Central Park Showdown Read online

  ‘I know I checked it,’ I said to nobody in particular.

  ‘We believe you,’ said Greg, ‘the question is who loosened it?’

  ‘What are you on about?’ asked Lorcan.

  ‘Who had both the motive and the opportunity?’ said Greg.

  ‘Camille,’ Kylie suggested.

  ‘She was stuck to my side like superglue since we got here,’ said Lorcan.

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Greg.

  ‘I think so,’ said Lorcan, ‘she might have gone to the bathroom or something for a couple of minutes.’

  ‘Camille’s no fan of mine but I don’t think she’d try and get me killed and anyway, she’s terrified of horses. I can’t imagine her going anywhere near Luna,’ I interjected.

  ‘Anyone else wander off during the time Evie tacked up and went out for inspection?’ asked Greg.

  ‘That Coltan dude, the reception in the barn was terrible and he went out to text someone,’ said Lorcan.

  ‘Coltan never even remembers Evie’s name,’ said Greg, ‘why would he want to hurt her?’

  Nobody said anything for a few moments and I patted Luna’s neck.

  ‘Finn,’ said Lorcan. ‘He disappeared when Evie was in the stables.’

  ‘It wasn’t Finn,’ Greg and I said quickly in unison.

  ‘And he rescued me,’ I pointed out.

  ‘He didn’t exactly rescue you,’ said Lorcan. ‘He could have put you in a wheelchair for life impulsively moving you like that. What if your neck had been broken? And it was none of his business, why doesn’t he stick to looking after his own girlfriend?

  We all looked at Lorcan in surprise; he’s such a cool laid-back guy, it’s not like him to bother to get angry and it’s not like I’m his girlfriend.

  ‘You don’t know the first thing about my brother,’ said Greg.

  Lorcan shrugged.

  ‘Come on, let’s go back in and watch Tamara,’ I said hastily, ‘Scott will be here soon.’

  ‘The attempted murder mystery will remain unsolved for now,’ said Greg, typing some notes in the mini-iPad he had taken to carrying around.

  Chapter 10

  We had our fourth snowstorm of the year a few days ago. The doormen are fed up with shoveling the snow from the sidewalk in front of our building. The snow is no longer pure or white or soft. It is a filthy forlorn grey, strewn with garbage, packed as hard as cement in banks along the edges of the sidewalks in Manhattan. On the corners of every block, the foot traffic has created deep holes in the snow filled with murky icy water. It’s impossible to go anywhere in the city without trudging through them (or falling into them). In Ireland, a big snowstorm is such a rarity that it would bring the country to a standstill for a week. Schools and offices would close. Snow meant freedom. Here, it means more work for nearly everyone and lots of complaining on the subway about the Mayor of New York for not having the snow cleared up fast enough. Nothing is ever done fast enough for New Yorkers.

  I have never felt cold like this. The cold burns on the inside and out and turns my lips blue. In the mornings on the way to school, I stop at a deli to buy a blue and white paper cup filled with grainy black coffee that tastes disgusting like lukewarm Bovril. But I don’t buy it to drink, I buy it to hold when my fingers start to hurt, to bring some sensation back into my hands already enclosed in two pairs of gloves.

  Holly insisted on giving me a pair of her earmuffs. They are unusually large, hairy and canary yellow. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings by refusing them. My compassion towards her feelings does not extend to wearing those hideous earmuffs all the way to school. I always take them off and stow them in my schoolbag at least three blocks away. This morning, that safety precaution was sadly inadequate. Camille somehow managed to snap an extremely unflattering photograph of me in all the glory of my oversized yellow earmuffs, and had it up on Facebook before I even arrived at school. It was maddening.

  Greg is also maddening. He thinks that Kylie likes Akono as in like like. That’s ridiculous. Kylie is ALWAYS going on about the sacrifices she has to make in order to succeed in being famous one day. One of the biggest sacrifices is in the realm of personal romantic relationships. Kylie does not have time for boys. And anyway, even if she decided to break her own rules, she would never go for someone nice and normal like Akono.

  When I arrived home from school today, Scott said we needed to have a talk. He said it in such a serious voice that I quickly scanned through my brain for crimes but I couldn’t think of anything that bad, not recently anyway.

