Quid Pro Quo Read online

  At 8:30 the next morning, I washed my face and changed my shirt. I left a note in the hall: COME AND GET ME AT SCHOOL AS SOON AS YOU GET HOME22!! I put on my Discman and left.

  I didn’t know where Andy was. I didn’t know what she’d done or why she’d done it or what I should do about it.

  All I knew was that nobody could find out she was gone.

  I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: “What?!? Are you nuts? She could be in trouble! Call the cops!”

  But it wasn’t that easy.

  Call the cops and they’d find out I was thirteen and living alone. Then what would they do? They’d send me to a foster home. They’d have no other choice. It’s not like I had any relatives who wanted me.

  It’s not like I had anybody who wanted me.

  Then the cops would start trying to find Andy, and I was really afraid of what they’d find her doing. The best possibility, believe it or not, was that Byron was forcing her to do something she shouldn’t. I remembered from law school that if you commit a crime “under duress,” you can use that as a defense.

  You know, an excuse.

  In other words, you can say to the judge, “It’s not my fault! He made me do it!” and if you’re lucky, the judge will believe you and let you off.

  Like I said, if you’re lucky.

  But there’s no counting on the judge believing you. Especially if you’re Andy. With our luck, she’d get the judge she rolled her eyes at.

  What I was really worried about was that Andy would get a taste of her old wild ways again and start liking them. I mean, she’d given up smoking before. She made a big deal about how much better she felt and how much more money we had and how she’d never smoke another butt ever again, so help me God. And, well, you know what happened with that. Why wouldn’t she take up getting in trouble again? She obviously used to like it. She did it for years.

  I didn’t know much about her life on the street, and I knew why I didn’t: Andy didn’t want it getting out. Why would she? It was hard enough for her to pull off the “responsible citizen” act without everybody knowing about her juvie record.

  God. I hated to think what kind of stuff she must have gotten into back then.

  If I sicced the cops on Andy and they found her doing something illegal, our life would be ruined. If she got convicted of a crime, she could get kicked out of the legal profession. On top of everything, she could even be charged with abandoning me. “Failing to provide the necessaries of life for a minor child,” they call it. She used to joke about that when I was little. I’d have a fit because she wouldn’t buy me some action figure or some remote- control car we couldn’t afford, and she’d go, “What are you going to do, Cyril? Charge me? I hate to break it to you, kid, but under the law, Super Thunderwheel Mini SUVs aren’t considered a ‘necessary of life.’”

  It wasn’t a joke this time. Unless Andy had a really good excuse for taking off, she could lose custody of me. For good.

  Andy could lose me. She could lose her job. She could go to jail.

  I had no other choice. I had to find her myself.

  I got to school, and Mrs. Payzant asked where I’d been. I said I had the flu. She said I still looked pale (No kidding). Was I feeling all right?

  I said, no, and I meant it. She said I should go home then. There was a terrible bug going around. Her son had been in bed for ten days. Why didn’t she call my mother at the office to come and get me?

  I said that my mother didn’t go in to the office today. She said that was good. She’d be able to look after me. I picked up my knapsack and left.

  I couldn’t believe how easy it was.

  chapter

  eighteen

  Client-solicitor privilege

  The responsibility of a lawyer to keep

  confidential anything a client says to him or her

  I went home. I checked the mailbox and picked up the news-paper at the front door. I reminded myself that I had to do that every day. I didn’t want people thinking that anything had changed around here.

  I scrunched up the note I left for Andy.

  I checked the messages. Nothing.

  I checked the kitchen cupboards. Nothing there either. I was going to get pretty hungry if Andy didn’t show up soon. I had about four dollars left from my allowance and could probably scrounge up another two or three dollars in change if I checked all Andy’s pockets, but that was it.

  I’d worry about how I was going to survive later. What I needed to do right then was figure out where Andy and Byron were. I needed clues.

  I ransacked the apartment, the bathroom, the living room, the bedrooms. There was lots there, but nothing that hadn’t always been there.

