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  ‘I bought that when we went to the mall that time with Meredith!’

  ‘Excuse me,’ Bessie said, ‘but I don’t think you bought anything when you were with Meredith!’

  ‘What are you implying?’ Megan said, now at the bottom of the stairs, hands on hips as she stared daggers at her sister.

  ‘I’m not implying jack-squat!’ Bessie shot back. ‘I know and you know that Meredith Rhiengold is one of the biggest shoplifters in the whole school!’

  ‘I did not shoplift! Ever! In my whole life!’

  ‘Oh, well, did Meredith get this for you?’ Bessie said, fingering the top she was wearing.

  ‘Ah ha! You admit it!’ Megan said, pointing a finger in her sister’s face. ‘That is my top!’

  Bessie looked into the kitchen where two sets of eyes were staring at her. Willis said, ‘She got you, hon.’

  ‘Go upstairs and change,’ I said.

  Bessie’s face turned red then she turned to Megan and ripped the top off, leaving her in just her bra. ‘Here’s your damn top! It’s ugly anyway!’

  ‘Then why did you want to wear it?’ Megan said in that nasty way girls have of scrunching up their faces while taking sarcasm to its evil extreme. She was talking to her sister’s back as Bessie headed for the laundry room.

  ‘Mother, are there any clean clothes?’ Bessie demanded.

  ‘I don’t know!’ I yelled so she could hear me. ‘Did anybody do laundry while I was gone?’

  ‘Then what am I supposed to wear?’ Bessie yelled back, tears evident in her voice.

  I heard Megan walking down the hall to the laundry room. ‘Here, wear this. Just ask next time, OK?’

  ‘I don’t want to wear your stupid top!’

  ‘Then go naked!’ Megan said and slammed out of the room.

  Megan was sitting at the breakfast bar eating Frankenberries when Bessie came in, wearing Megan’s top. Megan handed her the box of cereal but Bessie shook her head. To me, she asked, ‘Do we have any Fruit Loops?’

  ‘No. It appears no one went shopping while I was gone.’

  A big, trembly sigh, then, ‘I’ll just have a banana.’

  ‘No fresh fruit either,’ I said.

  She grabbed for the Frankenberries. ‘Just give me the stupid cereal,’ Bessie said, and Megan laughed, which got her a noogie on her arm, which in turn caused Bessie to receive a wet willie, at which point I intervened.

  ‘Eat! Next one to touch the other gets to ride to school with me in the Volvo.’

  It was amazing how quickly they straightened up.

  ‘Eat fast,’ Graham said, coming in from the garage. ‘I’m leaving in five.’

  The girls finished up, put their bowls in the sink, and both ran upstairs for their backpacks. And in five, they were gone. Out the door and away. Out of my sight but not out of my mind. This was just the first day. The first day to wonder when he was coming back and what he would do when he got here. The first day to try to know where Bessie was at every moment. Every second. My belly clinched up. And if he never came back? I asked myself. Then I guess, I answered myself, I’ll worry about him for the rest of my life.

  BLACK CAT RIDGE, TEXAS, 1999

  One of Codderville’s finest found me puking in the oleander bushes that separated Terry’s yard from mine. Bessie was standing silently beside me, staring off into space.

  I pointed back towards Terry’s house and said, ‘They’re all d-e-a-d.’

  ‘Ma’am?’ the officer said.

  I rolled over from my all-fours position into a sitting position.

  ‘Ma’am, are you hurt?’ he asked, obviously seeing the blood on my shirt and hands, and possibly my face.

  ‘No, but I think she is,’ I said, looking at Bessie standing just feet from me.

  The officer squatted next to me and pulled Bessie gently to him. She came docilely. Together we checked her for cuts or shotgun wounds. We found none.

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’ I asked, my voice dangerously close to a whine.

  The officer stood up and headed for his car. ‘I don’t know, ma’am. I’m not a doctor; maybe shock.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m calling an ambulance and some backup now.’

  He made his call and came back, his hand on the butt of his gun riding low on his hip.

  ‘Aren’t you going to go in there?’ I screeched. I really did. It was beginning to hit me. I wanted someone to do something, and he was the only someone within yelling range.

