eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
Chelsea has always believed that her mom died of a sudden illness, until she finds a letter her dad has kept from her for years -- a letter from her mom, Catherine, who didn't die: She disappeared. Driven by unanswered questions, Chelsea sets out to look for her -- starting with the return address on the letter: The Underground.
Told in two voices, twenty years apart, Catherine delivers a fresh retelling of the Emily Brontë classic Wuthering Heights, interweaving a timeless forbidden romance with a captivating modern mystery.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780316214711 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Little, Brown Books for Young Readers |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 923 KB |
| Age Range: | 14 - 17 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Catherine
By April Lindner
Poppy
Copyright © 2013 April LindnerAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780316196925
Chelsea
As I hurtled toward New York City on a Greyhound bus, I’d imagined my destination would be a gleaming ultrachic high-rise or a brownstone full of cousins, aunts, and uncles who would gather me into their arms, thrilled to discover the long-lost relative they never knew they had. So the reality was a shock: a hulking windowless concrete block on the corner of Houston and Bowery, painted a forbidding black. There wasn’t so much as a doorbell beside the locked front door. Big jagged silver letters spelled out THE UNDERGROUND. Whatever it was—a restaurant? a comedy club? a warehouse?—it looked about as welcoming as a maximum-security prison.
I froze on the front stoop, unsure of what to do next. Had my mother really grown up here? Two doors down a woman with fluorescent-yellow hair and a zebra-striped minidress was arranging thigh-high boots in a boutique window, and a mural of a fire-snorting dragon on the side of the building vibrated with color. Though cars blasted past me down the wide street, the sidewalks were surprisingly empty, except for a guy in a long black apron smoking against a wall and a couple of skaters propelling their boards in my direction.
Could I have gotten the address wrong? I dug in the front pocket of my backpack for the letter I’d found last Tuesday, the letter that had changed everything—my past, my present, my future. The return address, in my mother’s loopy handwriting, assured me I was in the right place. I pulled it out and unfolded it, hoping for some clue I’d managed to miss.
Sweet Chelsea Bell,
By the time you get this letter, I hope you’re old enough to understand and forgive me for leaving. As I write, you’re probably sleeping in your bed, what’s left of your favorite blue blankie clutched to your face, and it hurts to think that the next time I see you you’ll be older, bigger. Maybe you’ll barely remember me.
Maybe your dad is reading this letter to you, or maybe you’re old enough to read it on your own. Or maybe—if I’m really lucky—we’ll be together soon and you’ll never need to read this at all. Still, I’m writing it just in case.
You’re the best daughter I could imagine, better than I deserve. And your dad’s a good, kind, responsible man. I need you to know I’m not running away from him. I’m running toward something. Does that make sense?
I can’t explain exactly why I went away, but here’s the main thing: I’ve been given a chance to undo the biggest mistake of my life. That’s why I’ve come back to New York City, to the home I grew up in. I don’t know yet how long it will take. There are some people I need to talk to in person. One of them is Jackie, my best friend from high school. I hope you’ll meet her someday, because I know she would love you, and I bet you’d feel the same way about her.
Though I’m far away, everything I see makes me think of you. Like today, out on the street, I saw a woman in a pink suit being pulled along the sidewalk by a pack of five identical white poodles. I know you would have laughed at the sight of her flying along, her fussy little pink high heels barely touching the ground as the dogs raced her down the street. You have the greatest laugh, like lots of bells ringing all at once. At night, when I’m trying to fall asleep, I close my eyes and I can see your face and hear that laugh.
Remember me always,
Mom
No matter how many times I read the letter, her words still sent a jolt through me—an electric current of love, sadness, and even guilt, because my memories of her had worn away, vanishing like that tattered blue blanket. All I could summon was warmth, the tickle of her hair on my face, and the scent of her perfume—cut grass and little white flowers.
My discovery of the letter had been completely random. I’d had the day off from slinging crullers at Mr. Donut, but it was the worst kind of day off, with nothing to do and nobody to do it with. I finished the last of the mystery novels stacked beside my bed, and the thought of walking to the library to get more in the ninety-five-degree heat gave me a headache. My best (and only) friend, Larissa, was stranded on a family vacation in a part of Cape Cod so remote it didn’t even have cell-phone service. She’d be gone for two whole weeks, and though it was pathetic that I had only one real friend, that’s what moving every couple of years will do to a person. By the time Dad and I arrived in Marblehead, I’d grown so tired of starting over that I couldn’t make myself try very hard to fit in. Luckily, Larissa transferred from private school in the middle of freshman year, and she was in as dire need of a friend as I was. But with her out of town, I might as well be a complete pariah.
I could have used a ride to the beach, but of course my dad was at his office, teaching. He never used to teach in the summer; when I was little, he’d take me to the beach or the movies, or even to his office, where I would spin around in his chair, make long paper-clip chains, and draw with fluorescent highlighters. But at some point I got too old to hang around with my dad, and he started shipping me off to summer camp to be a counselor in training. This summer I flat out refused to be sent away—I wasn’t one of those hard-core camp types who lived to make lanyards and fight color wars. I applied for the job at Mr. Donut so I’d have a reason to stay home all summer for once.
So I’d gotten my wish, and there I was, hitting refresh at the Nico Rathburn fansite every fifteen seconds, waiting for someone else to make a post. When nobody did, forcing me to face the fact that everyone in the world but me had a life, I decided to look around in Dad’s closet in search of our old family photos, something I do every now and then so I won’t forget my mother’s face. She died when I was three, or so my father had always told me. Of a brief illness, he would say, to anyone who asked. His face would go all pale and solemn, and you could tell whoever asked was sorry they’d brought it up.
I riffled all the way through our box of family photos, and somehow it still wasn’t enough. Dad’s closet was packed with cartons and shoeboxes; there had to be something else interesting in one of them, but most of what I found was unbelievably pointless. A stack of old bank statements. A yellowing manuscript from a textbook Dad had helped edit. Manila envelopes full of tax documents. I’m not sure why I didn’t give up. I must have been really bored.
