Find Her Alive (Detective Josie Quinn #8) - Lisa Regan Page 0,64

she?” Shannon asked. “She has no friends. This past couple of months has been the roughest—even worse than early on in her career when that source fed her bad information on a story and got her kicked off the morning network show. She’s got no one but us. We thought she’d got past all the bullying and relational issues in middle and high school but maybe she didn’t.”

“It doesn’t matter now,” Christian said. “What matters is getting her back alive.”

Josie asked, “She didn’t have a best friend in high school?”

“No,” Shannon said. “It was always very sad. We would want to take her places and we’d suggest she invite a friend to go with us, but there was no one. All the other girls had paired off, but she was just alone, all the time. Any time she tried to make friends, it fizzled.”

“Remember that one girl?” Christian asked. “Her family was on vacation at the beach at the same time as us the summer before Trinity’s freshman year of high school?”

“The parasailing girl? Of course I do. That bitch.” Shannon looked at Josie. “This girl was in Trinity’s class at the middle school. She was going to the same high school. She hung out with Trinity the entire week we were at the beach. We took them parasailing together and they had a blast. I thought it really bonded them since it was a pretty intense experience. Trinity was on top of the world. For the first time in a couple of years, I had hope for her. She had a friend finally. Someone her own age to do things with. As soon as we got back to Callowhill, the girl acted like she didn’t exist.”

“I think it’s called ‘ghosting’ now,” Christian said.

“It’s called being a terrible human being,” Shannon spat. “Then and now. I even called her mother, tried to set up some get-togethers but she blew me off as well. Trinity spent the rest of the year wondering what she had said or done wrong.”

Josie’s heart ached for her twin. “That’s terrible.”

Christian shook his head. “No, that’s not terrible. After what happened to her during freshman year, that really wasn’t so bad.”

Shannon wiped more tears from her eyes. “You’d think after all these years, that dumb high school stuff wouldn’t bother me anymore, but it still does.”

“What happened?” Josie asked.

Shannon moved to the kitchen sink, searching the cabinet above it until she found teabags. She heated water in a kettle on the stove as she spoke. “It started with this purse she found at a thrift shop in Philadelphia. It was an eighties-style thing—patchwork with lots of different colors and patterns. She loved it. God knows why, but she was so thrilled with it. It was unlike anything anyone else had, she said.”

“Because it was from twenty years before her time,” Christian said.

Shannon shook her head. “That shouldn’t have mattered. She liked it. It was a bag. Well, she took it to school, and it was like blood in the water to those horrible kids. Immediately they started making fun of her, calling her ‘ugly bag lady.’”

“How creative,” Josie said.

“Yes, well, they were never very smart, those kids,” Shannon said. “Then they said she couldn’t afford a real bag and started calling her ‘Poorhouse Payne’ and that pretty much set the tone for the entire year.”

Christian said. “Trinity couldn’t understand why they would make fun of her for being poor when we clearly weren’t. We tried to explain that wasn’t the point—these kids were being cruel for cruelty’s sake.”

Shannon chimed in. “We told her it was unacceptable for anyone to make fun of another person because of their socioeconomic status, and that if they weren’t calling her ‘Poorhouse Payne’, they’d find something else to tease her about.”

In her mind, Josie catalogued the handbags she’d found among Trinity’s things upstairs. “What happened to the purse?”

Shannon poured hot water into a mug and dipped a teabag into it. “She threw it away. Before she even left school. She was mortified. I marched her right back down to school to pick it out of the trash because I wanted her to keep taking it to school to prove a point—”

Christian smiled. “Which was that those kids could shove their taunts right up their asses, although I believe my wife used much stronger language back then.”

Shannon went on, “But when we got there, all the trash bins had been emptied. There were about a hundred trash bags in the dumpster. Trinity’s