Guilty by Norah McClintock

Author:Norah McClintock
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Juvenile Fiction, Law & Crime, book, ebook
ISBN: 9781554699896
Publisher: Orca Books
Published: 2012-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Eighteen

LILA

I never wanted him there, but he tracked me down anyway. At first I was scared. At first I thought he knew who I was. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t ask me for my full name. He doesn’t ask for my father’s name. Or maybe he thinks he knows. He said his friend looked up our phone number; that’s how he found the address. But the phone isn’t in my name or my dad’s name. It’s in the name of the last person who lived here and who forgot to tell the phone company he was moving. My father had it on his to-do list: inform the phone company. But he never got around to it. In fact, he’d been thinking it over. Why not just pay the bill when it came and keep the phone. That way, we’d avoid any special connection fee, which, my father said, usually involved a credit check, which he probably wouldn’t pass.

Finn doesn’t know who I am, but I know who he is. That means I have a chance to find out what happened.

Except I don’t keep my mouth shut, which would have been the smart thing. Instead, I decide to ask questions and give unasked-for opinions. In other words, I blow it. He freaks out when I ask if his mother wanted to separate from his father. Well, that’s what it sounded like to me. What else does a woman mean when she tells her husband she needs time alone? But then, who asked me? I shouldn’t have said anything.

I sip my tea. I’m angry at myself for having the chance to learn something and finding out exactly nothing—well, except that maybe the first Mrs. Newsome was giving some thought to the future of her marriage, no matter what Finn thinks. He was seven years old at the time. What seven-year-old wants to think his parents are going to break up?

What else do I know now that I didn’t know before? Nothing useful. His grandmother was against the marriage. I wonder what she had against Finn’s father. I want to know because I want to have something against him too. He killed my father. I want to hate him for that instead of hating my father for going over there with a gun and trying to kill him…assuming that was his intention. I keep thinking about Detective Sanders’s question: Did he say anything to you about money, Lila? According to Finn, he said something to Mr. Newsome about it. It’s why he went there in the first place.

I set my mug down on the floor and push myself up off the couch. I go into the dingy little room that I’ve been trying to think of as my bedroom, even though it isn’t as nice as my room at Aunt Jenny’s and contains hardly any of my stuff. Most of that is still back home.

Back home. Where I mostly grew up. Where I belong now.

I look around the room. I should just finish packing and get out of here.

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