But then I hit the—pun intended—mother lode: a shoebox at the back of the highest shelf, where I’d never have stumbled on it by sheer accident. There wasn’t much stuff inside, but all of it was new to me. My birth certificate. My parents’ marriage license. Mom’s old passport, stamped in Italy, France, Greece, the Netherlands, and other places too blurry to make out. The next thing I found set my heart racing: a snapshot of my radiant, glossy-haired mom in a beret and a man’s flannel shirt. The picture was cut crookedly in half. She’d been standing beside someone—an old boyfriend, probably. Part of a hand was still holding hers.
I dug a little deeper and found a few more cut-in-half portraits of Mom. She looked a lot younger—maybe my age. She was dressed a lot younger, too; I saw none of the pastel shirts and denim skirts she’d worn in my baby pictures. Even in a black Pretenders T-shirt and torn jeans she looked regal and confident in a way that had unfortunately passed me by, no matter how alike my dad always said we looked. In another photo she wore a short skirt, motorcycle boots, and a leather bomber jacket, the missing somebody’s tan, slender but muscular arm draped across her shoulders. In that one, she was glancing to the side, toward the person who’d been chopped out of the picture, her blue eyes laughing.
But the next thing I found blew me away: an envelope addressed to me, Chelsea Rose Price, care of my dad, Max Price. Something about the handwriting on the envelope made my heart beat faster. The blood whooshed in my ears as I read it and the truth became clear. There hadn’t been a “brief illness.” And Dad hadn’t sprinkled my mother’s ashes off the coast of Falmouth, the way he’d said he had.
She hadn’t died at all. She’d run away from us, and he’d been lying to my face about it for years.
Of all the lies a father could possibly tell his only daughter, this seemed an especially cruel one—letting me believe my mom was dead when she wasn’t. But why hadn’t she come home to us, the way she’d wanted to? Had she changed her mind? Or had Dad not let her? What else had he been hiding from me?
When I could trust my shaking legs, I ran for my laptop and typed my mother’s name into Google. I found a Catherine Eversole Price in Des Moines, Iowa. A florist posed beside a prizewinning arrangement of tropical flowers, she looked nothing like my mom. One Cathy Eversole turned out to be a fifty-something real-estate agent in Bakersfield, California, and another was a fluffy blond newscaster in Indianapolis. On the next page of hits, I found what I was looking for—a four-year-old story in the North Shore Ledger.
Woman’s Disappearance Still Unsolved
Ten years since a Danvers wife and mother went missing, police are no closer to solving the mystery of her disappearance. On an ordinary weekday, Catherine Eversole Price vanished from her suburban home without a trace. A wife and mother of a three-year-old daughter left a brief note saying she had business to attend to in New York City and would return shortly. Her husband, Max Price, declined to be interviewed for this story, but police records show he assumed his wife had taken a spontaneous trip to her hometown to visit old acquaintances. Price, at the time a visiting professor of economics at Harvard, said he thought his wife would call him from New York and return home within a day or two.
Letters sent from lower Manhattan reassured Mr. Price that his wife was safe, and he resolved to wait patiently for her return. “Cathy always seemed reliable and sensible. I’m sure Max had no reason to think anything was wrong,” a former neighbor of the couple told the Ledger. But Price grew alarmed when days passed without a word, and he went to the police.
An exhaustive search uncovered few leads, and Price criticized investigators for what he perceived as a slow and ineffective response to his wife’s disappearance. Now an associate professor of economics at Salem State College, he resides with his daughter in Marblehead. A former Danvers neighbor still recalls seeing Mrs. Price wheel her young daughter’s stroller through town to the local playground. “Cathy was so devoted to that little girl of hers. I can’t believe she went away of her own free will. I’m afraid she must have met with some kind of foul play.”
A yearlong investigation yielded no leads. “We’ve done everything in our power to locate Catherine Price,” County Sheriff Dan Stevenson told the Ledger. “If a person wants to go missing, New York City is the perfect place to hide.” He declined to answer questions about why Mrs. Price might have chosen to run away. “That’s a private matter,” he told the Ledger.
My heart sped up as my eyes traveled down the screen. So the county sheriff thought my mom was still alive somewhere in New York! It seemed at least as likely as any other possibility. What if all these years she’d been hoping I would figure out the truth and come find her? Then again, why hadn’t she simply come to me? If she’d really been alive all this time, and hiding out somewhere, why not call and tell me she was okay?
But maybe she had tried to get in touch. Dad’s job-hopping and our moving around from one town to the next would have made it hard for her to track us down. And our phone number was unlisted (“So students won’t call and wheedle me to change their grades,” Dad had said). Of course Mom could have found Dad’s work number online. But what if she hadn’t wanted to talk to him? What if she knew he was trying to keep me away from her? He’d kept that letter from me. Plus, the article said my mother had sent “letters,” which meant there must have been others.
Unable to sit still a second longer, I paced the house on shaky legs, every familiar piece of furniture suddenly strange, as though I’d woken up in somebody else’s life. On the living room bookshelf, the framed photo of Dad and me goofing around at Wingaersheek Beach might as well have been a photo of two strangers. Who was that man—his blond hair dripping with salt water, his eyes the same clear green as the ocean sparkling behind us? Some guy who had been lying to me for fourteen years straight.
At first I rehearsed the speech I was going to give when he got home, muttering the words as I paced. I would expose him for the liar he was. How can you live with yourself? Don’t you think it’s time you told me the truth?
But as soon as I’d figured out exactly what I would say, I realized it was no good. I knew he’d say he’d only been trying to protect me, and I wasn’t in the mood for his excuses. No: What I wanted was to get away from him. I wanted to find out the truth for myself. And more than anything, I wanted my mother.