  He started asking me questions: my name, address, relationship to the child, but not what happened. I tried to tell him several times, until he finally said, ‘Save that for the detectives. They’ll be here shortly.’

  I stood up. My face dangerously close to his. ‘They’re all d-e-a-d in there. Can you spell? Do you understand the concept? D-E-A-D?’

  He put his hands on my arms and gently pushed me out of his space. ‘Ma’am, just sit down there on the lawn with the little girl. We’ll take a look at the house as soon as my backup arrives.’

  ‘Backup!’ I snorted. ‘They’re dead; they’re not going to hurt you!’

  I sat with Bessie and waited until the ambulance and the backup arrived. I saw three officers go into the house, but then I was distracted helping get Bessie into the ambulance. An officer was dispatched to watch my children and I gave her Willis’s number at work, asking her to call him to come home and tell him briefly what happened.

  As I crawled into the back of the ambulance with Bessie, a plainclothes cop crawled in with me. Holding out his hand, he said, ‘Detective Stewart, Mrs Pugh. Mind if I ride with you and get your statement?’

  I held up my bloody palms and he put his hand down. Shaking hands was not an option. I looked at Bessie then at one of the EMTs working on her. ‘Can she understand me?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t know, ma’am, but I don’t think so. She’s got all the symptoms of shock.’

  I moved to the back of the ambulance with Detective Stewart and there told him everything, from the moment I first walked into the house, until the moment I came out and puked in the oleanders.

  By the time I’d finished telling my story, we’d arrived at Codderville Memorial Hospital. They took Bessie quickly inside and, after several hours, I was told she was diagnosed as being in severe shock, borderline catatonic. I told my story to several more police officers, plainclothes and uniform, and a couple of medical types and one social worker. Finally, the doctor came out and told me that Bessie had been given some medication that would make her sleep for several hours.

  ‘The best thing you can do for her and yourself, is to go home and get some rest,’ he said gently, an arm on my shoulder.

  I thanked him and turned, finding Detective Stewart standing there. ‘I’ll drive you home,’ he said, grabbing keys from a uniformed officer.

  It was four o’clock in the afternoon before he dropped me off. All the vehicles that had been clogging the street earlier – the police cars, ambulances – were gone, and the house next door was cordoned off with yellow tape. I tried not to look at it as I rang the bell for my own home.

  TWO

  BLACK CAT RIDGE, TEXAS, THE PRESENT

  The boy who calls himself her brother, I’ll kill him first. I owe him big time. I’m gonna gut him like a fish. Fillet him. I can feel the smile on my face. Just the thought of him gone makes me happy. Maybe I’ll let Bessie watch. She deserves that much for her part in trying to escape me! She’s been bad, but I’ll teach her how to be good. I’ve learned from the best!

  OK, here’s what happened:

  APRIL, 2009 (LAST WEEK)

  Elizabeth Lester Pugh was of two minds when it came to what she wanted to be when she grew up: a Nobel Prize-winning quantum physicist or the Poet Laureate of the United States. Maybe both. She had no concerns whatsoever about make-up, clothes, shaving her legs, all those things girls her age seemed to fixate on. She believed highly in personal hygiene, would never go outside without washing her face and combing her hair,
and was always careful not to have a booger hanging out of her nose. But that was about it. Except – and this was a big exception – when it came to her sister Megan.

  Megan was a total girly-girl. Her existence was tied up in her make-up, her clothes, and what boy said what about what girl. Megan’s goal in life was to be a wife, mother, and fashion consultant, not necessarily in that order. So Elizabeth, who was smaller than Megan, was very careful to buy the clothes that Megan wanted but couldn’t wear, borrow things from Megan’s closet when Megan could never borrow anything from hers, and generally make Megan’s life as miserable as possible. It was her duty: they were sisters.

  On the other hand, nobody, and I mean nobody, said a bad word about Megan in front of Elizabeth, and visa versa. And that went double for their brother Graham. On the Graham front, the two girls were totally bonded.

  On this beautiful Thursday in April, the two girls got out of the minivan that was their carpool vehicle of the week, and raced to the front door, Megan of the longer legs winning as usual. They knew that today they were latchkey kids, as Dad was still at work and Mom was off to her romance convention in Austin, so they dug the extra key out of the flowerbed and used it to get in the house.

