Page 1 of The Lovely and the Lost
Saint Jude was the patron saint of impossible causes. My foster brother took his namesake very seriously. In the eleven years since his mother had found me, half-wild and dying in a ravine, I had never once known Jude to throw in the towel when the odds were stacked against him. Jude Bennett had never met a lost cause he did not immediately embrace with the whole of his overly optimistic soul.
I was a testament to that sometimes endearing, sometimes frustrating aspect of Jude’s personality—and so was the fact that he was currently standing in the middle of a party at Hangman’s Ridge, holding an old-school boom box over his head, and blasting eighties music in the direction of a girl who literally did not know his name. As in, I hadliterallyheard her call him Kyle.
Twice.
“Boy still insisting that Kyle is a nickname for Jude?” Free came to stand beside me, leaning back against the truck. She shook her long blond hair back over her shoulder and crossed one ankle over the other as she hooked her thumbs through the belt loops on her faded jeans.
“He’s moved on fromnicknametoterm of endearment,” I said, watching as Jude punched a fist into the sky. “Remind me to limit his consumption of eighties movies going forward.”
“Won’t help,” Free opined, reaching up to swat at a mosquito on her arm. “Cady say anything to you about whether or not she’s going to let the military have Pad?”
Free didn’t believe in segues between one subject and the next.
“Not a word,” I said, taking my eyes off Jude long enough to get a better look at Free. “Why? Did she say something to you?”
Pad, short for Padawan—Jude’s choice of name, not mine—was a fourteen-month-old golden retriever and quicker on the uptake than any other dog we’d trained. Jude and Free were holding out hope that Cady—Jude’s mother and my foster mother—would keep our star pupil, but every time I took Pad out, I could feel her energy, her determination. She needed to run, to track, to find.
She needed more than we could give her.
“I am not Cady’s favorite person at the moment,” Free admitted, “on account of the fact that we had a fundamental disagreement.”
Free was as prone to disagreement as Jude was to optimism. She was the most stubborn person I’d ever met—and the woman who’d raised me was number two. Jude insisted that crossing horns was their way of expressing affection.
“Was this disagreement about the fact that you haven’t been to school in over a week?” I asked Free.
Free shrugged. She was infamous in the Chester Falls public school system for two things: her perfect test scores and her less-than-perfect attendance. Free had a system. She aced every single test given during the semester, then skipped finals altogether, ultimately pulling home C’s in every class. Free’s parents, when this was first brought to their attention, had declared that they “respected their daughter’s individuality and right to make her own decisions.”
Cady, needless to say, did not. Our property backed up to the Morrows’, and Free had spent as much time at our place growing up as she had at her own. Cady didn’t treat her any differently than she treated Jude and me—and that meant that she and Free had their share offundamental disagreements.
“You could just ask the teachers to let you take makeup tests,” I pointed out. “Then you wouldn’t need to askmewhether or not Cady was selling Pad to an army search and rescue unit. You could ask her yourself.”
Free did not dignify that comment with a response. Instead, she nodded her head toward Jude. “It appears our boy has drawn the attention of some unsavory types.”
It took me two seconds to analyze the situation. Jude was standing in the midst of three very large, very angry townies. And being Jude, he appeared to be challenging them to a dance-off.
I pushed off the truck and headed for trouble. Free followed at a lazy pace.
“I assure you, gentlemen, proving yourselves to be better dancers than me would stick it to me far worse than any act of physical violence possibly could.” My foster brother offered his would-be assailants a conspiratorial smile. “I’m not saying that I’m the second coming of Fred Astaire, but I’m also not denying it.”
One of the townies reached for Jude. I got there first, stepping between them. The townie—twenty-one or twenty-two, too old to be at a high school party and too stupid to know it—barely managed to stop himself from ramming his knuckles into my face. Jude was a head and a half taller than me, six foot two to my five foot nothing. He was gangly.
I was small and dangerous.
“Well, well, well,” the townie said, looking back at his friends, bleary-eyed and clearly amused. “What do we have here?”
I said nothing, but I could feel a familiar emotion unwinding inside of me, an old friend come out to play. These idiot boys didn’t know what it was like to fight tooth and nail for survival. They didn’t know what happened when you cornered an animal in its lair.
They didn’t know that the biggest dog wasn’t always the one in charge.
“Man,” one of the other townies said, laughing, “I’d watch out for this one, Dave. She has the crazy eyes.”
I didn’t move, didn’t stop staring at the lot of them, didn’t so much as blink. All around us, the other partygoers began to realize what was going on. If Jude’s assailants had been a few years younger, they might have realized, too.
I had a bit of a reputation.
“Gentlemen,” Jude said behind me, “this is what is known as asituation. I would suggest that you take a step or two back, and then I can assure you with an entirely moderate degree of accuracy that this will probably not get ugly.”
The party had gone completely silent, except for the music and the distant sound of the river down below. We were maybe ten feet from the edge of the ridge, a hundred feet above the river, 9.6 miles as the crow flew away from the ravine where Cady had found me eleven years before.