  ‘You’re not in any trouble,’ said Scott, ‘we just need to talk … about your dad.’

  ‘You mean Michael,’ I said (calling him my dad is just too freaky).

  ‘Yes, Michael,’ said Scott, ‘he’s filed a lawsuit trying to claim custody of you.’

  I blinked, confused. ‘I know and your lawyer made it go away.’

  ‘That was the idea;’ said Scott, ‘my lawyer made the application to get Michael’s claims dismissed and we won. But Michael appealed and a bunch of four grumpy old men and one uptight old woman, the appeal judges, decided Michael can go ahead with his case, in the interests of justice or something like that. Some justice, huh!’

  ‘What are you saying? Michael won? I have to leave New York and go live with a total stranger who could be a complete psycho.’

  ‘No. No way. Not gonna happen!’ said Scott. ‘It just means we have to go through some more rounds in the court process.’

  ‘How can you be so sure Michael won’t win? I mean, last time, you made out it was all easy-peasy lemon squeezy. You said it was just like a parking ticket case. That’s what you said.’

  ‘I know I did,’ Scott said quietly, ‘that’s what I thought. But trust me, there’s no way any sane judge in the US of A is going to give custody to Michael.’

  ‘But what if we don’t get a sane judge? What if we get the craziest judge in America or some judge that takes bribes, like that judge out in Brooklyn that Joanna was talking about last year, remember, it was on Fox news. What if–’

  ‘Whoa, Evie, breathe! It’s going to work out. We have to take it one step at a time or we’re the ones that will go nuts!’

  ‘I can’t believe this is happening,’ I said, ‘it’s like a nightmare. How could those appeal judges let Michael do this? They’ve never even met us. Do they know I am THIRTEEN?’

  Scott ran his hands through his hair.

  ‘Yes, I guess so. I don’t know. We will deal with all this. It’s just going to take longer than we figured to get rid of this guy.’

  ‘A trial,’ I wailed, ‘more lawyer stuff. Way more money. You can’t afford this Scott. Maybe the best thing to do is for me to go back to Ireland for a while. I could stay with Janet’s parents in Dingle in the middle of nowhere, just until Michael gives up and goes back to wherever he’s been hiding for the last thirteen years.

  ‘Hey, I don’t want to hear talk like that. You. Me. Ben. We’re a family. Remember! We’ll get through this and the extra money from the Zoo will help pay the legal bills. Let’s take things one at a time. First, you have to get a blood test done to see if this guy really is your Dad.’

  Scott hugged me and I blinked back some tears. They were not tears of sadness. They were tears of pure rage with Michael and with the judges and with the whole stupid system. Could some New York judge ship me off to Australia like some poor, ancient convict who stole a loaf of bread because his family was starving? That was crazy.

  Later that evening, when I finally got my head together a bit, I went out to meet Kylie and Greg at one of the huge multiplex cinemas at Times Square. I wasn’t in the mood for watching a movie, but I didn’t want to stay alone in my room either. I was late. Greg and Kylie were waiting for me in the lobby, having already loaded up on popcorn and nachos and super-size sodas. Akono was with them, which was a bit weird because he’s older, Finn’s friend, not ours. Kylie told me she guessed he didn’t have anything better to do.

 
The movie was boring and excruciatingly long. It had been Greg’s idea to see a zombie film anyway. I wanted to tell Kylie about what had happened, about Michael, but she was whispering to Akono the whole time. I kept trying to whisper my news to Greg but each time I said, ‘Greg,’ and he said ‘what?’ I said ‘nothing.’ After three times, he took off his 3-D glasses and said that I was making him miss all the best blood and gore parts of the movie so there was no point in bothering to watch it. I said ‘sorry,’ and he put the glasses back on and I gave him my popcorn because I wasn’t hungry.

  I couldn’t concentrate on what was happening on the screen. My head was spinning crazily with my own homemade movies, in the horror genre. In my imagination, Michael won the custody trial and shipped me off to work as a slave in the deep, dark, suffocating, filthy darkness of a tin mine in the Australian outback where I would probably die in a year or so as a result of being smothered by a cave-in. I knew I was thinking crazy thoughts. Do they even mine tin in Australia? But I couldn’t get my head to switch off. I couldn’t even switch the channel or turn the volume down. My mind was stuck, thinking whatever stupid scary thoughts it wanted to think. It didn’t care about what I wanted to think about. As the closing credits rolled, Greg glanced at me,

  ‘Are you ok?’ he asked.

