Grave Secret - Charlaine Harris [88]
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,