Promise Bound by Anne Greenwood Brown

Author:Anne Greenwood Brown [Brown, Anne Greenwood]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-385-37129-2
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2014-01-07T06:00:00+00:00

20

CALDER

Back on the road in the hamburger-wrapper car.

I slipped my fingers above the visor, dug through the center console and then the glove compartment, looking for cash. I came up with seven dollars and fifty miserable cents. It wasn’t going to get me too far in Thunder Bay.

I lifted my foot off the gas and coasted. There was still the chance to turn around. Obviously I couldn’t avoid my promise to Lily, but I didn’t have to go all the way to Thunder Bay. I could research my parents from any coffeehouse with Wi-Fi. But the thought didn’t last long, and I stomped on the pedal, pushing my speed up to eighty.

When it came right down to it, eventually I’d have to start talking to real, live people. I cringed at the memory of one of my and Lily’s first conversations. “Didn’t they look for you?” she’d asked. At the time, the idea had been beyond my comprehension. I had given my human parents so little thought over the years that it was difficult to imagine my death having made a lasting impression on them. Now I was going to start asking the general populace of Thunder Bay if anyone remembered me? Lily believed a three-year-old couldn’t fall off a sailboat and be completely forgotten—even after all these years. I guess I had to trust that—despite my years of study—Lily understood human nature better than I.

Trust was going to be tough going, though, because right now, Thunder Bay was alien to everything I knew; it seemed impossible that anyone there would have heard of me. And who was I anyway? Tallulah had chosen the name Calder, so what name would I even ask about?

When I crossed the Minnesota border at Pigeon River, the customs officer waved me through. “I can let you go to Canada,” he said, “but you better find your passport if you want to get back in.”

Yeah, right.

I pushed the driver’s seat back a few notches, stretched out my legs, and succumbed to the rugged and rocky landscape. The shadow of the mountains shrouded me, and mesas pressed against the roadside before breaking into a valley of sprawling farms, their wheat fields plowed and recently planted. After an hour or so, the valley gave way to pine trees and Mount McKay, hotels, a roadhouse, and scattered gas stations before leveling out to more flat highway and ugly factories.

The expressway had taken me too far inland to see Lake Superior, but I could still smell it, faintly, beneath the acrid factory smoke that wafted through my car’s vents. I turned onto Arthur Street and made my way straight for the water, trolling along the shoreline. Somewhere out there, too far away, the lighthouse at Isle Royale blinked in the early-morning sky. It was mirrored by the red light on my newly acquired phone, blinking on the seat beside me.

I didn’t know if I hoped for or dreaded another text from Lily … or possibly worse, from Jason.… What would he say about the girl on the beach? I didn’t check to see who was calling.

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