Oliver Twisted (An Ivy Meadows Mystery Book 3) by Cindy Brown

were skating, who let the accident happen, who later insisted that he move out of my parents’ home and into the group home. Where he just disappeared from.
    “Right,” I tried to say, but couldn’t. The thought of Cody sleeping on the streets…I took a sip of Diet Coke, hoping to loosen the knot in my throat.
    My uncle reached a big hand over the table and covered mine. “It’ll be okay, Olive.”
    “Bob?” a feminine voice drawled at my shoulder.
    “Bette!” My uncle grabbed his hand back, his face red.
    “I wondered where you got to.” She eyed me, sizing up the competition. “You two know each other?”
    “He knows my uncle,” I said. “I was just asking for some advice. Cody, my…boyfriend, is…running around.” I might have been a good actor, but I was lousy at improv.
    “Honey, you should know better than to ask a man advice about another man.”
    Did Bette really think my uncle and I could be an item? He was thirty years older than me.
    “Like I said, I think he’ll come back.” Uncle Bob slid out of the booth and looked seriously at me. “Try not to worry.”

CHAPTER 20
    New Fortitude and Firmness

      
    As soon as Uncle Bob stood up, Bette clamped onto his arm like a mollusk. I watched them leave the bar arm in arm, then took a long drink of Diet Coke and checked my phone for messages. Nothing new, but shit, was that the time? I scrambled out of the booth, left a few bucks on the table for a tip, and hightailed it out of there.
    I skidded into the theater just in time. The entire cast of Oliver! At Sea! was onstage ready to rehearse. I jumped up on the stage and joined them. Timothy slid next to me and touched me on the arm. “You okay?”
    “I’m okay. Ready to go.”
    “Okay how?” said David. “Is something wrong?”
    “Everything okey-dokey?” asked Val.
    I motioned them away. “Later. I just want to be Nancy for a while.” A minute later, I slipped into a Cockney accent and into Victorian London. Theater had been my place of refuge ever since Cody’s accident. It was the one place I could forget everything around me and still feel safe.
    Some people don’t understand the “safe” part. They think it must be terrifying to be onstage in front of an audience. For me, it’s more like reading a good book. I become another person, transported to another place and time. But it’s even better than reading, because my chosen family is there onstage with me, reading the same book at the same time.
    So by the time we took a break, I was feeling better. Still, I didn’t want to talk about Cody, so I searched my brain for something else.
    Oh! How in the world had I forgotten that I’d found Harley’s knitting in Val’s room?
    “Hey,” I said to Timothy, who stood next to Val and David onstage. “Do you know if they’ve recast Madame Defarge? Candy could use a job.” I let my face fall. “Oh, would she have to knit? I don’t think she’s crafty.” But I was, so to speak.
    “She’d definitely have to knit,” replied Timothy. “I swear the audition consists of knit one, purl two.”
    “Makes sense.” In A Tale of Two Cities , Madame D. knits the names of the condemned into a scarf. I snuck a look at Valery. He was watching us, but his face was relaxed. Interested, but not nervous.
    “What did she do with all the stuff she knit?” Still no change on Val’s face.
    “Half the time she’d just unravel it and start again,” Timothy said.
    “But sometimes she gave presents,” Val said. “Like to me. I have nice scarf. It says Val.”
    “She knitted you a scarf?”
    “Sure. We were buddy-buddy.”
    “Everyone!” shouted Jonas from the front row, his eyes on his cell phone. “A little change in schedule. I want to run ‘Gruel, Glorious Gruel.’ We’re not going to have time to run the other numbers. Val, Timothy, you can go.” The guys exited through the wings. Jonas walked to the edge of the stage and held out a hand to help me off the stage. “Ivy, could