Charlaine Harris - Grave Secret

“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.

“Is it always like this?” asked the younger cop, looking around him.

“Shut up, Ken,” said his partner.

“Cameron and I try,” I said, and I began crying again. My bitterness ran out of me in a stream of explanation. I’d already realized, on some level, that our life there was over, so the pretence was over, too.

While I cried and talked, I was getting Gracie diapered and making a peanut butter sandwich for Mariella. I mashed the banana for Gracie and mixed it with a little formula and put it in a bowl for her. I got her little spoon out of the drainer. My mother never moved, except once. Her hand went out to the spot where Gracie had been, and she patted the air vaguely. I put Gracie in her infant seat and began feeding her, pausing from time to time to wipe my face.

“You take care of your sisters,” the older cop said in a friendly way.

“My brothers make enough to take them to day care while we’re at school,” I said. “We’ve tried real hard.”

“I can tell,” he said. The younger cop turned away with his mouth pressed together and his eyes hot. “Where’s your daddy?” he asked after a minute.

“My stepfather,” I corrected automatically. “I have no idea.”

When Matthew got home, he acted stunned that the police were there, agonized that Cameron was missing, appalled that his poor wife had slept through such hubbub and turmoil.

This had never happened before, he told the cops. There were several more at the trailer by now. One of them had arrested Matthew before, and he snorted derisively when Matthew finished his performance.

“Yeah, buddy,” the officer said. “And where were you this afternoon?”

Later, Tolliver and I sat together on the couch after my mother had been taken to the hospital. Mark paced, as much as you can pace in a trailer. A woman from Social Services had come to get our sisters. Matthew had been arrested because he had some joints in his car. The drugs were the excuse the cops used; I think they just wanted to arrest him after they saw the trailer and talked to me. Mark and Tolliver had confirmed everything I said: Mark very reluctantly, Tolliver with a matter-of-fact air that said a lot about our lives. But I found Mark crying outside that night, after the police had gone. He was sitting in the lawn chair right at the bottom of the trailer steps, and he had his face in his hands.

“We tried so hard to stay together,” he said, as if he had to explain his distress.

“That’s all over now,” I said. “That’s all gone, now that Cameron’s been taken. There’s no more hiding things now.”

For a month after that, Cameron had been “seen” numerous times around Texarkana, in Dallas, in Corpus Christi, in Houston, in Little Rock. A teenage panhandler in Los Angeles had been hauled in because she looked like Cameron. But none of those sightings had ever come to anything, and her corpse had never been found. I’d gotten excited about three years after she’d gone, when a hunter had found a girl’s body in some woods around Lewisville, Arkansas. The corpse-what there was left of it-was female, and the right size to be Cameron. But after close examination, the bones appeared to be that of a woman somewhat older than my sister, and the DNA wasn’t a match. That body had never been identified, though when they’d let me close to her I’d known she’d been a suicide. I didn’t share that, because I had limited credibility with the police.

Tolliver and I had started our traveling by then, and we were building up our business. It had taken a long time for word of mouth to get around and for the Internet to pick up on what I was doing. The cops thought I was a scam artist. The first two years were very difficult. After that, my career took on a certain momentum.

But now was not the time to think about my own journey, but about Cameron’s. I touched the backpack lovingly, and I took out everything inside. I’d examined every item a hundred times. We’d leafed through every page of the textbooks inside, looking for a message, a clue, anything. All the notes Cameron had been passed by other students were stuffed in a pocket, and we’d pored over them, trying to read something in them that would tell us what had happened to our sister.

Tanya had wanted Cameron to notice how stupid Heather’s outfit was, and Tanya had also remarked on the fact that Jerry had said that Heather had had SEX with him when they’d gone out the weekend before. Jennifer thought that Cameron’s brother Tolliver was HOT, and was he dating anyone? And wasn’t Mr. Arden a stupid idiot?

Todd had wondered when he should pick her up for the prom, and would she be getting dressed at Jennifer’s house, like she had last time?

(If Cameron could manage it, she got her dates to pick her up somewhere else. I didn’t blame her at all.)

There’d been a note from Mr. Arden, asking Cameron to tell her parents that one of them needed to come up to the school and explain that they knew the attendance policy. Just bringing a signature back to the school from home wasn’t enough. (Mr. Arden had told the police that Cameron had missed his class once over the acceptable limit, and he’d wanted to lay eyes on one of Cameron’s parents to make sure someone was aware that Cameron couldn’t skip any more or she might not graduate.)

She hadn’t been skipping the class out of senior giddiness. It was her last class of the day, and sometimes we had to leave early to pick up the girls at day care if Tolliver or Mark couldn’t.