  Megan, heading for the kitchen, said, ‘I’m hungry.’

  Elizabeth answered with, ‘You’ll never lose weight that way. I’m going upstairs.’

  Megan wasn’t really overweight but Elizabeth never missed an opportunity to point out that she could be. She bounded up the stairs and into her room, throwing her backpack on the bed and heading straight to the computer. She turned it on and checked her email. And there it was: an email from Tommy.

  Elizabeth wasn’t really into boys, but Tommy was different. He was smart and funny and he understood her. She had to admit, to herself at least, that she was beginning to have a bit of a crush on him. The email was simple:

  TO: Skywatcher75

  FROM: T_Tom37

  Home yet? IM me when you get there. T

  So she did. They’d met in a chat room several weeks ago, one dedicated to astronomy nuts, which they both were. They were the only non-college-aged kids in there and had gravitated to each other. Now neither visited the astronomy site much, but talked to each other by email and IM as often as possible. Elizabeth sent out an IM:

  Skywatcher75: ‘T, u there?’

  T_Tom37: ‘Hey, E, been waiting for u.’

  Skywatcher75: ‘Just got home’

  T_Tom37: ‘Missed u.’

  Skywatcher75: ‘How was school?’

  T_Tom37: ‘Usual – u?’

  Skywatcher75: ‘Same’

  T_Tom37: ‘Gotta talk bout something’

  Skywatcher75: ‘What?’

  T_Tom37: ‘This is serious, E’

  Elizabeth felt a stab of panic laced with joy. Was he going to profess his undying love for her? Was he going to say he couldn’t talk to her anymore? What?

  Skywatcher75: ‘What?’

  T_Tom37: ‘I haven’t been telling u the whole truth’

  Skywatcher75: ‘About what?’

  T_Tom37: ‘Me’

  Oh, God, Elizabeth thought, he’s not a boy in the ninth grade like he said – he’s some thirty-year-old freak . . .

  Skywatcher75: ‘Go ahead’

  T_Tom37: ‘U have to be brave and hear me out’

  Skywatcher75: ‘T, stop. Just tell me’

  T_Tom37: ‘My name’s not Tommy’

  This was it, Elizabeth thought. His name is Herman and he’s in his fifties. Oh, gross.

  Skywatcher75: ‘What is it?’

  There was a long silence from the other end, so long that Elizabeth thought for a moment that Tommy, or whatever his name was, had gone away. Then her computer pinged and words she’d never expected to see popped up.

  T_Tom37: ‘My name is Aldon.’

  Elizabeth stared at the letters, not sure she was reading them right. Finally, she wrote:

  Skywatcher75: ‘I don’t understand.’

  T_Tom37: ‘I’m your brother, Bessie.’

  E.J., THE PRESENT

  When Elizabeth told me about the emails, and the stalker’s ‘confession’, I was sick to my stomach. There was no question that this could be Aldon. I saw his dead body – tripped over it. Buried it. Cried over it. Bessie was so young when it happened that any memory she had of that terrible time would be shaky. The trauma of what she had experienced that night left her mute for several weeks. I’m not sure how much of that time she remembered. We used to make a pilgrimage every year to the Lesters’ graves, but in the last five years or so, we’ve let Bessie set the tone. Some years we all go, some years just Bessie. And once, no one went. It’s her call.

  But I never suspected that she could be almost convinced that Willis and I had lied to her. That Aldon never died, that we were somehow in a conspiracy to cover up ‘what really happened.’ I cried when she told me that. I didn’t even know tears were streaming down my face until she looked at me and her face began to crumble. Then I felt the tears and wiped them away. ‘I’m sorry, honey,’ I said. ‘So sorry you had to go through this.’

  ‘I’m sorry!’ she said. ‘That I could believe that creep! I don’t know what got into me!’ she said, sobbing.

  At fourteen, my youngest daughter is still tiny, still small enough that I can pick her up. I did, and pulled her into my lap, holding her tight. Megan was crying too, saying, ‘I told her you and Dad could never ever do that! I told her!’ Then I had ended up with both girls in my lap, holding them tight, all of us crying. Willis and Graham sat at the table, Willis with his face in his hands, Graham looking anywhere but at the crying females.

