2 CATastrophe by Chloe Kendrick Page A

originally kept the news to myself, not wanting Susan to get in trouble for her actions, but I’d told my parents when it became obvious something was wrong.
    What my statement didn’t contain was the enormous guilt I’d had over the years, asking myself what might have happened if I had let my parents know that she was missing after the first phone call. I’d been trying to keep things quiet to keep her out of trouble, but with that decision, had I doomed her? I couldn’t even count the number of sleepless nights I’d had during my teen years, asking myself what would be different if I’d told my parents then. Perhaps my sister would have been found in those first few hours. Perhaps my dad wouldn’t have drunk himself into a premature liver failure. Perhaps I’d be closer to my brother and mother. If life is made up of defining moments, this was one of my moments, a simple neglect to save my sister a punishment that might have lost her forever.
    None of that guilt was evident in my pre-adolescent statement, but I could still see it there. The worries about being taken and the desire to be non-descript to the point of becoming invisible would come later, but even in this statement I could see the harbingers of it under the surface.
    My brother’s statement was also in the folder, and I read it next. I’d been two years younger than Susan, and as such, I’d tempered what I’d read with the adult knowledge that kids don’t interpret everything correctly. I was interested to see what my brother, who’d been the wise old age of 15, had said about Susan’s disappearance.
    As I skimmed through it the first time, I realized again how much I missed my brother. He’d moved across the country after his college graduation to get away from the gloom of the family tragedy and the wreck of what had once been my parents. I understood why he wanted to do that. He’d settled out there and begun a family, which practically ensured that he would never return here to live. His visits would be short and managed. The real tragedy of that move, in my eyes, was that he’d lumped me in with my parents, so that now we rarely spoke and almost never saw each other.
    His statement was not much different than mine. He’d heard me answer the phone and talk to someone twice before handing it to my parents on the third call. He’d not talked to Susan that evening. Frankly, he had not been interested in her dating, and he’d stayed away from any drama that came with the age.
    I had to wonder in looking at his statement if my brother had always been aloof from the family. He’d not seemed overly concerned by Susan’s disappearance, only in how it affected him. Perhaps that was just teenaged behavior, but it made me rethink my relationship with my brother. Perhaps our estrangement would have occurred even without Susan’s disappearance.
    The next sheet was the original police report. There was nothing much to read in the report, other than a mere recitation of facts, most of which I’d supplied to the officers who wrote it. If Green had thought this would be of any help to me, she was wrong. I knew these things and still held them in my memory. I didn’t need to read the police report as well.
    I was about to pick out another paper to read when the phone rang. Part of me was grateful to be able to put the file down without reading more. I meticulously put the papers back in the file and closed it again.  I answered the phone.
    “Mr. Fitzpatrick? I’m Allison from Saved by the Bell, the rescue center that you called today. How can I help you?”
    I explained the situation with the multiple records on the database regarding the cats going to Mrs. Miller. “I’m helping my friend with his app to scan those chips, and we just wanted to verify that you actually sponsored two cats with two different chips, since they went to the same person on the same day and were very similar in description.”
    “I’m at home right now, but I can