Now and Forevermore Arabella: 1, #1

By Carolyn Summer Quinn

Found abandoned in a Colorado mall when she was too young to say how she got there, the little three-year-old girl wearing a bracelet with the name "Amanda" on it doesn't know anything about herself, not how she came to be left there, not who her parents are, and not even her full real name. 

 

Nine years of living in foster care later the truth finally comes to light.  Amanda's not an actual orphan at all!  It turns out she was accidentally kidnapped in Florida when one of the antique cars her father sells was stolen while she was in it.  DNA testing proves she's really a missing girl named Arabella Prescott, and her life changes for the better when her terrific parents and adoring little sister arrive to take her home to the island of Farris Key, where just about everybody she meets is thrilled to have her back. 

 

Yet Arabella has returned to the very island she was kidnapped from in the first place, so alongside the family's joy at their reunion are some very disturbing concerns.  Are the kidnappers, who were never found, island people too?  Who is the odd person who seems to keep watching their house from the beach across the street?  What exactly happened to cause the authoriies in Colorado not to figure out Arabella's identity when there were people all over Florida looking for her? 

And why does a certain nearby house keep giving Arabella the creeps?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carolyn Summer Rose Quinn
• Release date: Jul 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201888725

Carolyn Summer Quinn

CAROLYN SUMMER QUINN, Author and Fine Art Photographer, grew up singing show tunes in Roselle and Scotch Plains, NJ, a member of an outrageous and rollicking extended family.  She has a B.A. in English and Theater/Media from Kean University and now delights in living in New York City.  She is the Author of 10 books (so far!) and they've garnered 17 writing awards!

Book preview

Truth is like the sun.  You can shut it out for a time but it ain’t goin’ away. 

—Elvis Presley

Find out who you are.  And do it on purpose.

—Dolly Parton

Chapter One

Summoned to the Principal’s Office

THE LAST PERSON I EXPECTED to see that November school day was my social worker, but there she was.

I had been sitting in my seventh grade math class, bored as usual by the subject matter, and gazing out the window to see the snow flurries falling from a gunmetal gray Colorado sky.  The snow interested me more than the equations which were enough to put anybody asleep.  Math was almost over. We’d be released from this festival of dullness in exactly six more minutes and seventeen seconds and my favorite class, art, was next. 

That’s when the classroom phone rang.

It was the Main Office.  I heard the teacher say, You need Amada Fall?  Okay.  She hung up and told me to go to the principal’s office immediately.  Me.  And they said to bring your things, Amanda, the teacher instructed me. 

Uh-oh.  That wasn’t good.

The class brat, Wyatt, made snide little remarks like, Oooooooh, Amanda’s in trouble, and the other kids laughed at me.  I tried not to blush but failed miserably while gathering my math book, notebook, and what I think of as my charity backpack from where it sat beneath my desk on the floor.  It was the ugliest backpack imaginable, navy blue with gray trim and so plain I could barely stand looking at it, but at least it had come to me for free, along with the school supplies that had been in it.  When my social worker, Lara Reynolds, had brought me and several of her other charges to the city hall building in another town where a charitable organization had been giving backpacks out to poor children and foster kids back in August, we’d arrived late, and it was one of the only halfway decent choices left. 

My favorite colors were pastels, mint green, yellow and pink, in that order.  If I’d had my choice I would have wanted a pretty mint green backpack, but hey, foster kids have to take whatever we can get.  I got this one.  I knew better than to complain.  That never changed anything for the better.  Sometimes voicing an honest complaint could even make matters worse.  Foster parents didn’t have to keep kids like me.  None of them liked complainers.  It was best to stay silent whenever possible and just keep a low profile.   

Out in the quiet school hallway I had to wonder if I’d done anything wrong, and if and that was why I was being called into the principal’s office, but really, I hadn’t.  I was rather good at not getting noticed.  I did my homework.  I came to school on time.  I tried to be so quiet that nobody realized I was there.  What could the principal want with me?

I hoped with all my heart that Lara Reynolds wouldn’t be the reason why I was being called to the office.  That had happened once before, two foster homes ago, when the foster father, Mr. Brownlee, found out he needed an operation.  He and his wife decided that very day, when the doctor gave them the news, that they would give me right back to my foster care agency and get rid of me. 

Before that I had been so silly.  I’d hoped the Brownlees would adopt me.  Sharyn and Sean Brownlee.  I believed them when they said they cared about me, and made a big mistake when I began to like them back. 

Actually that isn’t the whole truth.  I did like them, but it was more than that.  I began to forget that my stay at their house wasn’t permanent and didn’t come with any guarantees.  I let my guard down.  In fact, I’d let my guard so far down that I had started to love Sharyn and Sean Brownlee. 

