Got Your Number

the question.
    "I don't know...s-somewhere D-Dee won't f-find me." Her teeth were chattering.
    Roxann turned on the air-conditioning, which, in Goldie, was the same as turning on the heat. "We could go to my dad's. Your mother wouldn't go near there."
    "W-will Uncle W-Walt mind?"
    "He might not even be home."
    "He doesn't know you're in town?"
    Roxann squirmed. "No, but I was going to stop by after the wedding anyway."
    Angora gave a lethargic shrug. "Anything to avoid D-Dee for a few hours. Maybe you can help me figure out what I'm going to d-do now." Angora pulled the stained seat belt over her sodden dress and clicked the buckle home. She sniffed mightily, then sighed. "Let's g-go."
    Roxann surveyed her bedraggled cousin with wonder—Angora still had a talent for sucking Roxann into her melodrama. Just yesterday she'd been dogged by a cop, the victim of a break-in, and the object of a subtle threat. Yet her potentially life-threatening situation had just been upstaged by Angora's jilting.
    "Did I mention it was good seeing you again?" she asked sarcastically.
    For the first time, Angora offered a watery smile, and Roxann knew her cousin was going to be all right. Eventually.

Chapter Six

    ANGORA HAD CRIED HERSELF to sleep before they reached the part of town where Roxann had grown up. Roxann was glad, partly because Angora needed the rest, and partly because she wanted to experience the old neighborhood privately.
    The rain had slackened to an aggravating drizzle. Only the driver-side windshield wiper worked, slapping a clear path of vision every few seconds. The houses, the streets—everything seemed smaller and bleaker, if possible. River Hills was a postwar development that had fallen out of favor with realtors when a power plant was erected at its boundary in the late 1960s. Property values plunged, and many residents fled inland.
    Walt and Ava Beadleman had stayed put to show their support for her father's employer, RTC Electric, so Roxann had had a close-up view of the rapid degradation of the area. Homes were turned into rentals, then abandoned altogether, and drug dealers took over the ballpark. Government housing brought in kids from broken homes with too much time on their hands. Graffiti spread from one end of River Hills to the other. And she had her own theories about the glowing power plant's effects on the residents' health—physical and otherwise.
    Her mother's discontent with the area had been the beginning of the end of her parents' marriage. Her father detested change, and refused to leave his circle of friends and his favorite fishing hole. The first day Roxann had come home from second grade and her mother wasn't waiting by the front door remained vivid in her memory. She'd sat in the front-porch swing, terrified, until her mother arrived, flushed and apologetic, making Roxann promise not to tell her father.
    The disappearances became more frequent, then her mother gave her a key to let herself in the house after school. A blue car would drop her mother off in time to get supper started before her father came home from work. It was only a matter of time, though, before Walt discovered his wife was keeping company with another man. One day he'd torn the seat out of his work coveralls, and had come home for a change of clothes to find Roxann alone. He was there when the man dropped off her mother. He'd thrown a loose brick from the front steps through the back windshield as the blue car raced away, and he'd made her mother leave.
    The next few months were a painful blur, with the exception of the phone conversations she'd overheard. The ugly, ugly things her father had called her mother still stung. After the custody hearing, she rarely saw her mother. Her father hired a woman in the neighborhood to cook and clean, but Mrs. Holt was a dour person who didn't like to be bothered while she watched television.
    Emotion crowded her chest as she slowed to turn onto the road where her father still lived. Braeburn Way seemed too pretty a name for an overgrown, shabby street. When she pulled into her father's driveway, sadness plucked at her. The pale green bungalow looked tired and tucked into itself, the eaves sagging, the clapboard siding in desperate need of a fresh coat of paint. The yard was a tangle of ivy and weeds, strewn with limbs from a wild apple tree that hadn't borne fruit in years.
    The gravel driveway and covered carport were empty, so she assumed her father was out fishing or