Fear Collector by Gregg Olsen

the lab in Olympia. She wondered if her little girl had been found. As the tap water filled the sink and a billowy cloud of suds heaped over the water’s surface, Sissy knew her firstborn was dead. She’d known so for decades. Yet in that moment, she half prayed that the bones were not Tricia’s. If they were, it would really be over. Final . There would be no little drop of hope that Tricia had run away and started a new life somewhere. Tears came to her eyes. She turned off the water.
    Mother and daughter had argued that last day. It was a silly argument, one that Sissy was all but certain had not been the cause of whatever it was that had happened to her. It was so silly, yet so painful; she’d never told Conner or the police about it.
    “That top, honey,” she had said, “makes you look like a streetwalker.”
    “Everyone is wearing them,” Tricia answered.
    The top in question showed a four-inch band of skin on her midriff.
    “March yourself into the bedroom and get yourself something decent. I don’t want your father to see you looking like that.”
    “I hate you, Mom. You’re always telling me what to do.”
    “I love you, Tricia, that’s why. Now, go.”
    She expected Tricia to come back into the kitchen wearing a more sensible top and give her a hug before she left. She didn’t. She slipped out the front door.
    Sissy never saw her again.

C HAPTER 7
    F or most of Grace’s life, Tricia’s room had been off-limits. She was able to go inside only when her mother and father allowed her to do so. That was once a year, when the family would gather to observe the anniversary of Tricia’s birthday. When she looked back on it later in life, she could envision that the entire bedroom was but a shadowbox of her phantom sister’s life. Her high school diploma was framed above a desk. On top of the desk were miscellaneous papers—a letter, a drawing of a cat, and other things that were so mundane that even though Grace had never known Tricia, she was sure that those things would have been thrown in the trash. They were not keepsakes at all. There were some items that truly were—her Bible, a desiccated corsage from her senior prom. The rose was no longer red, but black and brown, with petals that clung to the stem with fragility.
    Her sister’s room was the larger of the two secondary bedrooms. When she was younger, Grace had resented how even in death, Tricia would always trump her for everything—a larger bedroom, a closer relationship with her parents, even a dog. When Grace was five, the family poodle, Mirabelle, succumbed to cancer at sixteen. Mirabelle had always been known as Tricia’s dog, a trusted companion, a possible witness to whatever had happened the night of her disappearance. Grace cried a fountain after the dog died, and begged for another puppy. Her parents said no. It had been too hard to say good-bye to Mirabelle.
    Tricia’s beloved dog would be the only pet the family would have.
    A photo of Tricia taken when she was fifteen, her mouth a train track of braces, Mirabelle at her side, hung above the desk.
    Grace’s teeth were crooked, too. Yet her parents didn’t get her the benefit of orthodontics. Tricia, she had everything.
    And yet whenever she snuck into the bedroom and sat on the bed, Grace wondered how it was that for all the reasons she could conjure about why she could hate her sister, she didn’t. Instead, she felt the kind of aching loss that her parents did. Why , she asked herself over and over, did Tricia have to die? She couldn’t compete with a dead sister and she didn’t really want to. She simply wanted to know the same things that her parents agonized over.
    Who had taken her? Why hadn’t she been found? Was she still alive?
    It didn’t take a radio shrink to figure out the genesis of Grace’s interest in a career in law enforcement. She’d grown up inside a family subsisting on tragedy and anger. She’d seen her mother stuff envelopes for a crime