Nowhere to Turn Read online

  First U.S. edition published in 2012 by Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.

  Text copyright © 2009 by Norah McClintock. All rights reserved. Published by arrangement with Scholastic Canada Ltd.

  All U.S. rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc., except for the inclusion of brief quotations in an acknowledged review.

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  The image in this book is used with the permission of: Front cover: © MILpictures by Tom Weber/Digital Vision/Getty Images.

  Main body text set in Janson Text Lt Std 11.5/15. Typeface provided by Linotype AG.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McClintock, Norah.

  Nowhere to turn / by Norah McClintock.

  p. cm. — (Robyn Hunter mysteries ; #6)

  ISBN: 978–0–7613–8316–1 (lib. bdg. : alk. paper)

  [1. Mystery and detective stories. 2. Stealing—Fiction. 3. Dating (Social customs)—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.M478414184Np 2012

  [Fic]—dc23 2011034341

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1 – BP – 7/15/12

  eISBN: 978-1-4677-0035-1 (pdf)

  eISBN: 978-1-4677-3046-4 (ePub)

  eISBN: 978-1-4677-3045-7 (mobi)

  TO MY FAMILY

  CHAPTER ONE

  M

  y father gave me an odd look as he dropped the receiver of the kitchen phone into its cradle. “Aren’t you going to be late?” he said, reaching for the coffeepot to refill his mug.

  “I’ve got plenty of time,” I said. “I’m meeting Morgan—”

  “—downstairs at La Folie. I know.” La Folie is the gourmet restaurant that occupies the ground floor of the building my dad owns. He lives on the third floor and rents out apartments on the second floor. “Why doesn’t she just come up here? Is it something I said?”

  “No, it’s something Fred said.” Fred Smith is the owner of La Folie. “He promised her a double latte on the house anytime.” There’s nothing Morgan loves more than double lattes. Except boys—oh yes, and shopping.

  “Ah,” my father said. He gave me an odd look as he sipped his coffee.

  “Something wrong, Dad?”

  “No. Why?”

  “You’re looking at me funny.”

  “Am I?”

  “If it’s about Mom—”

  I am strictly forbidden from discussing my mother’s personal life with my father. My parents had been separated for three years, divorced for one, and my mom had just agreed to marry financial analyst and all-round nice guy Ted Gold. In fact, she and Ted had just left on a two-week vacation to celebrate their engagement. I was staying with my dad while she was gone.

  “It isn’t about your mother. I was just thinking how quickly you’ve grown up, Robbie.”

  He sounded convincingly wistful. I should have known better.

  Morgan Turner, one of my two best friends in the whole world, was sitting serenely at a booth near the window while La Folie’s waitstaff swirled around her. The restaurant was doing a brisk Saturday morning brunch business.

  “What can I get you, Robyn?” asked Carmine, one of the servers, as I slid in opposite Morgan.

  “Nothing, thanks. We’re not staying.”

  “Yes, we are,” Morgan said. “At least until I finish this.” She raised the giant latte in front of her, took a tiny sip, and settled back against the leather booth. “You know what I wish? I wish I didn’t have to spend one more minute in some musty old library poring over stupid books I’m not even interested in, just to fulfill the requirements of some curriculum writer who probably hasn’t seen the inside of a high school since before we were born.”

  Morgan and I had been paired up for a school project. I could see I was in for a barrel of fun.

  She took another sip. “You know what else I wish?”

  “No.” And I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

  “I wish someone would shoo that girl away. She looks like a junior bag lady. I think her nose is making a grease mark on the glass.”

  I turned to look and was startled by the face pressed against La Folie’s front window.

  “Beej,” I muttered. Short for B.J. I had no idea what B.J. was short for. Beej was a street kid I had met the previous autumn. When she spotted me, she smiled and waved—which made me instantly suspicious.

  “You know her?” Morgan said. Her eyes widened in horror. “Oh God. She’s coming in. Who is she, Robyn? Please tell me she isn’t one of those people from the homeless shelter.” She meant the shelter where I volunteered with my boyfriend, Ben.

  “She’s a friend of Nick’s,” I said.

  Nick was my ex-boyfriend—that is, assuming he’d ever been my boyfriend in the first place. I wasn’t sure about that anymore. He had disappeared a few weeks before Christmas but had recently reappeared. Or so I’d heard.

  “Nick?” Morgan said, suddenly interested. “Has he called you? Have you seen him?”

  “No,” I said. “I haven’t talked to him. I don’t know where he’s staying, and he sure hasn’t bothered to contact me.”

  I told myself that I didn’t care, but it was a lie. I was furious with him for walking out without a word of explanation. I had promised myself that if I ever saw him again, I’d let him know exactly what I thought.

  “Sorry I asked,” Morgan said. Her eyes skipped to the door. “Uh-oh. She’s headed this way.”

  Beej definitely did not fit the profile of a typical La Folie customer. She was wearing faded jeans, a beat-up army jacket, and a wool hat with earflaps. A bulging backpack was slung over one shoulder. She loped toward us, oblivious to the looks of La Folie’s clientele, and dropped down into the booth beside Morgan. Morgan wrinkled her nose and shifted over.

