Page 54 of The Naughty List

Addi nods. “I swear, I haven’t even spoken to anyone since your text last night. After Mikey finally made it home, I passed out cold.”

This I believe. She always waits up for him, says she can’t sleep until she hears him coming home safely every night.

I know how she feels because I used to be the same way with my dad before he retired from the force.

“Well someone talked.” I lower myself onto their couch and pull my knees to my chest. I’m still wearing Jonah’s clothes. I can still smell him on me. “And he thinks it was me and he’s irate.”

Addi’s forehead creases. “Well, tell him he’s wrong.”

I glance out the window at the snow falling to the ground. A fresh blanket covering the ground, like a blank slate covering the messy footprints from the past.

“I don’t think it’s going to be that easy.”

Nothing with Jonah ever was.

15

JONAH

OUR FINEST GIFTS WE BRING

Monday morning the week of Christmas, the reporter who left his card with Miss Nancy meets me at a bar down the street from my office.

Dave Whitmeyer is a weasel of a thing I’m tempted to put in a headlock on sight. His skull is the shape of a tennis ball and his black-rimmed glasses are entirely too big for his face.

He has a wannabe hipster vibe about him.

There are a dozen open sugar packets on the table and he’s twitchy when I slide into the back booth without a word.

“It’s really you,” he says, his beady eyes going round with surprise. “I thought maybe you’d send someone. I know you don’t meet with the press.”

“We’re not meeting,” I say, leaning forward. “We’re exchanging information.”

He nods, leaning back in his seat. “I understand.”

“Who told you about the group home? About my involvement with it?”

His eyes cast downward, focusing on his coffee cup. “Look, I’m well aware of the fact that you could just take me out back and beat the crap out of me. But like I told you on the phone, I’ll tell you what I know after you answer my questions.”

“Regardless of what information we do or don’t share here today, stay away from the group home,” I warn him. “Let me be clear. Don’t prowl around asking Miss Nancy or any of those kids a single question. If I hear that you so much as drove slow down the street it’s on, you’ll wish I had taken you out back.”

Threats are no longer my preferred method of communication, but I’ll do what I have to in this case.

He glances down at his hands and opens another sugar packet. “I won’t ask them anything if you’ll give me the answers I need.”

“Ask your questions then.”

I shake a toothpick out of the container on the table and put it in my mouth. I need something else to focus on so I can sit still.

“How old were you when you become a ward of the state?”

My teeth clench together. “Three.”

He moves his finger around on the screen of his phone. “How many foster homes did you live in over the years?”

“Didn’t keep count.”

Eleven.