Night Light by Terri Blackstock Page A

Joey.”
    Aaron didn’t answer.
    Deni’s eyes rounded. “Oh yeah, I remember.” There had been another pregnancy … when she was in eighth grade and Jessie was in ninth. It had caused quite a scandal.
    That must have been Aaron.
    She’d come back the next year to repeat the ninth grade and wound up in Deni’s class.
    She took the book back from her father. “Aaron, can we take this home with us? I want to read the notes her friends wrote in here. Maybe some of them are still around and know where she is.”
    “I don’t care.” He turned and left the room, his hands crammed into the pockets of his baggy jeans. She watched him cross the hall to the other room and begin sorting through his things.
    Doug sat down next to her. “What else do you remember about her, Deni?”
    Deni kept her voice low so Aaron wouldn’t hear. “She hung around with a rough crowd, Dad. They did a lot of drugs. Most of them never graduated.”
    Doug studied Jessie’s picture again. “That’s a shame. She was a pretty girl.”
    “Yeah, that’s why her kids are so cute. But ‘pretty’ wasn’t the image she was going for. I think she was into shock value. Black lipstick, thick black eyeliner, piercings, tattoos … It was hard to see through all that stuff.”
    “Maybe she’s still friends with some of that group. Do you think you can find them?”
    “Maybe,” she said. “I’ll ask Mark and Chris to help.”
    They put the book down and began rummaging through her chest of drawers. Finding nothing helpful, Deni looked under the bed. “Oh no. Dad, look at this.”
    When her dad turned, Deni held up a Ziploc bag of new syringes and several little white slips of paper.
    “It’s heroin,” Deni said.
    Her father shot her a look, as if asking how she knew.
    “A girl in my freshman dorm was an addict,” Deni said. “She flunked out that semester. But they peel the heroin off these papers. They don’t throw them away because when they run out, they scrape whatever is left off the papers for one more fix.”
    “So Jessie was an addict.”
    “I’d say so.”
    “Maybe that explains her disappearance. When the outage happened, it was hard enough to find food, much less drugs — especially with no money. A lot of addicts probably had to detox without wanting to. It could have been bad.”
    Deni nodded. But could that have killed her? It seemed unlikely.
    Her father waded toward the closet. “Here’s her purse,” he said, and lifted it from where it hung by its strap from the doorknob. He opened her wallet. “License … credit card … she sure didn’t take anything with her.”
    He dug through the purse’s contents, then held up a marijuana joint and a bottle of prescription painkillers, plus something rolled up in tinfoil. Deni watched as he unwrapped it. Another syringe. This one had been used. “Right here where any of the kids could have found it,” he said. “Unbelievable.”
    Deni glanced into the other room. Aaron was on his knees sorting through the contents of a box. “Dad, if she disappeared intentionally, don’t you think she would have taken her purse with her? Especially if she had dope in it?”
    “Seems like it. But the kids are under the impression she left on her own. Maybe it was typical of her to leave without her purse. It’s hard to predict what an addict might do. You never know if she was sane when she made the decision to leave.”
    “Yeah, but would any mother really leave her kids alone at a time like this? Could anybody be that selfish?”
    “Of course, they could,” Doug said. “We’ve already seen what people are willing to do out of selfishness. It’s no surprise. And addicts neglect their kids all the time. That’s why Human Services stays so busy.”
    She opened a cabinet and bent down to look. A stack of papers sat on a shelf. Deni pulled out the top few. They were brochures about drug rehabs. Had Jessie been looking for a way to break her addiction? Deni flipped through the