for a long time. I am assuming the trail’s too cold for Cameron’s abduction to have any relation to what’s happening to you now.”
I nodded. “I agree. I think the Joyce case is the most likely. If they okay me talking to you, I’ll be glad to tell you all about it. There’s really not much to tell.”
Victoria whipped out her cell phone and made a call, which I was pretty sure you weren’t supposed to do in a hospital. She started talking. A few seconds later, she handed the phone to me.
“Hello,” I said.
“This is Lizzie Joyce.”
“Hi. Did you want me to talk to Victoria?”
“That’s real ethical of you. You have my permission.” Did she sound
A memory surfaced. “One of the cops did tell me there was another shooting a couple of blocks away. So it’s possible. But that’s pretty hard to believe.”
“Well, I’m real sorry. If there’s anything I can do, you just let me know.”
I wondered how sincere the offer was. For one wild minute, I considered saying, “This hospital stay is going to be really expensive, because our insurance is shitty. Can you take care of the bill? Oh, and pick up the tab for his rehab, too, while you’re at it?” But I simply thanked her and handed the phone back to Victoria.
I’d been too preoccupied to think about the financial crunch we were going to face until that moment. I thought unhappy thoughts, while Victoria Flores wound up her conversation with Lizzie Joyce. For the first time, I saw the full scope of the problem in front of me. I realized Tolliver’s injury meant the end of our dream of buying a house, at least in the foreseeable future.
It was possible for me to be more depressed, which I would not have believed ten minutes earlier.
I told Victoria about the visit to Pioneer Rest Cemetery. She asked me a lot of questions I couldn’t answer, but finally she seemed satisfied that she’d wrung every last bit of knowledge and conjecture out of me.
“I hope I can perform like they want me to,” she said, having her own down moment. “I can’t believe they came to me instead of some big agency, but now that I know the details, I can see why they called someone like me.”
“It’s been hard, the move to this area?” I asked.
“Yeah, there’s a lot more business, but a lot more competition,” Victoria said. “It’s good to be close to my mother; she helps with my daughter. And the school MariCarmen’s in here is better than the one in Texarkana. Plus, the driving distance isn’t bad, and I still have business and a lot of contacts back there. It just takes me two and a half, three hours, depending on traffic and weather.”
“We’re never going to find Cameron, are we?” I said.
Victoria ’s mouth opened, as if she was going to tell me something. Then she closed it. “I wouldn’t say that. You never know when a lead will pop up. I wouldn’t string you along. You know that’s true.”
I nodded.
“It’s always in the back of my mind,” Victoria said. “All those years ago, when I came by your trailer and talked to Tolliver… I was just a rookie cop. I thought I could find her quick, and make a name for myself. That didn’t happen. But now that I’m out on my own, I still look for her, everywhere I go.”
I closed my eyes. I did, too.
Seven
AFTER Victoria left, I sat down on the chair next to the hospital bed. My right leg felt wobbly. It’s the leg the lightning traveled down that afternoon in the trailer when the thunder was rumbling outside. I’d been getting ready for a date; it was a Saturday, or a Friday. I discovered I no longer remembered all the circumstances, which was a real shock.
I did recall I’d been looking in the bathroom mirror while I used a hair curling rod, which was plugged into the socket by the sink. The lightning came in through the open bathroom window. The next thing I knew, I was flat on my back, half in and half out of the little room, and Tolliver was performing CPR, and the EMTs were taking over, and Matthew was yelling at them in the background. Mark was trying to shut him up.
My mom was passed out in their bedroom. I could see her sprawled across the bed if I turned my head to the left. One of the babies was screaming, probably Mariella. Cameron was standing pressed to the wall in the hall, her face soaked with tears and her expression distraught. There was a strange smell in the air. The hairs on my right arm were little crispy flakes. Nothing about me seemed to work.
“Your brother saved your life,” the older man bending over me said. His voice sounded far away and it buzzed.
I tried to respond, but my mouth wouldn’t work. I managed a tiny nod.
“Thank you, Jesus,” Cameron said, the words almost incoherent because she was so choked up.
That scene in the trailer seemed more real to me than this Dallas hospital room. I could picture Cameron so clearly: long straight blond hair, brown eyes like Dad’s. We didn’t look that much alike, even a quick glance would tell you that; our faces were different shapes and so were our eyes. Cameron had freckles across her nose, and she was shorter, and her build was more compact than mine. Cameron and I both made good grades, but she was more popular. She worked at it.
