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longer, I ll kill him. Please come. Don says it s okay.
Miranda liked Don. He was a nice boy. Not like most of the others. Claire was
lucky to have found someone like that.
Miranda sat up in bed. She looked at her dresser, wondered what she would use
to carry her clothes. She didn t even have a suitcase. They had never gone on
a vacation. They d never been anywhere. She could put some clothes in some
paper bags. Two or three would probably do it. A couple pairs of jeans, a
couple of tops, some underwear. She could get a job, make money, and buy some
other clothes, maybe from a secondhand shop, maybe
No, she couldn t do it. She couldn t run away. She was only fifteen. As
horrible as home was, it was still a haven. She knew bad things happened here,
but she knew what the bad things were. If she ran off with Claire, what
different bad things might happen? Would they be worse than the things she had
to deal with now?
I can t do it, Miranda said.
I can t just leave you here, Claire said. Her eyes were moist with tears.
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Just go.
Outside, they could hear a car coming to a stop. Claire glanced out the
window, and the tears running down her cheeks glistened in the moonlight. It
was Don. He was putting Claire s paper bags of belongings into the trunk.
Claire threw her arms around her sister, and they were both crying now.
Soon, Miranda said. I ll try to leave soon.
Claire sniffed, wiped her nose with her sleeve. I ll help you. Whatever you
need, anything, I ll help you. I will always help you, no matter what.
I love you, Miranda said.
I love you too, Claire said, and then she slipped out of the room.
Miranda watched from the window as Claire ran down to the road. Don threw his
arms around her, opened the passenger door of his old Camaro for her, and then
they drove off into the night.
Miranda did not cry long.You re on your own,she told herself. Start getting
used to it.
5
BACK AT THE OFFICE, I banged out the stun gun story after first placing a
couple of calls, one to the chair of the police commission to see what her
reaction was to officers meeting with a guy who was selling stun guns when
such weapons were not approved for use.
Go on the Net and read up on these things, she advised.
A number of stories came out of Florida. A disabled man in line at a theme
park, disgruntled because he s had to wait so long, gets zapped with a stun
gun by a security guard. A twelve-year-old girl, skipping school, is located
by authorities hanging out at a swimming pool, smoking. When she tries to run
away, she s stun-gunned. A father who gets hold of one illegally uses it to
keep his three kids in line. An off-duty cop pulls out his stun gun and shoots
a buddy who d just beat him at poker.
Just for a moment, I imagined the advantages a stun gun might offer an
exasperated parent. And I recalled a comment Sarah once made, upon hearing a
radio newscaster say, Police do not understand why the mother of three small
children snapped and wiped out her entire family. She said, Well, there s
your answer. She s the mother of three small children.
So I threw a bit of stuff from the Net into the story, put a -30- on the
end, and sent it on to the cityside basket with a note that there were photos
with it. I felt someone behind me, but I was sure this time that it was not
Dick Colby. Especially when a pair of hands fell softly onto my shoulders.
I tried to call you, Sarah said.
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I must have been in a bad zone, I said.
Bullshit, she whispered. I m sorry about this morning.
I didn t say anything.
I m still finding this hard, being the person who you most often have to
report to.
It s fine, don t worry about it.
Listen, if I get the foreign editor thing, we won t have these kinds of
problems, unless you get posted to Beijing or Baghdad or something.
If you could get me sent there now, maybe it wouldn t be as urgent to become
the foreign editor.
I felt her hands lightly squeeze my neck. Don t think I haven t thought of
it.
I waited a moment, and then said, There s something I want to ask you.
Sarah s hands stopped moving. I could sense her wariness. What?
Can you name two German political parties?
Her fingers tensed. Okay, hang on. There s a couple that sound very much
alike. There s the Christian Democratic Union, and the Social Democratic
Party.
Correct. Now, a bonus question. Can you name a third German political
party?
Sarah was hunting in some inner recess of her brain. Well, there s the Green
Party, right?
That s correct. You ve won what s behind Zipper Number One. I reached up
and touched one of her hands. Sarah laced her fingers into mine.
We okay? she asked. I nodded. Then, Did you see Trixie?
Yeah. She had a problem I couldn t help her with.
What was it?
I can tell you all about it later, but I can say that it involved a
violation of journalistic ethics. I think she was pissed.
So she didn t ask you to run away with her?
I suspect she was working up to it, but when I turned her down on the other
thing, I think she abandoned the idea.
Sarah had things to do. I was pretty much done for the day, but there were
some things niggling at me that I wanted to look into before I left the
building.
I knew I couldn t do what Trixie d asked of me, to try to scare another
reporter off his story, but I was feeling uncomfortable with the way we d left
things. Trixie, who d never worked in journalism and probably didn t fully
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understand how impossible her request was, had left our meeting feeling
betrayed. She d thought we were friends, and no doubt believed I d let her
down.
It s not that I was unsympathetic. I could understand why Trixie wouldn t
want any publicity for her business. She was probably getting all she needed
now. Word of mouth, as they say, is everything. When you re the best
dominatrix in the burbs, your reputation gets out there. You hardly need your
picture in the local paper telling the world how you make your living.
But Trixie s concerns about her picture running in the paper seemed to go
beyond how it might disrupt her livelihood. She seemed terrified by the
repercussions of Martin Benson running, as Trixie called it, her mug shot in
theSuburban .
Was Trixie on the run from the authorities? Had she been on some episode
ofAmerica s Most Wanted that I d missed? And what was to account for her
skittishness when that biker came into the Starbucks?
I typed Trixie Snelling on the Google page. The only thing that came back
was a reference to a woman by that name who, at the beginning of the last
century, married a man who wrote a cantata for a church in England. I didn t
think that was my Trixie. Next I tried a Yahoo people search and came up
with a big fat zero. I tried Google and Yahoo again, this time with the name
Trixie Snell, who, I learned, was a character in the 1933 movie
calledSensation Hunters that featured a young Walter Brennan as a stuttering
waiter. But I didn t learn anything more useful than that.
I went into the paper s library and checked our own database. It would find
any story theMetropolitan , or any other major North American newspaper, had
run with the name Trixie Snelling. I figured, if police were looking for her,
her name could have been mentioned at some point.
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