Her Sister (Search For Love series)

by Karen Rose Smith

  "Doesn't every young girl? Maybe now you call them journals and you do them on-line, but it's pretty much the same thing. So now, tell me, where did you hide things from me and your dad?"

  "Under a loose floorboard in my closet."

  "You had loose floorboards?" Max asked.

  "With a little prying. You know, they didn't quite meet the wall. It wasn't hard."

  Max glanced at the floor and the carpeting there, then he looked toward the closet. " Let's give her closet another go. I'll check the corners to see if the carpet comes up."

  The three of them emptied Shara's closet. Clare hoisted the hangers with clothes over her shoulder and carried them to the bed. Max piled shoe boxes on top of each other and pushed them outside the closet while Amanda reached to clear the top shelf that ran along the length of the closet above the clothes bar. But after Clare sneezed from the dust they'd raised, after Max had studied each corner and found the carpet still attached to the stripping around the edges while Amanda held her breath and hoped, they found nothing.

  "This could be useless," Max said. "She could have buried it outside for all we know."

  "No," Clare mused. "That's too noticeable if she wanted to fetch it. It has to be in this room. She wouldn't want it very far from her computer."

  Amanda gazed upward and suddenly realized the ceiling in the closet, unlike the ceiling in the bedroom, which was drywall or something like it, was composed of ceiling tiles. She gestured to it. "Those push up, don't they?"

  Max looked up and then down at the floor. "They certainly do. That's so the electricians can get to the electrical work." He clasped Amanda's shoulder. "You're a genius."

  The touch of Max's hand through her sweater sent warmth through her, warmth she hadn't felt in a very long time. His praise shouldn't mean so much, but she found it still did. That feeling unsettled her. She'd moved well on from their marriage. She'd become a different person and she suspected he had, too. So there was no place for that tightness in the middle of her chest, that little giddy tummy-twirl, that chemistry they'd both felt when they were teenagers.

  Already he was moving into the bedroom, heading for the desk chair.

  Amanda's shoulder brushed Clare's as they moved to the side for Max to push the chair in and then climb up on it. It was unusual to be this close to Clare. Usually her daughter shrugged away. She just hated that the price of the closeness was these circumstances.

  Max was an organized man, a lawyer, and he knew how to do a search. He started in the right corner, lifting one tile at a time, carefully feeling around the raised tile, and along the metal strips.

  "Damn," he muttered at one point and Amanda suspected what had happened. She rushed from the closet, went to the bathroom, and grabbed a box of bandages. She knew Clare always kept a filled box out of habit because Shara had been a rough and tumble kid, always scraping something. Little Shara had been a joy—open, friendly, loving. But as she'd become a preteen and then a teenager, she'd become more sullen, more alienated, more stand-offish. Amanda had always felt that her granddaughter loved her, but as a developing young woman, just didn't know how to show it. At that age, hormones could take the place of good sense. At any age, really. Sometimes she wondered if the lack of them now in her own body caused overreactions as much as the over-abundance of them when she was a teenager.

  When she tapped Max's arm, he looked down. Seeing the bandage in her hand, he shook his head. "I'm fine."

  "You don't want to bleed all over Clare's ceiling tiles. Take thirty seconds and put it on."

  She could see he was about to refuse, about to lift the next ceiling tile, when his gaze settled on hers and they both went perfectly still. He reached down and took the bandage from her fingers. She took the wrapper from him as he applied it.

  "Thanks," he said, looking as if he meant it.

  She didn't say anything as he went back to his search. But when she glanced at Clare, she saw her daughter looking at her with curiosity, as if maybe she sensed that something unusual had happened.

  After readjusting the chair three times, Max felt in the farthest left corner up above the shelf. "I've got something," he said, and Amanda's heart thumped wildly. First, he pulled down a pale pink diary that had one of those clasps with a small lock. He handed it down to Clare.

