Angels Burning (7 page)

The welcoming grin falls off his sunburned face.

“He's not in any trouble,” I tell him. “I just have a few questions for him. Is he home?”

He takes a moment to decide how he's going to answer me.

“No, but he's only a block away at a friend's house. I can text him.”

“That would be great. Is your wife home?”

“She's out back.”

I follow him around the side of his two-story, mocha brown,
vinyl-sided house with barn red trim, marveling all the while at how some people manage to keep their yards cleaner than I keep my kitchen.

I've met his wife once in passing at the Olive Garden. My memory of her is of various elements, not of an overall impression: shiny hair cut in a swingy pageboy, a forced cackling giggle, a distracting multistrand necklace made of silver-dollar-size red metallic discs. I would have been able to pick her laugh out of a lineup but not her.

We find her kneeling on a plastic mat next to a flowerbed. I'm certain she took the time to pick out her outfit rather than throw on just anything to dig in the dirt. She's wearing a pair of orange capri pants, matching Crocs, a sleeveless yellow blouse, and a blindingly white baseball cap. Her work gloves are covered in a butterfly pattern and are amazingly clean.

She sits back on her heels and flashes a warm smile at her husband and me.

“Honey, you remember Chief Carnahan. Dove,” he adds with a wink.

She pulls off a glove one finger at a time and extends her hand to me while Terry walks over to a patio table and picks up a cell phone.

“Nice to see you again,” she says, and hops to her feet.

“She wants to talk to Zane,” her husband explains while texting.

“Zane?” Her smile widens and tightens. “Why? Zane never gets in trouble. He's almost too good.”

I try to make my smile equal hers in size, but the muscles in my face won't comply.

“That's refreshing to hear about a seventeen-year-old boy,” I say. “He's not in trouble. I want to ask him a few questions about his girlfriend.”

I leave the statement hanging in the air, waiting to see if she'll supply a name.

“Camio?”

“Yes. What can you tell me about her?”

“She's a nice girl. Polite. Straight A's from what Zane tells us. A little on the shy side. We have no problems with Camio.”

She darts a look at her husband.

“But . . . ,” I urge her.

“It's her family.”

“You've met them?”

“Well, no. But we don't really have to meet them to know what they're like.”

“How's that?”

“Half of them are dead or in jail,” she says.

“But the other half isn't,” I offer.

Terry laughs. His wife smiles at him, uncertainly.

“I've met her mother,” she continues.

“And how did that go?”

“I don't want to sound mean,” she lowers her voice to a conspiratorial level. “I understand some people have no willpower. It's an addiction, you know. Overeating. Just like being addicted to drugs or alcohol. The only difference is that you can stop eating like a pig. I mean, just stop it. Put the Twinkie down. Drugs and alcohol are much harder to quit. Not that I would know firsthand, of course.”

“When you met Mrs. Truly did you have any kind of interaction with her other than realizing she's overweight?”

“She was extremely rude. It was a school function. I introduced myself. I said, ‘I'm Zane's mother,' and she said, ‘Do you want a medal?' ”

A laugh leaps to my lips, and I clear my throat to cover it up.

“Are Camio and Zane serious?”

“No,” she says automatically, shaking her head, while her husband simultaneously nods and says, “I think so.”

Before I can question them further, Brie pulls her husband aside and attacks his ear with tiny hisses that I can't quite make out.

“Were they together last night?” I try.

Again, I receive two different answers. A “no” from Zane's mother, and another “I think so” from his father.

Brie fixes Terry with a glare, and he turns suddenly serious.

“What's this about?” he asks me.

“Camio is missing.”

I carefully watch their faces: Terry looks a little shaken, while Brie appears almost pleased.

“From what you know of her, do you think she might have run away?” I ask.

“If she has run away, I wouldn't be all that upset,” Brie replies. “I know that's a terrible thing to say, but I can't help myself.”

I nod my understanding.