  It had been the longest night I’d spent since childbirth. And it wasn’t over. Not until he was found, and I managed to have a few words with him.

  GRAHAM, THE PRESENT

  Here’s the strange thing: I didn’t get grounded. Not one day. Actually, I came out of this whole thing looking pretty damn good, if I do say so myself. Semi-superhero status. The girls, my sisters, might disagree, but they sure as hell didn’t when I was saving their asses! It’s just when they got time to think about it and figure out how much they now owed me that they decided I didn’t do much. But they are Wrong with a capital ‘W’.

  So I called Lotta that first Sunday, after I finally got up, late in the afternoon, and asked if I could drive her home from school on Monday. I’d met Lotta the night before, riding around in the low-rider. Long story. Anyway, the guys in the low-rider were her cousins (one was an uncle, I think), and they picked her up from work. So she was with us when the whole thing with Elizabeth came down. And she was hot – Lotta, not Elizabeth, jeez – and she’d given me her number.

  ‘Hey, I work, idiot,’ she said.

  ‘Who you calling an idiot?’ I said, smiling when I said it.

  ‘You! Who do you think?’ she asked.

  ‘I dunno. Thought maybe you had somebody else on the line who really was an idiot,’ I said.

  ‘Naw, I only talk to one idiot at a time,’ she said.

  ‘So I’ll drive you to work,’ I said.

  ‘Um, you’ll have to talk to my cousin,’ she said.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘You saying I got too many cousins?’ she asked.

  ‘Hey, if you can count ’em all, that’s fine.’

  ‘Are you saying I can’t count?’ she said, no longer playing around.

  ‘No, I’m saying you got a lot of cousins!’ I said.

  ‘’Cause if you’re saying you think I can’t count ’cause I’m Mexican, you can just take your white ass . . .’

  ‘Whoa, there! Jeez, Lotta, where’d this shit come from?’ I asked, totally confused.

  There was a sigh on the other end of the line. ‘Never mind,’ she finally said. ‘The school counselor says I got issues.’

  ‘Hey, we all got issues,’ I said.

  ‘You saying your issues are better than my issues?’ she demanded.

  ‘OK, look,’ I fina
lly said, ‘I guess this isn’t gonna work, so, Lotta, enjoyed meeting you . . .’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I tend to get defensive. I think that comes from being the only girl with five brothers and fourteen male cousins. Not another girl in the bunch.’

  ‘I can understand that – on a smaller scale,’ I said, ‘being the only boy with two sisters.’

  ‘Yeah, but I met your sisters, and I think they’re nice,’ she said.

  ‘That’s ’cause you’re not a boy sharing a bathroom with them. Underwear drying on the bathtub, hairy razors everywhere, face cream or some such shit all over the counter – and don’t get me started on trying to get in there in the morning! I almost pissed myself last week.’

  ‘Oh, thanks for that image!’ she said, laughing.

  ‘So,’ I said, taking a deep breath. ‘Can I drive you to work after school tomorrow?’

  ‘Hum,’ she said, like it was the first time she’d heard me ask. ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Great!’ I said. ‘I’ll meet you at the door to the parking lot, OK?’

  ‘See you then after last bell,’ she said.

  Then we both said goodbye and hung up. Then I thought, all I had to do was figure out how to get Mom’s car. But that afternoon, that, and so many more of my problems got solved when my grandma came over.

  She had her friend Miss Gladys with her and they were driving what I thought were both their cars. One was a fairly late model Ford Taurus and the other was Grandma’s Valiant.

  Once everybody got in the living room, she made Mom call me downstairs and then came the bombshell of all bombshells.

  ‘I was looking at the Valiant,’ Grandma said, ‘and thinking about the horror Bessie went through in my car. And I thought she’ll never want to ride with me anywhere again. And then I thought, I need to get her to ride in it a lot so she’ll get used to it being my car again, and not that horrible place where she was held captive, but then I thought how she hardly ever rides with me, so then I came up with the perfect solution.’