Read Online Sing It to Her Bones by Marcia Talley - Free Book Online

trying to remember if I missed anything.” She leaned back against the shelves and closed her eyes. With one graceful hand, she beat out a slow, imaginary rhythm in the air. Suddenly her eyes snapped open, and she stared at me. “We had real bands then, you know, not disk jockeys like they have today who just sit on their duffs all night and play CDs.”
    She let out a long sigh. “I broke a strap on my gown that night, and when we went to the rest room to pin it back together, Katie told me she was the happiest girl in the whole, wide world. Later I saw her standing near the punch bowl, holding Chip’s hand. Chip just smiled that sweet, closed-mouth smile of his and looked mysterious.”
    “I read in the paper that he was the last person to see her before she disappeared.”
    “That’s right, except for whoever …” She shivered. “But Chip could never do anything like that.”
    “Maybe they had a fight and something got out of hand.”
    “Oh, no! Chip was crazy about Katie. Besides, he’s way too religious, one of those born-again Christians. He attended that all-glass megachurch over near Lanham; still does, for all I know. You’ve probably seen it. It’s the one that looks like a humongous greenhouse.”
    I shook my head. Episcopalians like me aren’tusually up on the location of churches with TV ministries and parking lots the size of RFK Stadium. I changed the subject. “I keep thinking about the Dunbars and how tragic it would be for them. Was Katie their only child?”
    “Oh, no. They have another daughter, Elizabeth. She’s four years older than Katie. Now that she’s working for some hotshot law firm in D.C., though, she doesn’t come home very often.” She leaned toward me confidentially. “To tell you the truth, I think Liz is a little ashamed of her parents, her father just being a handiman at the local nursery and all. They don’t call him a handiman, or course; he’s head gardener or deputy horticulturalist or something.”
    The phone rang, and Angie took a minute to write down a carry-out order for four Italian subs and hand it through to Bill.
    While Angie scribbled, I stared at a poster hanging crookedly on the wall and wondered how Katie’s parents could have afforded a three-hundred-dollar dress. I know we couldn’t. For her junior prom, Emily had selected a red leather skirt with a slit from here to Christmas and a strapless black plastic bustier with spangles that cost the earth and would have looked right at home in Madonna’s closet. I absolutely put my foot down, insisting it made her look like a tart. There had been a terrible scene in the dressing room that sent the sales associates scurrying for cover and ended with both of us in tears and not speaking to each other for a week. Shortly after that Emily hadrun away again, and I tried to convince myself that it hadn’t been my fault.
    Angie hung up the phone and stuck the pencil she had been using behind her ear. “Sorry about that. Where was I?”
    “You were telling me about Katie’s sister,” I prompted.
    “Oh, yeah. Liz is a lot older than Katie. She was a sophomore at the University of Maryland when Katie disappeared.”
    “It must have been hard on Liz, too,” I said.
    “I suppose.” Angie paused. “But they were never very close. Katie was prettier and more popular than Liz.” She leaned forward, and her folded hands disappeared into her lap. “One time when Katie was a freshman and Liz was a senior, they had a knockdown, hair-pulling, rabbit-punching fight in the girls’ locker room just because Katie got asked to the senior prom by one of Liz’s old boyfriends.” She wiggled off the stool and turned to fetch our sandwiches, which had just appeared in the pass-through window. “I’m sure the police filed that interesting fact away in their little notebooks,” she added. “They talked to Liz, too, you know. She was home that weekend.”
    Connie chose that moment to join us and demand what she