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third beer. I was still nursing my second. "Wasn't she taken by a man in a blue pickup?"

I nodded. "Grabbed on her way home. She'd been decorating the gym for some dance. I'd walked home earlier, so she was alone. This guy took her right off the street. There were witnesses. But no one ever found her."

"I'm sorry," he said.

I nodded in acknowledgment. "Someday I'll find her," I said. "Someday it'll be her, when I feel that buzz. And we'll know what happened to her."

"Are your parents still alive?"

"My father is, I think. My mother died last year." Her addictions had finally succeeded in eating up her body.

"What's your connection with Tolliver?"

"Tolliver's dad married my mother. We were brought up as family, after that." If we'd been "brought up" at all, I added to myself. Mostly, we'd fended for ourselves. After a while, we'd become good at presenting a facade to the authorities who might separate us. Tolliver watched over Cameron and me, I watched over the two littler girls, Mariella and Gracie. Tolliver's older brother Mark stopped by on a regular basis to make sure we were eating. If we weren't, Mark would bring groceries. Tolliver got a job at a restaurant as soon as he was old enough, and he brought home all the food he could.

Sometimes our parents were both working, sometimes we got government assistance. But mostly the money went down their throats or into their veins.

We learned to survive on very little, and we learned how to pick clothes at the thrift store and at yard sales, clothes that wouldn't give away our situation. Mark would lecture us on how important it was to make good grades. "As long as you keep clean and neat, don't skip school, and make at least average grades, social services won't come by," he'd taught us, and he'd been right. Until Cameron vanished.

I tried explaining those years to Hollis.

"That sounds horrible," Hollis said. His face looked sad, sad for the girl I had been, God bless him. "Did they hit you?"

"No," I said. "Neglect was the key to their parenting system, even for Mariella and Gracie. My mom tried to take care of them when they were babies, but after that, it was kind of up to Cameron and me, mostly me. It was hard for us not to go down the same drain." I had clung to my memory of what life had been like before - before my mother had begun using drugs, before my father had gone to jail. I'd promised myself I could have that life again. My two younger sisters hadn't had as hard a time; they had no memory of anything better.

The tension of maintaining the status quo had almost killed me. But we'd managed, until Cameron got snatched.

"What happened then?" Hollis asked.

I fidgeted, looked anywhere else. "Let's talk about something else," I said. "The summary is that I spent my senior year living with a foster family, and my little half-sisters stayed with my aunt and uncle."

"How was the foster family?"

"They were decent people," I said. "Not child molesters, not slavedrivers. As long as I did my assigned chores and finished my homework, I wasn't unhappy." It had been an acute pleasure to live in a household that valued order and cleanliness.

"Any trace of your sister ever found?"

"Her purse. Her backpack." I shifted my right leg, which tended to numb if I didn't move it around.

"Tough."

"Yeah, I'd say we've both had lives that had a few bumps."

Hollis nodded. "Here's to trying to live a better life," he said, and we bumped glasses.

We went to his small house later, gaining a little comfort and warmth from each other. But I wouldn't spend the night, though he wanted me to stay. About three in the morning, I kissed him goodbye at the door to my motel room, and we held each other for a long minute. I went inside by myself, cold to my bones.

Chapter 7

seven

IT was a good morning for running: the third clear day in a row, chilly, with the promise of brilliance in the early sky. I ran a brush through my hair and put on my dogtag engraved with my name and Tolliver's cell phone number. I dressed in a sports bra and three-quarter length Lycra running pants. An old "Race for the Cure" T-shirt covered the little canister of pepper spray clipped to my pants. I'd found a plastic slotted cover with a hole punched in one end,