Dad stayed at his office even later than usual, so I had a long time to piece together a plan. The first step was obvious: I had to get to New York City. I would start with the letter’s return address, knock on the door, and figure out where to go from there. Luckily, my seventeenth birthday was just a few days away. I knew Dad would give me a check, the way he’d done since I turned twelve and stopped wanting Barbie and her Dream House; I guess after that, he couldn’t figure out what to get me anymore. That was around the time I quit doing the things he wanted me to—swim team, piano lessons, and getting straight As—and we stopped having much of anything to say to each other, to the point where all he ever wanted to talk about was why I hadn’t made a list of colleges to apply to and why I didn’t already know what I wanted to major in. How many times had I heard about my mother’s great sense of purpose and direction, how she’d always known she wanted to be a writer and go to Harvard, and, sure enough, she’d applied herself and gotten in? How many times had I asked myself why I couldn’t be more like my perfect mother?
Well, the joke was on Dad. I was about to become a whole lot more like my mom. Now I had a purpose—finding her—and a direction—as far away from him as I could get.
As it turned out, I was right about getting a check for my birthday. Dad handed me the envelope and stood in the kitchen doorway waiting for me to rip it open. He was on his way to his office, of course. He fidgeted in his checked shirt and dorky tie as I read my card and examined its contents. Five hundred dollars. More than I’d expected. I should have been glad—after all, I needed the money—but I couldn’t help feeling let down that it wasn’t something more personal or fun—an iPhone, maybe, or a boxed DVD set of The X-Files, something that showed he had thought even the tiniest bit about what I wanted and who I was.
Even so, as I thanked him and let him kiss me on the cheek, I felt a twinge of sadness. I knew he would worry about me when I was gone; he always worried. As I inhaled the familiar scent of his aftershave, I was seriously tempted to blurt out how I’d found the letter and give him a chance to explain himself. I opened my mouth to speak.
But Dad stepped back, took a look at his watch, mumbled something about being late for work, and bolted. It was my birthday, and even so he couldn’t wait to get away from me. I looked down at the check in my hand and felt the anger flood in again. Thanks, Dad, I thought. I’ll use this money to buy myself something you could never give me: a new life not based on lies.
The very next day I slipped out of my house before dawn. That’s how I came to be stranded in front of 247 Bowery, without a clue what to do next. Would The Underground eventually open its doors? And what on earth would I do with myself in the meantime?
I looked around, taking inventory. Across Bowery, well-lit and glowing like The Underground’s polar opposite, stood a health-food café. I crossed the street and ducked through the door. Behind the counter a youngish woman with crayon-red hair and hennaed hands was manning the juice machine.
I waited my turn, ordered a banana-coconut smoothie, and asked, “So, that place across the street? Is that some kind of restaurant?”
She gave me a look as if to say Well, duh. “That’s The Underground. THE Underground.”
“Oh. Right.” Apparently I was supposed to have heard of this place because, after all, New York is the center of the universe, and THE Underground is the center of New York. “When does it open?”
She shrugged. “Different times. Six, maybe. Or seven thirty.”
Great. It was only noon. The guy in line behind me was breathing down my neck, and I could tell the girl wanted me to move along, but I had about a thousand questions. “Do you know who owns it? And how long it’s been there? Like if it’s been there about fourteen years or more?”
“Of course. It’s been open since the seventies.” She sighed and turned away from me, firing up the blender and drowning out any further conversation.
So much for that strategy. If I wanted to learn more about The Underground, I was going to have to find it out on my own. I took my smoothie and set up shop at a table in the corner. Luckily, the place had free WiFi. I googled The Underground and clicked on the first hit. Punk rock started blaring out of my speakers, drowning out the café’s wind chime-and-synthesizer mood music. One table over, a lady with floaty gray hair and pink overalls shot me a dirty look. The website’s jagged silver lettering—just like the lettering across the street—told me I’d found the right place.
I plugged in my earbuds and clicked to enter, and a collage bloomed in front of me—picture upon picture, all of punk rockers. I’d never seen so much leather, so many tattoos and body piercings and Mohawks in one place. Had my mother grown up in a punk nightclub? This didn’t mesh with what little I knew about her—mostly the things my dad had told me. She’d had a 4.0 average at Harvard before she’d left school to have me. She baked sourdough bread and made birthday cupcakes from scratch. Most of all, she’d married my dad, who listened to Bach and Brahms and whose idea of a wild night was having a glass of red wine before he dozed off in front of Law & Order reruns.
I examined the evidence in front of me—a sea of unfamiliar faces sprinkled here and there with one or two I recognized: Blondie, The Ramones, Green Day. A link took me to The Underground’s history, a formidable block of text in red letters on a black background. The Underground has outlived its competition—even the famous CBGB—and remains THE place to catch cutting-edge underground music….
This was all very interesting, but I was scouting for information I could actually use. I found it in the second paragraph. Visionary founder Jim Eversole… Could that be an uncle of mine? I did the math quickly and realized he was about the right age to have been my grandfather. After Jim’s untimely death, the torch was passed briefly to his son, Quentin, who remade the site into an upscale steak house. But The Underground’s original vision was revived by its current owner, Hence, former frontman for Riptide….
What kind of name was Hence? Was he a relative of mine, too? I scanned the screen for my mother’s name but didn’t see it. No matter. I had a strong feeling I was on the right track. I couldn’t waste the rest of the afternoon waiting around for The Underground to open. After all, how much time did I have before my father guessed where I’d run off to and came looking for me? I’d been careful not to leave any clues. Still, I could imagine Dad getting home from work, finding me gone, and going on a frenzied search. How long would it be before he thought to look for the letter, found it missing, and guessed where I’d gone?
Back at The Underground, I tried pounding on the front door until my hands ached. Nothing. I walked around to the rear of the building, stepping over fast-food wrappers and broken beer bottles. I found another door with an actual doorbell beside it. I pressed it and heard a buzzer ring inside the club. No answer. I rang again.
