had. Big old bed with a nice mattress that doesn’t sag in the middle. A bookcase stuffed with books—mostly boring stuff like
Child Development: The Case for Early Intervention
. A desk with a computer on it—but not one that’s hooked up to the Internet, since Dez says he just uses it for writing on. I figure this room is really his office, since there’s a phone in it, but it’s still a pretty nice bedroom. It just isn’t mine, and I don’t want to call it that, because as soon as a foster family comes up I’ll be shipped out to Mount Pearl or wherever there’s somebody willing to take in an orphan kid from Alberta.
Anyways, I can just see Clare’s house from here. It’s on the other side of the little bit of ocean that comes right into the middle of Quidi Vidi. I want to go over there because she still has my backpack. Unless Nick took it with him, which I don’t think he did, because the cops might come looking for it. I’d like to get it, mostly because of that old T-shirt of my dad’s, plus my jeans.
That’s about all I got left of my old life, the only proof I ever lived in Fort Mac. Like, look at me now—I got new jeans Dez bought me because they had to cut the old pair off in the ambulance. New shirt, new underwear, new socks, all of it bought in St. John’s. What’s left from when my dad was alive, except what’s in my head? I guess maybe that’s how it is when you grow up—stuff from your old life keeps disappearing. It gets chucked in the garbage or gets left in a cupboard some-wheres or it ends up in the red bin for secondhand clothes. But me, I’m not really ready to have all that stuff ripped out from me, so I would like to go over to Clare’s and get that backpack back, just to have that stuff in my hands. To feel it. To give it a sniff and smell what things used to be like.
Except I can’t really just walk over to Clare’s and ask for it, for a couple of reasons. First, half the time Tubby is sitting out in front of Dez’s in a cop car—not one painted up like a cop car, but a ghost car. Which anybody older than five can tell is a cop car right away, so why do they even bother pretending it’s not? If I was making a ghost car I’d buy the most beat-up old piece of junk I could find, like a banged-up old Pontiac, and stick a fast engine in it. Then you’d see a ghost car. Course, maybe they do that already and they got ghost cars out there that are so ghosty that I don’t even know they’re there, but I doubt it. I don’t think the cops are that smart. Anyways, Tubby isn’t for sure, ’cause he’s sitting out there in his
2005
Chevrolet Impala with the plain rims and dark blue paint and little antenna on the back that practically shouts out, “I’m a cop car. With a cop sitting in me.”
So I can’t just walk over to Clare’s with him sitting there. Plus, let’s say I did get over there, and I rang the bell and Clare’s mom or dad answered. What am I going to say? Excuse me, I think you have some stuff I left here when my crazy murderer-uncle was chasing me outta your house while your daughter was having a beer? I don’t think so. What I should do is phone, but when I look up Dalton in the phone book, there’s about a hundred of them: Alfie, Arlene, Earl, Edith, Isaac, William…I have to cut down the number of possible Daltons, which I do by asking Dez what the street across the way is called.
“Quidi Vidi Road,” he says, which has just one Dalton on it: Dalton, T. J. I decide to call at
4
:
30
pm when Clare should be home from school, but before her mom and dad get back from work. The clock hits
4
:
30,
but I’m too scared, so I promise that I’ll call when it hits
4
:
37
. Which I do.
“Hello,” says a girl.
“Clare?”
“Who’s this?” she asks. She takes in a bit of a sniffle.
“It’s me. Charlie.”
“Charlie.” She snuffs in again. “Sorry. I’ve got a cold— runny nose.”
“’Kay.”
She snuffs again. “Are you still in the hospital? I read you had that accident.”
“No. I got out yesterday.”
“So where are you?”
“I’m staying at Dez’s—a guy who works with Child Services. I’m staying with him for a bit.”
“That’s nice.”
“Funny thing is, it’s just over from you—in Quidi Vidi.”
The phone goes quiet.
“Clare?”
“Where? Which house?”
“A blue one—with a white fence in front. I can just see the top floor of your place from here.”
“Really,” says Clare. She doesn’t sound too excited.
“Yeah. Anyways, I wondered if I could come over and pick up my stuff.”
“Your stuff?”
“My backpack that I left…”
“Right, right, right,” says Clare. “Listen, Charlie. You say you’re living with somebody who works for the government?”
“Child Services.”
“Right. Well, I don’t think it would be a good idea for you to come over here right now. You haven’t told anyone you were here, have you?”
“No.”
“Good. I don’t think the cops know anything about you being here, which is how I’d like to keep it. So, listen. Let me bring your stuff to you, ’stead of you coming here.”
“Okay.”
“There’s an old shed down at the water, just past the brewery. That’s the big green building. You can probably see it from where you are.”
“I see it.”
“We can meet down there tonight—after supper. My parents have got some dinner or something in town. Can you be there at seven?”
