Finding Danny Read online

  Linzi Glass

  Finding Danny

  For my friend Sylvia Kelegian, one of the many

  unsung animal rescuers, and for all the amazing dogs

  I have helped, and those I have yet to save

  Contents

  Chapter One

  My life would have been completely different if my mom…

  Chapter Two

  Langston Middle School was located at the top of Mulholland…

  Chapter Three

  It was Tuesday, May 15, at 10:23 A.M. when everything…

  Chapter Four

  My room was painted pale lavender. The decorator had told…

  Chapter Five

  I was walking with Kate and Lulu between classes, and…

  Chapter Six

  I barely slept all night. I kept waking up expecting…

  Chapter Seven

  I was anxious to speak to my mother on the…

  Chapter Eight

  The dog ducked and darted down the alley and then…

  Chapter Nine

  School the next day was not fun. Lulu had taken…

  Chapter Ten

  “You said she would be here by now, Bree. It’s…

  Chapter Eleven

  I followed Rayleen in through the double doors. The smell…

  Chapter Twelve

  “Daddy!” His spicy aftershave wafted over me as I opened…

  Chapter Thirteen

  While I sat next to my dad at the sushi…

  Chapter Fourteen

  On the way up Topanga Canyon’s mountainous road of twists and…

  Chapter Fifteen

  “She sounds weird,” Ashton said as we walked door to…

  Chapter Sixteen

  Over the next few days we got about twenty emails…

  Chapter Seventeen

  I was in a good mood when I walked into…

  Chapter Eighteen

  Ashton tossed a rubber ball across the lawn to Buster…

  Chapter Nineteen

  Those were the words on my vocab pop quiz the…

  Chapter Twenty

  When I got home from school I called Ashton. His…

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Mr. Matheson had said that we didn’t need to wear real…

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  When I got home that afternoon I had what seemed…

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I barely slept a wink all night, but at seven…

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “Look, he’s smelling the roses!” Martha said as we all…

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “Slow down, boy, he’s still healin’.” Rayleen cupped her hands…

  Epilogue

  Dear Rayleen,…

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Mission: Humane!

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  My life would have been completely different if my mom and dad had just decided to have another kid. Maybe a baby brother with freckles on his nose or a cute little sister whose giggles sounded like tinkling bells. But my parents must have felt that one gurgly bundle of joy fulfilled their “kid quota,” and I was destined to be Sabrina “Bree” Davies, only daughter of Todd and Colleen, the superduo from Santa Monica, California.

  Sure, being the “only one” had its perks—no sharing of toys, clothes, desserts, or bedrooms, no sibling squabbles, no “who’s gonna use the bathroom first” races, and no yelling “it” to decide who got to sit in the front seat when Mom or Dad picked me up from school or the mall or a friend’s house.

  But while I didn’t have to share my parents or anything in our home with another kid, I did have to share my parents with something that was very important to them both: their careers. Or “The News Monster,” as I affectionately liked to refer to their jobs.

  “They’re journalists,” is what I said when someone asked what my parents did for a living. “My mom’s on TV and my dad’s in print.” The person asking would usually stare at me confused, but not wanting to sound stupid would say something like, “Wow, Bree, that must be so cool.”

  “Yeah, for them,” I’d reply. “Colleen Davies, human interest television reporter; Todd Davies, hard news journalist for a big newspaper,” I’d add if they wanted more juicy details.

  “Awesome!” they’d say. But it wasn’t awesome. News reporting took them both away, and always in an urgent, hurried way. In twelve years I can honestly say that the single most used word in our house was “deadline.” And Mom and Dad were always racing toward it.

  When I was three, I thought “deadline” was an evil witch with searing green eyes who might come and cast a spell on them both and I’d never see them again. So I would go to my room and play by myself with my Barbie dolls with missing patches of hair so the “deadline witch” wouldn’t be mad at them. When I was seven, I imagined “deadline” as a neon pink rope that they had to race toward like in track, and if they made it across there would be a big prize—a two-week vacation for the whole family at a resort in Hawaii where the three of us could lie on the warm beach under palm trees that danced the hula all day in the balmy breeze. The best part would be that “deadline” wouldn’t be allowed in Hawaii. It was banned on the islands.

  But as I got older I realized that “deadline” was more like a never-ending escalator; one deadline just carried them to the next and the next and the next. And neither one of them ever got off.

  I remember the second, the hour, the minute, and the day that “deadline” stopped mattering as much. It was the Saturday afternoon just a few days after my third-grade parent/teacher conference, which was what started everything.

  “She’s alone too much at home. The teachers say she’s very social but seems a little lost. Eight is a hard age at best,” I had heard them whispering to each other while I pretended to be asleep. “She should have something to call her own.”

  So the newsparents decided to add a fourth member to our team.

