Dream Chasers Read Online Free PDF Page B

our family time.”
    â€œI know.” She flashed him a wry smile. “But Tony’s having a nap, and he’ll hardly notice you’re gone. And Hannah is family too. You have to take care of this.”
    He hugged her, buried his face in her dark curls. “Thank you.”
    She held him. “Bring her back with you, okay? Kicking and screaming, if need be.”
    Taking nothing but his wallet, keys and cell phone, Green drove at breakneck speed up the busy, twisting Highway 15, grateful that his little Subaru had all-wheel-drive, but wishing it was equipped with lights and siren too. Eighty-six minutes later, he was weaving through the narrow, leafy streets of his west end neighbourhood. The house looked empty and undisturbed. Today’s Ottawa Citizen still sat in the middle of the front porch where the delivery boy had tossed it, and the mail bulged from the box.
    Green unlocked the front door and stepped into the hall. It echoed eerily, as if it had been abandoned for a week instead of a mere day. A shout to Hannah elicited no response, and a rapid search of the premises yielded no trace of her. He tried not to panic. This was the same girl who had climbed onto a plane in Vancouver on a whim when she was barely sixteen years old and had flown east to visit the father she had never known. The same girl who, upon arrival, had hung out on the streets of Ottawa for days without a word to either parent before fate had delivered her into Green’s hands. She was no stranger to the grand gesture of liberation. But she was still an innocent girl, albeit blue-haired instead of blonde, and now finishing her first year at an alternative high school, a far cry from your model student.
    He debated phoning his father, who lived in a small senior’s residence in Sandy Hill. Hannah had adored her gentle, oldworld grandfather ever since their first meeting, and she showed him a sensitivity and affection she never shared with her father. But Sid Green was eighty-five, frail and partially deaf. Scars from the Holocaust had left him with a weak heart and a penchant for paranoia that no amount of security on Canadian soil could ever quite counter. Even a casual question about Hannah’s whereabouts would send him spinning into panic. Until Green had exhausted all other avenues, he would not put his father through that.
    He stood in the middle of her bedroom, looking for clues. Its severe black decor—Sharon called it eggplant, but it looked black to him—reflected a goth influence but she had recently added some brightly coloured posters of music groups other than Three Inches of Blood and Avenged Sevenfold. The clothing strewn across the floor was red, turquoise and even pink. Progress.
    He looked for her school bag. It wasn’t there. Nor was her cell phone or her school agenda book, despite a detailed search under the piles of books and papers that littered every surface. He did, however, turn up her little black purse and her wallet, complete with credit card, bus pass and student ID . Also in the wallet, he noted with resignation, was a fake ID with her photo and name, but a date of birth four years earlier that her real one. It bore a Vancouver address, leading him to wonder how long she’d owned it.
    So she had taken her cell phone and her school bag, but not her credit card, bus pass or ID s, fake or otherwise. He tried not to imagine the worst. Perhaps she had just gone to stay at a nearby friend’s house, where she would not need money or ID . Perhaps they were using a friend’s car. He realized with a pang how little he knew of her social circle. She rarely brought friends home, and when she did, it was only a quick stop between one party and another. Introductions, if they were given at all, were a perfunctory flick of her hand in his direction.
    â€œDeedee, this is Mike,” she’d mutter. Not father, not Dad. Even after a full year, he had not yet earned that