Grave Secret (28 page)

She’d been so late that day. And that wasn’t like Cameron. I remembered making my mother rouse enough to watch the girls, whom I’d collected from day care. Though it wasn’t smart to leave them alone with her, I couldn’t take them with me. I hurried down the road, past all the other trailers, following the route we always took coming home.

Tolliver and Mark had been at their respective jobs, and Matthew, as it turned out, had been playing pool in the home of one of his wonderful friends, a junkie named Renaldo Simpkins. The police would never have believed Renaldo, but his girlfriend, Tammy, had been there, too, and she said she’d walked in and out of the room at least five times during the pool game. She was sure that Matthew had never left between around four and six thirty. (The six thirty was firm, because that was when she’d gotten a phone call from a neighbor, telling her that there were police cars all around the Lang trailer, and Matthew better get his ass home.)

Around five thirty, I’d found my sister’s backpack—the one now sitting before me on a hotel coffee table—by the side of the street. It was a residential street lined with very small houses. About half of them were abandoned. But there was a woman living in the house across the street from the spot where I’d found Cameron’s backpack. Her name was Ida Beaumont.

I’d never talked to Ida Beaumont before, and despite all the times I’d walked past her house, I don’t think I’d ever seen her out in her yard. She was afraid of all the teenagers in the neighborhood, and maybe she had good reason. This was a part of town where even police looked over their shoulders. But I met Ida Beaumont that day. I’d walked across the street and knocked on her door.

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 woman somewhat older than my sister, and the DNA wasn’t a match. That body had never been identified, though when they’d let me close to her I’d known she’d been a suicide. I didn’t share that, because I had limited credibility with the police.

Tolliver and I had started our traveling by then, and we were building up our business. It had taken a long time for word of mouth to get around and for the Internet to pick up on what I was doing. The cops thought I was a scam artist. The first two years were very difficult. After that, my career took on a certain momentum.

But now was not the time to think about my own journey, but about Cameron’s. I touched the backpack lovingly, and I took out everything inside. I’d examined every item a hundred times. We’d leafed through every page of the textbooks inside, looking for a message, a clue, anything. All the notes Cameron had been passed by other students were stuffed in a pocket, and we’d pored over them, trying to read something in them that would tell us what had happened to our sister.

Tanya had wanted Cameron to notice how stupid Heather’s outfit was, and Tanya had also remarked on the fact that Jerry had said that Heather had had SEX with him when they’d gone out the weekend before. Jennifer thought that Cameron’s brother Tolliver was HOT, and was he dating anyone? And wasn’t Mr. Arden a stupid idiot?

Todd had wondered when he should pick her up for the prom, and would she be getting dressed at Jennifer’s house, like she had last time?

(If Cameron could manage it, she got her dates to pick her up somewhere else. I didn’t blame her at all.)

There’d been a note from Mr. Arden, asking Cameron to tell her parents that one of them needed to come up to the school and explain that they knew the attendance policy. Just bringing a signature back to the school from home wasn’t enough. (Mr. Arden had told the police that Cameron had missed his class once over the acceptable limit, and he’d wanted to lay eyes on one of Cameron’s parents to make sure someone was aware that Cameron couldn’t skip any more or she might not graduate.)

She hadn’t been skipping the class out of senior giddiness. It was her last class of the day, and sometimes we had to leave early to pick up the girls at day care if Tolliver or Mark couldn’t.

Of course, all the teachers we’d had had professed their shock and horror at our living conditions, except Miss Briarly. Miss Briarly had said, “And what would you have had us do? Call the police so the kids wouldn’t have even had each other?”

That was exactly what the press thought Miss Briarly should have done, and she’d gotten reprimanded by the principal. It had made me so angry. Miss Briarly had taught Cameron her favorite class, advanced biology. I remembered how hard Cameron had worked on her senior project about genetics, charting the eye colors of everyone in the neighborhood. She’d gotten an A. Miss Briarly had given me the paper after Cameron’s disappearance.

Ida Beaumont had had to tell her story over and over. She’d become such a recluse, as a result, that she’d stopped answering her door and got a church lady to deliver her groceries.

My mother and Tolliver’s father had been sentenced to jail on multiple charges of child endangerment and assorted drug offenses.

Tolliver had been given permission to move in with Mark. I’d gone to a foster home, where I’d been treated very decently. It had been marvelous, to me, to be in a home where the floors were solid, where I only had to share a room with one other girl, where everything was clean without me having to clean it personally, and where study time was mandatory. I still sent the Clevelands a Christmas card every year. They’d let Tolliver come to visit me on the Saturdays he wasn’t working.

By the time I graduated, we’d developed our plan for using my weird new talent to make our living. We’d spent hours at the cemetery, practicing and exploring the limits of my strange ability. Even weirder than our plan was the fact that this had actually been a very happy time in my life, and I think in Tolliver’s, too. The biggest flaw in that new life was the loss of all my sisters. Cameron was gone, and Mariella and Gracie had moved away to live with Iona and Hank.

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.