“It's almost as if you have an addiction to saying terrible things.”

Terry lets loose with a guffaw.

“I told you she's got a great sense of humor. For a cop.”

“I thought you said you didn't have a problem with Camio?” I continue.

“I don't. She's a nice girl and I wish her well, but I don't want her to be the mother of my grandchildren.”

“I thought you said they weren't serious?”

Her frustration gets the better of her, and she explodes into one of her shrieking giggles I remember from the restaurant.

“You're twisting my words.” She laughs.

I can tell Zane has arrived by the sudden transformation in her expression; the brittle panic melts into fuzzy fondness, then two stark lines of worry appear on her forehead and dip toward her nose.

I look over my shoulder and see a teenage boy loping toward us with the easy, loose-limbed gait of an athlete leaving the field after a satisfying practice. He's cut through a half dozen backyards to get home. Even if Zane is not too good—as his mother believes—he's good enough to earn the tolerance of his neighbors.

He arrives in front of us. His mother immediately puts an arm around his shoulders. He allows it to rest there for five seconds before shrugging it off. I can almost hear the two of them ticking off the countdown in their heads: the mother thinking it's better than nothing, and the son thinking it's the least he can do.

He's dressed in shimmery red basketball shorts that fall to the knee, a dark blue tank top, and a pair of rubber white Nike sandals. No piercings. No visible tattoos. No outward signs of rebellion. I'm impressed at how quickly he obeyed his father's call.

Terry makes the introductions. Zane doesn't seem intimidated or surprised by my presence. He takes the fact that the chief of police has shown up at his house on a Saturday afternoon wanting to talk to him as a matter of course. Either he's an authentically nice kid who's utterly innocent or a sociopath who's completely guilty.

“Could I have a moment alone with Zane?”

The parents have become uneasy. I don't expect a teen to sense this, but he does. Zane smiles at them.

They're a smiley, attractive family. I've yet to meet the younger daughter, but I'm sure she fits in snugly with the rest, completing them like the last piece of a puzzle. I know there's a professional portrait of them in color-coordinated sweaters posing on a rustic footpath on a wall in their house somewhere, along with photos of both children documented at every milestone age.

Shawna Truly didn't have a single photo of any of her five children displayed anywhere that I could see, just her own faded wedding picture.

“What's wrong, you two?” Zane asks his mom and dad, and they relax at the joshing quality of his voice.

“They're totally paranoid I'm going to fu . . . I mean, mess up someday in a major way 'cause I haven't so far,” he says to me, and laughs. “Sometimes I feel like doing it just to get it over with.”

“This will only take a minute,” I say to everyone.

Brie clenches her mouth shut. Terry holds his hands out to me, palms up, as if he's giving me the memory of his son's long-gone infant body.

I want to tell them that I won't hurt their baby, but I can't make that promise yet.

“Where were you last night, Zane?” I ask, once his parents are safely inside the house, each pressed up against a different window watching us.

“I was out with some friends. Then I was home.”

“You have a girlfriend but you weren't out with her?”

“We were supposed to go out, but she bailed on me.”

“Did she say why?”

“She got in trouble or something like that.”

He pulls his phone out of a pocket and starts scanning through his text messages.

“We were going to go catch a movie, then she texts me and says she needs to see me right away. She wanted me to meet her at Laurel Dam. We hang out there a lot in summer at the bonfires. I drive all the way out there, and she's not there and no one's seen her. I text her and she says she got in trouble and she's not allowed to leave the house. Then she stopped answering my texts.”

“When was that?”

He checks his phone again.

“Eight twenty-four p.m.”

“Was it unusual for her to stop communicating with you?”

“Camio could be real secretive. It kind of bugged me at first. I even got jealous sometimes. Then I decided it was just her being weird about her family.”

“Weird how?”

