Nowhere To Run Read Online Free PDF Page B

face upside down, her chin parallel to Elizabeth’s forehead. They were laughing as the inverted images of themselves transformed into circus characters with eyebrows bizarrely turned into moustaches drawn under each other’s eyes, more absurd the longer they stared. She could see Sarah’s skin with the unflawed smoothness of childhood, coloured with summer sun and scattered with a few small freckles across her nose. The image was so clear it seemed that if she lifted her hand she would touch her sister’s face. And then it was gone.
    Sarah was always gone anyways, when it came down to it. Always leaving her behind. Not more than a few days had passed after moving here, and there was Elizabeth, still standing alone and confused in a strange place, full of people with curious eyes. Looking out of place in her city clothes, her salon haircut. She still cringed to remember the kids laughing at her stupid shoes that weren’t practical for anything but city sidewalks, short skirts that all the girls were wearing back home, but just looked out of place here.
    But it was fine for Sarah, of course. Already wrapped in the safe cocoon of high school romance with Tommy, half of the most popular couple in school. The haircut and skirts didn’t look so funny on her somehow. Disappearing for make out sessions in the caves, overnight camping trips to the Bluffs. And you knew they were having sex, you could tell from the way she would stare out the window as if she was in another place entirely, while Elizabeth was left here with her mother’s bitterness, her father’s failure.
    So she wasn’t entirely surprised when she found the airplane ticket tucked in the pages of the book Sarah had borrowed from her. It wasn’t enough for her sister that she was going to marry the wealthiest, best looking boy in town. She had been planning to leave them all behind: Tommy, her parents, her own sister. Well she was gone now, and this time it wasn’t just her left standing alone.
    Elizabeth’s reverie was interrupted by the jangle of the front door bell. A man and a woman dressed in police uniforms stepped into the pharmacy. Both looked vaguely familiar, like maybe she had passed them on the street before, or waited behind them in the checkout line at the grocery store.
    “Can I help you?” she asked apprehensively.
    “Hi Elizabeth,” the woman responded. “I’m Inspector Kovalsky, you can call me Susan. This is Constable Gary Driscoll. We’re here to talk with you about your sister.”
    Elizabeth hesitated, wishing the walls of the pharmacy, lined with their vials and tubes and pastes, would swallow her up.
    “Your parents told us you were here when we called them,” the woman continued gently. “If you’re more comfortable, we can visit you at home and we can talk to you with your mom and dad there.”
    “No, that’s okay,” Elizabeth answered quickly. “We can talk here, there aren’t any customers anyway.” She gestured around the empty store.
    “Let’s have a seat then,” Susan suggested, pulling the pharmacy’s consultation chairs forward, and indicating for Elizabeth to take one.
    “How are you doing?” Susan asked carefully when they were all seated. “It must be difficult to take this all in.”
    Elizabeth breathed out of her nose heavily and focused on the framed pharmacist’s certificate behind Susan’s head.
    “I can’t believe she’s gone,” she answered finally.
    “I know it’s very hard to talk about this right now.” Susan continued. “But we have to try to find out everything that we can about what happened.”
    Susan studied the girl in front of her. There were similarities to the pictures she had seen of her sister, but Elizabeth’s genes had given her a more voluptuous form, curves evident even under the clinical pharmacy lab coat. Her face was drawn with slightly broader strokes, the rounded under chin of a child that she would likely never lose in spite of age or weight loss.
    “Can you