Free Taking Terri Mueller by Norma Fox Mazer

traffic jam, cars stopped on a highway. They had walked forward. She saw the flashing lights. She saw the police cars. She saw the grey car crumpled like a piece of paper. She saw feet sticking out from beneath that crumpled paper car.
    â€œLook, Daddy—”
    â€œDon’t!” He pulled her against him, covered her eyes, turned her, walked her away. Then, only then, she understood that she had seen death. Dead Feet. She stumbled along next to him, her face buried in his waist, her heart beating so softly and heavily inside her chest. A Dead Person. Dead like her mother. “Don’t think about it,” her father said. “You don’t have to think about it.”
    But she had thought about it. Yes, even then, when she was a child. Now she was thirteen, and he was still saying the same thing to her. No good, she thought.
    Friday night he went out to visit Nancy. Terri stayed home. About half an hour after he left she went to herfather’s room and took the grey metal box down from the closet shelf. She pressed the latch. It was locked. She pressed it again, harder.
    She heard something in the hall and stopped, her heart jumping. What if her father walked in on her? Okay, she just wanted to see her birth certificate again. She’d asked him to let her have it. She would take good care of it. It was the only thing she knew of that linked her to her mother.
    â€œKathryn Susso Mueller,” she said out loud. “Kathryn Susso. Kathy.” Or maybe she had been called Kate? Or Cat? She pushed at the lock again, then put the box back. She felt restless and strange.
    In the kitchen she bit into an apple. Maybe she was hungry? But after two bites she was full.
    In the living room she fell down on the couch. A cloud of dust and dog hairs rose and settled. Barkley grinned hopefully at her. He wanted to play. Terri closed her eyes and tried to see her mother. A tall, handsome woman . . . It wasn’t enough. So many things she didn’t know, would never know unless someone told her. But who? Her father wouldn’t talk about Kathryn.
    Kathryn. She loved the name. She said it again. “Kathryn.” Kathryn had been killed in her car by another driver. Had he been drunk? She hated that man, whoever he was. Where was he now? What if she met him someday and knew he was the one who had killed her mother?
    She sat up, clutching a pillow. She would want to kill him! Barkley poked his head against her hand and whined. “No, Barkley, honey, not you.” She put her arms around hisneck. What if her father had felt this way after her mother’s death? What if he had found the driver and killed him?
    She jumped to her feet, turned on the TV, immediately turned it off. She had never seen Phil angry enough to even raise his voice. What had he said to her the other day? I’m disappointed in you . That was the way Phil got mad. But yet, the thought made so much sense, would explain so many things, that she kept thinking about it.
    Say her father just hit the man. And the man slipped, fell, and cracked his head on the pavement. Died. Became a Dead Person. That would be murder. Manslaughter. What had Aunt Vivian said? You have to tell her. She’s got to know sometime . . .
    â€œOh, Barkley.” She put her face against his familiar stinky dog smell. “Oh, Barkley.” Her father, a murderer. It would have meant jail for him. And there she would have been, four years old, with no mother and no father.
    Rather than let her be orphaned, had her father decided to run? To go away with her? To disappear before the police came for him? Wasn’t that it? It would explain everything. All the moves they’d made, and what her aunt had said to him, and why he didn’t want her to know about any of it. “Oh, Barkley,” she said again.
    On Saturday, Terri and Shaundra shopped in the Mall for a birthday present for Shaundra’s mother. They looked at scarves, sprayed