Charlaine Harris - Grave Sight

"Seems like I remember that," Hollis said thoughtfully. He was on his third beer. I was still nursing my second. "Wasn't she taken by a man in a blue pickup?"

I nodded. "Grabbed on her way home. She'd been decorating the gym for some dance. I'd walked home earlier, so she was alone. This guy took her right off the street. There were witnesses. But no one ever found her."

"I'm sorry," he said.

I nodded in acknowledgment. "Someday I'll find her," I said. "Someday it'll be her, when I feel that buzz. And we'll know what happened to her."

"Are your parents still alive?"

"My father is, I think. My mother died last year." Her addictions had finally succeeded in eating up her body.

"What's your connection with Tolliver?"

"Tolliver's dad married my mother. We were brought up as family, after that." If we'd been "brought up" at all, I added to myself. Mostly, we'd fended for ourselves. After a while, we'd become good at presenting a facade to the authorities who might separate us. Tolliver watched over Cameron and me, I watched over the two littler girls, Mariella and Gracie. Tolliver's older brother Mark stopped by on a regular basis to make sure we were eating. If we weren't, Mark would bring groceries. Tolliver got a job at a restaurant as soon as he was old enough, and he brought home all the food he could.

Sometimes our parents were both working, sometimes we got government assistance. But mostly the money went down their throats or into their veins.

We learned to survive on very little, and we learned how to pick clothes at the thrift store and at yard sales, clothes that wouldn't give away our situation. Mark would lecture us on how important it was to make good grades. "As long as you keep clean and neat, don't skip school, and make at least average grades, social services won't come by," he'd taught us, and he'd been right. Until Cameron vanished.

I tried explaining those years to Hollis.

"That sounds horrible," Hollis said. His face looked sad, sad for the girl I had been, God bless him. "Did they hit you?"

"No," I said. "Neglect was the key to their parenting system, even for Mariella and Gracie. My mom tried to take care of them when they were babies, but after that, it was kind of up to Cameron and me, mostly me. It was hard for us not to go down the same drain." I had clung to my memory of what life had been like before—before my mother had begun using drugs, before my father had gone to jail. I'd promised myself I could have that life again. My two younger sisters hadn't had as hard a time; they had no memory of anything better.

The tension of maintaining the status quo had almost killed me. But we'd managed, until Cameron got snatched.

"What happened then?" Hollis asked.

I fidgeted, looked anywhere else. "Let's talk about something else," I said. "The summary is that I spent my senior year living with a foster family, and my little half-sisters stayed with my aunt and uncle."

"How was the foster family?"

"They were decent people," I said. "Not child molesters, not slavedrivers. As long as I did my assigned chores and finished my homework, I wasn't unhappy." It had been an acute pleasure to live in a household that valued order and cleanliness.

"Any trace of your sister ever found?"

"Her purse. Her backpack." I shifted my right leg, which tended to numb if I didn't move it around.

"Tough."

"Yeah, I'd say we've both had lives that had a few bumps."

Hollis nodded. "Here's to trying to live a better life," he said, and we bumped glasses.

We went to his small house later, gaining a little comfort and warmth from each other. But I wouldn't spend the night, though he wanted me to stay. About three in the morning, I kissed him goodbye at the door to my motel room, and we held each other for a long minute. I went inside by myself, cold to my bones.

IT was a good morning for running: the third clear day in a row, chilly, with the promise of brilliance in the early sky. I ran a brush through my hair and put on my dogtag engraved with my name and Tolliver's cell phone number. I dressed in a sports bra and three-quarter length Lycra running pants. An old "Race for the Cure" T-shirt covered the little canister of pepper spray clipped to my pants. I'd found a plastic slotted cover with a hole punched in one end, and I slipped my room key in it and put it on the same chain with my dogtag.

After some warm-up stretches, I decided I'd run from the motel until I'd reached the Kroger that was at the other end of town. I didn't want to follow the main drag; even in Sarne, there'd be traffic, and I hated inhaling truck exhaust fumes. I had picked out a route that involved backstreets lined with small businesses and homes. With an inner feeling of release, I began running.

When I was able to pick up my pace, it was possible to think of something other than the act of running. A little to my surprise, I felt better than I had expected: relaxed, not guilty. Though I was fairly inexperienced, Hollis had seemed a tender and considerate lover. He'd also seemed to need the contact, the basic act of joining flesh, as much as I had. So , I told myself, that was actually an okay thing to do .

Absorbed in my thoughts, I gradually realized a pickup was moving just behind me. The growl of the motor had been chewing at the edge of my awareness for a minute or two. My heart began pounding with an unpleasant desperation when I realized the driver was definitely dogging me. The dark shadow in the corner of my left eye turned into a rumbling presence. Though I kept running at a steady pace, all my attention was focused on the truck creeping along like a lion through high grass, waiting for my inattention to prove fatal. I flipped open the little holster and eased the canister of pepper spray out of it. Was Arkansas one of the states where the spray was legal? I couldn't remember, and at the moment I decided that was the least of my worries. I was at least half a mile from the motel, and there were few cars stirring in the streets. I couldn't count on any help. The little canister was almost completely concealed in my hand.

I was in front of a little strip of businesses that hadn't yet opened; a laundry, a jewelry store, an insurance agency. No cars, no passersby. The tension roiled under my skin as I waited for whoever was in the pickup to act. If they would just wait until we were closer to the main street, or if I could angle through the downtown buildings to the police station... but then the suspense was over.

The pickup swerved to pull across the sidewalk, blocking my path, and three young men hopped out. Of course! Alpha male, the high school boy Mary Nell had called Scotty. He had his two buddies with him, naturally.

I stopped, and they ranged themselves in front of me, their faces ugly with tension. Incongruously, the three were wearing high school football jackets. Scotty was in the middle, and a smaller black-haired boy was on my right. There was a husky brown-haired boy, uniformly thick through the chest and middle, on my left. They didn't have weapons, at first glance. But they all had clenched fists.

"Hey bitch, we told you to leave town," Scotty said. His words' ugliness twisted his face. The three were suppressing so much excitement they were literally shifting from foot to foot, shoulders moving restlessly.

My eyes went from face to face as I wondered who would charge first. They were cocked and primed and ready to fire.

"You guys thinking of raping me?" I asked, wanting to have it clear in my mind.

They looked shocked. Shocked. The two followers looked at the alpha, so he could answer for them. Or maybe they needed to find out what they wanted to do.

"We don't want any part of you, you skanky ho," Scotty said, trying to sound scornful, to square his lack of rape aspiration with his need to assert his manhood. Of course, real men should be ready to have any sort of sex, any time. So if they didn't want to rape me, I must not be desirable.