  I nodded.

  ‘You’re dripping with sweat and you look pale,’ he said.

  ‘I’m fine, I’m just tired,’ I said and I thought, maybe Michael is one of those weird twisted maniacs that will make me sleep in a coffin and live on a diet of meagre scraps, like a poor neglected dog that is blind in one eye.

  Holly texted me to say Scott had an emergency call from the zoo and he’d asked her to come meet me. I’m not allowed to take the subway at night by myself and Kylie and Greg both live on the East Side. Akono offered to take Kylie home, which is totally out of his way because he lives down in Battery Park City. Greg whispered to me,

  ‘I told you there’s something going on between those two.’

  He didn’t say it in a smug, I-told-you-so voice, more like a resigned, and now, we can say goodbye to Kylie forever tone. Greg reads too much into things.

  Holly talked the whole way on the subway home, but I wasn’t really listening. There were advertisements plastered along the top of the subway carriage – for a personal injury law firm in New Jersey, a cosmetic dental surgeon in the Bronx and for a Learn English Fast course in Bayside in Queens. The New Jersey law firm advert consisted of a photograph of a man with dyed black hair in a cheap grey suit with a phony smile, holding up a cheque as big as a chair with a lot of zeroes on it. ‘This could be you,’ the ad promised.

  That lawyer could be him, I thought, my dad. He could be anyone. He could be sitting here in the same subway carriage as me and I wouldn’t know. He could be watching me right now and I wouldn’t know. I looked around the half-full subway feeling creeped out, but nobody was remotely interested in me; their eyes were on the floor or on their phones or closed with exhaustion. Nobody looks more tired than a New York subway-rider.

  Holly said something about my dad. That caught my attention and I turned to look at her.

  ‘What was that?’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be hard on Scottie for not telling you about your dad’s appeal, he’s just trying to do what’s best for you,’ Holly said, ‘although you know, it’s real nice, sugar, that you have a dad who is interested in having you.’

  It made me feel SO mad that Holly, a practical stranger, the part-time receptionist, had obviously known all about the appeal when I hadn’t known a thing.

  ‘Yeah, whatever,’ I said rudely, ‘interested after thirteen years.’

  ‘Better late than never, sugar,’ said Holly and I rolled my eyes.

  ‘Yeah, that and a thousand other oh-so-comforting clichés, thank you so much,’ I said, ‘that was super helpful and incredibly useful.’

  Holly stopped talking, which isn’t like her at all. She took a hand mirror out of her purse, the size of a small suitcase and began fixing her hair.

  ‘And don’t call him my DAD,’ I practically shouted at her. She twirled a strand of her yellow hair around one of her fingers and didn’t answer.

  I felt a sharp pain in my stomach. I might have a stone in my gallbladder, I thought hopefully, remembering the terrible pain David, my mum’s friend, had in his stomach the Easter before last. But really, I knew perfectly well, my gallbladder was pebble-free. The pain was just my totally deserved guilt for being such a horrible mean brat and to a genuinely sweet person like Holly who was only trying to help me. How low could I go?

  ‘I’m so sorry Holly for being such a big pain in the butt,’ I said hoarsely, ‘I’m just kind of mad with everyone today. I hate that guy, Michael, for messing around in our lives.’

  Holly smiled at me, a genuine wide smile, instantly forgiving me and I felt even more remorseful. I pushed my hair back from my eyes.

  ‘You grew up without your dad?’ I asked.

  Holly laughed and shook her head. ‘Hell, no, his trailer was in the same park as ours; I saw him all the time but that loser never had any interest in me. He wasn’t interested in anyone, not even himself, the only thing he cared about was beer.’

  ‘Sounds awful,’ I said.

  ‘Nah, it wasn’t too bad, he didn’t cause trouble, he was a weak man, not a bad one.’

