Help Me Read Free Page A

precinct to file a report. Someone will follow up within twenty-four hours.”
    “But what about her place?”
    “Is this your residence?”
    “No.”
    “Then you can’t file a vandalism report. Unless there’s a sign of a break-in?”
    “No, it was locked when I got here.”
    “In that case you’ll have to come down to the station.”
    I sighed. “Okay.”
    “Don’t worry, Miss. Most cases like this are nothing. Your sister probably just forgot she had to meet you. Maybe she had a little too much fun last night and is sleeping it off. Does she have a boyfriend?”
    “I…I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
    “Well, see if she does. Make some calls.”
    “All right.”
    “Is there anything else I can help you with?”
    “No. Thank you.”
    When I hung up I felt more lost than ever. Was it possible he was right? That Kat had just forgotten? But if so, that didn’t explain her apartment. She’d never leave a place in such a mess.
    I looked around and spoke to her, hoping that somehow, wherever she was, she would hear me. “They don’t know you like I do, sis. I’m going to look around and then go down to the station like he said. I don’t care if they think I’m a silly fool.”
    Part of my reason for not going immediately was I was scared. Filing a police report seemed too real. So serious. I wanted it to be nothing. A misunderstanding. Kat was all I had. I couldn’t even begin to face the idea of losing her, too.
    Fortunately, I had the perfect distraction all around me. If the cops didn’t care about checking her apartment, I’d do it myself. I waded through the mess back to her bedroom and sat down on the floor next to a particularly large pile of papers and began to read.
    At first, I was only shifting things around. Running my fingers over her electricity and cable bills. Tracing her signature on tiny photocopies of checks on her bank statements. But the more I sorted though, the more a depressing realization sank into me. Reading through her lease on the apartment, it dawned on me that I didn’t know anything about my sister’s life. Kat was living in a nice place and spending more money on bills than I could have ever imagined. A hundred and fifty bucks for cable. Her credit card statements left me breathless.
    How the hell was she affording all this along with the last four years of my expenses? What kind of cocktail waitress buys shoes that cost five hundred dollars?
    “Kat, what the hell?” I asked the empty room. But then, a twinge of guilt hit me. I wasn’t there to question her. I was there to find her. With doubts roiling in the back of my mind, I stood up and went into the living room. There had to be someone I could contact who knew her, who might be able to at least tell me where she’d been recently, or places she frequented.
    I tried to remember the name of the bar she worked at, but came up with nothing. Why hadn’t I paid closer attention? I’d been so wrapped up in my own life that I’d missed hers. For years. And now that self-centered behavior could be the thing that kept me from finding Kat and bringing her home safe.
    While I was riffling through a drawer on the floor, full of takeout menus and other random flyers, I had to smile. Kat, always so organized, had even made ordering dinner into a project. She’d circled everything she ate from each place and wrote a grade next to each dish. A veggie calzone from a place called Mario’s got a “D,” but their spaghetti with hot sausage earned a “B+.”
    Underneath the pile of menus there was a notepad. It had five different phone numbers on the top sheet, but no names. They were all local numbers. I flipped through the menu pages and found no matches, so they weren’t likely to be restaurants.
    Heart pounding, I grabbed my phone and typed each number in the search box. I thought about dialing them right away, but I wanted to have some idea who I was dealing with, first. Unfortunately, none of the numbers