  "I gave her this when she was ten," Clare said. "I doubt if she writes in it now. It's not locked." Without hesitating, she opened the clasp and shuffled to the last page. "The last entry's three years ago."

  She closed it again as Max felt along the wider side strip at the edge of the closet ceiling. Triumphantly he pulled out a small Rolodex and held it up for them to see.

  "Now, we're making progress."

  Amanda hoped that Rolodex held the answer to their prayers.

  ****

  Chapter Six

  Once at Shara's desk, Clare stepped aside and let her dad sit at the computer. After all, she should have been doing this before now. She should have monitored Shara better. She should have known what was in her daughter's head.

  He flipped through the Rolodex quickly, getting an overview of the type of passwords Shara used and the sites she visited.

  "Do you know anything about Branches?" Max asked, looking up at Clare.

  "No, I've never heard of it."

  "She doesn't have an icon for it on the desktop which makes me think she didn't want you to see it. But there's a password. Let's see what we can find."

  "Do you know anything about this site?" she asked.

  "It's come up."

  With her dad's association with family law, she imagined it might be relevant in lots of ways. "Is it something bad?"

  "It's what the kids make it. It's a social media site that's grown in popularity."

  From the search engine, he accessed the site. From the information on the card in the Rolodex, he signed in with Shara's user name and password. Her page came up.

  Max whistled through his teeth. "Our granddaughter thinks she's twenty-five instead of sixteen. Unfortunately she doesn't have the good sense to know the difference. My God, what was she thinking?"

  Clare was almost afraid to look, but she did.

  There was a photo of Shara in a bathing suit Clare had never seen. Actually it couldn't even be called a bathing suit. It was definitely a skimpy bikini. The poses weren't sweet, but rather suggestive. Whatever she was trying to do, she was absolutely giving off the wrong message. That was obvious by the comments on her page, most of them from guys. Clare wasn't naïve, and she suspected many of the males behind the messages were a lot older than they pretended to be.

  She was still looking over her father's shoulder, becoming more and more appalled, listening to her mom's equally upset comments, when her father said, "One guy here is commenting more than the others. He doesn't seem to be as sleazy, but my guess is that's just a pretense. I don't trust male motives on a site like this. Who knows? His name's Justin. Ever heard Shara mention him?"

  "No, she's never mentioned anyone but Brad."

  "This back and forth has been going on for a while. From what I can tell from her timeline, maybe about ten months. It's sporadic at first, but they're definitely flirting, bantering back and forth, like high schoolers do. Yet he sounds more mature than a high schooler. He mentions here that he would e-mail her. Let's check her e-mails."

  "Dad."

  "Max's reaction was quick and repudiating. "You want to find out where your daughter is, don't you?"

  Her mother laid a quieting hand on her father's shoulder, and Clare just stared at them in a flash of insight struck by the history they shared. What was it like for her mom to touch her dad when they'd been divorced for so long? What was it like for them to be here in the same room, worrying again, when they weren't even together for holidays any more?

  "Of course I want to find her," she murmured. Then she added, "But I keep hoping she'll call or something. Why would she let me worry like this?"

  "She's rebelling and she's a
ngry," Amanda responded. "She's probably angry at the world as much as at you. There had to be some kind of incident that made her run. We have to find out what it was."

  Clare hadn't realized how wise her mother had become over the years. Maybe it was all the counseling she'd had. Maybe it was the sheer experience of losing a daughter. Whatever it was, Clare was grateful for her insight now.

  She added some of her own.

  "It must have been something to do with Brad."

  Max exited Branches, clicked on the icon for Shara's e-mail program and found her user name and password in the Rolodex.

  Her father seemed to know exactly what he was doing, so Clare asked, "Have you done this before?"

  "Try to find someone's daughter or son, husband or wife? Usually I have a private investigator to do this kind of thing, but I've learned a trick or two myself. Everyone sloughs off e-mails as if they're disposable, and they are if you do it right. But most people don't. They just delete them from their in-box and think they're gone, or delete them from their trash and don't clean out their recycle bins. Real criminals, frauds or perverts are more careful about it. But Shara doesn't fall into any of those categories, so my guess is she wasn't careful. She thinks she hid her passwords, but the truth is, even those can be broken with the right programs. Let's see what we've got."