Just as I was about to give up, the door opened and I came face-to-face with a guy exactly my height and slender, with brown bangs that fell in his eyes and splotches of pink on his cheeks. We stood for a moment, staring at each other. This couldn’t be the club’s owner; he was too young—around my age, or a little older. He wore paint-stained cargo shorts and a faded purple T-shirt with black letters that read PUNK’S NOT DEAD. Head cocked questioningly, he looked at me, not saying anything.
He was probably just an employee, but my hopeful side wondered if he could be related to me—maybe a long-lost cousin? “Hello. I’m Chelsea Price.” Would my name mean anything to him?
It didn’t seem to; his head remained cocked. “We’re not open yet.”
“I’m looking for the guy who owns this club. Is he here?” When he didn’t answer, I tried again. “Hence. That’s his name, right?”
“He’ll be in later tonight,” he said, reaching for the door. “I’m not sure when.” And he started to close the door on me.
“Wait! Please…” I could hear my voice getting higher, the way it does when I get upset. “I took a bus all the way from Massachusetts to see him. I’ve been dragging this backpack around since five this morning….”
He hesitated. “I don’t think Hence would like me to let you in.”
But something about his hesitation gave me hope. I leaned forward a little, so that to close the door he’d have to slam it in my face. “My pack is heavy,” I said. “And it’s so hot out.”
The guy sighed, but he didn’t shut the door on me. “You want to fill out an application? I’ll give it to him when he gets in….”
“No! I’m not here for a job. I’m looking for my mother, Catherine Eversole.”
The expression on his face changed.
“You’ve heard of her?”
His response was tight-lipped. “I know the name.”
“You do?” I asked. “Is she related to the guy who founded the club? She’s his daughter, isn’t she?” I was pretty pleased with myself for having figured this out, but he didn’t answer. Still, he swung the door open and let me in.
I followed him down a long hallway that reeked of fresh paint. We passed a door that led into an industrial-looking kitchen and another that opened into a room stacked high with mixers and musical equipment, its walls smeared with graffiti. So this was what a nightclub looked like.
“This way.” He opened another door and flipped on a light switch, illuminating a steep staircase to the basement. I followed him down the creaky steps. At the bottom he clicked on a bare lightbulb dangling by its wire from the ceiling.
The basement’s floor and walls were stark cement, adorned only by a poster of some band I’d never heard of called Black Watch—three bare-chested guys in eyeliner and tartan plaid pants. A metal cot was covered with a few scratchy-looking blankets and a lumpy pillow. Against the foot of the bed leaned a battered electric guitar. “You can stay here until Hence gets in.” He turned to leave.
“Is this where you sleep?” I asked his retreating back, not wanting to be left alone for God knows how long. “Wait!”
He paused. Before he could disappear again, I asked, “What’s your name, anyway?”
“Cooper,” he said. “Coop.”
“Are you Hence’s son?”
He laughed, as though I’d said something funny. “No. I work here. And I need to get some painting done. I’ll let you know when Hence gets home.” He took the stairs away from me two at a time.
When he was out of earshot, I allowed myself a heavy sigh. I perched on the cot’s crinkly mattress, with nothing to do but wait. The small, ancient TV in the corner got about four stations, all of them too staticky to watch. I thought of the phone in my pocket, but I couldn’t exactly call anyone. Larissa was still on the Cape, and even if she hadn’t been, I couldn’t trust her not to crack under my father’s interrogation.
After at least an hour had passed and I was about to die of boredom, I started poking around Cooper’s stuff. Not that there was much of it—a heavy English lit textbook under his cot, and a battered trunk plastered with stickers and stuffed with a tangle of jeans and T-shirts with names of bands I’d never heard of. I fought the urge to fold his clothes for him—that would have just been weird.
Instead, I picked up his electric guitar, slung the strap over my shoulder, and stood in rock-star stance, giving it a strum. Not that I knew how to play. Those piano lessons Dad had forced me to take revealed I wasn’t the prodigy he’d hoped for, and in a few months he’d gotten tired of nagging me to practice. Now, wondering if my mother had been musical, I ruffled my hair and drew my lip back in a sneer, trying to look like the pictures on The Underground’s website. I gave one last muffled, tuneless strum. According to my watch, it was five thirty. What if Cooper forgot his promise to come and get me? Would I have to stay trapped in this basement all night?
And then I started worrying about Hence. Cooper had seemed nervous about my being here, like his boss would bite his head off for letting me in. Why else would he be hiding me in the basement? But if I really was the granddaughter of the guy who founded The Underground, didn’t that make me something like rock-and-roll royalty? Why wouldn’t the current owner be happy to meet me?
Suddenly tired, I thought about lying down on the cot, maybe crawling under the blankets, but they smelled like boy and probably hadn’t been washed in months. Instead, I dug into my backpack, zipped on a hoodie for warmth, and put a T-shirt between my head and the grungy-looking pillow. Earbuds in, I hit play on my iPod and shut my eyes.
When I opened them again, groggy and disoriented, someone was standing over me, watching me sleep. I bolted upright, struggling to recall where I was. The someone was a guy, familiar and strange at the same time, looking down at me with a wry little smile, like I was a puzzle he was working out how to solve. I yelped, scrambling to my feet, and our heads collided.
“Ouch!” The pain jolted me back to the present, and I remembered where I was and how I’d gotten there. “Geez! What were you looking at?” It didn’t seem fair, watching a person like that while she slept.
“I came to get you.” The flush on his cheeks deepened. “I was trying to decide whether I should wake you up.”
“You scared the crap out of me.” I didn’t mean to be rude, but I’d always been cursed with a tendency to blurt out the first thing that pops into my head. It was something I’d been meaning to work on.
“Sorry.” The flush on his cheeks deepened.
I felt bad for snapping at him, so I changed the subject. “Anyway, is Hence here?”
Cooper nodded. “He’s not in the best mood.”