  “Don’t open up yet!” My mom had me sit on a sofa in the living room. I remember feeling the air-conditioning cooling the back of my neck while they got the “surprise” ready for me. As I squeezed my eyes shut, I could hear my dad’s footsteps just a few feet away and a tiny little sound, like someone had stepped on a squeaky toy. Then my mom clapped her hands and shouted, “Okay, open up now!”

  Right on the living room floor, in my dad’s arms, was a puppy. Not just any puppy. The cutest puppy in the whole world. The most adorable thing I had ever seen. A black and white, fluffy, big-eyed, soft-whiskered border collie, the most perfect creature ever created.

  I couldn’t move. I just stared. It felt like a dream, but then the puppy made a little yip-yap sound and wriggled and I knew I was most definitely, one hundred percent wide awake. As he looked at me with his big round eyes, his little pink tongue came out of his tiny mouth. My dad stood and held him out to me and said, “He’s all yours, kiddo,” as he put the puppy in my arms. My mom sat down next to me on the sofa and placed an arm around my shoulders. “We decided you need a little friend at home. So, what do you think?”

  Think? I couldn’t think. I was feeling fur and softness and puppy breath on my cheeks as he licked me. I felt warm and woozy, the luckiest girl in the whole world. I held him tight.

  “This is the best present you’ve ever given me, and it isn’t even my birthday!”

  My mom and dad hugged me at the same time, but not too hard because no one wanted the newest and smallest member of our family to get squashed.

  I named him Danny, because if I’d had a baby sister or brother that would have been what I would have wanted h
er or him to be called. My best friends, Lulu and Kate, said it really wasn’t a dog’s name, but I didn’t care. It suited him perfectly. Besides, being unique and different and special was what Danny-O turned out to be in every way.

  He swam laps with me in our pool at six months, howled if you said the word “moon” and rolled over and played dead whenever I made the rat-tat-tat sound of a gun by the time he was three, and by his fourth birthday learned how to hold himself up on his back legs whenever I danced in the house.

  Danny never left my side, from the minute I got home from school until I went to bed. He wagged his tail and jumped up to kiss me no matter whether he was tired or hungry or missed his walk because the deadline superduo had forgotten his leash in a car that was parked at an airport or up on an embankment on the outskirts of Los Angeles where a brush fire was burning out of control. “This is Colleen Davies from Channel Five reporting to you from Porter Ranch, where three thousand acres have already burned….”

  Danny was my permanent sleepover snuggler, ball catcher extraordinaire, hairy headrest, lickfest for days, toe tickler, and yap monster, all rolled into one. And my dinner companion on nights when no one else was home.

  “Spaghetti and meatballs. Your favorite.” I rolled my fork around my plate as Danny sat looking up at me with those same big eyes that had stared at me for the first time all those years ago. He cocked his head and made the Danny half-woof, half-whine sound that meant he was getting impatient. I had already fed him two cups of kibble in his shiny silver bowl that was kept next to the water cooler, but I could never resist that look on his face. His tail wagged even before I put a giant meatball on a napkin and dropped it on the kitchen floor.

  “Looks like it’s just you and me, Danny-O, for this very fine, heat-me-up-and-serve feast that the newsmom left in the fridge for us.”

  We had a housekeeper who came to clean, but she was usually gone by the time I got home from school. Sometimes my mom would pick me up, but when she couldn’t I took the school bus home. That’s when there’d be a note left and a dinner that needed to be zapped in the microwave because a news story had to be covered or she was running late at the station. My mom always signed the notes that she left taped to the front door for me with lots of XOXOs, but they didn’t quite make up for not having her there, sitting across the table from me in person.

  Danny gobbled down the meatball, then jumped up to lick the sauce off my face. “You’re the best of the best. Do you know that, Danny-O?” I looked into his eyes as he put both paws on my shoulders. He held my gaze and gave a little bark as if to say, “Right. Exactly. Couldn’t have said it better myself.”

  My dad had left to go overseas and would be gone for a few weeks, which was often how long his trips took. Wars and terrorist attacks were the things he covered most, which was weird since he was a really calm, no-drama kind of guy. Maybe that’s why the newspaper sent him, because he had a cool head and could handle tense situations.

  My mom came back about an hour later to find me and Danny snuggled on the living room couch reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Danny had his head on my shoulder and I was trying really hard not to fall asleep. I had to learn the lines for Queen Titania in one of the scenes.

  “I am so sorry I’m late, honey.” My mom leaned down and gave me a kiss on the cheek and patted the top of Danny’s head at the same time. She was still wearing her “news suit” and heels, but she pulled off her jacket and kicked off her shoes as she sat down beside me. “What have you two been up to?”

  “Dinner, doing vocab words for English, and studying a scene from this play.” I yawned. “Danny’s been doing the lines of King Oberon. He’s already got them down.”