  As they all peered at the monitor, Max dismissed the e-mails from classmates. After he went through the In-box list, he switched to the Trash. "Here we are. Justin. His handle is 1234. But I don't recognize the server. One of my paralegals at the office is good at this kind of thing. I'll put her on it."

  Taking out his phone, he sent a text message, got a quick response, and went back to what he was doing. Clare had already been looking over the last e-mail.

  "Oh my gosh, Dad, he sounds so sympathetic. He's telling her everything she wants to hear."

  "Yeah, that's what predators do."

  Clare felt her heart practically stop. A predator luring her daughter. That just couldn't be.

  They swiftly went through more e-mails and then Max spotted the one that gave them the information they needed.

  "Sandia Peak. That's Albuquerque. He's telling her she should come to Albuquerque for a break." Pushing himself away from the desk, Max announced, "I'm going to Albuquerque."

  Although Clare was glad they'd found a lead and her dad was doing something, she exchanged a look with her mom. "But you don't know where to go. You don't even know his last name."

  "Hopefully I'll get his last name when we trace his IP address."

  Amanda said quietly, "But what if he's using a fake name? It's like all the leads with Lynnie—"

  "Don't even say it," Max snapped. "Do not say it."

  After a strained moment of silence, Amanda said off-handedly, "If you're going to Albuquerque, I'm going with you."

  "Amanda—"

  "Don't use that authoritarian voice with me, Max. Don't argue with me. I won't change my mind."

  "I should go, too," Clare stated.

  But her father disagreed. "No, you shouldn't. You need to stay here in case we're all wrong about this. You need to be here if Shara comes back home. You need to be in touch with the police department here."

  She wanted to fight what her dad was saying. She wanted to go searching for her daughter. Was it a wiser strategy to stay here and wait?

  The doorbell rang. Amanda suggested, "Maybe that's the detective."

  Clare rushed to the front door. Amanda was on her way there, too, when she recognized the sound of the visitor. It was Joe. Maybe he could be some kind of consolation to Clare. She doubted if she and Max could be.

  Max must have recognized his voice, too, because he turned back to the desktop, studied the e-mails once more and took out his cell phone. "I'm going to get us seats on the next flight out."

  "We don't know what we're doing," Amanda said calmly, having her own ideas about what they should do. She had to make Max listen.

  "We know this Justin is in Albuquerque and he invited Shara to visit him. By the time we get there, maybe we'll have more information about him."

  "And maybe we won't."

  "What are you suggesting? I'm not staying here when I have a lead."

  "I'm suggesting we call Gillian Bradley."

  Max went perfectly still. "You're not going to pull me into that woo-hoo universe again. She couldn't help the last time we called her."

  After Lynnie had been taken, and no leads panned out, Amanda had consulted a couple of psychics. None of them had provided useful information though they were willing to take money for trying. Then year before last, still desperately needing to know what had happened to her daughter no matter what that was, Amanda had found a blog online. Gillian Bradley had found a child who had been lost while the family had been camping near Big Sur. Full of hope, Amanda had told Max about her. Still leery about treading in those murky waters, he'd agreed to consult with her and they'd flown to California. In spite of Gillian's impressive success rate, she'd come up blank. She'd gotten nowhere.

  "This situation with Shara is different," Amanda insisted. "Even if Shara ran to Albuquerque to be with this Justin, hopefully nothing has happened yet. She's just running. Now's the time to find out if Gillian can get a bead on her."

  "Oh, Amanda."

  "You know a foundation funds Gillian and her partner. She still helps even if someone can't pay daily expenses."

  "Rich people donate and pay her salary." He checked his watch. "I just want to make those airline reservations."

  "Don't close down on me, Max. Haven't you done that enough over the years?"

