Seventeen

TOLLIVER was stunned and exhausted. I had to help him climb into the bed. I called room service for some soup and salads for both of us after I got him settled. I sat on the side of the bed while we waited for the food to come.

“I can believe a lot of bad stuff about Matthew,” he said, “but I don’t believe he hurt Cameron.”

“It had never occurred to me, either,” I said. “Honestly, I don’t want to believe it. But if he did have a connection to her disappearance and he’s been letting us wonder all these years, I want him to die.” With Tolliver, I wasn’t going to worry about how saying such a thing would make him think of me. He knew me. Now he would know me a little better.

Tolliver understood. “He’d deserve to die, if he hurt Cameron,” he said. “But there’s not one single thing to tie him to Cameron’s disappearance, and he had no motive at all. For that matter, we don’t have any proof that he’s involved in the mess with the Joyce family. We need something more than the sight of a man’s back as he walks out of a public building.”

“I understand,” I said-and I really did, even if I hated his logic. “So we have to figure out a way. We can’t go on living our lives unless we get rid of this, one way or another.”

“Yes,” said Tolliver, and then he closed his eyes. Amazingly, he fell asleep.

I ate supper by myself, though I saved his in case he woke up to eat it. After I was through with my salad, I did something I hadn’t done in at least a year. I went out to our car, opened the trunk, and got my sister’s backpack out of it. Back inside our room, I sat on the couch and unzipped the backpack. We’d thought it was so cute when Cameron picked it out. It was pink with black polka dots. Cameron had gotten a black jacket and black boots, and she’d looked wonderful. No one had to know that everything had come from the secondhand shop.

The police had finally let us have the backpack, after six years. It had been fingerprinted, turned inside out, examined microscopically… for all I knew, they’d x-rayed it.

Cameron would be very nearly twenty-six now. She’d been gone for almost eight years.

It was late spring when she’d been taken. She’d been decorating the school gym for the prom. She’d had a date with-oh, God, I couldn’t remember. Todd? Yes, Todd Battista. I couldn’t remember if I’d had a date or not. Probably not, because following the lightning strike, my popularity had plummeted. My new ability had thrown me completely out of whack, and it had taken me almost a year to adjust to the buzz of dead people. And then I’d had to learn how to conceal my strange ability. During that awful time, I’d earned a well-deserved reputation for being very strange.

She’d been so late that day. And that wasn’t like Cameron. I remembered making my mother rouse enough to watch the girls, whom I’d collected from day care. Though it wasn’t smart to leave them alone with her, I couldn’t take them with me. I hurried down the road, past all the other trailers, following the route we always took coming home.

Tolliver and Mark had been at their respective jobs, and Matthew, as it turned out, had been playing pool in the home of one of his wonderful friends, a junkie named Renaldo Simpkins. The police would never have believed Renaldo, but his girlfriend, Tammy, had been there, too, and she said she’d walked in and out of the room at least five times during the pool game. She was sure that Matthew had never left between around four and six thirty. (The six thirty was firm, because that was when she’d gotten a phone call from a neighbor, telling her that there were police cars all around the Lang trailer, and Matthew better get his ass home.)

Around five thirty, I’d found my sister’s backpack-the one now sitting before me on a hotel coffee table-by the side of the street. It was a residential street lined with very small houses. About half of them were abandoned. But there was a woman living in the house across the street from the spot where I’d found Cameron’s backpack. Her name was Ida Beaumont.

I’d never talked to Ida Beaumont before, and despite all the times I’d walked past her house, I don’t think I’d ever seen her out in her yard. She was afraid of all the teenagers in the neighborhood, and maybe she had good reason. This was a part of town where even police looked over their shoulders. But I met Ida Beaumont that day. I’d walked across the street and knocked on her door.

“Hi, I’m sorry to bother you, but my sister hasn’t come home from school and her backpack is there, under that tree.” I pointed over to the bright splotch of color. Ida Beaumont peered at it, her eyes following my finger.

“Yes,” she said cautiously. She was in her early sixties, and the newspaper articles told me later that she was living on some kind of disability check and what remained of her dead husband’s pension. I could hear her television going. She was watching a talk show. “Who’s your sister?” she asked. “Is she that pretty blond girl? I see you two walking home all the time.”

“Yes ma’am. That’s her. I’m looking for her. Did you see anything happen over there this afternoon? She would have been coming home sometime within the past hour, I think.”

“I stay at the back of the house, mostly.” Ida seemed to put emphasis on that, because she didn’t want to be seen as a busy-body. “But I seen a blue pickup, an old Dodge, about half an hour ago. The man in it was talking to a girl. I couldn’t really see her, she was on the other side of the pickup. But she got in, and they took off.”

“Oh.” I tried to make sense of this, tried to remember if anyone we knew had an old blue pickup. But no one popped up in my memory. “Thanks. That was about half an hour ago?”

“Yes,” she said, very positively. “Yes, that was when it was.”

“She didn’t look like she was… like he was making her do it?”

“I couldn’t say about that. They talked, she got in, they left.”

“Okay. I appreciate your taking the time to talk to me.” And I turned and walked back across the street. Then I reversed myself. Ida Beaumont was still standing at her doorway.

“Do you have a phone?” I asked. We lived in a neighborhood where you couldn’t take that for granted.

“I do.”

“Will you call the police and tell them what I just told you, about my sister? Ask them to come? I’ll be standing over there, by the backpack.”

I could see reluctance in Ida’s face, knew the older woman was wishing she hadn’t come to the door. “All right,” she said finally, exhaling loudly. “I’ll call ’em.” And without closing the wooden door, she went to a telephone that was mounted on the wall. I could see her dialing the police, and I could hear her part of the conversation.

I’ll say this for the police: they were there very quickly. Initially, of course, they were doubtful about Cameron really being missing. Teenage girls often found better things to do than go home, especially to a home in this neighborhood. But the abandoned backpack seemed to speak to them, to testify that my sister hadn’t been willing to leave.

Finally, I’d broken down crying, explained to them that I had to get home, that my mom couldn’t be trusted to take care of my sisters, and that had made everything more serious, right away. They let me call my brothers, who both left work immediately to come home. That neither Mark nor Tolliver was skeptical that Cameron had been abducted also convinced the police that my sister hadn’t gone away willingly or intentionally.

Going into the trailer with the cops would have been humiliating under any other circumstances. But I was so frightened by then that I was only glad they were there. They saw that my mother had passed out again on the couch and that the girls were crying. She’d started to put a diaper on Gracie and hadn’t finished taping it shut. Mariella was trying to mash some banana for Gracie (who’d just started eating real food) and she was standing on a chair to reach the counter. It was clean, or at least as clean as an old dilapidated trailer could be, but of course we were very crowded in there, and the sheer amount of stuff made it look incredibly cluttered.