City of Fury

By Shawna Hansen

Summer has just started, Anjie's been living it up while her parents enjoy a vacation in Florida. Late returning from their trip, Anjie discovers some really odd notes and starts to wonder if her parents are really just delayed at the airport or if, maybe, they are not coming home. Not sure about what's going on, Anjie starts to find clues that maybe her parents aren't who she thought they were.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shawna Hansen
• Release date: Jun 5, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458155658

Shawna Hansen

Author of 3 romance/new adult novels: A Guy's Best Friend, A Guy's Worst Nightmare and A Guy's Dream Come True. Shawna also is working on a series of Young Adult Science Fiction books starting with City of Fury. Shawna HANSEN lives in Massachusetts and loves Revere Beach.

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City of Fury

Shawna Hansen

Copyright © 2011 by Shawna Hansen

Smashwords Edition

CITY OF FURY, Copyright © 1995 by Shawna Hansen. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented without the express written permission of the author.

FIRST EDITION

EPub Edition June 2011

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Email the author at [e-mail] and check her Facebook author page at http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_208579265847129&ap=1 for new books!

Dedication

Dedicated to my family, friends and readers everywhere.

Chapter One

The Black Box

The day had been a scorcher--at least 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. Anjie felt the sweat drip down the side of her neck even though she’d been stuck inside all day cleaning with the AC on. She tossed her dad’s two-week-old Sunday newspaper onto the couch’s yellow afghan where her cat, Misfit, slept. Her parents were due back from Florida any minute. Thankfully, they were already several hours late!

Anjie looked at the last mess in the house--pizza boxes on the end tables and empty soda pop cans lined up on the window sill. She knocked the cans down into the recycle bag. At least something is moving in here.

The place hadn't been such a mess since she used to play with her dolls, the Furies. She'd placed the dolls strategically under the front window, so her dad could watch TV and so the Furies could see all the way down the block. Anjie loved playing Furies. She'd lined up her dolls, all dark brown and small like herself, and they'd invaded the whole house. Furies moved quickly, silently and communicated with vibrations. Each Fury had a rule. Each rule had to have a corresponding rule--if someone killed another Fury (which never happened), Anjie had to find a rule to counteract the kill. She remembered how upset her mom had been about how messy the house had gotten when Anjie played Furies and how she had finally had to give Anjie the common ground, private ground lecture. She'd sat Anjie and all of the Fury dolls down and reminded them that this family lived in the house together and that Anjie's space was in her room. She could keep her own bedroom in any state of messiness she preferred, but on the outside, where everyone lived, she had to be considerate and clean. That had been a long time ago. Now Anjie was thirteen and didn't play dolls, but she still loved the Furies.

The empty cans and pizza boxes also brought back the memories of when her parents left for Florida two weeks ago. She had gone wild --stayed up late, ate popcorn for dinner, calling her friend Kathy at camp in Michigan three times a day, ordering pizza five days in a row. Of course, her next door neighbor technically was babysitting Anjie via the telephone and daily visits, but on the whole Anjie felt free! When Kathy went to camp, Anjie had been both disappointed and happy for her best friend. Kathy had kept her promise to write and call once a week, which made up a little for being alone the first month of summer without Kathy around or her parents around. She almost missed school. Ok, she didn’t miss school. Being alone the last few hours waiting for her parents to come home had strained her nerves. Although she sometimes pretended to be annoyed when her babysitter/neighbor, Lorraine stopped over and bugged her, she had appreciated the just past dark visits. Lorraine had been MIA all day. Anjie missed her parents' noises: the typing, hammering in the basement, phone calls. It was so quiet that Anjie left the kitchen radio, turned permanently to KUNI public broadcasting thanks to one of her father's welding experiments, on all day. She didn't want to feel completely isolated from the outside world. With her parents in the house there was never a moment's peace, but now she missed all the commotion.

Anjie thought about doing something--ANYTHING, besides cleaning. She could go for a ride on her bike, check out the construction site near her old school or buy some gum. Anything! But, she needed to stay close to home and there was one other problem - she couldn't remember where she had left her keys. She looked in the jogging shorts she'd worn yesterday for her keys, but they weren't there. She hadn't used her bike or unlocked it from the front porch since last Wednesday when she went to a matinee. Time had churned slowly at the beginning of the week. Plenty of time to get all the cleaning done, right? It was hard to believe the week had already ended and now suddenly today was Friday. Not only had she lost track of time, but her keys seemed to have disappeared completely. Anjie didn’t understand how Misfit could just sleep so peacefully on the couch!

