Things We Do in the Dark(44)

“You’ll be sharing the older boys’ room.” Tito Micky was wheezing slightly, the years of cigarettes and booze preparing him not at all for any sort of heavy lifting. Interestingly, his back injury—the reason he was able to collect disability—seemed fine. “Everything happened so fast we didn’t get a chance yet to buy a bed.”

“That’s okay,” Joey said.

Tita Flora appeared in the bedroom doorway with Deborah, who frowned.

“This is just temporary,” her aunt explained. “Our youngest boy sleeps with my mother because he still needs help using the bathroom. But in a few months, Carson can sleep with his brothers in here, and we can move Joey’s bed into her lola’s room.”

“What bed?” Deborah’s tone was blunt. “All I see is a mattress, and Joelle will need a proper bed so she’s not sleeping four inches from the floor. When we spoke on the phone, you assured me her room would be ready.”

“It’s ordered.” Tita Flora looked at her husband. “From Sears. Right, Mick?”

It took Tito Micky a second to catch on. “Yes, it’s coming soon.” He was a terrible liar. “They’re, ah, they’re late with the delivery.” Dee-lib-or-ee.

“So, Deborah.” Tita Flora’s smile was all teeth again. “When might we expect the first payment?”

The social worker had explained to Joey that her aunt and uncle were eligible for monthly kinship-care payments from the government, similar to foster-care payments. How much they’d receive, Joey didn’t ask, but she knew the money was the only reason Tita Flora had agreed to this arrangement.

“About three weeks.” Deborah’s voice took on a flat note Joey hadn’t heard before. “Which is around the time I’ll be back here to check and see how things are going.”

The warning was obvious, but her aunt merely nodded and directed Deborah back out to the hallway to check out the rest of the second floor.

Joey moved toward the window in the room she’d be sharing with her cousins, who were eight and six. Deborah was right. It was pretty here. Maybe everything would be fine. It had to be, because there was simply no option for it not to be. It was either here or foster care, especially if (when) her mother was convicted.

She felt a hand graze her lower back, and jolted.

Tito Micky had joined her at the window, his palm pressing lightly into the indent just above her tailbone. He smelled like tobacco and whiskey. She moved over a few inches, just enough for his hand to fall away, and he looked over at her with an innocent smile.

“I can’t believe how big you are now, Joelle,” he said. Believe sounded like bee-leeb. Maybe one day she’d stop hearing his accent, but for now, it sounded foreign, and obvious. “’Sus. You look so pretty.”

Joey cringed at her uncle’s use of her formal first name. When Deborah called her Joelle, it sounded grown-up, respectful. But when Tito Micky said it, giving equal weight to each syllable of her name as if they were two separate names (Jo-Elle), it made her skin crawl.

“You know your Tita Flora didn’t want you here, because your mom has done something very bad.” Tito Micky spoke softly, conspiratorially, as if they had a delightful secret just between the two of them. “But I told her, you’re family. This is your home, okay? If you need anything, you just ask your Tito Micky.”

Her uncle moved closer until their shoulders touched. His hand was back on the base of her spine, and she could feel his finger moving in slow, lazy circles. Tito Micky was no longer looking out the window, he was looking at her. He sighed, and his whiskey-tinged breath caressed Joey’s cheek.

“’Sus,” he sighed. The word—which wasn’t really a word, more like a syllable—was Filipino slang for “Jesus.” “So pretty, Joelle.”

He leaned closer and whispered into her ear.

“You look just like your mother.”





CHAPTER NINETEEN


Deep in his overstuffed storage locker, somewhere between the artificial Christmas tree and his daughter’s neglected ukulele, Drew finally finds the box he’s looking for. It’s filled with notebooks, scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, photos, hard drives, and memory sticks. Basically all the work he did during his fifteen years as an investigative journalist for Toronto After Dark.

Drew chased all kinds of stories for that Saturday weekly. He discovered that the homeless woman who earned thirty thousand a year in spare change was actually a grandmother with a car and a house in the suburbs. He exposed an eighteen-year-old pimp who insisted he never intended to get into the business of sex, he just happened to know a few girls at school who were willing to sleep with his friends for extra money, and so he took a fee for arranging the dates (“Like the Baby-Sitters Club,” he told Drew earnestly. “Only without the babysitting.”).

And at the height of his career, Drew published an award-winning series on the Asian street gangs that had ruled Chinatown back in the nineties, some of which are still in operation today. Which means that everything there was to know about them back then will be somewhere on one of these old hard drives. Drew takes his best guess, plugs one of them in, and begins searching. If he doesn’t find what he’s looking for here, he’s got seven more.

Had it been up to him, he’d have stayed with Toronto After Dark until he retired. But like all the smaller newspapers, it had gone the way of the dinosaurs in the last few years. It shut down right as Sasha was sending out university applications, and while some of her tuition would be covered by the fund he and Kirsten had set up when she was born, the rest would have to come from Kirsten’s parents, who’d already done so much. Drew took every freelance gig he could find, but it wasn’t until the online piece he wrote about murdered billionaire couple Barry and Honey Sherman went viral that things took a turn for the better. He was invited to appear on CBC public radio to discuss it, and the interview was so popular, he was invited back several times to discuss other criminal cases.