I even used to secretly write Amanda Brownlee on pieces of paper, wishing I could have their last name and someday become their adopted daughter, rather than remaining Amanda Fall, with the made-up last name I’d been given by the social worker before the one before Lara.  I had been found nine years earlier in a shopping mall wearing a beaded bracelet with the letters A-M-A-N-D-A spelled out in black letters on white plastic beads, surrounded with alternating orange and turquoise round beads made of glass.  Lara had shown me a photo of it a few months earlier.  The bracelet had appeared homemade, something put together from a craft kit.  The actual bracelet itself was still held in a file somewhere as evidence of child abandonment by the police.  And bracelet or not, the name Amanda may have been pretty, but from the day I was found onwards it never felt quite right to me.  Lara had told me that when I was found I would not answer to Amanda, or Mandy either.  I said my name was R.E., but that didn’t make sense.

The day I was found happened to be October 16th, which the child welfare workers used as my birthday, estimating that I was about three years old.  October 16th, of course, fell during the Autumn, which is how they came up with that unimaginative surname, Fall.

The last name didn’t suit me.  In another school kids made fun of it, teasing me with ridiculous lines like, Who fell?  Amanda Fall!   

Well, at least it was better than being called Jane Doe.  That was the official substitute name usually given to people who don’t know their real names and the authorities can’t identify.  That one would have been worse. 

So I was a girl with a first name that seemed wrong, a last name that wasn’t real and a birthday that wasn’t the actual day I was born.  I also had no idea who my parents were.  I didn’t know what my family’s nationality was, except that I had light ivory skin, green eyes and brown hair, which meant I probably came from a European background, but who knows?  Worst of all, I didn’t know why they had left me all alone in a mall and never came back. 

I’d just had a long line of foster parents.  An old dragon called Mrs. Tucker had been the worst of them, but those professional do-gooders, the Brownlees, were the most treacherous.  They pretended to actually love me.  The Brownlees took in foster children simply to do something nice for humanity, or so they told everybody.  Ha!  It was quite a line, I thought now as I turned the corner in the hallway, which was decorated with paper Thanksgiving turkeys from art classes hanging on the wall, and saw the main office up ahead.  The minute those Brownlees had been hit with a problem of their own, doing good and humanity had flown right out the window, and I’d been tossed right out of their lives.  I was moved to the children’s shelter for two weeks before being placed in yet another home that also wasn’t destined to work out.

So much for having wanted to be adopted by those people and becoming Amanda Brownlee.  I had been ten years old back then.  There was nothing I’d wanted more than a family I could really and truly call my own - then.  What would it be like, I used to wonder, to have a permanent home, and caring parents?  Other kids knew who they were and where they belonged.  They were treated like they were worth something and had parents who were always there, taking them on family vacations, giving them wonderful holiday presents, terrific gifts like cool bicycles and fancy mobile phones.  Those kids didn’t even know how lucky they were, but me?  I knew. 

I had been ridiculous back then.  I had let myself believe the Brownlees might just have wanted me to become their daughter.

Well, that hadn’t worked out, had it?  That childish dream evaporated into thin air on the day I’d lost that particular placement.  It’s possible to get used to anything if you absolutely have to.  I had no other choice but to get used to not being well cared for, let alone loved, and I didn’t dare wish to be adopted again. 

Now I was twelve and just glad to have landed, since the summertime, with my latest foster mother, Minerva Leighton, a retired woman in her sixties who had once been a high school drama teacher.  She was in it for the money the state paid her to take in foster kids, but thankfully she was an all right sort of person.  She seemed to genuinely like me, and let me watch all the shows I wanted, which was great, but I knew better than to let myself care back too much.  Living with Minerva Leighton wasn’t exciting but it wasn’t horrible at her tiny house, either.  There were worse places to live, like with those phony Brownlees, or at wacky Mrs. Tucker’s house.  I’d had a really terrible time in that particular foster home.  I didn’t want to lose this one.

But I’d be losing it, I realized, as soon as I looked through the glass walls of the main office and saw that there she was. My social worker.  Lara Reynolds, with her hair pulled back in a French twist and wearing a light blue puffer coat, was sitting on the bench where the kids who got in trouble usually landed while waiting to see the principal.  Lara was waiting instead for me.

Oh, no.

I OPENED THE GLASS office door with a thumping heart full of dread.

There you are!  Lara sprang up from the bench and greeted me brightly.  She was smiling, and that, for Lara, did not seem exactly right.  Whenever Lara, or any of my previous social workers, had showed up unexpectedly, they usually brought bad news with them and looked about as happy as a bulldog with indigestion when they saw me.  A smiling social worker wasn’t normal.  I’d better stay calm but brace myself.

Well, hello there, little Miss Fall, Principal Townsend popped out of his office to greet me heartily.  He was also smiling.  It was like the two of them were posing for a toothpaste commercial.  Sorry to pull you out of class.  You have a visitor and she’s got some news for you.

I can just imagine, I said as politely as I could, trying my best to keep my face and voice expressionless.  One of the first rules of being a foster kid was to never let people know what you were thinking.  If you kept a blank expression it meant you didn’t give them a clue about what was in your head or your heart.  That was an especially good rule to follow when bad news might be coming your way, since it usually was. 