“She's embarrassed by them, but at the same time she sticks up for them like crazy. It's hard to explain. I've only been out there twice, but I'll never go back. I mean, I've been around families who say shitty things to each other when they're mad, but I've never been around people who are mean to each other all the time. When Cam's with them, she's just like them. I hardly recognize her.”

“Do you have a picture of her on your phone?”

He goes through his photos until he finally comes to the one he wants to show me.

It's a summer picture. A lovely dark-haired girl with a slightly sunburned face. She has a sprinkle of freckles across her cheekbones like her brother Derk. She's holding an orange Popsicle to her lips and smiling around it.

I can't help but think about the way we found her, and vomit rises in my throat. In my head I hear Rudy Mayfield's voice: “
Who does something like that?
”

“I took this last weekend,” Zane says.

He beams down at the place where he holds her in his hand. He doesn't notice that I have to turn away from him.

“She's pretty,” I say while composing myself.

“Yeah, she is.”

“Would she run away?”

“Cam? Never. She wants to go to college more than anything in the world, so she has to finish school. She already got a 2350 on her SATs this spring but she's planning to retake them in the fall. She wants to get a perfect score. People like that don't run away.”

“Why is she so motivated?”

“She doesn't want to end up like her sister or brother. Jessy got pregnant in high school, and Shane's in jail. She wants out of here.”

“What about her two younger brothers?”

“She thinks if she can show them a different life maybe they'll want to get out, too.”

“And what about you, Zane? Do you want to get out of here?”

“I got nothing against this town, but I'll probably move after college just 'cause there're no good jobs here. I want to make some money.”

“Doing what?”

“I don't know. Something in business probably. I'm going to Penn State and party my ass off while I can, then I'll take my degree somewhere and get serious.”

“No offense, but Camio sounds very focused and driven. You . . . not so much.”

My words don't bother him. On the contrary, he flashes me more of the Massey pearly whites.

“It's not like I'm dumb or something. I think I'm pretty typical; Cam's the one who's extraordinary.”

I smile back at him for using that word.

“You're definitely not dumb,” I tell him. “So what do you think she sees in you besides your obvious good looks?”

He shrugs away my compliment the way he shrugged away his mother's affection: accepting it but thinking he doesn't need it.

He gives my question serious thought. Not a lot of kids his age would do that.

“We didn't go to prom,” he begins. “She'd never tell me why she didn't want to go, but I knew it had something to do with her family. I was really pissed at first. It's just junior prom but still, all our friends were going. Plus my mom went ballistic. She wanted to take a million pictures of me in a tux and post them all over Facebook. She's really into all that sappy mom bullshit.”

We both glance back at the house to see his mother and father openly watching us from their separate windows.

Brie starts to raise her hand in a wave, then realizes she doesn't want us to see her and disappears behind a ruffled curtain.

“I figured if we weren't going to go Cam at least owed me an explanation, but she wouldn't give me one,” he continues. “We got in this fight and I told her I was going to take someone else. She said she wouldn't be mad at me if I did. That made me feel even worse, so I told her we'd just skip the stupid junior prom. And she smiled and said that's why she loves me, because I'm on her side.”

My phone beeps. It's a text from Nolan:
+ID. Camio Jane Truly, 17.

When I look up from it, all of Zane's youthful nonchalance is gone, replaced by the adult tenseness that comes from a premonition of tragedy.

The break in our conversation gave him a chance to finally wonder what's going on.

“Why are you asking me all this stuff? I haven't heard from Cam since last night. I'm starting to worry about her. Do you know where she is?”

“Yes,” I tell him.

The relief on his face breaks my heart.

WHEN WE WERE GROWING UP,
Neely, Champ, and I lived in a leaky, creaky, flaky, cobwebby, moldy, sweltering in summer, barn cold in winter, slightly left-leaning structure on Springfield Street that from a distance looked as if someone had plunked down a weather-beaten birdhouse in the middle of a row of beloved but rarely played-with dollhouses.