  I went through Andy’s closet, her drawers, her makeup bag, her laundry, her bedside table, her piles of junk. All I found were old clothes, broken eyeliners and overdue library books.

  I went through Byron’s stuff. That took, like, four seconds. I guess he was right. He wasn’t into material things. All he had were the clothes he’d taken off the day before. They were folded neatly on my bed like he’d joined the army or was trying out for a job at the Gap. I poked them with a ruler, flipped them over, shook them. I even stuck my bare hand in the pockets. Nothing.

  I kicked the wall for about five minutes until my foot hurt and the guy downstairs started banging on the floor with his cane. That’s all I needed, him calling the cops on me. So I went into the living room and punched the couch for a while. At least it was quiet.

  I finally got tired and stopped. For a long time I just lay there, staring at the big stain on the ceiling. It always used to remind me of a bunny in high heels. That was sort of cute. But that day I turned my head the other way and realized that the bunny’s legs could be somebody’s arms, and the high heels could be a couple of guns. That was sort of sick. That’s what someone with a disturbed mind would see.

  It’s bad when you can’t trust yourself to stare at the ceiling.

  I turned on the TV and sort of watched it until 3:30, when it was safe to go. School was out. No one would wonder what I was doing on the street. I grabbed my skateboard and left. I stopped at Toulany’s and picked up a beef jerky stick, some sour-cream-and-onion chips and a large cardboard box. I tried to make the food last, but I couldn’t. I was starving. I had it inhaled by the end of the block.

  I got to Atula’s at about four. Toby gave me a big hug when I walked in, and Marge said she sure missed me. Mr. Lucas went on about how much I’d grown and Elmore Himmelman started screaming that I was an FBI agent who was trying to kill him for his million-dollar inheritance.

  That’s when Atula came flying out of her office, yelling at people to keep their voices down. Things must have been crazy for her without anyone to help, but she still smiled when she saw me. I told her I was there to collect Andy’s stuff, and her smile sort of died. She rearranged that scarf of hers and asked me to stop by her office before I left.

  I pried Toby off me, went into Andy’s room and shut the door. I started dumping stuff from her drawers into the box. It was mostly loose-leaf pads, message slips, old school pictures of me, that kind of thing. Not what I was looking for. I was looking for evidence—whatever that meant.

  I cleaned out the desk, then opened Andy’s filing cabinet. That’s where I figured all the really good stuff would be.

  I was too late.

  It was empty.

  I had this moment of terror. You know, like in movies when the person who’s going to get killed realizes that the phone is dead or the gun is gone. I imagined some thug—Byron, maybe, or whoever he was after—sneaking in with pantyhose over his head and rifling through Andy’s office. There must have been something incriminating in her files … something they had to get … something they were willing to kill for.

  Clearly I was getting hysterical. That’s not what happened to the files. Atula had them! It was obvious. Andy was gone so Atula was looking after those clients herself now. Who else was going to?<
br />
  I tried to think of some way I could get the files from her, but I knew that would never happen. There’s this thing in law, “client-solicitor privilege,” that means anything you say to your lawyer is private. Even if you told him you killed somebody or robbed a bank, he’s not allowed to say anything about it unless you let him. Same thing with your legal files. They’re private. Atula was hardly going to hand them over to me. And I wasn’t ready to steal them. At least, not yet. I had to figure this mess out some other way.

  I put Andy’s daytimer and her address book in the cardboard box. I wiped off her desk and threw the dead plant she’d had all summer in the garbage can. I grabbed the box and the coat she’d left hanging on the back of the door and went to see Atula.

  Good thing Atula was so busy, because there was no way I could take another lecture or another little “you know I’m here for you” talk. Atula tried to squeeze one in anyway, of course, but the phone rang and she had to get it. While she was talking to the guy, she reached up and rubbed the back of her hand on my cheek. I don’t know why, but that made my eyes get all watery. I felt like such a wuss. I just wanted to get out of there. I was worried I was going to start crying.

  Or talking—that would be even worse.

