Audacious by Mike Shepherd Page B

trying to remember the taste of cold chocolate on a warm day. Trying to remember a happy moment here. There had been a few.
    Then she turned and walked purposefully toward a place that held very few good memories. It was always better to walk as if you knew where you were going. Needed to be there ten minutes ago. Slow down and who knew what might overtake you.
    At that pace, it didn’t take Abby long to turn the final corner, to bring the last place she’d lived on Eden into view.
    Then she had to slow. There wasn’t all that much to see.
    Half the houses on this block were broken down and abandoned. It had been headed that way back then. The brown house was now among the derelicts.
    She really shouldn’t be surprised. She’d been gone fifteen years. How long had Momma Ganna ever lived anywhere?
    That was a big mistake. Suddenly Abby was flooded by feelings. The feelings of going out in the morning, maybe to school, maybe to something that might earn an Eden dollar for her… or Momma.
    Only to come back to an empty house. Not just empty of Momma, but swept of anything that Momma called her own. Momma totally gone.
    Abby tried asking around among the neighbors to see if anyone knew where Momma had vanished to. None knew. She went looking for a grown-up that might admit to knowing Momma.
    People who knew Momma were never that easy to find. Not easy for a short person who couldn’t read or write all that well.
    The first time had been the worst.
    That time, Abby hadn’t been much older than the kid she gave the ice cream to. She’d spent a night and a day on her own before she stumbled into someone who knew someone who knew where Momma Ganna had set up shop.
    That time Abby got a beating. As if going to school one morning expecting to come home to the same place was somehow wrong. She didn’t deserve a beating, not for that.
    And it taught Abby a lesson she never forgot.
    As Abby slowly ambled by the gutted brown house, she spotted the telltale signs of squatter occupation: the smell of smoke, a bit of movement in the deep shadows.
    Her first thought was to keep walking, circle around to the trolley station, and get back where she belonged. She’d worked hard to get there. To be Abby Nightingale, the maid of many skills. If she was smart, she’d get gone from here.
    Abby glanced over her shoulder at the crumpling brown house. She could ferret out any secrets it still held about Momma. Yeah, me and a squad of Marines .
    Or maybe just me and the chief and Penny .
    No way would she take them to the hell that was Five Corners. No way would Abby risk seeing the look on that Longknife girl’s face when she saw where her maid came from.
    Okay, smart kid. You gonna just give up cause Momma ain’t here with no cake? You gonna call it quits that easy? What about Myra? You gonna forget about her?
    If this was a job for the princess, you’d think of something.
    That jab hurt.
    Abby paused. If she went right here, she’d almost be at the green house.
    “Computer, mark the brown house, two blocks back. Mark the green house, one block farther down this street.” The green house still looked in decent shape.
    The brick house would be two blocks farther along that street, and one over, she told her computer. Three data points showed on the map reflecting on the glasses Abby wore today.
    The maid walked a few more blocks, remembering two more homes of her youth. And spotted the pattern about the time she spotted the wasteland.
    Two blocks beyond, Five Corners came to an end.
    Not really. Actually the five corners that gave the place its name was out there, surrounded by the baked ground and struggling weeds of half-begun urban renewal. A few houses still stood out there, surrounded by nothing. They huddled alone, waiting for someone to put up a shopping mall and chic housing for the wealthy, or those on their way to wealth.
    But it hadn’t happened yet.
    With Five Corners’s luck, it might never happen.
    Abby frowned at the