Dust to Dust

“They bought that?” said Diane.

“I told you, they didn’t care. They were like my parents. I’m invisible. I think it’s my superpower,” she said.

“Why were you hanging with Stacy? How did you meet?” asked Kingsley.

“Both of us were auditing a class at Gainesville State College. She wanted to transfer there and was trying it out. I’m going there until I can transfer to UGA. I recognized her last name, but there are lots of Dances, so I didn’t think anything of it. Of course she recognized mine and kind of avoided me.”

“How did you finally meet?” asked Kingsley.

“I found out she was in a band. A real successful band. They played lots of gigs, and people in class knew them. See, I play the guitar and I’m really good. I wanted to be in the band and they needed another guitar player. I talked to her and that’s when she told me who she was. She was kind of freaked about it,” she said.

“You weren’t?” asked Kingsley.

“No. She didn’t do anything to my family. And she said her brother was innocent and she was going to prove it,” Samantha said.

“Did you believe her?” asked Kingsley.

“Why not? I’ve been blamed for stuff I didn’t do. My parents still think I took money out of my aunt’s purse when I was ten. It was my cousin who did it, but he’s a really good liar. So why couldn’t it have happened to her brother?” she said.

“What about all the evidence?” said Kingsley.

“Evidence doesn’t mean anything. It can be anything people want it to be. I mean, look at Jurassic Park. The dinosaurs looked real to me,” she said.

“It must be hard, living in a world where everything could be an illusion,” said Diane.

“We all do. It just means we can make the world the way we want it. That’s what Stacy’s band did. They wanted to be successful and they are making it real. Or, they were,” she said.

“You need to tell your parents you found her body,” said Kingsley.

“They’ll just yell,” she said. “They’ll tell me I betrayed El. You’d think they would want to be really close to me, with El gone and all, but they don’t. All Mother does is sit in front of that painting. And Dad… he just pays lip service to telling me not to be late. He doesn’t even know when I come home. He stays in his games. That’s how he’s remade his world,” she said.

“Games?” asked Diane.

“Warcraft and Second Life. He fights demons, rescues princesses, and builds his own world to live in.”

“I’m sorry,” said Diane.

Samantha shrugged. “They gave me a cool car, clothes, telephones, and money. It’s not so bad. I don’t want that to stop. It’s all I have.”

“You need to talk to someone,” said Diane. “The police are likely to be coming around and they’ll recognize you. Your parents need to know what happened to you. Maybe this will jolt them into the real world. At least go to a counselor at college.”

Diane took one of her cards and wrote her psychiatrist friend Laura Hillard’s name and number.

“Dr. Hillard is a friend. Tell her I sent you. If you don’t want to talk to her, she can send you to someone here who would be good.”

“Shrinks can’t take things out of your head,” Samantha said.

“No, but they can teach you how to cope,” said Diane.

“I cope,” Samantha said in an uncertain voice, her eyes downcast.

“Are you having nightmares?” said Kingsley.

She nodded. “They’ve started back again. I had bad nightmares after El died,” she said.

“Take Diane’s advice. See someone, just to talk to, at least,” he said.

“Maybe,” she said, sticking the card in her purse.

“Have your parents been like this for nine years?” asked Kingsley.

“It comes and goes. It gets bad around Christmas and El’s birthday. It’s worse when Mother is drinking. Sometimes she takes a cure for a while, but sooner or later she goes back to it. She likes vodka in tea. Can you imagine? If she put it in orange juice, she’d at least get some vitamin C.”

“By ‘takes a cure,’ what do you mean?” asked Kingsley.

“She goes to visit my grandmother for a while. They don’t have any alcohol around and she stays in the house. Sometimes she goes to a clinic in Atlanta. She comes back and starts falling back into bad habits. I told them we should move, but they won’t. They don’t want to go to a house where El has never been. They think it’ll make her disappear, and I’m like, hello, she’s gone. She’s already disappeared.”

“You seem to have supportive neighbors,” said Diane.

Samantha shrugged. “Kathy Nicholson is pretty nice. I go over to her house some. She gets kind of lonely. We talk about things. But it’s not like she can do anything about my parents. Wendy Walters means well, but I think Mother wore her down. She used to try to discourage her from drinking, but now she just helps her. You saw when I brought the tea.”

“Why did Stacy want to speak with your parents?” asked Kingsley. “If she knew you, you could give her a lot of the answers she wanted.”

“Not really. I was nine when El died. I didn’t know a whole lot that was going on in El’s life. Stacy thought they could tell her about the day El disappeared. I didn’t really know much about that. Except, I think my parents think it was my fault.”

“How is that?” asked Diane.

“We’d been fighting that day and El said she didn’t want to ride all the way to Grandma’s house with me and she was just going to stay here. She wasn’t home when we got back,” she said.

“That wasn’t your fault,” said Diane.

Samantha shrugged again and took a sip of drink. “Maybe not, but still, if we hadn’t fought…”

“You think she might have wanted to stay home for reasons of her own?” said Diane. “And the argument with you was just her excuse?”

Samantha raised her eyebrows and opened her mouth slightly. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Did she have a boyfriend?” asked Diane.

“She always had boyfriends. You saw her portrait. That’s pretty much what she looked like. But it would have been in her diary,” said Samantha.

“She kept a diary?” asked Kingsley.

Samantha nodded. “I loaned it to Stacy to copy.”

Chapter 26

“Your sister kept a diary?” said Kingsley.

“Yes, like forever. I mentioned it to Stacy one time and she begged me to let her see it. I told her it wouldn’t help. See, El caught Mother reading her diary when she first started writing one and she was really pissed. That’s when she started writing in this code she made up. El was really smart. Mother wanted to read her diaries after she died, to be close, I guess. But she couldn’t make heads or tails of them. Dad packed them in a box when he packed up El’s room. Mom wanted to keep it the way it was, but it was a little too creepy for Dad. They saved her things in the basement. I took her last diary so Stacy could copy it.”

“Did she copy it?” asked Kingsley. He leaned forward in his chair slightly. Diane knew what he was thinking. Diaries can be loaded with just the best clues.

“Yes,” said Samantha.

So, the copies were probably in the file that was missing, thought Diane. “What happened to the diary?” she asked.

Samantha Carruthers hesitated and was quiet a moment. Then, quick as a mouse, she slipped her hand into her backpack, pulled out a book, and handed it to Kingsley.