I shook the hair out of my eyes and slipped my hand into my hoodie pocket to make sure the letter was still safely there. “That’s okay. Neither am I.”
“No, seriously. He can be prickly. It’s easy to get on his bad side.” He paused to look me squarely in the face with eyes that were midway between blue and green. “And I’m guessing you can be prickly yourself.”
True as that was, I didn’t much like hearing it from a complete stranger. “I’m not prickly.” I drew myself up to my full height. “And I’m not afraid of your boss.” Because, really, how bad could this Hence character be?
“Hokay.” Cooper’s mouth twitched, like he was holding back a grin. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” And with that he led me up the creaking staircase, into the heart of The Underground.
Catherine
My life changed forever on an ordinary Tuesday. I was rushing home from school so I could get together with Jackie and start on our homework assignment. The school year had barely begun, and already I was feeling frazzled and more than a little frustrated—I wanted to be doing my own writing, not some lame collaborative book report. It was a hot, sticky afternoon, the kind of late-summer day that made me want to hang out in a sidewalk café with an iced tea and a fresh pad of paper, eavesdropping on the conversations around me and jotting down every crazy idea that popped into my head. It felt wrong to be wearing an itchy school uniform and lugging a backpack, and even more wrong to have homework.
When I took the corner, I saw him right away: a slender guy with shaggy black hair camped out on my front stoop next to a guitar case and a big duffel bag. My first thought was Oh, no, not another one. One of the most annoying things about living above a nightclub—and believe me, there are plenty—is the musicians who are always trying to introduce themselves to my dad, hoping to convince him to put them on the bill. It’s a waste of time, of course; Dad books his acts a year in advance, and he knows exactly who he will and won’t let play in the club. A band not only has to be great, it has to be on its way up, about to go national. “The Underground has to stay relevant. We’re more than a place to hear music. We’re tastemakers”—that’s how he puts it. He’s not exactly humble when it comes to The Underground, but why should he be? The place is kind of famous, and Dad’s a legend in the rock-and-roll world. Or so everybody has told me all my life, to the point where I get a little tired of hearing about it.
Really, I’d gotten so sick of coming home and finding stray guitar-god wannabes on the doorstep that I was thinking about sneaking around to the back door so I wouldn’t have to talk with this one. He was staring down at his feet—lime-green Chuck Taylor All Stars—so I could have slipped right around the building without him so much as noticing me, except he happened to glance up as I was passing, and the look on his face stopped me. He was striking, with dark eyes, glossy hair, skin like coffee with extra cream, and the sharpest cheekbones I’d ever seen, but it was more than that. He looked hungry. Literally. Like he hadn’t eaten in days. I had this feeling he needed someone to be kind to him. It was written all over his face: He was on the verge of losing hope, and he needed someone to urge him to keep going, to fight for what he wanted.
It was the strangest thing. It’s not like I’m usually good at reading minds. If anything, I’m the opposite—dense about what other people are thinking and feeling. But something flashed between me and the guy on the stoop—a kind of understanding. So I went over to him and he scrambled to his feet and dusted his hands off on his jeans. He held out his hand and I shook it—like we were executives meeting at a business luncheon. His touch surprised me; the palm of his hand was dry but hot—almost feverish.
“Do you work here?” His voice sounded hopeful, but right away his gaze shot back down to his sneakers, as if he didn’t dare meet my eyes for long.
It was a strange question, considering I was wearing my school uniform and carrying a knapsack.
“I live here.” I threw my shoulders back and brushed a stray lock of hair from my eyes.
“You live in The Underground?” Now he was looking at me in disbelief, as though I’d claimed I lived in the Taj Mahal or Buckingham Palace.
“Not in it. Above it.” I fumbled in my knapsack for my keys. “My father owns the place.”
“Seriously? You’re Jim Eversole’s daughter?”
I had to hand it to him; he’d done his homework. But the hope in his voice made my stomach lurch. Like all the others, this one would turn out to be way more interested in my father than in me. Why had I thought, even for a moment, that there might be more to him?
“You want Dad to book you.” It wasn’t a question.
“That’s not why I’m here.” He sounded defensive. “I know I’m not ready for that yet. For now, I just want a job. Any job. Waiting tables, maybe.” From closer up, I could see the faint scruff above his upper lip and along his chin. Despite the heat, he had on a black denim jacket, and under it his faded blue T-shirt was speckled with small holes, one wash away from dissolving into shreds.
“I don’t think my dad needs any more waiters.”
“I’ll wash floors. I’ll even scrub toilets. I just want to get to know the place from the inside.” He dug his hands into his front pockets and looked back down at his sneakers, as if he knew he was asking for a huge favor and didn’t want to pressure me one way or another.
Maybe he wasn’t like the others who had tried to worm their way into The Underground. I paused a moment, weighing my options. When I opened the door, stepped inside, and beckoned for him to follow, I wondered if I was making a big mistake.
I usually hate giving tours of the club to my friends. Call me paranoid, but I get the feeling that where I live is more important to most people than who I am. But showing this guy around made me see the place through new eyes. First I took him through the main room. As we approached the stage, he paused for a long moment, staring like he could see the ghosts of all the acts who’d played there. So I waited beside him, recalling some of the bands I’d seen—The Magnetics, The Faithful, and Hot Jones Sundae were a few of my recent favorites—and I had the feeling that if I grabbed his hand and squeezed my eyes shut I could share my memories so that he’d have them, too.
But I didn’t. What would he have thought if I’d tried it? Most likely that I was crazy—or hitting on him.
Instead, I cleared my throat and led him onward, into the mixing room with its tangle of wires and crates. I let him take a peek at Dad’s office, and at his wall of glossy photographs of bands who’d come through the club. I saved my favorite spot for last: the dressing room where so many rockers had graffitied the walls into a multilayered, psychedelic mess. I pointed out a doodle drawn by Joey Ramone, and he studied it closely, as though trying to decipher its secret meaning.
