Fireside Susan Wiggs (best free ebook reader for android .txt) 📖

end of everything. What I didn’t count on was him following me to the parking lot.”

She could still hear the echo of his furious voice: “You’re walking out on me? You’re walking out on me.” He’d answered his own question.

“You fired me. Good night, Lloyd.”

“Not so fast. You don’t walk out on me.”

“Watch me.” She’d turned on her heel. She shouldn’t have shown that flash of defiance. That was all it took to spark his temper. Yet, even then, she hadn’t anticipated his violence. It was like an accident she played over and over in her mind. What could she have done differently?

She got up and wandered over to the fireplace, staring into the flames. “That’s why I showed up here with nothing,” she whispered.

Bo Crutcher didn’t say anything. She didn’t need for him to say anything. It was enough that he’d listened. Nothing had changed, yet at the same time, she felt something shift between them.

“I don’t regret what I did,” she said, “but I definitely picked the wrong time to show up penniless on my mother’s doorstep.”

The ensuing silence felt…safe. Comfortable. They were easing into a friendship, Kim realized. She felt him watching her. “What?” she asked.

“So do you still want that neck rub, or am I a jerk for asking?”

She couldn’t take her eyes off him. “You’re not a jerk.”

“Not today, anyway,” he said, slowly getting up from the table.

She forgot to say no. She didn’t want to say no. The look in his eyes hypnotized all the words out of her. She was already imagining how his hands would feel when the phone rang, shattering the moment.

The sound kicked her back to reality as she snatched up the receiver.

“This is Kimberly van Dorn.”

“Miss van Dorn, it’s Rourke McKnight of the Avalon Police Department.”

She frowned, hoping her mother wasn’t in even more trouble. She glanced at Bo, finding an unexpected sense of balance as she gazed into his eyes. “Yes?” she prompted.

“I’m just calling to check on something,” said Chief McKnight. “It’s about one of your guests.”

Fifteen

Grand Central Station was one of those places people mentioned when they wanted to describe something really busy.

“It’s Grand Central Station in here,” a teacher might say about a classroom.

The real Grand Central Station lived up to the description. It reminded AJ of a human anthill inside a marble cube, with everyone scurrying in different directions.

AJ had no idea which direction to scurry. Still, he knew better than to stand around looking lost, so he joined a stream of people heading for the exit. Along one wall he spied a bank of pay phones. Almost no one used pay phones anymore, except people who couldn’t afford a mobile phone. Like AJ.

There were stickers on the wall around the phones, advertising bail bonds, help for suicide prevention, addicts, runaways. AJ wondered if that was what he’d become—a runaway. A knot of fear formed in his stomach, compounding the lump of sadness in his throat and the keen sense of yearning that burned in his chest. All these emotions together made him want to throw up, so he followed some signs to the men’s room.

A couple of guys there halted their conversation and glared at him, making AJ change his mind and back out the door. He cast about for somebody to ask for help, but suddenly everyone looked sketchy to him. A group of teenagers poured in through one of the entrances, and a couple of them checked him out. He could feel their stares from twenty yards, and something told him they weren’t like the guy he’d sat next to on the train. He tried to act all cool, putting on the dangerous slit-eyed expression and unhurried saunter of the gangbangers at his old school. He headed for daylight and found himself on a busy street jammed with traffic, mostly yellow taxis and delivery trucks. Honking horns, whistles and shouts clouded the air, along with the cindery smell of exhaust.

Although there was no snow here, the city felt cold. He should never have come here. Bad things happened to kids who ran away to the big city.

On the other hand, what could be worse than losing your mother?

At least he fit in a little better here. There were plenty of brown-skinned people everywhere, workmen in blue jumpsuits doing street repairs, guys in hard hats on a scaffold, people stopping for a chat at the coffee carts on every street corner. As he wandered along the street, he occasionally caught Spanish being spoken, just a whiff, like the scent of hot dogs in the air.

He dug the slip of paper out of his pocket, something he’d printed off Bo’s computer last night. It was a place with a New York City address: Casa de Esperanza. The House of Hope. Although he hadn’t planned this trip out, he’d hung on to the printout, somehow knowing it would be important. He studied the address and prayed it wasn’t far, shivering as a gust of wind howled through the street. He didn’t understand how people could live in this cold weather. In Houston, people complained about the heat, but here in the cold, you had to curl up against the wind and hope you wouldn’t freeze to death.

He scanned the throng of people, trying to figure out who to ask for directions—the guy with the coffee cart on the corner? The grim businessman with the briefcase? The skinny girl with a long scarf wound around and around her neck? He approached a lady with graying hair, wearing a plain cloth coat and worn leather gloves. There was something about her that seemed to be friendly enough. Unlike most people in the crowd, she didn’t act like she was in a hurry.

“Ma’am,” he said, “I’m looking for One Hundred and Sixteenth Street East. Do you know how to get there?”

“Sure. Go a block over to Third Avenue. Almost all the buses there go uptown. You all right?”