An Ice cold Grave Page 0,22

all moved in together. Your mom was pregnant."

The trailer had been a tight fit: my older sister, Cameron, and me in one room, Tolliver and his brother, Mark, in another, Tolliver's dad and my pregnant mom in the third. Plus, there was a never-ending flow of the low-life friends of our parents coming in and out. But we kids had decided we had to have a tree, and since our parents simply didn't care, we set out to get one. In the fringe of woods around the trailer park, we'd found a little pine and cut it down. We'd gotten a discarded tree stand from the Dumpster, and Mark had mended it so it would work.

"That was fun," I said. Mark and Tolliver and Cameron and I had come together during that little expedition, and instead of being kids who lived under the same roof, we became united together against our parents. We became our own support group. We covered for each other, and we lied to keep our family intact, especially after Mariella and Gracie were born.

"They wouldn't have lived if it wasn't for us," I said.

Tolliver looked blank for a minute, until he caught up with my train of thought. "No, our parents couldn't take care of them," he said. "But that was the best Christmas I'd had. They remembered to go out and get us some presents, remember? Mark and I would rather have died than say it out loud but we were so glad to have you two, and your mom. She wasn't so bad then. She was trying to be healthy for the baby, when she remembered. And that church group brought by the turkey."

"We followed the directions. It turned out okay."

There'd been a cookbook in the house, and Cameron had figured we could read directions as well as anyone. After all, our parents had been lawyers before they fell in love with the lifestyle and vices of the people they defended. We had smart genes in our makeup. Luckily, the cookbook was a thorough one that assumed you were totally ignorant, and the turkey had really been good. The dressing was strictly Stove Top Stuffing, and the cranberry sauce came out of a can. We'd bought a frozen pumpkin pie and opened a can of green beans.

"It turned out better than okay," he said.

And he was right. It had been wonderful.

Cameron had been so determined that day. My older sister was pretty and smart. We didn't look anything alike. From time to time, I wondered if we really were full sisters, given the way our mom's character had crumbled. You don't suddenly lose all your morals, right? It happens over time. I caught myself wondering if my mother's had started to erode a few years before she and my dad parted. But maybe I'm wrong about that. I sure hope so. When Cameron went missing, it felt like my own life had been cut in half. There was before Cameron, when things were very bad but tolerable, and after Cameron, when everything disintegrated: I went to foster care, my stepfather and my mother went to jail, and Tolliver went to live with Mark. Mariella and Gracie went to Aunt Iona and her husband.

Cameron's backpack, left by the side of the road the day she'd vanished on her way home from school, was still in our trunk. The police had returned it to us after a few years. We took it with us everywhere.

I took a sip of water from my green hospital cup. There wasn't any point in thinking about my sister. I'd resigned myself long since to the fact that she was dead and gone. Someday I'd find her.

Every now and then, I'd glimpse some short girl with long blond hair, some girl with a graceful walk and a straight little nose, and I'd almost call out to her. Of course, if Cameron were alive, she wouldn't be a girl any longer. She'd been gone now - let's see, she'd been taken in the spring of her senior year in high school, when she was eighteen - God, she'd be almost twenty-six. Eight years gone. It seemed impossible to believe.

"I called Mark," Tolliver said.

"Good. How was he?" Tolliver didn't call Mark as often as he ought to; I didn't know if it was a guy thing, or if there'd been some disagreement.

"He said to tell you to get well soon," Tolliver said. That didn't really answer my question.

"How's his job going?"

Mark had gotten