“…such a beautiful girl,” Ms. Lopez was saying. “That hair—all those auburn curls!”
“Yes, she’s very pretty,” Olivia agreed.
Ms. Lopez continued, “And as striking as Lucky is, you’d think someone somewhere would have noticed her and remembered her. But the police can’t track her, and she won’t tell us anything about herself except for that ridiculous name. Lucky Deal—what kind of a name is that?”
“Obviously fake,” Steven answered.
“Making it impossible to trace,” Ms. Lopez added.
Jack knew it was wrong to eavesdrop, but he couldn’t stop himself. He stayed hidden behind the wall, listening intently as Ms. Lopez talked to his parents.
“She’s a charmer, but at times she can act quite odd. We’d interrogated her—unsuccessfully, I might add—and we’d begun filling out the papers to bring her here. All of a sudden she jumped up and demanded to make a phone call. It had to be right then, she insisted, that very minute. She created a huge fuss, yelling that even if she was a juvenile, she was entitled to one phone call.”
“Was she?” Olivia asked.
“No, but we let her use the phone anyway. Since she refused to tell us who she was calling, we wanted to trace it.”
“Who was it to?” Steven wondered.
“We didn’t find out. But we do know she dialed the number of a phone booth in Park City, Utah.”
Hesitating, Jack decided this was not the time to walk into the kitchen and rummage through the refrigerator for a soft drink. The last words he heard as he turned away were a warning from Ms. Lopez.
“It sounds as if your assignment at Mesa Verde is an important one, Olivia, and I can’t tell you how grateful we are that you’re willing to include Lucky in your plans at the last minute like this. Our agency is hoping that a trip to a beautiful park might be just the distraction she needs to let down her defenses and tell you about herself. But….”
“But what?” Olivia asked.
“You’ll need to be careful. There’s something not quite right about Lucky.”
“Meaning?” Steven asked.
“Meaning—watch your back. Lucky’s a handful. Cougars aren’t the only creatures that can turn on you.”
CHAPTER TWO
Jack tossed restlessly. Lying flat on the edge of the cliff, he clutched brittle rock with his fingernails as he stared down a vast chasm to the canyon floor. Then the rock crumbled into sand, shattering his safe handhold, plunging him into peril. He was falling. He heard the wind, heard Lucky’s voice whisper, “Mesa Verde.” Or maybe it was the wind that sighed the words as they streamed around him: “Flying. Flying. To Colorado.”
With a start, he rose out of the terrifying plunge of his dream to find his fingers curled stiffly around the edge of his quilt. Still, the soft voice whispered inside his head, even after he convinced himself he was awake and was no longer dreaming. Jack rolled out of his bed onto his feet and padded to the bedroom door, opening it just a crack.
A small, arched alcove in the hall held one of the Landons’ telephones. Lucky stood there, hunched over, cradling the receiver, speaking in low tones with her back turned toward Jack’s door. Barefoot, she’d wrapped herself in a terry cloth robe Olivia had lent her. As she pressed the phone against her ear, the robe’s full sleeve slid back to reveal her wristwatch. Jack had noticed the watch earlier in the evening. He remembered thinking then that it was a large, chunky-looking one for a girl to wear. More like a man’s. Now he could easily read the glowing digital numbers: 2:10 a.m. The middle of the night.
“It’ll be OK,” she was saying softly. “Don’t worry so much. I can handle them.”
She hung up then. When she turned around and noticed Jack, she jumped in surprise. No smile this time: Her startled eyes turned as cold as green ice. “What did you hear?” she demanded.
He stammered, “Nothing. Just, like, something about you can handle—I don’t know what.” His eyebrows drew together as his mind focused on her and on the telephone that now lay back in its cradle. She shouldn’t be here, calling someone in secret. The last of his sleepiness evaporated as his mind finally comprehended what was happening. “Wait, what are you doing? Who were you calling?”
It seemed to Jack that a lot of different looks flitted across Lucky’s face, as if she were searching for the right one. Suddenly, her face turned soft, pleading.
“Shhhh!” She pointed toward Steven and Olivia’s bedroom door. “Quiet! Please?” Then, gesturing toward the living room, she tiptoed down the hall, away from where the rest of the Landons were sleeping. Jack followed, not sure what he should do, but knowing he could call out for his folks in an instant if he needed them. For now, he wanted to understand what Lucky was up to.
She motioned for him to sit on the couch, then perched on a footstool opposite him, gazing at him like someone about to ask a favor. Keep it together, Jack warned himself. Stay cool. Get information. “So,” he asked softly. “What’s going on?”
“I…I don’t know if I can tell you,” she whispered. Then, a beat later, she added, “I don’t know if I should.”
“What is it?”
Lucky stayed silent.
“Is it something bad?”
“Yes.”
Bad! Jack’s stomach squeezed. With a foster kid that could mean all kinds of things, problems that Jack wouldn’t know how to deal with. “Listen,” he began, “maybe I should get my folks—”
“No!” Lucky said the word with such force that Jack blinked. “I’m sorry, it’s just—I need to tell someone, and I thought, since you’re so….” She took a breath, then shook her head. “But not anyone else—not your folks and not the social workers. Your mom’s already all upset about the cougar and all the problems at Mesa Verde. She couldn’t handle this, too. She’d send me back, and that could get me killed.”
“Killed! Wait a minute, wait a minute. I don’t get this. I need to go one step at a time. Who was on the phone?”
“Maria. She’s my friend from where I used to live.”
Jack turned on a small table lamp, which sent a flare of light through the room. He had to be able to see her better, to make sense of the words going into his head. “Maria—is she the one who’s trying to hurt you?”
“No. Jack, Maria was almost killed by gang members.”
“Gang members?”
“We were together—Maria and me—when we saw the gang do a crime. They found us out.” Lucky squeezed her eyes shut, but continued. “We tried to run, but they caught us and said that if we ever told, they’d find us both and kill us. Maria started screaming. They didn’t like that. They beat her up real, real bad.” She shuddered, barely whispering the last words. “I was faster. I got away.”
“Gang members?” Jack knew he sounded incredulous, but he couldn’t help it. Ms. Lopez had warned his parents to be careful of Lucky. Maybe he should be, too. His thoughts must have shown on his face, because suddenly, her green eyes pierced him like a laser. “You think I’m lying? You think I’m making this whole thing up?”
Now it was Jack’s turn to stay silent.
“You want me to prove it? Is that what it takes for you to believe?” Pulling up the right sleeve of the robe, Lucky revealed a nasty bruise, like an ugly shadow, on her forearm. “They gave me this,” she told him.
She must have been hit, and hit hard. Nothing short of a hard punch