  I went “see ya” and bolted. Toby made a dive for me on the way out, but I was too fast. I said, “Gotta run, Tobe.” And I did.

  chapter

  nineteen

  Real evidence

  Evidence supplied by material objects

  I got home and dumped the box full of Andy’s stuff on the kitchen table. It was pretty depressing. What a pile of useless junk.

  I had to organize it somehow, make some sense of it.

  I started by throwing out all the garbage, the empty cigarette packs, the wads of gum wrapped up in little bits of tinfoil, the paperclips that Andy had bent into weird shapes, but then I changed my mind. I took them all out of the garbage can again and put them back on the table. I realized this stuff could be important. Maybe Andy didn’t chew that gum at all. Maybe somebody else did and left his slimy DNA all over it. Maybe all I needed was a little bit of his saliva, and the guy would be behind bars for the rest of his life.

  I studied every single thing I took from Andy’s office, one at a time. This is what I found.

  Nothing.

  So then I tried to put the stuff in groups. Maybe I’d start seeing a pattern. I put all the “garbage” over on one corner of the table. I put all the pink message slips on another. I put all the photographs together, all the pencils together and made two piles out of the loose-leaf: used and unused.

  Lot of good that did. Sherlock might have been able to see some pattern, but I couldn’t.

  I read each of the phone messages over again. Darlene, Elmore, Marge. Immigration Resource Center meetings. Appointments with the crown prosecutor. Reminders for Atula’s secretary (yeah, right) to call Mr. Bigshot’s secretary to confirm the date of the hearing. I was the one who had taken most of the messages, so there were no surprises there. When I went back to school, Andy and Atula just answered the phone themselves or let the machine pick it up. The pink message slips kind of dried up after that.

  I looked at the photos. I arranged my school pictures by age, and it suddenly hit me. It was so obvious! Why hadn’t I seen it before?

  My teeth were way too big for my face! They looked like someone rammed a couple of Fig Newtons under my top lip. (I guess it would have helped if I’d brushed them.) I made a mental note to get them filed down to normal human size when I had the time.

  I looked at the other photos. There was Andy at her graduation. There was Andy at the Poverty Coalition protest. There was Andy outside the new Immigration Resource Center. That one must have been taken the day it opened. Andy and Atula were standing on either side of this giant guy in a business suit. He had his arms around them and they were all smiling away like a bunch of monkeys who’d just won a lifetime supply of bananas. I figured he was the Center’s honorary chairman, the guy Andy had gone on and on about. I could even see the fender of his famous green BMW poking out at the bottom of the picture. I thought it was kind of gross, to tell you the truth. Driving up to a place for poor people in a car that cost a hundred thousand bucks. Did nobody else have a problem with that?

  Why wouldn’t Andy have a problem with that?

  It was stupid wasting my time thinking about that kind of stuff right then. I was supposed to be trying to find Andy, not figure her out. She’d die of old age before I could do that.

  I moved on to the next pile: the used loose-leaf. The only thing I learned from that is that my mother is an excellent doodler. I just hoped they had a good art program at the women’s penitentiary.

  That left the unused loose-leaf. A less-sophisticated detective would have just tossed it in the garbage, but that’s because a less-sophisticated detective wouldn’t have spent his childhood years watching Bobby Smye, Private Eye. I took a blue crayon and rubbed it over the blank paper. I started to see the imprint of words Andy had written on the missing top sheet. A white phone number appeared in the cornflower blue, and then an address. My heart started to pound. I did another swipe with the crayon, and suddenly I knew what Andy’d been up to. She’d been trying to enroll me in an after-school course! “Political Activism for Teens.” For a second there, I was almost glad she had disappeared. I wished she’d just stop trying to improve me.

  By this time, I was mad and frustrated and ready to quit, but if I quit, what would I do then? There was nothing to eat. I couldn’t sleep. And I’d kill myself if I tried skateboarding in the shape I was in. I picked up Andy’s appointment book and started flipping through it.

  It was a mess too, with lots of stuff crossed out or unreadable. Even the stuff I could read looked like it was written in code. “EH Lw. Ct.” “D&F sep ag?” “JHG – Hng.”

