Sisters of the Road Read Online Free Page B

was her last name? Her parents ought to know.”
    “I don’t think she has parents,” said Trish. “She came from California. I didn’t know her long, but…” she ducked her frosted head and opened up her purse, expensive soft leather like her boots. “She was my best friend.”
    I thought for a second she was crying, but when she raised her head again her eyes were dry and their expression distant. She took out a Marlboro and lit it with a cheap lighter. Her hands were small and skinny, child’s hands, with artificial purplish fingernails attached to them like mussel shells.
    She smoked badly, as if she had learned the art for an amateur play.
    “I want to do something,” she said. “But I don’t want to talk to the police.”
    “Why not?” asked June.
    “They’d tell my parents where I am. I don’t want them to know. They live in Broadmoor—they’d just put me back in that awful girls’ school I ran away from. In six months I’ll be eighteen. I don’t want them to know where I am until then.”
    “You hooking?” June asked.
    “Not really.”
    “What do you mean, not really?”
    “I have a friend,” said Trish. She attempted to smile, and choked a little on her cigarette smoke.
    “Then what were you doing down around Sea-Tac?” June shot back.
    Trish didn’t answer; she took a long, uncomfortable drag from her cigarette and looked at me.
    “How can we help you?” I asked.
    Her sudden look of panic went straight through me.
    “I’m afraid,” she whispered.
    “Afraid? Afraid of what?”
    “I don’t know,” she said. Her cigarette was burning close to her purple fingernails but she didn’t seem to notice. “It was so dark and snowy. It took me a long time to get there and I was late—I feel like it’s all my fault.”
    “Did you see the man? Would you recognize him again?” I leaned towards her from my perch on the armrest. “Is that who you’re afraid of?”
    “No,” she said, with a thin, quavering vehemence, and stubbed out her cigarette on the floor. “I didn’t see him. But I have this feeling—it makes me so afraid—that he saw me.”
    June and I conferred in the press room while Trish continued to smoke cigarettes out front. June had pointedly provided her with a saucer and told her to pick up the butt from the floor.
    “Don’t get involved in this, Pam. It’s too weird. And you’ll get dragged into it, I know how you are, and you won’t pay attention to your work, and then it will be you and Carole flaking off.”
    “Just because Penny’s gone you don’t need to start acting like her. Christ, she was born two minutes before me and my whole life she’s acted like my older sister. If you want to know something, her leaving was a relief and I don’t need you telling me what to do.”
    “You think this girl is telling the truth? She is not . All that stuff about her parents and that guy supporting her? She’s just a regular street hooker like the rest of them downtown. Before she goes you better take a good look in your wallet and see if all your credit cards are still there.”
    “She’s not going to get far on a Sears card already charged up to its limit. Besides, I think Nordstrom’s is more her style.”
    “Those clothes are all ripped off. Ripped off, I’m telling you. The girl is a con artist if I’ve ever seen one. Broadmoor, fancy girls’ school, that’s a load of shit. She’s got something in mind you don’t know the slightest bit about. I know these types of girls. I knew them in high school, hey, some are even my relatives.”
    There was nothing I could say to that. June had street smarts and I did not. But I trusted my instincts about Trish somehow. And I wasn’t going to send her away without finding out more about her.
    June finally accepted it. She turned to the press and started to load the paper and said, “I’m only promising you one thing—that I won’t say I told you so when you get disappointed.”
    “Promise me one other