chapter three

Grace woke suddenly at around noon from a restless sleep filled with screaming, crying, and enough cursing to be banned from any movie rated anything below NR-17. She couldn’t fall back asleep and didn’t particularly want to so she got up and showered in the tiny bathroom, trying her hardest to touch as little as possible. She’d didn’t bother looking in the mirror since she knew she looked alright. Ever since she could remember she had been confident of her appearance. She was only sixteen but was often mistaken for older. With her slender figure, clear ebony skin and silky hair as dark as midnight, it was no wonder she had been considered beautiful all her life. Once she had been described as having full lips that were especially created with the sole intention of pleasure. But her most startling attribute were her piercing eyes: light gray with a violet tint. They changed shade with her mood and almost looked stormy whenever she became angry. Them and her music were the only things that ever expressed her true feelings ever since she had perfected the stony expression that hid her emotions.
She got dressed, grabbed her things and left to sign out. As she stepped out she swung her backpack over her shoulder and saw the writing on the front. She took a moment to read her favorite poem for the thousandth time:

There was a rose that faded young;
I saw it’s shattered beauty hung
Upon a broken stem.
I heard them say, “What need to care
With roses budding everywhere?”
I did not answer them.
There was a bird, brought down to die;
They said, “A hundred fill the sky –
What reason to be sad?”
There was a girl, whose lover fled;
I did not wait, the while they said,
“There’s many another lad.”

It was entitled ‘Solace’ and was written by Dorothy Parker. She had copied it onto her backpack in the fifth grade when the world was still all right.
While she stood in front of the door to the bedroom and read the poem, on the verge of tears she knew she couldn’t shed; she felt someone’s presence and looked up. A young cop who looked like he was only a couple years older than herself was staring at her with heaven blue eyes from just a few feet away and she became rigid. Had they found her?
“Excuse me, miss,” he spoke with a faint southern accent and looked down when she met his eyes, “I didn’t mean to startle you, but could you please answer some questions I have about what went on here this morning? We got a call concerning a disturbance earlier but when we got here nothing was wrong. Then we got another call recently saying that the noise had started up again. It’ll only take a second.”
She wondered about the second disturbance and assumed it must have happened while she was in the shower. Trying to relax by attempting to convince herself that Bradley must not have moved the search this far yet she spoke and her voice was as calm as a spring lake at the brink of dawn, and just as flat. “I’m very sorry but I’m not sure I can help you much. I saw the man who was working at the office last night hitting the door of Room 9 and yelling out to whoever was inside but it didn’t last very long and I didn’t hear anything after that.” She completely surprised herself when she told him that much; she had no love for cops and figured she’d just lie about hearing anything at all and then out came everything she knew. She told herself she did it to get rid of him without looking suspicious.
“Alright, but can I just ask you a couple questions, sometimes it helps people remember little details that will help me figure out what happened.”
“How long will it take?” she asked, baffled that she was even considering it.
“Oh, minutes at the most, I wouldn’t want to take up too much of your time.” He told her with typical southern charm and smiled, showing dazzling white teeth.
She told him okay and he led her to his car and took out a pad of paper.
“Well, first things first,” he announced, “I’m Ben. And you’re the one who signed up as Jane Doe on the registry, is that correct?”
“That’s right,” she told him with an almost warning tone in her voice. She didn’t outwardly express the least bit of worry towards the question.
“What’s your real name?”
“What makes you think it’s not Jane Doe?”
“Well—”
“So my parents aren’t very creative,” she cut him off dryly.
“Okay, so you don’t want to tell me your name, that’s alright too," He seemed to be expecting an answer so she quietly stared at him. He chuckled uneasily and went on: “Approximately what time did you sign in this morning?”
Grace told him she thought he would’ve seen it on the sign-in sheet and so he moved on with another chuckle. She wondered why he was acting so nervous and supposed he hadn’t been a cop too long. Then he underwent a drastic change. As if suddenly pulling himself together he became all business, shooting out one question after another.
After twenty minutes of her life went by without any progress she got impatient (it would’ve been five but she’d been practicing patience over the last three years, after all) and interrupted him to inform him of how much easier his job would be if he just talked to the desk clerk.
He looked taken aback by her blatancy but recovered quickly and said with more than a little annoyance, “I would but he disappeared. No one’s seen him since around nine this morning.”
“Ah shoot, well, that’s too bad. Now, if that’s all I really need to get going now, sorry I couldn’t help much, see ya.”
“Alright then, I guess there’s nothing else. Thank you for your time.” She already had her back to him and began walking toward her truck when he stopped her cold, “Hey, you don’t know William Delacroix by any chance do you?”
Slowly she turned around; she looked him straight in the eye and demanded in a low, chill voice, “Why?”
She had surprised him with the animosity had managed in a single syllable and he stammered, “Sorry, it’s just that you kinda remind me of him and he has a truck like that. I was just wondering if you guys were related or something.”
He had her full attention now and she started back towards him. All her instincts were screaming for her to get outta there before she gave herself away but she just had to hear about her brother. She’d never forgive herself if she ever forgot him and she hadn’t spoken to anybody who had known him for too long. Everything she heard about him was as soothing to her as salve to a burn. She couldn’t help herself.
“How’d you know him?” she asked.
“Oh, so you do know him. We were pretty tight in high school but I haven’t seen him since I moved down here. He used to call now and then but he just stopped a couple years back. How’s he doing?”
She stared at him; shocked he didn’t know about William’s so-called “disappearance”. It was in the local paper for months. The media just eat up headlines like ‘Nephew of Local Hero Mysteriously Vanishes.’
When she didn’t answer him he asked what was wrong and she said, “Forget about it. Sorry, never heard of the guy,” saying it caused a sharp pain in her heart but she endured it and went on, “too bad you didn’t stay in touch. Goodbye.”
She all but ran to her truck, got in and drove away as fast as she could without tempting a ‘man of the law’, and left him standing by his car staring after her. She went seventy-five on the open road for a few miles before pulling over to the shoulder and killing the engine.
For the first time in more than five years she put her face in her hands and wept an ocean.