  I didn’t know what to say about that. I started thinking about Michael again. Holly glanced at me and said,

  ‘Boy, am I jealous of Joanna lazing around in Mexico or somewhere having fun while we’re freezing our little butts off here in subzero temperatures.’

  ‘Joanna wouldn’t even know how to begin to laze around,’ I said. ‘Scott and I are so good at it. Joanna’s with Jeffrey; they’ve gone on a field trip to Texas. It’s a working volunteer holiday. They’re helping to record the current numbers of the Braken Bat Cave Meshweaver.’

  ‘Joanna has gone to some stinky cave with bats to weave nets?’ asked Holly in a horrified voice, glancing quickly around the subway carriage as if to expecting to see vampire bats drop down from the ceiling.

  ‘No, a Braken Bat Cave Meshweaver is a spider. It’s a very difficult name and I don’t think it was a bright idea to have the words ‘Bat Cave,’ in a spider name; you are bound to think of bats!’

  ‘Why would anyone want to spend their vacation time counting spiders,’ asked Holly with a shudder.

  ‘They’re an endangered species,’ I explained.

  Joanna had shown me a photograph of the spider last week – a jelly-pink, flesh-coloured, almost transparent blobby thing that looks like a naked spider foetus. I nearly screamed when I saw it. ‘That thing is disgusting,’ I had said truthfully. Joanna said that it is easy to be a wildlife enthusiast when it comes to the ‘cute’ animals. ‘Yes, it is,’ I’d agreed.

  Walking home from our subway stop on 72nd Street, Holly kept insisting that Joanna and Jeffrey were really on sun loungers knocking back margaritas in Cancun. Holly doesn’t know Joanna very well because she hates sunbathing. And, Holly certainly doesn’t know Joanna’s boyfriend, Jeffrey. He hasn’t taken a real vacation since he was twelve or at least, that’s what he told Scott. He bragged about it like that was a good thing.

  By the time Holly and I reached home I felt in a much better mood and totally distracted by the whole spider/Joanna/Jeffrey tangents. It was only much later after Holly had gone home and I was in bed that I wondered if Holly had deliberately distracted me from thinking about Michael and the custody case. I think – probably yes and it had worked, I felt in control of my mind again, which was a huge relief. Holly is much smarter than she sometimes gets credit for.

  Chapter 11

  Sunday is my least favourite day of the week. It’s a long, boring chunk of time you have to pass through until school on Monday morning. It’s like treading water during swimming class. Almost every single second of Sunday, I’m horribly aware that I should be doing my weekend homework, but Sundays are dep
ressing enough without throwing homework into the mix. I think we should all get credit for just surviving them.

  It’s different for Scott because he watches football every Sunday night so he actually looks forward to them. I don’t feel up to the challenge of learning the rules of American football this year; I still have not fully mastered baseball.

  Today, however, was no ordinary, simply surviving Sunday. It began with an emergency. Greg had taken Dr Pepper for some fresh air in Central Park and somehow, somewhere, Dr Pepper had vanished. Yep. One average-sized, black rabbit alone in the wilds of Central Park. That might not sound terribly alarming but coyotes have been spotted in the Park this year.

  Kylie was at her ice-skating class so as soon as I got off the phone with a panicked Greg, I called Lorcan to come help. We met at the Delacorte Theatre near my end of the Park, which was the meeting point for all the volunteer rescuers. Finn took charge of the rescue efforts. He brought a bunch of maps of the Park, which had been divided into quadrants and he assigned all of the volunteers a different quadrant to search. Tamara couldn’t come because she had to study for some big test, but her twin brother, Coltan, whom I still can’t stand, was there, which didn’t make any sense as he’s the last person in the world to care about a missing rabbit. He hung around close to Finn, making a lot of surprisingly helpful and clever suggestions about organising the search. I wasn’t buying it. Coltan never reaches out to help anyone unless there’s something in it for him. He must want something from Finn but God knows what that is. A bunch of kids from school turned up to help and Luke and Luca, a pair of identical twins from Greg’s Young Film-Makers of Tomorrow class. Angela, Greg’s mom, came along with her boyfriend, Leonard. She brought flasks of hot chocolate for us, the really good, double-chocolatey kind from Dean & DeLuca.