59 pages • 1 hour read
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Art decides to find the coffeeshop from the crumpled receipt. Camille rejects his idea of her staying behind, and Art is grateful for her support. McClain spots the children in the street and calls his teammates, Nigel Stenhouse and Regina Cash, for backup. As Mary joins Detective Evans in her patrol car to look for the children, Detective Evans receives a call reporting the car accident and a sighting of Camille.
McClain positions his teammates around the block to corner the children. Art spots McClain crossing to the street and notices a nearby black SUV. The children dash into the nearest building, the Hotel Monaco.
McClain chases the children up the steps to the hotel entrance, and Camille narrowly escapes his grasp when she slides out of her jacket just as he grabs her. The children run into the lobby, and before darting up the grand staircase, Camille blocks the entrance door handles with an umbrella. McClain attempts to break down the hotel’s doors just as the hotel manager, James Appleton, removes the umbrella. McClain crashes into the lobby’s Christmas tree, and a hotel guest yells “Timber!” to the amusement of the other guests in the lobby (173).
Regina Cash discovers McClain moaning under the Christmas and spots the children at the top of the staircase. She leaves McClain and informs Nigel Stenhouse of her location. The children run down the hallway where a ballroom party is taking place.
Cash reaches the landing and turns off the hallway lights as Art and Camille try to reach the exit stairwell. The children weave through the revelers mingling in the corridor, and Art spots from a window the black SUV where Stenhouse lies in wait for them below. With no other path to escape, they head toward the exit stairs.
Art pulls the emergency fire alarm, and the ballroom guests rush toward the exit stairwell, shielding the children from Cash’s pursuit. The children hide among the exiting crowd and evade Stenhouse’s detection by the exterior doors. When Cash reaches the street level, she spots the children breaking away from the crowd and slowly follows them at a distance.
Cash hides behind a row of cars as she tracks the children down the sidewalk. When she finds an opening, she fires one of her tranquilizer darts at Art and misses. Camille notices the small dart land on the strap of Art’s backpack and pulls it out just as Cash leaps from her hiding place and lunges at the kids.
Camille quickly jabs the dart into Cash’s neck as self-defense. As Cash lays sedated on the ground, Camille wishes she had a cell phone, not to call her mother but to take a picture of her triumphant defeat of Cash. Art smiles despite the danger of their situation, and the pair jump into a taxi to find the coffeeshop. Meanwhile, Stenhouse finds Cash unconscious in the street and informs Palmer that the children have escaped again.
At the accident scene, Detective Evans receives confirmation that a witness saw two kids, one with red hair, flee from the smoking car. Mary refuses to wait for news at home and stays with Evans to search the neighborhood. Before they reach Evans car, the fussy manager of Hotel Monaco, James Appleton, stops them to report the shenanigans of two kids who locked his hotel’s entrance and whom he believes are responsible for setting off a fire alarm in the establishment. Mary immediately asks if one of the kids was a girl, and when Appleton confirms he saw a red-head, Mary dashes to the hotel.
Art hopes the coffeeshop will revive some of his memory, but when they arrive at the café, nothing seems familiar and he feels as if a dam is blocking his memories. While Art is in the restroom, Camille quickly uses the shop’s phone to call her family’s landline. She leaves a brief message to her mother that she is ok and will be home soon. She mentions that things have been crazy but she is keeping her promise to watch over Art. Palmer’s tracking system traces the call, and he sends his last standing agent, Nigel Stenhouse, to capture the boy at all costs.
Detective Evans and Mary arrive at the Hotel Monaco to search for the children. Evans is unsurprised when hotel security informs her that their camera footage was wiped. Meanwhile, Art returns from the restroom, and Camille hides the fact that she made a phone call. Art suddenly recognizes the scent of turpentine in the air from a neighboring customer, a graduate art student. When the student explains that he paints in the university’s studio nearby, Art remembers the small key in his backpack and discovers that it resembles the student’s key to his studio. Art and Camille race out to the art studio building and enter a dark, narrow alley to look for its back entrance. Camille is too afraid to proceed, but Art assures her he sees light ahead. Camille follows him and admits to herself that keeping an eye on Art is harder than she presumed.