I think Cameron would have managed much better if she hadn’t been able to clearly remember the nice house in Memphis where we’d grown up, before our mom and dad had gone to hell. That memory also made her struggle to keep us up to a standard she held in her head. It made her crazy if we didn’t look neat, clean, and prosperous. It made her nuts if anyone even suspected what our home life was like. Sometimes that frantic desire to keep up appearances at school made Cameron a little hard to reason with. To live with, truth be told. But she was absolutely loyal to her siblings, both step and full. She was determined to raise Mariella and Gracie as she deemed fit according to her shadowy memories of our respectable past. Cameron worked constantly to keep the trailer looking clean and orderly, and I was her deputy in that struggle.
Seeing Victoria had raised a lot of ghosts. While Tolliver slept, I remembered the years I’d expected to see my sister everywhere we went. I’d imagined that I’d turn around in a store, and she’d be the clerk who was waiting to ring up my purchases. Or she’d be the prostitute we passed on the street corner at night. Or she’d be the young matron pushing a stroller, the one with the long blond hair.
She hadn’t been.
Once I’d even asked someone if she was named Cameron, because I was suddenly convinced that the young woman was my sister, a little aged and worn. I’d frightened her. I’d had to walk away quickly, because I’d known she would call the police if I said one more word.
In all those fantasies, I’d never once explained to myself how Cameron had gotten launched in this second life of hers, or why she hadn’t called me or written me in all those years.
At first, I’d been convinced my sister had been abducted by a gang or sold into slavery, something violent and horrible. Later it had occurred to me that maybe she’d simply been fed up with her life: the tawdry parents and the tacky trailer, the sister who limped and looked abstracted, the baby sisters who never seemed to stay clean.
Most days, though, I was sure Cameron was dead.
I was yanked out of my unhappy reverie by the sudden appearance of one of the detectives from the night before. He came into the hospital room very quietly and stood looking down at my brother. Then he said, “How are you today, Miss Connelly?” in a voice that barely moved the air in the room, it was so hushed and even.
I stood up, because he made me nervous, with his silent entrance and hushed voice. He wasn’t especially tall, maybe five foot nine, and he was thickset and had a heavy mustache flecked with gray. He wasn’t anything like his partner, Parker Powers. This detective looked like a million other men. I tried to remember his name. Rudy something. Rudy Flemmons.
“I’m fine compared to my brother,” I said, nodding down at the figure on the bed. “Have you got any ideas about who did this to him?”
“We found some cigarette butts in the parking lot, but they could have come from anyone. However, we bagged them just in case we ever get someone to compare the DNA to. Assuming the lab guys can get DNA.” We did some more looking at the patient. Tolliver opened his eyes, smiled at me very slightly, and went back to sleep.
“Do you think they were really shooting at him?” the detective asked.
“They hit him,” I said, a little confused at the question. Of
“You think they might have been shooting at you?” Rudy Flemmons asked.
“Why?” That sounded stupid the minute it was out of my lips. “I mean, why shoot at me? You’re saying you think the bullet hitting Tolliver was an accident, that it should have been me?”
“It
“You’re basing that on… what?”
“You’re the dominant one in your little group of two,” Flemmons said. “And your brother is strictly your support staff. You’re the talent of the outfit. The chances are much higher of someone taking issue with you, rather than with Mr. Lang, here. I understand he doesn’t have a girlfriend?”
This was the strangest policeman I’d ever talked to.
I sighed. Here it came again. “He does,” I said.
“Who is she?” He’d even gotten out his little notebook.
“Me.” Flemmons looked up, his eyes quizzical.
“Come again?” he said.
“He’s not my brother by blood, you know.” I was very tired of explaining our relationship.
“Right, you don’t share parents,” he said. He’d been doing his research.
“No, we don’t. We’re partners, in every sense of the word.”
“Okeydokey. I got an interesting phone call this morning,” Flemmons said, throwing the line away. I immediately became more alert.
“Yes? From whom?”
“From a detective on the Texarkana police force. Name of Peter Gresham. He’s a friend of mine.”
“What did he tell you?” I said and sighed. I really didn’t want to hear yet another rehashing of my sister’s disappearance. It had already been a “grieved about Cameron” day.
“He said there’d been a phone call about your sister.”
“What kind of phone call?” There are more crackpots in the world than you can shake a stick at.
“Someone spotted her at the Texarkana mall.”
I stopped
