Little Lost Angel by Michael Quinlan Read Free Book Online Page B

thing. I don’t want you around my daughter. Don’t you ever call back again.’”
    A few days later, Shanda told Jacque that Amanda had been having other girls call on a three-way connection so that Amanda could talk to Shanda. “She told me that if certain girls called I should hang up because it was Amanda trying to get to her,” Jacque said.
    In a letter that Shanda wrote to her friend Lisa Livergood on January 2, she complained about Amanda trying to drawher back into their relationship. “I can’t take all this pressure,” Shanda wrote. “I wish she would stop calling me and following me.”
    *  *  *
    Jacque hugged her daughter one night in early January and said, “Shanda, I know you were mad at me because I made you change schools, but don’t you feel like you’ve got a second chance?”
    Shanda returned the hug and said, “Yeah, I didn’t think I could ever find my way back. I had been so bad. I had done so many bad things. I didn’t know what to do.”
    Shanda had never wavered from her claim that Amanda had not touched her, and Jacque didn’t pressure Shanda to tell her more now. That would come in time, she thought. Now was the time for healing old wounds and for getting their lives back together again.
    Little did she know that time was running out and that Melinda Loveless was already plotting her revenge.

4

    R ural Kentuckians tend to think of Louisville, the state’s largest city, as a wide-open town. And it’s true that it probably has more bars per capita than most Midwestern cities its size. But even though it cultivates a laid-back, good-time image, at its heart Louisville is a blue-collar, churchgoing, family-oriented, softball-playing town with tree-shaded streets and middle-of-the-road views. Nearly all of its politicians are Democrats, yet the most popular show on the most popular radio station belongs to arch-Republican Rush Limbaugh. Louisville is not so much wide open as it is relaxed, and its relaxed ways seem to keep it a couple of years behind other cities its size when it comes to most fashions and trends.
    Despite the Middle America conservatism of the area, the teens that Melinda had fallen in with had carved out their own niche of places to go and things to do.
    The alternative music scene in Louisville was flourishing, and many of the local bands would play at off-the-beaten-track teen clubs, where these young iconoclasts would congregate. Another place they felt at home was amid the eccentric shops, coffeehouses, and music stores in Louisville’s Highlands and Crescent Hill neighborhoods, two ofthe few places in town where punk hairstyles and clothes did not draw stares. Every so often, when the Rocky Horror Picture Show would make one of its frequent appearances at the avant-garde Vogue theater in Louisville, the teens would follow in that cult film’s tradition and come to the theater dressed in bizarre costumes.
    The previous fall, Melinda had been initiated into this motley mix of young rebels by Kary Pope, a friend who’d boldly come out of the closet and openly flaunted her homosexuality, taking pleasure in shocking people with her punk clothes, dyke hairstyle, and butch behavior.
    Among those introduced to Melinda by Kary were two seventeen-year-old twin brothers with weirdly poetic names, Larry and Terry Leatherbury. The two slightly built, darkly handsome brothers had recently moved to Louisville from Madison, Indiana, a small town about fifty miles upriver from Louisville.
    Compared to Louisville, Madison was Old World. Madison had been portrayed in a military propaganda film during World War II as a typical small town, to remind soldiers of the way of life they were defending. Madison had changed little in the subsequent fifty years and still prided itself on its homespun values.
    Teen life in Madison revolved around high-school basketball and football games, bowling alleys, and hanging out in shopping-center parking lots. None of these pastimes appealed