CHAPTER ONE
SARAH
September 2009
I can remember every second of that last graffiti patrol with Ellie. Maybe it’s the meds they’re feeding me, or maybe I’m a little crazy right now. The nurse says I probably should be with all the stuff I’ve gone through in the past couple of weeks, Ellie at the center of it all.
It was chilly that morning, and we shivered a little as we headed toward the first mailbox, me, in my punk clothes, Ellie in her old lady sweatshirt and red sneakers. She had her supplies and towels in an old shopping bag, like usual, and I could tell she was still mad at me, at my knowing how the graffiti got on the boxes. I was thinking about that, too, but she didn’t know the whole story, not then.
“Spray!” Ellie ordered, and I stopped remembering and pointed the bottle at the mailbox in front of me.
We scrubbed, Ellie not talking to me yet. After a couple of minutes, the black polish on my nails began to melt like the paint scrawls we were working on. Ellie muttered “Good” when she saw me rubbing at them. As soon as the box was as clean as Graffiti X could get it, we headed toward the next one. By the time we got to the street with the big trees, I was getting hot and glad for what little shade was left, the limbs above me almost bare. Leaves crunched under my boots.
The people who lived in these buildings were rich. I could tell by the doors, the polished brass knobs, and the pots of flowers beside them. They must sit on their upstairs terraces and feel like they were living in the arms of the trees. I was imagining eating breakfast four stories up and feeding a squirrel a piece of pancake, when I stumbled and heard the heel of my boot snap. Shit, my only shoes was my first thought. I had to walk like a cripple, one leg short, one long.
“Take ’em off!” Ellie said, shaking her gray head at me. “Stupid to wear boots like that; you look like a baby hooker.”
She took the bag of supplies from me, and I leaned against a tree and pulled them off. The cold from the sidewalk seeped through the leaves and into my toes. The look on Ellie’s face told me not to complain, so I shoved the boots into the bag. Maybe I could get the heel fixed somewhere.
“We’ll finish up with the next box. When we get back you can borrow a pair of my old sneakers.”
I watched where I was going, hoping I wouldn’t step on dog poop or something yucky hidden under the leaves. That’s when I saw the white basketball shoe sticking up from a pile of debris at the curb. Someone must have lost it. Except that the shoe also had a sock in it. And in the sock, a leg.
I grabbed Ellie’s arm and pointed. She looked, made a sound like she was choking. I ran to the gutter and pushed sticks and leaves away from the rest of the leg. I saw familiar, worn denim jeans, recognized a plaid patch on a thigh, a hand I knew because of the small ink tattoo of a smiley face at the wrist. I was bawling by the time I uncovered his head, brushed bits of dirt from his eyes, understood that he was dead. Peter.
“Leave him!” Ellie yanked on my arm, her words daggers of icy fear. “Not our business.”
She had me up on my feet, and I shoved at her and knocked her into the trunk of a tree.
“It’s trouble!” She reached for me again. “Nothing good ever comes from a dead body.”
I was crying so hard I couldn’t see. She grabbed my arm and pulled me through the trail of leaves. “I’ll call 911,” she said. “When we get home. Anonymous.”
The Runaway Description:
Ellie is a crabby old woman who cleans graffiti off local mailboxes. When she meets Sarah, a black-haired teenager in Goth garb and makeup, neither imagines that they will join forces to stop a psychopathic killer of homeless young people in the neighborhood park and forest.
The Runaway is told through the eyes of Ellie, Sarah, a cop named Matt, and a man who calls himself Starkey, and the histories of these characters, their loves and losses, are vital in the frantic search for a killer who targets transients living on the streets of two Northwest towns. This gritty, shocking path leads them to a murderer with blood on his hands, a gold ring in his ear, and a note from his long-lost mother in his backpack.
With fear as a backdrop, the unlikely relationship of Sarah and Ellie matures into acceptance, then into friendship, and then into even more as each discovers she needs a family to replace the one she lost.
Along with the revealing look into the lives of homeless teenagers and the sad beginnings of a serial killer, The Runaway carries an important message for it readers: Family is the engine that drives our lives, whether it’s the one we find ourselves in or the one we seek.
