Grave Secret - Charlaine Harris [91]
I opened Cameron’s math book. She’d been taking precal; she’d hated it. Cameron had poor math skills. She was good at history, I remembered. She’d liked that. It was easier to study people’s lives when they were all dead, their troubles all past. Cameron was a good speller, and she’d enjoyed all her science classes, too, especially the advanced biology class she’d been taking.
The newspapers had gone on and on about the sad condition of the trailer, the depravity of Laurel and Mark, the arrest records of their frequent visitors, the lengths we kids had gone to in our attempt to stay together. Truthfully, I don’t think our home was so very unusual. In the unspoken way kids communicate, we’d learned of a dozen or more kids in our school who had it just as bad or worse.
People often can’t help being poor, but they can help being bad. We were unfortunate in having parents who were both.
I flipped open one of my sister’s notebooks. Her class notes were still in place. The grubby ruled pages covered in her handwriting were all that I had left of her. Cameron had been the only one, besides me, who could remember the good days—the days when our mom and dad were still married and they hadn’t started using. If my dad was still alive, I doubted he’d remember much of anything.
I shook myself. I was not going to get maudlin. But it was necessary to think about the day Cameron had vanished. If she’d gotten into that pickup voluntarily, then I might as well forget about tracing her. Not only would that make her a stranger to me, but there would be no body to sense, unless something had happened to her in the meantime. If Cameron was dead, ironically enough, one of these days I might find her.
I wondered if Ida Beaumont was still alive. I’d been so young then, she’d looked positively tottering on the edge of her grave. Now, I realized she had been no more than sixty-five.
Obeying an impulse I couldn’t fathom, I called information in Texarkana and discovered that she still had a listing. My fingers punched in the number before I could even explain to myself why I was doing this.
“Hello?” a creaky voice said suspiciously.
“Mrs. Beaumont?”
“Yes, this is Ida Beaumont.”
“You may not remember me,” I said. “I’m Harper Connelly.”
Dead silence.
“What do you want?” the voice said.
That wasn’t exactly the question I’d anticipated.
“Are you still in the same house, Ms. Beaumont? I was thinking I might come by to visit you,” I said, making this up on the spot. “I was thinking I might bring one of my brothers.”
“No,” she said. “Don’t come here. Don’t ever come here. The last time you came, I had people knocking on my door all day and night for weeks. And the police still come by. You stay away.”
“We have some questions to ask you,” I said in a voice that I hoped was pitched somewhere between anger and simple determination.
“The police have already asked me plenty of questions,” she snapped, and I knew I’d gone the wrong way. “I wish I’d never answered the door that day when you come knocking.”
“But then you couldn’t have told me about the blue truck,” I said.
“I told you, didn’t I, that I didn’t see the girl clearly?”
“Yes,” I said, though in my mind, over the years, I’d pretty much disregarded that. I was missing a girl, she’d seen a girl get into a pickup, and Cameron’s backpack was there on the spot.
Over the line, I heard a deep sigh. Then Ida Beaumont began speaking. “A young woman started coming by from Meals on Wheels about six months ago,” she said. “Those meals, they’re never any good, but at least they’re free, and sometimes they bring enough to last another day. Her name’s Missy Klein.”
“Okay,” I said, since I had no idea what else to say. My heart was sinking into my stomach, because I knew this was going to be bad.
“And she said to me, she says, ‘Mrs. Beaumont, you remember all those years ago when you saw a girl getting into a blue pickup?’ And I says, ‘Yes,