  My mom laughed. “Told you we got you the smartest dog on the planet.” I was about to tell her that actually the part of King Oberon was being played by a boy in my class, Ashton Adams, but her cell phone rang at that exact moment and she snapped it open and headed off to the kitchen.

  I sighed. I never felt like I got more than little bits of time with my mom. Danny always seemed to know how I was feeling. He lay down and put his head in my lap. I bent over and kissed the fuzzy spot between his eyes.

  One of the vocab words that I had to learn this week was “solidarity,” and Danny and I were just that. A unit. Bound together. Forever.

  “What would I do without you, Danny-O?” I whispered into his soft fur.

  Chapter Two

  Langston Middle School was located at the top of Mulholland Drive, with a guard gate and green lawns and playing fields ushering you in at the entrance. To get into the school I had gone through two interviews with the headmaster, and so had my parents. Mostly we were the kids of moms and dads in “the industry,” as the television and film business is called. I’m pretty sure my dad was the only hard news journalist, but there were lots of kids whose parents were writers, producers, directors, and movie stars in Hollywood.

  I didn’t think there was anything special about us, but that was because I rarely met anyone from outside of my school. Just take my two best friends, Lulu Miller and Kate Sinclaire. Lulu’s father was an agent and represented famous actors and actresses, and Kate’s father was this well-known British producer who had worked with just about everyone. Lulu was a bit of a tomboy—no surprise with three older brothers—and had a stay-at-home mom, which was really lucky for her. Kate was an only child like me, and even though her mom didn’t work either, she wasn’t around all that much. Her mom’s job, it seemed, was keeping herself looking young and beautiful by going to spas and salons in Beverly Hills all day. She once took me and Kate with her to get manicures and pedicures, and she was surprised when I told her my mom had never taken me before. Kate was starting to act more like her mom, and lately all she talked about was her latest seaweed body wrap and oxygen facial and deep tissue massage. Lulu and I had started wondering what had happened to the Kate we used to know.

  “What about doing a fancy high tea at a hotel and we all have to dress up?” Lulu suggested as the three of us walked together to our next classes. It was so not Lulu to suggest a party like that. She must have been getting desperate and running out of ideas.

  Kate shook her head and Lulu groaned, since this was the millionth suggestion that had been turned down. Kate’s birthday was just a few weeks away and we had been debating what kind of party she should have for what felt like months.

  “Karaoke in your family room and then a marathon movie night sleepover?” I said.

  “Nah.” Kate tossed her long blond hair back. “Something glamorous. Like a spa day in Beverly Hills. Manicures, pedicures, and everything. My mom thinks that’s the best idea.”

  Lulu’s dark, curly hair bounced vigorously. “Okay, whatever you say. It’s your big day.”

  “Sure. That sounds fine,” I said, wanting to get the whole birthday thing over with as the main topic of our conversations.

  Lulu headed off to computer lab. As Kate and I walked in the direction of drama lab, I practiced my Queen Titania lines over in my head and realized I had a long way to go before I had them down.

  I had been really shocked when Mr. Matheson, our supercool young teacher, paired me with Ashton Adams to work on a scene. Ashton was the very cute, ever popular son of a famous movie director who usually ignored me at school and had sighed loudly when Mr. Matheson made the announcement that we would be working together.

  “Everyone will need at least two home rehearsals before presenting, so exchange numbers if you don’t already have them and make a date to get together,” Mr. Matheson said. We had to do a dry run-through of our lines sitting across from our partners on the small stage.

  “Give us an Academy Award performance!” Max Benson, Ashton’s best friend, shouted as we made our way to the front.

  “Don’t worry, I will!” Ashton looked back as I followed him and he gave one of his perfect white smiles to the rest of the class. I could almost hear all the girls in the room sigh together.

  Ashto
n read his lines like a real professional, while I stammered and faltered a few times, then forced myself to stay focused. A “date” with Ashton seemed like a really unnerving idea since we had barely ever said more than five words to each other, despite the fact that we had most of our classes together. Now we would have to meet outside of school and spend time together. The thought made my stomach tighten into a knot that didn’t loosen until the bell rang and class was dismissed.

  As I waited in the carpool line for my mom, I thought about how often people said I was the spitting image of her—long dark hair, almond-shaped gray eyes, and pale complexion. They always commented on how pretty she was, so I guess that meant I had to be pretty, too. But I never spent tons of time in front of the mirror or fussing over myself, and while I loved shopping and going to the mall like the other girls, they just didn’t seem like the most important things to do on a Saturday afternoon. I much preferred taking Danny down to the beach and tossing a ball for him or watching him dive into the surf and chase the seagulls that he could never catch, which always made me laugh. Lulu spent most of her weekends playing soccer or riding her horse, Soprano, out at stables in Malibu, so it was usually Kate who called on the weekend about going to the mall. It was becoming more and more obvious to me that we were starting to have less and less in common.