“Thanks,” he said when the tour was over. “For letting me take up your time. And for giving me a tour.”
I shrugged. “No problem.” There was nothing more to show him, really, but I wasn’t ready to head upstairs and start dinner just yet. “I’m Catherine.” And when he didn’t reply, I said, “You have a name, right?”
“Hence.”
It took me a while to wrap my mind around that one. “Hans?”
His answer came through gritted teeth, like he’d been asked that question a thousand times. “Hence. Like therefore.”
I wanted to ask him if it was short for anything, and whether he had a last name, and where he’d come from, but he crossed his arms over his chest and cast a glance toward the front of the building. I got the distinct sense he was about to bolt. “You want to leave a phone number? In case my dad wants to get in touch with you? If he’s hiring?”
Hence grimaced again. “I don’t have a phone,” he said. “I’m not really staying anywhere. I’m… I’m looking for someplace.” He swallowed hard and I remembered the impression I’d had earlier, that he was on the verge of giving up. Had he been sleeping on the streets? Or in a shelter?
So I did something I probably shouldn’t have. I invited him up to our apartment, into the kitchen. At my urging he sat down on one of the stools along the counter, perched uneasily like a stray cat who wasn’t sure if he was going to be stroked or shooed. I cooked him one of those make-it-yourself pizzas heaped with everything I could find in the fridge. He practically swallowed it whole, so I made him another. Either he wasn’t much of a talker or he was too busy eating to make chitchat. To fill the silence, I talked about myself—about how I wished I were musical but couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, so I wrote poetry instead, and how most of the girls at school thought I was weird because I liked vintage clothes and would rather spend an afternoon reading than shopping. I went on and on until I noticed I was whining about my relatively nice life to a guy who probably didn’t even have a roof to sleep under.
The realization brought a blush to my cheeks.
“No,” Hence said, frowning down at his plate. “Keep going. I’m interested.”
“I’d like to hear about you.” I stole a glance at the kitchen clock. It was 4:15, and Dad had told me that morning to expect him home at about five. My father’s pretty cool about most things, but even so I didn’t want him to come home and find me alone with a boy whose last name I didn’t even know. Same thing goes for my brother, Quentin, who was due back from school any minute, and who could be a bit overprotective and big-brothery sometimes.
“There’s nothing to tell,” Hence said. “I’ve always wanted to come to New York to see The Underground. I’ve read about the seventies punk scene, and the place is legendary…. But you know that already.” And he stopped, as though that’s all I could possibly have needed to know about him.
If I hadn’t been worried about the time, I would have pressed further. I needed to get him safely outside, but I didn’t want to let him disappear into the night, not before I at least tried to help him. I reached out—slowly, so I wouldn’t startle him—and tugged his jacket sleeve. “I have an idea.”
I sent Hence out, telling him to return around six thirty. Less than ten minutes later, Quentin burst through the front door without so much as a hello. A bag of fast food in his arms, he took the stairs up to his room two at a time and locked the door behind him. Q had been cranky a lot lately and, judging by the expression on his face as he blew past me, that night was no exception. Good thing I’d gotten Hence out in time.
Twenty minutes later Dad turned up, and—surprise, surprise—he was in a bad mood, too, after a long, frustrating meeting with his investment broker. He lumbered into the kitchen, kissed me on the cheek, loosened his tie, and tossed his jacket over a chair.
“I started a nightclub so I’d never have to deal with money-grubbers again, and look at me now.” He opened the refrigerator and stared absently at the shelves as if something delicious would magically appear in front of him. “Completely at their mercy.”
“I’m making pizza,” I told him. “Pepperoni and mushroom. Your favorite. I’ll have it ready in ten minutes if you’ll sit down and get out of my way.”
He grabbed a can of club soda and shut the door. “I don’t deserve you, Cupcake.” Dad had called me that for as long as I could remember, and despite being too old for it I didn’t have the heart to make him stop. Though he was busy almost all the time and could be a bit distracted, he still had the softest heart imaginable.
While I cut the pizza and shoveled slice after slice onto his plate, I told him about the nice guy who had come to the club looking for a job as a busboy or janitor because he’d read books about The Underground and wanted to see it for himself. Of course, Dad wasn’t a total pushover. He took hiring very seriously, so I made a big point of saying how trustworthy Hence seemed, and how honored he would be to work even the most menial job, to the point where I was worried I was laying it on too thick, but Dad just kept nodding, with that faraway look that meant he was either listening thoughtfully or musing about something else completely.
Luckily, it turned out he was listening, and by the time Hence knocked on the front door, Dad was completely primed. After introducing the two of them, I ducked into the hallway and hovered nearby, ready to pretend I was on my way upstairs if Dad noticed me. All Hence had to do was shake hands and talk music, and the job of busboy/janitor was his. The other part was trickier. Hence thanked Dad, then looked so uncomfortable I started to worry he’d get all the way out the door without mentioning he had no place to sleep. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore: I stuck my head into the club and gave him a pointed look.
“There’s one other thing, sir….” he began.
“Sir? I’m not royalty, Hence. Call me Jim, the way everybody else does.”
“I don’t have any place to sleep, Jim,” Hence blurted out. “Can you, um, recommend a place nearby—a hostel, maybe, or a boarding house?”
Dad did just what I hoped he’d do—he said if Hence was willing to clean out the basement, he could stay here. We’d taken in stray musicians before, so I had a feeling he’d be cool about it, and I was right. Before long, Hence, his guitar, and his duffel bag were in the basement. I would have slipped downstairs to say congratulations and help him shift crates around and set up the metal folding cot, but as Dad helped me load the dishwasher, he seemed to be watching me more closely than usual.
“Why are you so interested in this boy, Cathy?” he finally asked, a bemused smile on his lips. “It’s not like he’s the first ragtag guitarist to come knocking on our door.”
“He’s so intense. I feel like he wants the job more than any of the others did.” I paused. “Plus, he desperately needs our help, don’t you think?”
