Little Lost Angel by Michael Quinlan Page B

dissect an animal.”
    Shanda moved. The girls held their breath in horror as the bloody, beaten girl pushed herself up into a sitting position. She had one hand on her head and the other on the spare tire and slowly swayed back and forth.
    “Her eyes weren’t really open, but they sort of were,” Hope recalled. “They were kind of back in her head.”
    “We tried to talk to her then but she wouldn’t talk or couldn’t,” Laurie said later.
    Melinda turned to Hope and asked, “Where’s your heart?”
    Hope touched the left side of her chest. “Here. Why?”
    “Well,” Melinda said, “how do you get a knife to go into somebody’s body?”
    Eager to end it now, Hope told Melinda, “You’ve got to jab it in.”
    This bizarre scene was suddenly interrupted by the voice of Laurie’s mother. Peggy Tackett had walked out on her back porch. From her position facing the front of the car, Laurie’s mother could see only the three girls standing around the trunk and Toni behind the wheel.
    “What’s going on?” she yelled.
    Laurie slammed the trunk down on Shanda’s head, imprisoning her again. “I’m trying to get a fire started,” Laurie yelled at her mother.
    “You aren’t starting any bonfires at this time of the morning,” Peggy Tackett shouted back. “Are you just getting in?”
    Fearing that her mother would investigate, Laurie stormed toward the house, arguing as she went. “Just shut up and leave me alone,” Laurie sneered. She and her mother stood nose to nose, wrangling for several long minutes. After a while, Peggy Tackett’s anger began to fade. She looked at Melinda, Hope, and Toni. These were the kind of nice girls she’d been wanting Laurie to hang around with. They weren’t weird like the Leatherburys and Kary Pope.
    “Well,” she said finally, “do you want me to fix you and your friends breakfast?”
    “Nah,” Laurie said as she turned away. “I’ve got to take them home. We’re going to stop by McDonald’s.”
    Laurie drove the car away with Melinda beside her and Hope and Toni in the backseat. “We’ve got to get some gas,” she said. “We’re going to have to burn her. We have to kill her. She knows all our names.”
    Laurie pulled the car into a Clark Oil station on State Road 62, a busy highway lined with fast-food restaurants north of downtown Madison. But at this time on a Saturday morning, there were few people on the road. Laurie told Toni to go with her into the station, where they bought a two-liter bottle of Pepsi and paid for several dollars of gasoline.
    While they were inside, Melinda and Hope heard Shanda moving in the trunk. At that moment a car pulled up beside them at the pumps. Fearful that the man getting out of his car would hear Shanda, Hope ran around to the driver’s seat and moved Laurie’s car away from the pumps.
    “What’s going on?” Laurie asked upon her return.
    “Listen,” Hope said.
    Shanda’s moans were growing louder.
    Laurie quickly passed the Pepsi around, and after each girl took a drink, she poured the rest out. By this time theother car had left and the girls drove back to the pumps. Laurie filled the plastic bottle with gasoline, topped off her gas tank, then drove away. They headed back north, taking some of the same side roads that Laurie and Melinda had driven the night before. Hope said she knew a place where they could burn Shanda—a little-traveled gravel lane called Lemon Road.
    There were no farmhouses around, only harvested soybean fields on both sides of the country lane. The car stopped beside a wide dirt path that ran between a crop field and thick woods. Laurie swung the sedan around and backed a few feet up the path. All four girls stepped out. A tractor and a combine were parked about thirty feet up the path on the edge of the woods. But otherwise it was deserted. As Laurie started to open the trunk, Toni got back in the car.
    “I didn’t want to take part,” Toni said later. “I didn’t want to touch