The second half of Part 2 includes multiple short chapters that quicken the narrative’s pace and heighten the action’s suspense. Whereas the previous chapters primarily addressed Art’s internal conflict over his unknown identity, these chapters focus on Art’s external conflicts, most notably the members of Palmer’s team pursuing the pair. Palmer has only five agents, four of which the children have incapacitated. However, Camille and Art have no idea how many people are chasing them and why, and their quick thinking and resourcefulness enables them to evade capture. Despite being professionals with an armored vehicle, weapons, and hi-tech spyware, the agents fail to apprehend the children who succeed in thwarting them with an umbrella and can of Coke. The children’s simple successes highlight the error of Palmer and his agents’ cockiness and their underestimation of the youths. The children’s ingenuity contrasts the ineptitude of the adults who literally fall flat on their faces. Trust Among Family and Friends as a Way to Create Sincerity comes into play here, particularly as a tool against Fraud, Fake Identities, and the Search for Truth and Sincerity. The pair can defeat Palmer and his crew because they have sincerity and trust on their side; this is the greatest weapon of all. No matter how many resources Palmer has, sincerity will lead to sincerity. Art and Camille’s friendship will inevitably lead to exposing the truth of the forgery and Palmer’s schemes.
Throughout these chapters, Hicks alternates various scenes of danger with comedy to create a tone of adventure. Although the children are alone and encounter serious moments of peril such as kidnapping, threats by a stun gun, a car collision, a smoking locked car, and a tranquilizer dart, Camille buffers the intensity of their fears and distress with her light-hearted, if not inappropriate, sense of humor. Hicks tempers the terror of the chase scenes by inserting moments of comedy, such as the hotel manager’s fussiness, a hotel’s guest shout of “Timber!” and Camille’s desire to take a photo of an unconscious Regina Cash. Even as the ballroom guests make their emergency exit out of the building, the book says, the “crowd of partiers […] did not seem the least bit deterred by the fire alarm or the cold or the snow—in fact, it was as if they had simply moved the festivities outdoors” (183).
In some ways, the hotel guests function as a type of audience surrogate that maintains the novel’s light-hearted tone. During Detective Evans’s investigation at the hotel, the “guests in the lobby [seem] oblivious to the perilous circumstances around them—if anything, they [seem] to be enjoying the absurdity of the situation” (204). Even Art echoes the zaniness of their adventures. Shortly after they escape Regina Cash’s dart attack, “Art smile[s]. It [is] exciting—and ridiculous, and stupid, and incredibly dangerous” (190). Although the children are not themselves perpetrators of a heist, the novel shares some characteristics of a conventional caper adventure, a subgenre of crime fiction and mystery, that includes inept figures of authorities, a series of hyperbolic scenarios, and slapstick comedy. As Art and Camille continue to thwart Palmer and his crew, increasingly in comedic ways, they bond more and more closely; here, Trust Among Family and Friends as a Way to Create Sincerity works against Fraud, Fake Identities, and the Search for Truth and Sincerity.
The various narrow escapes constitute the novel’s rising action as well as provide the context for the pivotal change in Art’s demeanor. The items in his backpack provide the clues to his identity, and he begins to take initiative. Camille notices that “for the first time since she had met Art, he seemed to have a purpose—a goal. Camille could begin to see something more than the quiet boy who had arrived at her home the previous night. He no longer seemed completely lost” (161). Part 2’s last chapter emphasizes the change in Art’s character through the metaphor of the locked door and the symbolism of light and dark. When Art steps into the dark and cramped alley, the setting mirrors the way his murky comprehension of himself constrains him. When he heads toward the light with the key in his hand, the scene foreshadows Art’s enlightenment to his identity and the explanation to why Palmer pursues him. When he unlocks the studio door and enters, he passes through the threshold from mystery to clarity. It is crucial that an art studio is what leads to this clarity, as the novel demonstrates The Transformative Power of Art for Oneself and One’s World. The studio will help to establish Art’s identity, and it will also help on the path to thwarting the disingenuous criminals.
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