Free Trail of Echoes by Rachel Howzell Hall

was right. I hoped she had just run away, that she just wanted out of this place for a little bit. At that point, I didn’t care. I just wanted her to come home.” She sank into her mother’s arms again and wept.
    And we waited.
    Regina wiped her wet eyes on her robe’s sleeve, then smiled to herself. “Taking pictures was gonna get her outta here. Back when she was little, I used to give her those cheap little throwaway cameras and she’d run around, snapping everything, telling us to say ‘cheese.’ One day, I took one of the cameras to Walmart to be developed. And I was saying to myself, Why am I throwing my money away? This girl probably took pictures of fingers and feet .”
    She closed her eyes as she remembered. “She took pictures of her dolls, of my mom, of me. But they were good pictures . Really good. I was like, Wow, my baby took these ? I got ’em somewhere…” She started to stand, but sunk back to the bed.
    â€œWhen was the last time you saw Chanita?” I asked.
    â€œI dropped her off at school like I do every morning,” Regina recalled. “She was wearing these new jeans she had begged me to buy. They was those low-cut ones. You know, the ones that show your panties whenever you bend over? I thought they was too sexy for a thirteen-year-old, but all the other girls was wearin’ them, and she kept begging me and begging me to buy them, and so I gave in.”
    She grimaced and glared at the closet, the place that had provided sanctuary for those low-rise jeans. “I seen how the boys looked at her. They used to always say, Ooh girl, you got some pretty eyes . And … He probably saw her in them, and she was already curvy, more of a woman at thirteen than I was at thirteen. Them jeans called too much attention to her body.”
    â€œWhatever she wore,” Colin whispered, “didn’t give anyone the right to hurt her.”
    Regina squeezed the bridge of her nose. “I just wanna wake up from this.”
    â€œTell me about the days before she disappeared,” I said. “Was everything okay? Did you two hang out, argue…?”
    Regina chewed her bottom lip as her eyes turned hard. “I had been … away, and I was just gettin’ back into everything, so…”
    I pulled the chair closer to Regina. “Did Chanita have a phone?”
    Regina nodded. “One of those cheap little LG phones.”
    â€œDid you have a family locater on it?” Colin asked, scribbling into his memo pad.
    She frowned. “Huh? We can’t afford that shit.”
    Colin and I looked at each other. Then I touched Regina’s wrist. “We’re asking—”
    â€œI don’t need some dumb electronic whatever now, ” she spat. “Unless it’s gon’ bring her back to life or something.”
    â€œWhat about an e-mail account?” I asked.
    â€œChanita Lords at Gmail dot com,” she said. “But she only used it for this online tutoring academy and for YouTube.”
    Thinking about those needle injection marks and the broken foot, I asked, “Was Chanita diabetic? Any recent injuries?”
    â€œNah,” Regina said. “She was healthy.” She turned to her mother.
    Alberta nodded. “She was fit as a fiddle.”
    â€œDo you have any idea who would harm her?” Colin asked.
    Regina’s leg jiggled up and down. “I tried to keep Nita away from Ontrel Shaw’s nasty ass. He live over in Hillside Manor. Anyway, I threatened her. Told her to stay away from him cuz he was too old for her. He ain’t going nowhere even if you gave him a map and a bus pass. I told her that I was gonna take her camera, that I was gonna send her to Saint Louis to live with her other grandma. Nothing worked. It was the only thing she disobeyed me about.”
    Regina covered her mouth as her eyebrows crumpled. “I just didn’t want her to get pregnant.