Dad threw an arm around my shoulders, squeezed, and kissed the top of my head. “That’s my Cupcake,” he said. “Kind to a fault.” Satisfied, he let the subject drop, eager to settle into his favorite armchair with the day’s newspapers and to let me go off and do my homework.
Another father might have hesitated to let a good-looking stranger move in under his roof. As I rearranged my backpack, emptying out the heavy books I wouldn’t need to lug all the way over to Jackie’s, I thought about how great my dad was—and how much he trusted me. What intrigued me about Hence wasn’t his good looks—I’d been burned by one too many gorgeous musicians. It was his intensity—that dark hunger in his eyes—coupled with that hurt look of his, the way he had of averting his glance as though he’d been kicked hard by someone he trusted and didn’t dare let down his guard. I knew he must have stories to tell about the past he was fleeing and the future he’d planned for himself. I’ve always liked mysteries, and now one had landed on my doorstep, just begging to be solved.
Chelsea
The club was busier than before. A burly guy was unloading crates from a dolly and whistling to himself in the kitchen, and a woman with a shaved head fussed with a coil of electrical wires. I followed Cooper to the end of the hallway, into a long room with a stage at one end and a curved and gleaming bar at the rear. The walls were rough, exposed brick, bare but for a blue stripe of neon light that shot down their length, giving the space a watery glow.
By the time I noticed the man lurking in a patch of shadow we were almost on top of him. He stood at the bar with his back toward us, pouring himself a shot of Jack Daniel’s. He wore a businessman’s jacket, and his dark hair was cut short. Though he must have heard our footsteps, he didn’t turn or move. His stance was casual, commanding, like he owned the place. This had to be Hence.
Coop drew to a halt a few feet away, his arm out to keep me from getting any closer. The man finished pouring, then downed his shot in one gulp before turning to face us, an ironic smile—actually, more of a smirk—on his face. When his eyes landed on me, the smile vanished.
We gaped at each other. His dark hair was silver at the temples, and his skin was the color of caramel. He was scruffier than I’d expected, with a two-day beard. As older men’s faces go, his was handsome, but it wasn’t friendly or nice.
When he finally spoke, his voice sounded choked. “My God. You look just like…” Then he seemed to collect himself. “There’s nothing of your father in you at all.”
I stood up a little straighter. All the people who had known my mother—my father, my grandmother and aunts—liked to tell me how much alike we looked, but never in this tone of voice: a mixture of disbelief and wonder, and then, in that crack about my father, something like disdain. I struggled to keep my tone even. “So you did know my mother,” I said.
He chuckled. “I knew her, all right.” His tone implied he’d known her in ways I’d rather not have to think about. “A long time ago. What do you want from me, little girl?” He poured himself another shot.
Who did this guy think he was? “I only wanted to ask you a few questions. About her.” From the corner of my eye, I could see Cooper hovering anxiously nearby, as though he thought I might need rescuing from his boss. Or maybe he was flat-out eavesdropping.
Hence smiled, but not nicely. “Okay, what do you want to know?”
What didn’t I want to know? This guy might not stand still for a whole lot of questions, so I decided to start with the most important one: “Do you know how I can find her?”
He was silent for a moment, something like sadness crossing his face. “She’s not buried around here. Her body was never recovered.”
“But she’s not dead!” I insisted. “I mean, I found this letter she wrote, and there’s a good chance she might be alive. She sent it from here.”
His eyes bugged. “A letter? Written when? Sent from here?” He took several steps forward and, involuntarily, I backed up. Hence was starting to scare me.
“Fourteen years ago.”
“Fourteen years ago?” He ran a hand through his hair and gaped at me. “You think she’s been in hiding for fourteen years?”
“The police investigators think so,” I said.
“They’re incompetent fools.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “That’s why I’m looking for her myself.” I reached into my hoodie’s pocket for the envelope.
He practically grabbed it from my hand, pulling the letter out so roughly I was worried he would rip it. I watched his face as he read, trying to decipher the emotions that passed across it. Surprise? Sadness? Hope? I thought I saw all three, but they vanished so quickly I couldn’t be sure.
“Chelsea…” he said finally. “So that’s your name. Just like Catherine, to name you after her favorite neighborhood.” Was that really where my name had come from? “She and I used to spend time together there.”
“Who are you, anyway?” I asked. “Who were you to my mother?”
“Sit down.” He gestured to a barstool, and I complied. “And you”—he motioned to Cooper—“get back to work.”
Cooper retreated.
“How did you get here? You don’t look old enough to drive.” He looked me over appraisingly and a vertical line deepened between his brows.
“I’m seventeen,” I told him. “I took a bus.”
“Does your father know you’re here?” Hence pulled up a barstool and lowered himself onto it. “Never mind. There’s no way in hell he would let you come here to see me.” He held the letter out, grudgingly, I thought, and turned back to the bar, as if he was completely done with me.
When I couldn’t stand the silence anymore, I broke it. “My dad kept this letter hidden from me. He told me my mother was dead.”
Hence turned to face me again. “I guess it goes without saying he never mentioned me.” He looked at the letter in my hand, hungrily, as if he was thinking about taking it back. I slipped it into my pocket.
“Maybe for you,” I said. “Nothing goes without saying for me. I grew up thinking my mother died when I was three. This letter tells me she’s still alive.”
“That letter is fourteen years old. It doesn’t tell you anything.”
“For all I know, there might be others. I read a story in the newspaper that said she’d sent letters. Plural.”
He looked at me with new interest.
“My dad and I moved around a lot, and our phone number has always been unlisted. Even if my mother had wanted to reach me, she couldn’t have.”
“Isn’t your father some kind of philosophy professor? She couldn’t find him online?”
