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“This is your oldest daughter?” I point to a girl fully cloaked in the awkward development of adolescence. Glasses, braces, teeth much too big for her mouth, pimples so clustered it’s as if she was being punished by the gods.
“Yes. Belinda. She’s an officer in the Navy now.”
“Okay. A military officer, huh? Did she attend Annapolis?”
“Yes. Graduated in the top half of her class. Economics major. She says the Marines tried to steal her somehow—they’ll steal anything—but she wanted to drive huge boats. Be a captain one day. She always loved pictures of the sea.”
I won’t mention I was a Marine. We Devil Dogs didn’t steal “anything.”
“Did Delilah ever talk about joining the service?”
“Belinda practically beat her over the head with it but Delilah...she just—well, it’s not in her genetic make-up to be so.
..pinned down. Delilah will just take flight when the mood strikes her. In high school she lost virtually every job she had because she just never showed up. She would follow that heart of hers. Hell, one time she took a four-day weekend and left the state. If she had a cell phone back in those days it might have eased up on my heart a little bit to know that she and some friends just went on a joy ride and it turned into some teeny-bopper version of Thelma and Louise without the weird suicide thing at the end.”
“When she left this last time, there was no note? No phone message?”
“No.”
“Email?”
“No.”
“What happens when you call her?”
“Voice mail. My emails go unreturned.”
“Any friends or family heard from her?”
“No. Unless they’re lying.”
“When she did this before, she just dropped off the face of the planet?”
“Yes.”
“What does she do for money?”
“I know a few times when she’s taken waitress jobs here and there for a few weeks at a time to make ends meet. She bums.”
“Does she have a credit card with your name on it?”
“No.”
“Does she have her own credit card?”
“I don’t know. I assume so.”
“Did she ever go to a payday loan place?”
“Oh, I’m sure.”
With the way Derne made Delilah’s credit sound, she’d have a low limit credit card that wouldn’t go far.
“What did she take with her?”
“Oh...” Darla drifts off. Finally, “Some clothes, I guess. She left most everything. Jewelry, her laptop. If she kept cash around I never knew it.”
“So you came home and Delilah was just gone. Correct?”