But the principal and Lara both surprised me.  They laughed.  Oh, no, honey.  It’s not bad news this time, Lara assured me.  She was even still smiling.

Well, that was a switch.  I wondered what the news could be.  Was Minerva Leighton suddenly interested in adopting me?  No, she wouldn’t be, since she mainly took foster kids in for the money she could get for housing us.  She wouldn’t want to give up those wonderful, marvelous checks.  She loved them, not her foster children.  I knew she had already applied to take in another foster kid who was supposedly going to be joining us right before Christmas, which meant she’d receive more money.  Some people would gladly house grizzly bears or mountain lions if only there was a payment attached to it.  On the other hand, I’d lived in worse places.

Why don’t you two feel free to use my office and have a nice little chat?  Mr. Townsend suggested.  It’s almost last period.  I want to go to the music room to watch the choral practice for the next half hour or so, and then I’ll be back. 

My eyes widened at that.  Mr. Townsend was going to walk away and let us use his office?  What kind of a talk did Lara have to have with me to merit a move like that?  But the principal still had a smile on his face and a twinkle in his eyes as he strolled out the door.

Whatever this is about, he already knows it.  And he’s even happy about it.

This is getting stranger by the second.

I held my breath.  Could Lara Reynolds really be here with news that wasn’t bad?

Come on, Lara grinned, leading me inside the office by the hand, which she squeezed. 

I had never been called into Mr. Townsend’s office before but I’d heard school rumors that it was rather spectacular.  They turned out to be true.  It was paneled and hung with pictures of the school’s current teams and squads.  There was a gigantic flat screen television hanging on one wall and a large bubbling fish tank filled with lazily swimming blue and yellow exotic fish – because blue and gold were the school colors.  The principal usually marched around acting like a tough guy, but it was kind of cute of him to choose yellow and blue fish for the tank.

Lara didn’t sit behind his desk.  She sat in one of the two wooden guest chairs in front of it and gestured with her free hand for me to settle in the other.  Then she gave my hand another squeeze before letting it go.  Amanda, in all my years as a social worker, I’ve never had news to impart to any child that’s ever been as good as this.

In all her years?  Had she lost her mind?  Lara Reynolds was twenty-six!  I could have made a smart remark about that but I didn’t.  The suspense concerning what this was all about was beginning to kill me, but still, I was not going to admit it.  I’d learned a long time ago that the less said to social workers, or anybody, really, the better. 

I just waited.  But for once in my life I was waiting for a social worker to deliver whatever the news was that she was bringing to me with a tiny spark of hope in my heart instead of the usual dread.

We’ve found your real family, Lara finally blurted.

Chapter Two

Suddenly Arabella

I don’t understand , I said to my social worker.  "What real family?"

Nothing whatsoever was known about my family.  I had gone into foster care when I was estimated to be three years old, and even that age, three, had been a guess arrived at by some pediatrician who had examined me, somewhere.  Nothing I knew about myself was for real.

The story went that I had been found fast asleep on a bench inside a shopping mall in the early hours of an autumn morning.  A janitor arrived for work, found me and called the police.  He believed I had probably been placed on the bench sometime after the mall closed the evening before.  I’d sneaked a look at my file once when I had the social worker before Lara and the janitor had said, The child wasn’t sleeping here when I closed up last night. 

They had a tough time waking me up.  When I got brought to a hospital it was discovered that I also had some kind of a drug in my system.  The doctors found traces of a lot of it, as if I had been given the drug for some time.  Whoever had abandoned me in the mall had given me a shot or a pill or something weird to make sure I hadn’t made any noise and slept straight through the night.  And I was wearing that awful turquoise blue and orange beaded Amanda bracelet. 

At the hospital the staff said I was malnourished.  I had diaper rash – even though I was three years old!  The theory was that I’d been put in diapers while I was drugged, in case I had to go.  I was also confused, according to the file, and wasn’t able to tell anyone very much when I did wake up.  I didn’t answer when anyone addressed me as Amanda, so they tried calling me Mandy.  I replied, Who’s Mandy?

That was all I seemed to know about myself, that I wasn’t Amanda or Mandy.  People asked me where I came from, but I couldn’t tell them.  They wanted to know my full name, but I told them what sounded like R.E.  They told me that couldn’t be right.

I didn’t know that whole story until a few years ago, from the last social worker before Lara.  By then so much time had passed that even though sometimes when I couldn’t sleep I would wonder about what R.E. could possibly have stood for, it was impossible to remember and figure it out.  Rachel Emily?  Robin Elizabeth?  Riley Ella? 

No one had reported a little girl roughly my age missing.  No girl called Amanda was missing.  My picture was taken and put in the Denver newspaper and on TV, along with several days’ worth of stories about the Little Lost Doll of the Mall, but nobody recognized me.  I went from the hospital right into foster care, with Fall assigned as my made-up last name.  I wasn’t with the first foster family too long before I was moved to another, and another, and another, put in seven foster families