Total pages in book: 30
Estimated words: 28104 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 141(@200wpm)___ 112(@250wpm)___ 94(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 28104 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 141(@200wpm)___ 112(@250wpm)___ 94(@300wpm)
"And you told her," Aislinn said.
"There was money." Mrs. Kimberly's voice cracked down the middle. "Every month, regular as a pension. I'm seventy-three, my husband left me a mortgage and a bird, what was I supposed to, it was only talk, it was only ever talk, I never thought talk could—" She stopped. Her eyes went to Aislinn's face and couldn't hold it. "Then last week there was a man at your door with a knife, and the day after that, half the city was saying your little boy belonged to Valerio Le Sabre. And I thought, that's it, that's what the talk was for, all these years somebody's been building something out of my talk, and whatever it is, it's finished being built. So I ran."
"They paid her for gossip," Aislinn said to Valerio, faintly, as though saying it plainly might make it make sense. "For four years. They pay for gossip?"
"Good gossip," Valerio said, "is the cheapest surveillance there is."
"I kept one." Mrs. Kimberly was already shuffling toward the hallway sideboard, glad of a task, any task, that wasn't being looked at. "You'll think I'm a wicked old woman, and maybe I am, but you don't take strange money for four years without keeping something in a drawer. Insurance, my husband used to call it."
The envelope she brought back was ordinary. Plain, white, her name in laser print, cash long gone. Valerio turned it over once, and went still.
"Aislinn."
She leaned in. In the corner where a stamp should have been sat a red machine-printed marking, a franking stamp, the kind offices used for bulk mail, and its little inked ring of text was as ordinary as the envelope and so much worse. She'd seen it a hundred times, on permission slips and fundraising letters and strongly encouraged invitations.
It belonged to the school.
"Envelopes again," she heard herself say. "Dominguez got envelopes too."
"Same buyer." Valerio was looking at the franking mark the way he'd looked at Louis's list. "But Dominguez's caller claimed to be from the school. Anyone can claim. This," he tapped the red ring, once, "was posted from inside it. Through the front office machine. Whoever they are, they don't just know your school, ma belle. They work there."
The kitchen went very quiet, except for the sister's bird, somewhere down the hall, cheerfully saying a word it shouldn't know.
They left Mrs. Kimberly with three conditions and one mercy. The conditions were Minna, a full statement, and her signature. The mercy was that Aislinn, at the door, took the old woman's shaking hands in both of hers and said she hoped the bird was good company, and that seventy-three was too old to spend running, and Mrs. Kimberly cried harder at that than she had at anything Valerio said, which Valerio, privately, understood completely.
In the car, Louis surrendered the juice box evidence and read their faces with one sweep.
"Item five went well?"
"Item five is resolved," Valerio said. "And it came with information."
"The kind of information where I should put my headphones on?"
"The kind," his father said, pulling out his phone, "where you should teach your mother the rules of chess, because this call is boring and she'll need the skill by Thursday."
Aislinn blinked. "What's Thursday?"
Valerio put the phone to his ear. Somewhere in the city, Minna answered on the first ring.
"Clear your Thursday," he told his cousin, watching the school's red ink dry on eight years of questions. "We're going to a parent council meeting."
Chapter Twelve
THURSDAY MORNING, AISLINN woke up smiling, which was becoming a habit, reached out, and found the bed empty on both frontiers.
Louis and Valerio were already dressed. Both of them. Standing at the foot of the bed like a small committee.
That was the first alarm. The second was her phone, blinking on the nightstand, and the email opened before she was fully upright, and then she was very upright.
"There's a parent council meeting, Louis is—"
"We know."
"How do you—wait, Louis?" She rounded on her son. "Did you hack into your school's system?"
Louis quickly shook his head.
She started to sigh in relief.
"Because Papa already did it."
"Valerio!"
"Louis wasn't accurate." Valerio adjusted his cuff, entirely unrepentant. "I was hacking the parents' phones, not the school's. Only fair, since they were all talking about you."
Aislinn opened her mouth, closed it, and stared at the two identical faces in front of her, one of which had the decency to look slightly sheepish, and the sheepish one did not belong to the seven-year-old.
The school had that swept, braced look of a place expecting weather. Parents were already filing into the council room in their best fabrics, and staff stood along the walls, and every single conversation died wherever Aislinn walked, which in a strange way was almost restful, like the world had finally agreed to gossip about her in bulk rather than retail.