  “Hey, Robyn, long time no see,” Beej said, as if she’d actually missed me. That made me even more suspicious. Beej had always given me the impression that she regarded me as a prissy, spoiled, rich (by her standards) kid. She wriggled free of her backpack, unzipped one of the pockets, and pulled out a CD jewel case, which she shoved across the table to me.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  She gave me a look, as if she was trying to assess exactly how stupid I was. “What does it look like?” she said.

  “You burned some music for me?”

  “Right,” she said.

  “Photos? One of your film projects?”

  I hated to admit it, because I wasn’t any fonder of Beej than she was of me, but she was actually a really good photographer. She spent every penny she could earn or scrounge on her cameras. She had even won a couple of awards at a downtown youth center for her work. She also made short films. She’d done one on street kids that had aired on a local TV station. “It’s a DVD,” she said.

  “About what?”

  “Nick.”

  I shoved it back across the table.

  “Ancient history,” I said.

  “More like breaking news,” Beej said. “I just made it.”

  Morgan examined the DVD with interest. “You made a movie about Nick?”

  Beej glared at her—she and Morgan had never had the pleasure of meeting—snatched the DVD, and slapped it on the table in front of me.

  “You have to watch it,” she said.

  Uh-huh. I hadn’t seen Nick in months, and all of a sudden he was sending Beej to find me an
d give me a DVD that I had to watch? What was on it—an apology? Well, if he wanted to say he was sorry, he was going to have to do it in person. I didn’t touch the DVD. I didn’t even glance at it. Instead, I reached for my coat. Beej shook her head in disgust.

  “You haven’t changed a bit,” she said.

  I pulled the coat on and stood up.

  “We have to get to the library,” I said to Morgan.

  Morgan sighed and, for once, didn’t argue. She waved Carmine over and asked for a to-go cup.

  “Believe me,” Beej said. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important. Nick’s in trouble.”

  It kept getting better.

  “What kind of trouble?” Morgan said.

  “Whatever it is, it’s not my problem,” I said. “Come on, Morgan.”

  “Do me a favor,” Beej said, standing up. “Watch the DVD. There’s a phone number inside the case where you can leave me a message.” She shouldered her backpack.

  I waited until she was gone before I turned to Morgan.

  “Can we go now?” I said.

  “I’ll be just a sec.” Carmine was coming toward the table with a to-go cup, but I couldn’t wait any longer. I didn’t want to be anywhere near that DVD. I headed for the door. “Wait,” Morgan called.

  But by then, I was stepping out onto the street. Who did Nick think he was? He’d told me he loved me, and then he’d just vanished. Two months later, I’d heard he was back in town, but he hadn’t even called. And now he needed my help?

  Right.

  “I guess you don’t want to talk about it,” Morgan said a little later at the library.

  “You guess right,” I said. I looked at the computer screen and jotted down the call number of a book for our project.

  “I wonder what kind of trouble Nick is in,” Morgan said. She was sitting at the workstation next to mine and was supposed to be doing the same thing I was doing. But as far as I could tell, she hadn’t even started searching the library catalog. “Do you think it’s serious?”

  I’d been wondering about that, too, ever since we’d left the restaurant. Beej’s news had thrown me. Nick, in trouble—again—after all the progress he’d made? He had served time in both closed custody (where they lock the doors and don’t let you out, just like prison) and open custody (where they let you out for specific purposes, such as going to school). But he had been getting his life back together. Before he vanished, he’d started going to school again and had been washing dishes part-time at La Folie. My dad had let him have an apartment on the second floor of his building. And I’d been crazy about him . . .

  But that was then. I told myself over and over that he wasn’t my problem anymore.

  “The AV department is on the fifth floor,” Morgan said. “We could take a break and watch that DVD.”

  “First of all,” I said, “how can we take a break when we haven’t done any work yet? Second, we don’t have the DVD. I left it at the restaurant.”

  Morgan dipped into her backpack. “Ta-da!” she said, waving the DVD case. “Come on. Want to take a look?”

  “What I want, Morgan, is to get this assignment done. It counts for 20 percent of our final grade, and I don’t particularly want to have to work on it over March break.”

  “But Nick—”

  “Why are you so interested in Nick all of a sudden?” I spoke louder than I had intended, and the librarian at the information desk gave me a sharp look.

  “You don’t even like him,” I whispered. “You’re the one who kept telling me to forget about him.”

  “I just thought—”

  I snatched the DVD out of her hand and tossed it into the trash. It landed with a satisfying thud.

  “There,” I said. “Now can we get to work?”

  We spent the next several hours gathering information for our project.

  “If we get together again tomorrow and really focus, we can probably finish an outline,” I said.

  Morgan quietly agreed. She was being uncharacteristically subdued.

  “Okay, I’m sorry I snapped at you,’ I said.

  “It’s not your fault. You have unresolved issues with Nick.”

  “Trust me. They’re resolved.”

  Morgan gave me a look that told me she didn’t believe that for a second.