The last time she thought she had seen her keys had been on her stereo speakers. Anjie ran up the stairs, past her parents' rooms and into her bedroom. She looked through all her shorts' pockets, but no keys. Under the bed she found that lost math assignment she had gotten a zero on last semester. Anjie remembered her mom's saying if you can't find something, look in the one place you know it couldn't be; the freezer. It helps me.

Anjie went back down to the kitchen, shutting off lights upstairs and picking up a stray candy wrapper off the stairs. She glided over to the freezer, knowing the only thing left inside was the big, family size bag of lima beans that had lived in their fridge since Christmas. The lima beans never managed to get eaten. Last and the very, very least. She hated lima beans and didn't even want to see the empty ice box looming in front of her, but she had to test her mom's theory. Where did Mom get these wild ideas?

Crystal-ice hung from the freezer's top and she recognized that defrosting time smell. She pulled out the lima beans, dramatically holding her nose and saying, PU! Throwing the lima beans back into the freezer, she imagined her keys frozen in a glob behind the bag's outline in the caked ice. No keys in there. But there was a shiny, black box about the size of a shoebox. She pulled the box out and ran her fingers around the cold, silver-rimmed edges. Diamonds, not real ones of course, she didn’t think her parents could afford that, jutted out from each corner. This was great. She should have known her parents had hidden something behind those nasty lima beans. Her mom and dad always left surprises behind. She guessed this box held fancy, imported candy or ice cream. Anjie couldn't wait to see what was hidden inside, but the box was too cold to hold. She was afraid her fingers would stick to the sides. Anjie sat down at the table and waited for the box to thaw.

Anjie really missed Kathy. This would have been so fun to share with her. She missed playing duets on her synthesizer with Kathy's baritone saxophone. At this point, Anjie missed everyone, even Lorraine, her annoying neighbor, who would be leaving for Los Angeles later this afternoon once Anjie's parents returned. Even LA would think Lorraine was weird. I bet Kathy would take pictures, have a party or make a video of this freezer discovery. I should at least write her a letter about it!

Anjie wondered where her parents found this box. It was pure black, like a winter sky with no stars. Her face was reflected clearly. No distortions. The box weighed about the same as Misfit. She looked at herself mirrored in the toaster and her face distorted into a big clown's grin. Her eyes popped out over her bubble nose. The black box showed a perfect image compared to the toaster. Just her normal face.

The box didn't feel frozen anymore. She held it up in the light. She could see all the kitchen appliances behind her. The box was like a second set of eyes in the back of her head. Beautiful.

Although she could touch the box without numbing the tops of her fingers, she couldn't find a way to open the box. No handle or lock was visible. Maybe this is some kind of new ice cube? She sat back and thought about what she would have hidden inside the box--all of her savings, her keys, old report cards. Everything important and secret. She examined it again. There were no openings anywhere. What a stupid box.

Smoothing her fingers over the surface she felt a small crack on the left side. She wedged her fingers around the crack, but it wouldn't budge. All the great things she could have stashed in here if she could get it open crowded through her head--her school pictures, her diary, her Fury dolls. The crack opened wider as her list grew. Old guitar pics, flower seeds, Lorraine's beads, her mom's homemade, rock-hard Brownies. . . .

The lid stood straight up. She hadn't seen it move, but it flopped wide open. It was crammed full of papers and all kinds of family heirlooms.

The first thing she pulled out was her mom's wedding ring. She couldn't believe her eyes. Her mom never took this ring off. It was part of her body. Anjie fingered the inscription inside written in a foreign language, which she knew said To Kari with all my love. Her real father had given it to her mother before she left for the U.S. Anjie wondered if her mother had known she was pregnant at the time? The words, practically rubbed out, had given her mother the courage to move to a new world and start over. Anjie hoped to visit her mother's country someday and see why it had been so crucial for her mother to escape when she did. Why had Mom remarried without waiting for her real dad to join them? Anjie loved her parents as they were, but sometimes she had a lot of questions she wished she could ask about her real father.

If they would just get home. . . .

The more she thought