“He teaches economics.” Hence had a point… but he didn’t know everything. “Maybe she didn’t want to talk to him. Or maybe she did call. Maybe he didn’t tell me… or the police.” I felt a pang of guilt; what was I accusing my father of, exactly? “She could have been trying to reach me for years. Maybe after a while she decided I was angry at her and just gave up.” In a way, that was my worst fear—that my mother thought I’d gotten her letters and hadn’t cared enough to write back.
We fell silent for a moment. The woman I’d seen untangling wires before strode into the room looking like she was going to say something to Hence, then caught the expression on his face, spun around, and was gone. For a while, Hence and I continued to sit side by side in a silence that was only slightly less hostile than before.
Finally, I dared another question. “Can you tell me about her? What she was like?”
“I can’t talk about her,” he said. “Don’t ask me to.”
This was a strange and disappointing response. Still, if he wouldn’t talk about her, maybe I could at least learn something about the rest of my family. “What about Quentin Eversole? He must be my uncle, right? Does he still live around here?”
Hence snorted. “After he sold me this place, he moved upstate. For all I know he could be dead. But you didn’t miss much; he was an idiot of the first order.” He poured himself yet another shot. “Quentin.” He spit the word out.
I waited for more.
“He despised me. Thought I wasn’t good enough to hang around with any sister of his.” He sneered down at my sneakers. “Jim—your grandfather—was a rich man. Did you know that?”
I shook my head, realizing how ridiculously little I knew.
“He inherited this building and turned it into a club in the late seventies. Didn’t that father of yours tell you anything? A lot of acts cut their teeth here. The Chokehold. Toxic Cake. Steamtrunk.” I nodded, as though those names meant something to me. “Between CBGB and The Underground, the Bowery was the epicenter of the punk movement. Bands were falling all over themselves for the chance to play here….”
I kept nodding, trying to get on his good side.
“Your grandfather turned this place from a kitchen-supply warehouse into a music mecca. I always admired him for that—the old bastard.”
Uh, okay. I kept my smile frozen in place. “So what happened to him?”
“Heart attack. At fifty-eight. Then Quentin got hold of the club and ran it into the ground. It was his worst nightmare, having the club fall into my hands, but by the time he hit bottom, he didn’t have a choice. It was sell out or go bankrupt. And I’ve built The Underground back up to what it used to be—even better. You know who played here last week?” He paused for emphasis. “The Starving Artists. Rolling Stone profiled them a month ago. They could be playing arenas. But they chose to come here for a victory lap because we’re the venue that broke them.” I looked up from my hands and caught him studying me. “Not that you care. What bands do you listen to?”
I shrugged. I don’t care who’s hot or edgy. I like what I like—but I wasn’t about to tell that to a professional music snob. “I came here to learn about my mother, not to chitchat about obscure bands.” Something about Hence was bringing out the ugly in me.
He mimed shock. “My mistake. What else do you want to know?”
“Do you have any ideas about where she went? After she left me and my dad and came here?”
His black eyes bored straight into mine. “When she arrived here, I was in Liverpool. By the time I got to New York she had vanished. And believe me, if I had even the slightest clue about where she had gone, I would have followed her there. I would have…” His voice trailed off. “If she were still alive, I’d know.” Another long moment of silence. “I, of all people, would know.”
Was he claiming he was closer to my mother than I had been? Than Dad was? This struck me as deeply unfair. “You of all people?”
He inspected me, cocked his head to one side, leaned in a little, and changed the subject. “It’s spooky how much you look like her. But I was wrong. You do have some of him in you, too. Around the mouth. Not that I’ve ever met him. I’ve seen his picture. Professor Max Price.” He made a face like he’d bitten into a lemon.
But I’m not that easy to distract. “What do you mean, you of all people?”
He laughed. Then he rubbed his eyes and was silent for a while. When he finally spoke again, his tone was cold. “Are you planning to take the bus back to Massachusetts tonight?”
I drew myself up as straight as I could. “I’m staying here until I learn about my mother,” I said. “Until I figure out where she is.”
“You might not like what you learn,” he said, rising and rubbing his hands on his jeans.
“I’ll take that risk.” Anything had to be better than nothing.
Hence chuckled. “Well, okay then. I’ve got work to do.” He started off into the hallway, but paused at the door and looked at me over his shoulder. “It’s rash of you to barge into my home like this. But since you’re here…” He paused for a moment before shouting, “Cooper! Get in here.” His voice boomed through the empty space, and Coop appeared in the doorway, out of breath. “Take little Miss Price upstairs. She’ll be spending the night.”
“Should I put her in the spare apartment? You know… the one…”
“Yes, I know the one.” Hence’s voice was sour with impatience. “That’s the perfect place for her.” And he stalked out of the room without another word.
Cooper and I looked at each other. For a long moment, I fumed. “What’s wrong with him?” I asked, when I could find the words. “Is he that rude with everyone? I don’t know how you can stand working for him. And what did he mean when he said it’s the perfect place for me?”
But Cooper just sighed and vanished. A minute later, he reappeared with my backpack and beckoned me toward the elevator. All I could do was follow.
Catherine
Between classes, Jackie asked if I wanted to come hang out at her place after school. I told her our fridge was almost empty and I’d promised Dad I’d bring home groceries, but she wasn’t having any of it. She poked her lower lip out and crossed her arms over her chest. “It’s that new waiter, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Annoyed, I fumbled my locker combination and had to start over. “And he’s not a waiter.” Lately I’d been spending more time around the club, going straight home from school, hoping for a chance to really talk with Hence. He’d been living in our house for almost two weeks, and I still hadn’t begun to unravel the mystery of where he was from and why he’d left. When he was in The Underground, he always seemed to be scrubbing the walk-in freezer or helping the bands unload their gear; either that or he was down in his basement room, playing his guitar, the amp turned up loud enough for me to hear it whenever I passed the closed door. On his days off, he would disappear completely, taking his guitar and amp with him, then return with his spine a bit straighter, looking confident and exhilarated—almost like a different person.
Continues...
Excerpted from Catherine by April Lindner Copyright © 2013 by April Lindner. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.