Out of the Cold

NORAH McCLINTOCK

TO MR. JONES

CHAPTER
ONE

M

y father's enormous loft was as silent as a mortuary and as dark as the inside of a coffin—except for the glow from his study. I walked toward it.

Staring out at me from the computer screen at my dad's desk was a not-quite-right likeness of Ted Gold, the man my mother had been seeing for almost a year. My parents are divorced. Despite my mother's best efforts to keep her personal life, well,
personal
, my father is well aware of Ted. He'd even met him a couple of times—
not
my mother's idea. I stared at the Ted-like picture on the screen and wondered what my father was up to. Knowing him, probably nothing my mother would approve of.

Somewhere else in the loft, something hit the floor with a bang.

I jumped. “Dad?”

I poked my head out of his study just in time to see someone—a woman I had never seen before—picking a heavy hardcover book up from the floor. She was wearing a bathrobe and had a towel wound around her head. She didn't look anywhere near as surprised to see me as I was to see her.

“You must be Robyn,” she said, smiling. “Mac was hoping to be here when you arrived, but he called to say that he was running late.” That was typical of my father. He has made a career out of being late for every type of occasion, from school concerts to wedding anniversary celebrations, which helps explain why he and my mother are no longer married. “He asked me to tell you he should be home by nine.” She glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. “Uh-oh. If I don't get going,
I'm
going to be late.” She disappeared into what was supposed to be
my
room, but which my dad also uses as a guest room. “Nice to meet you,” she said as she closed the door.

Meet me? She hadn't even told me her name.

Okay, so a woman I had never seen before (an awfully
young
woman, considering that my father was firmly in his forties) had taken a shower, or maybe a bath, in my father's bathroom and was getting dressed in my (parttime) bedroom. What was a girl supposed to do in an awkward (for me, if not for her) situation like this?

I decided to bail. I left my suitcase near the front door where I had dropped it and went downstairs to see if Nick was around.

I hadn't seen Nick in seven days—and before that, I hadn't seen him alone, just the two of us, in weeks. My mother claimed that she had nothing against Nick personally, but that didn't mean she considered him ideal boyfriend material for me. Nick has had a few problems, some of them with the law. He also didn't have what my mother would consider the best family situation. Both of his parents are dead. His stepfather and stepbrother are both in prison. Nick is supposed to be living with his aunt, but that didn't work out—Nick didn't get along with his aunt's new boyfriend. So for the last couple of months he'd been renting an apartment from my father, who owns a building that used to be a carpet factory. My father lives on the top floor. The first floor is occupied by a trendy gourmet restaurant called La Folie. The second floor consists of six apartments. Nick lives in one of them. My mother has never been comfortable with that. She was much, much less comfortable after what had happened last month, before I went on a weeklong school trip.

“You were almost killed,” she'd said. “And it was all Nick's fault.”

It wasn't
all
Nick's fault, but there was no point in arguing with my mother. And I hadn't been killed. Everything had worked out just fine. But that hadn't stopped my mother from having a total meltdown. She forbade me to see Nick ever again. She ordered my father to evict him and was furious when he refused. “Fine,” she'd said. “Robyn is not setting foot in that building as long as that boy is there.” I argued with her until I almost lost my voice. In the end, it was Ted who negotiated a compromise—basically, a month of extremely limited access that broke down like this: I wasn't allowed to see Nick or even talk to him for a whole week. For two weeks after that, I could only see him in my mother's or Ted's presence. Nick had been so uncomfortable after the first time that mostly we had just talked on the phone. Who could blame him? My mother had allowed him to come over to her house to watch a movie with me and then had sat in one corner of the room the whole time—reading, supposedly. I had hoped my father would cut us some slack. He hadn't. Other than refusing to evict Nick, he had gone along with my mother. He didn't want to make waves. “Your mom has every right to be upset,” he'd said.

For the final week, I was out of town. My mother had looked relieved when she saw me off on the bus.

But, at long last, my punishment was over. I could see Nick whenever I wanted—without a chaperone. I couldn't wait. I had called him a couple of times while I was out of town, but he hadn't answered his phone. He'd probably been working. Nick put in a lot of hours at a part-time job. He also went to school. That didn't leave him with a lot of spare time.

My heart was pounding as I knocked on his door.

There was no answer.

I knocked again.

Still no answer. He wasn't home.

I heard footsteps in the stairwell. Nick? But no, instead of coming up from street level, the footsteps were coming down from the third floor. Must have been the mystery woman from my father's place. I waited in the second-floor hallway until I heard the door on the ground floor swoosh open and clang shut again. Then I went down to La Folie. Nick had landed a job there (thanks to my father) right after he had supposedly almost got me killed and shortly after he had broken his ankle. He was probably in La Folie's kitchen, perched on a stool, scraping plates and loading them into the industrial dishwasher.

  .    .    .

“Isn't Nick working today?” I asked Lauren, the hostess.

She gave me a funny look. “No,” she said. “He isn't.” I was pretty sure she was going to say something else, but just then a party of six came through the door. “Excuse me, Robyn,” she said as she bustled away.

If Nick wasn't at home and he wasn't at work, maybe he was visiting his aunt. Or maybe he was just out. I went back up to my father's place and lugged my suitcase to my room. I'll say one thing for the mystery woman—she was neat. Everything was exactly as I had left it. You would never have known that she'd been there at all. I was on my way to the kitchen to make a cup of tea when I heard the door. It was my father. His face lit up when he saw me.

“Robbie! How was the trip?” he said. “Did you have a good time?”

I had spent the past week on what my school had billed as a cultural field trip, but there had been no fields involved. This trip had been decidedly urban—three days of lectures and handson learning at a museum, two days of educational sightseeing, and an evening at the theatre. My best friend Morgan had gone too, and we had been rooming together, which meant, “I had a pretty good time, Dad.”

My father was still smiling while he looked around. “Where's—”

“She said she had to run. Who is she, anyway?”

“Tara?”

So that was her name.

“You hungry?” my father said as he hung up his coat. “Because I'm starving.”

“I'm fine.” I followed him into the kitchen and took a seat at the counter while he rummaged around in the fridge. “So who exactly is she?”

Out came a chunk of cheese—extra-old cheddar, I think—and the end of a ham, followed by a jar of Dijon mustard, a tomato, half a loaf of dark bread, and a container of coleslaw.