Blink & Caution by Tim Wynne-Jones Page B

well. I wouldn’t eat it. Dad got severely pissed off. ‘There’s nothing else,’ he says, ‘And there’s no place to stop on the way home, so if you want to go hungry, that’s your business.’ You know the kind of thing parents say to bratty kids.”
    “Right.” Sure.
    “And I just throw my bowl at him. Just like that. I pick it up and hurl it. Smash!”
    “Wow. Really?”
    “I know. Such a bitch.”
    “So . . .” you say, leaving lots of space for her to jump in. “So?”
    “So that’s why I remember that wall. The one behind him in the ransom video.”
    “You can see a chicken noodle soup stain on the chipboard?”
    “Well, no. Not so much. Okay, not at all. But it rang a bell. And his hands are in front of him, right? Like they’re resting on a table? Do you see what I mean?”
    You’re not sure. Is this wishful thinking or what?
    “I have to find out,” she says urgently, her voice dropping in case anyone else might hear her other than you. You can imagine her leaning forward, clutching her cell phone tightly, her blue eyes trained on you, pleading. “I have to know, Blink.”
    “I don’t get it,” you say.
    She kind of growls and then apologizes, and you think maybe you are really stupid, because this probably makes perfect sense, just not to you.
    “It’s what you
said,
Blink. Don’t you get it? What you implied.” She’s whispering now. “If my daddy’s in on it; if he, you know, arranged this thing; well, I can’t — cannot — tell the cops.”
    “But why would he?”
    She makes an impatient sound. “There might be a reason. Something . . . a possibility. But there’s no way I can talk about it on the phone. Can you get here?”
    “Where?”
    “Kingston.”
    You don’t want to tell her that you have no idea where Kingston is. You remember the license in her father’s wallet, and it was an Ontario license, so — okay — Kingston is in Ontario and, hell, Ontario is only about as big as Europe. But you have money. Some. And you want to go. That’s the thing. You want to. But it’s still totally —
    “Blink?”
    “Uh, I guess so.”
    “Oh, great. Thank you. Thank you so much!” You can hear her sigh of relief, and it sounds real. “Oh, and Blink? You can drive, right?”

“C ome hunting with me, Spence,” she says.
    “I can’t,” he says. “I’m busy.”
    “No, you’re not. You’re moping.”
    “I am not moping. And nothing’s in season, so you can’t hunt.”
    “Rabbits are in season. Nuisance rabbits. And Rory says he saw one that had already turned white. Why does that happen, Spence? Turning white when it’s still summer?”
    “It’s called the lethal gene, Kitty. Now, will you please leave me alone?”
    She backs off. He’s sitting at his computer. There’s a screen saver of a starry sky. She watched him go to screen saver as soon as she came into his room. Barged into his room. “You’ve got to stop doing that,” he’d said. He’s hiding something from her, and he’s never done that before.
    “You and Melody had a fight, huh?”
    “We did not have a fight.”
    “Then why’d she leave here in tears?”
    Spence turns to her. He tries to take her hand, but she pulls back. “We did not have a fight, Kitty. Just leave it alone, okay?”
    Kitty’s at the door now. “Are you going to break off the engagement?”
    Her brother throws himself back in his chair. “Don’t you ever stop?” he says.
    “You are, aren’t you?” says Kitty. Her hair is loose, and she has to hold it back from her face, like curtains.
    “We have things to discuss. That’s all. Period. Full stop. You wouldn’t understand.”
    And that’s when she knows something is really wrong. He’s home from school. He just graduated. He and Melody are supposed to be getting married, and something is up he won’t tell her about.
You wouldn’t understand.
Spence has never said that to her. Not ever — not once. She’s fifteen and he knows she can understand