  "So now it's another guilt trip?"

  Amanda sighed. "No, but I'll use whatever I can to get you to try every avenue. We're not going to let what happened to Lynnie happen to Shara."

  At that moment, Max looked weary, as if all these past years of searching drew lines in his face at the same time. He closed his eyes, opened them again and then maybe really saw her for the first time in years.

  "All right, call Gillian Bradley. But don't expect too much out of it, Amanda. She might be too busy to even consider helping us. She might not even be searching for missing persons any more."

  That was possibly true, but Amanda didn't think so. Gillian had a gift and if Amanda had read her right, she wouldn't put it aside if she could help others.

  ****

  Joe had brought take-out from Happy Family, the Chinese restaurant downtown. He said seriously, "I know no one's thinking about food, or thinking they want any food, but believe me, you've all got to keep your strength up." He carried the bags to the kitchen table and Clare followed him.

  "You didn't have to do this."

  "I know. I wanted to."

  He looked at her as if he wanted to bring her more than lunch, and Clare couldn't deal with that right now, so she looked away.

  But he wasn't the type of man to allow that. After setting the bags on the table, he came close and lifted her chin, forcing their gazes to meet. "Don't shut me out. You need a friend right now."

  "A friend?"

  "We'll discuss what we're going to be after this is all over," he decided.

  "Will it be all over? It never has been with my sister."

  "Ah, Clare, you have to think positive."

  "I'm trying. And we did find something." She told him about their search, Branches, and the e-mails her father had unearthed. "Mom and Dad are flying to Albuquerque. I don't know what to do. They say I should stay here. And I wonder what they're going to be able to do there?"

  "I think since your sister was taken, all three of you have tried to stand on your own, haven't you?"

  "I had to stand on my own. My parents weren't there for me while I was growing up. They weren't there for me when I got pregnant."

  "Did they want to be?"

  Joe asked the difficult questions. Maybe her parents had wanted to be her support, and she'd been too defiant and resentful to let them.

  "Even if I
accept their help, I don't know if they're going to accept each other's. Sure, they have a common goal, but that old tension is still there between them. It started the night Lynnie disappeared and it's always been there. It contributed to their divorce. And now—"

  "Now, they have a common goal again," he said.

  "But that won't change who they are. That won't change how they feel about what happened in the past. I learned today that Dad started drinking after Lynnie disappeared, and that's one of the reasons he and Mom divorced."

  "Is he drinking now?"

  "No. Maybe that's why Mom has insisted she's going with him, so he doesn't. I don't know."

  Stepping closer, keeping his eyes on hers, he took her by the shoulders. "You can't solve your parents' problems, but you can let them help you. You can be here for Shara. You've got to keep the best possible outlook on this, not the worst, and you'll be able to keep in touch with your parents to know what's happening every step of the way. That's what cell phones and texting are for, right?"

  Thinking about it, Clare found herself biting her lower lip, feeling younger than she was, feeling uncertain about everything.

  "Your parents probably don't know how much they hurt you. Have you ever told them?"

  She'd let a little of that come out today. Still … "How could I tell them when they were hurting so badly because Lynnie was gone. I let some of my feelings slip today. They seemed shocked, actually shocked. Are they really so clueless?"

  "They're human, Clare. They've tried to do their best, but that just wasn't enough with you. You have to decide if you're going to forgive them and move out of this, or if you're always going to hold bitterness toward them."

  She saw the look in his eyes and the road she should take. "You're going to tell me bitterness is only going to hurt me, not them."

  "No, I’m not. It will hurt all of you."

  His eyes were so kind and compassionate that she found tears coming to hers. Blinking hard, she tried to turn away. But instead of letting her, he pulled her into a hug and he held her tight.

  ****

  "Mrs. Bradley, I don't know if you remember me. I'm Amanda Thaddeus. My husband and I met with you about trying to find our daughter Lynnie." In spite of her efforts to stay calm, Amanda's voice shook.