Chapter 10: The Old Line

I didn't cry.

I went back to the storage room and opened my notebook to a clean page.

At the top I wrote: Westbrook house. Lake Forest.

Under it I wrote the date I came.

Then I sat there with the pencil and didn't know what to write next.

At every other house, the last line was the same.

Recalled.

I didn't write it.

I'd known a lot of grown-ups who decided things about me.

Not one of them ever changed their mind because I asked nicely.

They changed it when I showed them something they couldn't argue with.

A receipt. A clean floor. A circuit that worked.

So I needed proof.

Real proof, like the hotel manager's camera.

Something even my mother couldn't cry her way around.

I looked around the storage room.

Mops. Buckets. The vacuum. A shelf of light bulbs.

And on the wall above my cardboard, an old beige telephone with a curly cord, the kind with buttons that light up.

I'd noticed it the first night.

It was dead. I'd checked. You check everything in a new placement.

The house still had a landline, though.

I'd seen the same beige phones in the library, in the butler's pantry and on my mother's desk.

Grown-ups in big houses keep a landline for the alarm and the gate.

And Odette, I'd bet my twenty-three fifty, kept it for something else.

Because if Odette called Noreen from her own cell phone, it would be on her bill.

And Wesley read everything.

But a call from the house line would just be one more call from a house that ran a foundation and talked to half of Illinois.

I took the phone off the wall.

The wire behind it had been snipped years ago, when somebody turned this room into storage.

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