 Avid audiobooks presents, Pray for the Girl by Joseph Sousa. Narrated by Sarah Borges. CHAPTER ONE The girl's body was found after a day-long search. Her frail corpse discovered not far from the banks of the Alamosa River. She was nestled between two unmovable boulders rising up out of the ground. I heard my sister say that a kayaker paddling down the river saw what looked to be a body protruding from the ground and called the police. The girl, later identified as a refugee from Afghanistan, was 15 at the time of her death. Rumour had it that she'd been buried up to her chest and then stoned. Wendy said that the trauma to her face was so devastating that she was almost unrecognizable to her family and friends. The news of the girl's death startled me when I first heard it. Things like this didn't happen in Vaughn Grove. Or at least they didn't happen when I grew up here. Then again I left this place fifteen years ago, and I've seen a lot of bad since. I'd roused myself from a long bout of self-imposed hibernation when I heard the news. My sister and her husband were discussing it at the dining table over lunch, although it could have been breakfast for all I knew. I was standing upstairs and holding on to the railing for support, unsteady and fighting off a stubborn case of vertigo. Time had lost all meaning to me. It seemed not to exist in the sorry state I'd gotten myself into. To say that I was in a bad frame of mind during this conversation was an understatement. My current woes included PTSD, anxiety and depression, and they were all acting in unison to cloud my thinking. I hadn't experienced such helplessness in a long time. As much as I tried to disassociate myself from the conversation my sister was having with her husband, I ended up hearing every last word of it. I stumbled back to my room, numb, narcoleptic, not wanting to hear any more of this. Depressing news seemed to be all I ever heard while living in New York City. Murders, rapes, greedy Wall Street types ripping off investors, stabbings, shootings, terrorist attacks, to name just a few of the heinous crimes that occurred there. The sound of police sirens became like elevator music to my ears. But now that I was back home in Fongrove I just didn't care. Hope seemed like some long lost campaign slogan from a bygone era. I lost track of my med schedule and started taking whatever pills lay in front of me that day. Sometimes the shape or size appealed to me. Other times a a certain... Sample complete. Ready to continue?