Disclaimer: Characters contained within do not belong to me.

Author's Notes: I can't tell you how happy I was that the first chapter of this story was so well-received. Thank you everyone who took the time to read it and review it.

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Courtney Wallace

by Kristen Elizabeth

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I was really glad that they didn't let my mom see me in the morgue. I don't think she would handled it very good. The man who did my autopsy was even older than Gil. He would have made an awesome Santa Claus.

Gil and Sara didn't come to the autopsy until after I was all sewn up again. The doctor and his assistant had gotten rid of the maggots…thank god…and covered me up to my chest with a white sheet.

"Cause of death?" Gil asked Dr. Santa.

"Asphyxiation due to manual strangulation," he replied, and even though they were big words, I knew what he meant. Sometimes, I could still feel hands around my throat. I hope that goes away eventually.

"Sexual assault?" Sara asked.

He nodded. "I collected a kit."

I really didn't want to remember that, so I looked at Sara instead. She had one of those faces that could say a lot even if she wasn't saying anything. It was my new favorite thing to do. Trying to figure out what Sara was thinking.

"She put up a fight. Found a lot of fingernail scrapings," Dr. Santa told Gil.

"Good girl," Gil said. Because he said it kind of sweetly, I almost forgave him for calling me a child earlier. "Anything else?"

"She was definitely tied up, but with what I can't say." He shook his head. "I was hoping she wouldn't end up on my table."

"We all were," Sara said.

I don't think she was feeling sorry for me when she said it. She was just sad. Not sad like my mom, who couldn't stop crying, but like guilty sad. Like when you hear about starving children in Africa, and you think 'I wish I could do something about that,' but you know you really can't do much.

"Take care of her," she told Dr. Santa.

It would have been nice if I could have told her that she already was.

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Captain Brass was growing on me. He'd been really good with my mom when he'd had to break the news that it was my body in the woods. He'd let her cry on his shoulder and had pretended not to be uncomfortable about it. And he hadn't looked down her blouse, even though he could have. Most guys could stare for hours at Mom's boobs. In college, she got paid to show them off on stage. I wasn't supposed to know that.

He gave her the number of a grief counselor. I really hoped she'd go. It used to be just Mom and me. And now it was just Mom.

In the days that followed, Captain Brass actually interviewed my killer. I know it wasn't his fault that he didn't realize it. He wasn't psychic or anything. And he had a lot of people he had to interview. Sometimes Sara or Gil went along to talk to someone who might have seen me last. But neither of them were with him when he talked to my killer. I like to think that if Sara had been there, she would have known.

I didn't sit in on many of these interviews. But when I did, I liked hearing what people had to say about me. No one remembered that I was skinny or that I had braces or that I'd gotten a C in English last year. In the interviews, I was "so lovely" and "so precious" and "so smart." Even Mrs. Abbott down the road said I was a firecracker, and that woman's had it out for me ever since I ran my bicycle into her stupid ferns when I was ten.

I think being dead makes you seem better than you were when you were alive. Maybe that's why people commit suicide. They want nice things said about them. If people would say nice things about other people while they were alive, there might not be so many people killing themselves.

But I didn't kill myself, and I didn't want to die. Dr. Santa was right when he said I'd fought back. I'd kicked and screamed and clawed. But my killer was a lot bigger than me. On nature shows, they say that if you're attacked by a shark, you should poke it in the eye and it'll let you go.

It doesn't work with people.

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It was okay with me that Sara went through my room. Someone had done it already, back when I was just a missing girl, and people thought I might have run away. They looked through my diary, went over my computer files, checked to see what I was reading and even looked under my bed.

Sara did all of those things, too. But I didn't mind it when she did it. Because Sara wasn't looking for evidence that I'd met some guy online and run off to be with him. She just wanted to know me better.

So she read my diary and smiled when I talked about how stupid every single boy in junior high had been, and how English class never made any sense, not like math class always did. She checked my computer and found out that the only buddies on my list were friends from school. Before I disappeared, I was reading Harry Potter. I had the whole collection. I had better still be around when the last book finally came out. Maybe I wouldn't be able to read it, but I'm sure I could overhear someone talking about it.

She looked at my stuffed animals, my old textbooks, my collection of glass miniatures. Mom had left everything exactly as it was that last morning. I really wished I'd made my bed. But I never made my bed. What was the point?

Sara picked up a framed picture of me and my mom riding Pharaoh's Fever. Not the world's greatest photo of me. I was so glad they'd used my school picture when they were looking for me. It wasn't half-bad. Much better than this one of me screaming. She shook her head and put it down.

"Fourteen is so hard," Sara said out loud. For a second, I thought maybe she had some idea that I was there, and that she was talking to me. But she wasn't. She was just talking. "I remember. But there's so much beyond it. And I'm sorry you never got to find that out."

Her cell phone rang. She looked at the screen before she answered, "Hi there."

It's hard listening to one side of a phone conversation. It's like having half of a puzzle.

"I'm in Courtney's bedroom…no, just acquainting myself…I'm leaving in a minute…I hadn't even thought about dinner…surprise me." She smiled. "Yeah. A sleepover would be nice…see you soon."

While she was putting my diary back in my nightstand, I whispered my killer's name in her ear. Even though I knew it wouldn't work, I wanted her to hear me. I wanted her to be the one who figured everything out.

Sara left me alone in my bedroom. I didn't blame her. I wished I had somewhere else to be. Mom started crying ten minutes after Sara was gone. I really tried to talk to her, to tell her that it wasn't her fault. I walked to McDonald's all the time when she was at work and I didn't have school. I guess my killer knew that. It wasn't Mom's fault. It wasn't Sara's fault.

It was kind of my fault.

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To Be Continued