Grave Secret - Charlaine Harris [89]
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