Sunny Dreams Read Online Free

bustling female presence went a long way in filling up the gaping chasm that my mother had left behind.
    The baby’s absence made a hole too, and I felt it, but on an entirely different plane. I’d had so little time to grow attached to Sunny and that had been in a kind of audience capacity. She was like a little moving picture that blew spit bubbles and raised the odd stink. She was too young for me to play with. The criminals stole her from us when I was six and Sunny hadn’t yet celebrated her first birthday.
    It must have been during those terrible months in the spring and summer of ’25 that I started my lifelong habit of conjuring up in my mind The Worst That Could Happen. In the beginning, all my imaginings featured Sunny. I turned her into a cripple before she even arrived at her new home: she lost the use of her arms and legs. To me, that was the worst thing on the planet Earth that could befall anyone, worse even than crashing head first into the Nutty Club. At least if you did that you wouldn’t be around to realize what had happened to you.
    Our family’s primary claim to fame before that summer was that my dad’s dad, Grandpa Palmer, had gone down with the Titanic . I knew it, but didn’t feel it, so it was easy to talk about. Even my dad didn’t mind when I brought it up on occasion. But Sunny’s kidnapping and my mother’s death never took on enough distance for us to be able to talk about them comfortably even among ourselves.
    Every year on the anniversary of Sunny’s disappearance my dad put an ad in all the major papers across Canada. Each time he worded it a little differently, according to how old she got to be and how much he imagined her to have grown. He never got a serious answer. There are an awful lot of cranks out there in the world.

Chapter 1
     
Eleven Years Later
     
    My family had been out of quarantine for a fortnight when I finally persuaded Fraser to go with me to see the boys.
    At first, Johnny Lee was reluctant to talk to us.
    “I thought it was just a pile of thistles,” he said at last.
    So the part about the Russian thistles was true.
    We sat around the dining room table at a big house in Riverview: Johnny Lee, Fraser Foote, and I. We had been lucky enough to catch Johnny when his mother wasn’t home.
    The boy started to cry. I was sorry for putting him through this, but not sorry enough to stop.
    “It must have been hard for you,” I said.
    “Leave my brother alone.”
    We hadn’t noticed a little girl standing in the doorway to the kitchen.
    “Go play in the backyard,” Johnny said roughly.
    “No.”
    “Go play in the backyard, Muriel, or I’ll tell Mum you snuck cookies.”
    “I didn’t sneak,” Muriel said quietly as she backed away from us through the kitchen. “You snuck.” The screen door closed behind her.
    “That’s my sister,” Johnny said. “She’s five.”
    A familiar sad worm wiggled inside my chest. Seven years ago our Sunny would have been five and I’d missed it.
    “Does Muriel know about what you found?” I asked Johnny.
    “I don’t know,” he said. “Probably. She knows something bad happened.”
    In late August of 1936 two eleven-year-old boys from Riverview became famous because of something that they found by the railway tracks. Johnny Lee was one of those boys and the other one was Artie Eccles. Their names weren’t in the paper but news like that travels fast and their identities were bandied about soon enough. Fraser pestered his dad into confirming the names for us. His dad was a cop.
    The phone book told us where we could find the boys. Riverview is on the other side of the Red River from the Norwood Flats where Fraser and I lived. It was a part of town that we mostly saw from across a muddy expanse of water. People just like us lived there, I’m sure, but they had always seemed exotic to me simply because they were as tiny as toy soldiers and they lived west of the Red. It was more like south-southwest at that bend in