  I’d like to say that the Undisputed King of Scrabble had this all figured out in three minutes, but it didn’t happen that way. I just stared at the letters for a long time and thought about Kool-Aid Blizzards and Mary MacIsaac and what the chances were she’d go to the school dance with me if I ever got the nerve to ask her. I came up with a few good lines to make her laugh and started thinking it might not be completely hopeless. Then I realized that the dance wasn’t for three more weeks, and if I didn’t find Andy by then (or at least some food money), I’d be so scrawny nobody would dance with me. They’d all just lean against the back wall and watch my bones rattle.

  I had to concentrate. I looked at the address book again and a couple of things suddenly seemed pretty obvious. Lw. Ct. was law court. The capital letters were people’s initials. Once I got that, I could pretty much figure out who most people were.

  EH: Elmore Himmelman.

  D&F: Who else? Darlene and Freddie. So that would mean that “sep ag” meant separation agreement, and the question mark meant “Are they finally going to break up or what?”

  JHG – hng. For a second there I thought it was “John Hugh Gillis – hanging,” but they haven’t hanged a man in Canada for, like, forty years. And even then, I doubt they ever hanged someone for a couple of break-and-enters. I guessed that “hng” had to mean “hearing,” the one the court set up to figure out what John Hugh’s sentence would be on that last B-and-E.

  Breaking the code after that was pretty easy. I got stuck on a few words until I realized Andy wasn’t just keeping track of work stuff. “T. M.” was her hairdresser, Taryl Melanson, the one who talked her out of the purple spikes, and “ct” this time wasn’t “court.” It was either “cut” or, more likely, “chat.” (The two of them could gab like you wouldn’t believe.) CM – dnt. ck-up meant I had an appointment at the dentist that week (I just pretended I didn’t understand that one).

  But there was one entry that showed up over and over again that I couldn’t get: “BC – Wtrfrnt.” Andy usually just left out the vowels in the words, so the last part was pretty easy to figure out. Wtrfrnt = Waterfront. I guessed sh
e’d been meeting somebody at one of those fancy restaurants overlooking the harbor.

  Boy, did that make me mad. I’m eating Mr. Noodles for lunch every day while she’s out dining like a queen. Aren’t mothers supposed to look after their children first?

  Even while I was mad, though, I knew something was wrong with this picture. I just couldn’t see it: Andy eating out and not even bringing me back a doggie bag. Maybe this wasn’t about work either. Maybe this was a boyfriend. I knew she’d had a few over the years, but not because she’d ever admit it to me, that’s for sure. I’d catch some guy putting his arm around her, or some girlfriend of hers would let slip about Andy’s “big date,” and Andy would never talk to her again. If she was out having some romantic meal with some new love (barf), she wouldn’t bring me back a doggie bag, because she wouldn’t want me to know about it.

  Made sense.

  But who was the guy this time?

  B.C.

  B…C…

  B…

  C…

  I knew someone with those initials. I was sure of it. I ran through all the guys’ names I could think of that started with B.

  Bill. Blair. Brendan. Ben. Bert. Bart.

  Byron.

  Byron Cuvelier.

  B.C.

  chapter

  twenty

  Statutory rape

  Former charge for sex with a minor

  I hadn’t slept in, like, thirty-six hours. I was so wired I didn’t think I’d ever sleep again, but that night I did. I just kind of passed out at the kitchen table. Maybe that’s why I had such a weird dream.

  Byron was my father, and I had a stump for my hand too, and we were living in this sort of tent thing that we had to keep moving all the time. Kendall lived with us too, I think, or he was around, anyway. He gave me this special skateboard that only had three wheels. I could do these amazing moves on it, but only because I was missing a hand. Andy was in the dream too, sort of. You know what dreams are like. I could hear her voice or smell her smoke or talk to her on the phone, but I could never actually see her. One time, I even had to wait outside the bathroom while she used it (our tent had a phone and bathroom, quite the camping experience), but somehow she slipped out without me noticing.