Free Memories of You by Margot Dalton Page B

marking.
    If she could do anything personally about the people who poured drugs onto these streets, she’d have no compunction about condemning them to life in prison. The volunteers at the hostel saw firsthand the results of the dealers’ greed. They saw the damaged young minds and bodies, the wrecked hopes and heartbroken families.
    But they couldn’t intervene. A private operation without formal mandate, public funding or governmental support, the hostel was simply a final resource for homeless youth. Camilla could only wait here in the shabby, poorly equipped little room until the kids came to her for help.
    Camilla pushed her hair back wearily from her forehead and returned to the essays.
    Eventually she came to Steven Campbell’s impromptu treatise on personal goals, and looked at it with quickened interest.
    “My goal is to be a modern-day Robin Hood,” the boy wrote. “I want to steal from the rich—people like my parents—and give to the poor who really need help. I see nothing morally wrong with criminal activity as long as it results ultimately in a fairer distribution of wealth.”
    Nothing morally wrong with criminal activity…
    Camilla thought about the boy’s handsome face, his moody, withdrawn look and the stubborn set to his mouth, and wondered if perhaps Jon Campbell was having some serious problems with his elder son.
    Not that it was any of her business, of course.
    But the twins…
    Camilla smiled wistfully and nibbled on her marking pen.
    The twins were a different matter, baffling, intriguing and funny.
    It was a rare experience for Camilla to enter theworld of these small children. In fact, she was beginning to realize, as she spent more time with Ari and Amy, that she’d never really had a childhood herself.
    And the twins had never had a mother. Camilla knew their mutual needs and yearnings made the three of them a potentially explosive combination, but she couldn’t resist the charm of these brilliant, winsome children.
    If only they didn’t belong to Jon Campbell, who posed such a terrible threat to her own safety…
    “Queen!” A girl clattered down the hall and tumbled through the door, breathless and pale. “Thank God you’re here.”
    “Hi, Marty. What’s up?”
    The girl wore denim coveralls with one strap hanging, a filthy plaid shirt and a pair of men’s running shoes, riddled with holes.
    “Is it Chase?” Camilla asked.
    Marty nodded and rubbed her eyes with blackened fingers. “He’s in terrible shape. He…got some really bad stuff.”
    “I heard there was bad stuff around tonight. How is he, Marty?”
    “I think…God, Queen, I think he’s dying!”
    “Let’s go. Hurry!” Camilla got up from the desk, grabbed her cellular phone and box of medical supplies and ran out of the room. She followed the girl through dark alleys piled with garbage, heading for a row of fire-damaged, abandoned warehouses.

CHAPTER FIVE
    C AMILLA STOOD ALONE on the windswept street, watching the flashing red lights of the ambulance as it screeched off into the darkness.
    The ambulance attendants hadn’t wanted to take Marty with them. Only Camilla’s passionate insistence had finally convinced them that the girl should be with Chase when he was admitted to the emergency room.
    People tended to look on street kids as less than human, somehow lacking in the emotions that other people had. But Marty was a nice girl, and Chase, too, was a decent person, shy and pleasant, with a rare talent for music. He’d been supporting himself and Marty for more than a year now, playing his guitar on downtown-street corners while people dropped coins into a bowl that Marty held as she sat crosslegged on the sidewalk nearby.
    Camilla often wondered where the boy had come from, and what he might have become if drugs hadn’t claimed him. She’d never know, of course. Street kids kept their pasts to themselves. Every young face was a secret, a closed book.
    Probably that was why she felt strangely