Griego Rojas, his houseguest/rommate had disappeared during the night on February seventeenth--the same day that Johnson's favorite musician, Thelonious Monk, had died a quarter of a century earlier. So the anniversary of this date fairly saturated the Tillman household with a palpable sadness. Apparently Dusty had witnessed young Griego's departure, but whenever his parents asked him about it, the toffee-eyed boy responded with the same story.

"It's the truth," Dusty calmly stated during the first inquiry. "I'll even swear on the Bible that it's the truth. Delisha Paine came into our bedroom last night, pulled the blankets back from Griego's bed and picked him up as if he was a baby. I mean, he didn't even wake up when she carried him out of the room."

Dusty would miss his roommate, for he [Dusty] had a foot fetish and Griego would invariably stick his big bare feet out from beneath his blankets in the middle of the night. And Dusty would stare at those big, golden-skinned beauties until he either fell asleep…. or until he masturbated himself to sleep while watching them. How he longed to make his way over to one of the eighteen-year-old’s feet and take a big toe into his mouth and suckle upon it like a contented babe. How he longed to glide his tongue along Griego’s smooth sole and taste the salt and sweat of his young feet. But, in actuality, all he’d had the nerve to do was make his way over to the slumbering lad’s feet and take hug whiffs of them, savoring the sultry scent of the sleeping young man’s toes and soles.

There were no other eyewitnesses to disclaim Dusty's story. In fact, it was later discovered that all of the raven-haired eighteen-year-old's belonging were still where he'd left them the night before his disappearance. This clearly implied that he had not run away. Also both pairs of Griego's sneakers were littering the bedroom floor right along with Dusty's. And all of the boy's clothes were in the bureau and closet.

"So that means that, wherever Griego went last night, he was barefoot and dressed only in his pajamas." Johnson surmised. "It doesn't make sense."

Hope Tillman said nothing. She just sat on the living room sofa, wishing over and over again that she had been kinder to the raven-haired eighteen-year-old.

Surprisingly, it would be Griego's disappearance that would save Hope and Johnson's marraige. Once the police investigation began, the mortuary mogul, of course, had to reveal everything he knew about the raven-haired lad--who the young man really was, and where he had really come from. One would assume that the revelation of her husband's vile web of lies would have been the final straw for Hope. But, oddly enough, this wasn't the case at all.

And as the couple worked closely together to aid the authorities in locating Griego, the two truly got to know one another--their innermost fears and pleasures as well as the reasons why they sometimes behaved so wretchedly. They made peace with one another and pledged to make a brand new start with a relationship built on honesty. Some might tell you that people simply don't change. Well, Hope and Johnson Tillman proved this theory to be wrong. By the same time the following year, the couple would bear little resemblance to the bitter, bickering husband and wife that they had been before the arrival and subsequent disappearance of the Latino lad.

But while these positive things were going on, the toffee-eyed youngest Tillman was trying his best to cope with the loss of his friend. Dusty spoke little about what had happened, but the image of what occurred the dreadful night of the disappearance remained fresh in his mind. He had witnessed it all from his top bunk:

On a whispering whoosh of air, the robed stranger swoops in through the bedroom window, eyes glowing within the darkness, razor-sharp white fangs glinting in the moonlight. Up close the stranger is clearly a woman, unable to conceal her femininity even within the cumbersome folds of the hooded robe. The temperature of the room has dropped considerably since her entrance.

With a smile on her shadow-enshrouded face, the stranger draws down the blanket and sheets covering the sleeping raven-haired boy. Then she reaches down and lifts the child from the bottom bunk gently, lovingly--as a mother would. Slowly, with the raven-haired boy still asleep and powerless in her arms, she carries her limp teenage captive through the door of the bedroom and out into the darkened hallway. Her face came close to being visible once--when she glanced over her shoulder and whispered a soft goodbye to the startled toffee-eyed boy on the top bunk who was peering at her confoundedly . . . .

Dusty's account of what happened that night never varied. His parents couldn't help but to note the similarity between their son's behavior, and the behavior of their orphaned nephew Angel. When Johnson and Hope had first taken in the taciturn youth, he had come to them fresh from the hospital with recently healed scars. Scars that were indicative of stab wounds. He was a rather quiet and secretive lad who--when asked--would recount a wild, far-fetched story of when and how he'd gotten stabbed. It was an extravagant, Hollywood-styled tale involving kidnappers and racist religious fanatics. No one ever believed that the account had a single grain of truth in it.

And, similarly, no one bought young Dusty's preposterously gothic story about Griego's kidnapping.

Hope Tillman believed that her son honestly thought he'd witnessed something disturbing, but she never believed his wild tale. How could she? She had never met Delisha Paine--at this particular point in time she was still unaware of the responsive prostitute's very existence. Hope just figured that this "robed female stranger" was a shapely figment of Dusty's vivid imagination. As far as her husband was concerned, however, Delisha "Delicious" Paine was all too real. Or atleast she had been.

Johnson Tillman never claimed outright to believe his son's tale, but once he did catch himself confronting young Dusty and asking, "Well, if you saw Delisha carrying Griego away, why the hell didn't you do anything to stop her?"

To be continued