  “Ben and Billy will be here soon,” she said. “I’m going to freshen up. Coming?”

  I shook my head. “I’ll wait for you here.”

  While Morgan was gone, I couldn’t help but think about Nick. If he had sent Beej to find me, then whatever mess he had landed himself in had to be big. But how was that my problem? Nick wasn’t part of my life. He wasn’t my boyfriend anymore. Ben was. Nick was nothing.

  The elevator doors opened at the far end of the cavernous main floor of the library. A janitor trundled out his cleaning cart, beginning a circuit of the area, ducking down to scoop up trash and recycling bins and dump their contents into his cart. In a couple of minutes Nick’s DVD would be history. I wouldn’t have to think about it ever again.

  I placed all the books Morgan and I had used in the middle of the table so that they could be reshelved. Then I heard the click of wheels. Behind me, the janitor bent down and picked up the trash bin closest to the computers where Morgan and I had been working earlier.

  “Wait!” I cried.

  The janitor turned to look at me. So did almost everyone else in the vicinity. I ran over to the cleaning cart.

  “I threw something away by accident,” I said and thrust my hand into the basket, which fortunately, contained nothing gross. The janitor didn’t say a word. He tipped the rest of the contents into a container on his cart, replaced the liner, and moved on. When I turned to retrieve my backpack, Morgan was grinning at me through a fresh application of lipstick. To her credit, she said nothing.

  We ended up going to Ben’s house, where Billy and Morgan got to see Ben’s brand-new baby half sister for the first time. Billy was mesmerized. He was also in awe of the ease with which Ben lifted her from her basket and held her in the crook of his arm. Billy’s sister was expecting her first baby. Maybe Billy was trying to imagine himself in the role of doting uncle.

  We ordered pizza (vegan, otherwise Billy wouldn’t touch it) and watched a movie before Ben drove us all home. He dropped Billy off first, then Morgan, and finally pulled up in front of my father’s building.

  “You were pretty quiet tonight,” he said. “Is everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine,” I said. But the truth was that I couldn’t have told him a thing about the movie we’d spent two hours watching. “Morgan and I were assigned a big project that we want to finish before March break, which means we’re going to have to work on it all day tomorrow.”

  “I know that feeling,” Ben said sympathetically. He leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “I’ll call you tomorrow and see how you’re doing,” he said, and kissed me again.

  It was silent in my dad’s loft when I got upstairs. His keys were on the counter in the kitchen and his coat was on a hanger. He must have made an early night of it.

  I dug the DVD out of my backpack; popped it into our DVD player, taking care to keep the volume low; and pulled a chair up close.

  I had thought I was prepared for what I was about to see, but when Nick’s face appeared on the screen, I knew I was wrong.

  CHAPTER TWO

  N

  ick’s thick black hair was longer than it had been the last time I’d seen him. He looked thinner too and tired, as if he hadn’t slept in days. The hairline scar that ran from the bridge of his nose to the bottom of his right ear stood out against his pale skin. He was sitting in an armchair in a brightly lit room. His first words were “What’s the point? They caught me with some of the stuff on me. They have the crowbar. I’m screwed.

  “They say they’ll make a deal with me if I tell them what I did with the rest of it. But they’re going to lock me up, Beej. With all the trouble I’ve been in, they’re going
to lock me up for sure.”

  “That’s why you should make a record of what happened,” Beej said.

  “What’s the point?” Nick said again. I moved a hand toward the screen to touch his face, then pulled it back when I realized what I was doing.

  “The cops make a record of everything,” Beej said. “You should make a record too while everything’s fresh in your mind. It always helps to talk things out.”

  Nick shook his head.

  “Okay,” Beej said. “So maybe I’ll get into Sundance with my documentary about Nick D’Angelo and his many brushes with the law.”

  If she was trying to lighten his mood, it didn’t work. Nick sank back in his chair and stared close-mouthed into the camera. He hadn’t sent Beej to deliver the DVD to me. He hadn’t even wanted her to make it.

  “Did you do it?” Beej said.

  Nick stared sullenly at the camera and didn’t answer.

  “Why don’t you start by telling what happened to Mr. Schuster?” Beej said.

  Nick and I had met Mort Schuster last summer. I had been volunteering at an animal shelter, and Nick was in a special anger management program there. The program was supposed to teach him and some other kids patience and self-control by training them to work with dogs that had behavior problems of their own. The human participants learned how to control their frustration by helping the canine participants overcome their problems so that they could be adopted rather than put down. Nick had trained a big black beast named Orion. When the program ended, Schuster, a volunteer at the shelter, adopted Orion. Then, because Mr. Schuster wasn’t able to walk long distances and because he had grown fond of Nick, he hired Nick as a dog walker.

  “You already know what happened,” Nick said.

  “Humor me,” Beej said, her patience wearing thin.

  Nick stared at the camera again. “I got back to the house after walking Orion and found Mr. Schuster lying on the floor. He couldn’t move. I called 9-1-1. They took him to the hospital.”

  “Did Mr. Schuster say anything to you before they took him away?”