“I don’t want to see Maggie.” I didn’t mean to say it out loud, but it came out of my mouth anyway. I sounded like a kid. Like I was asking Dawn to protect me or something.
She was a step ahead of me, but she stopped and put an arm around me so we were walking together. Her long red hair brushed my cheek. The smell of her hair reminded me of my mother, like maybe they used the same shampoo or something. I turned my head so I could pull in another whiff of it.
“I’m not that wild about seeing Maggie either, Keith,” she said. “But look. You don’t have to talk to her. Don’t even have to look at her. We just need to think about your mom, okay?”
It wasn’t looking at Maggie that would piss me off as much as her looking at me. It would be massive humiliation, letting her see how she’d screwed up my life.
“Keith Weston!”
I turned to see a man and a woman running toward us from the street. The dude had a camera, the woman, a microphone. Reporters, again! I could not fucking believe it! Were they trailing me or what?
“Do you have any idea where your mother is?” the woman asked.
I turned away so fast I whacked my head into Dawn’s chin. She gave me a shove toward the Lockwoods’ front porch. “Go on,” she said to me.
I headed for the porch and heard her shout from behind me, “Keep the hell away from him! Don’t you think he’s been through enough?”
I was shaking by the time she caught up to me on the porch, but I made like the whole thing had been no big deal.
“Total assholes,” I said, nodding toward the reporters. They were walking toward a white van parked on the street.
“No kidding,” Dawn said.
Trish Delphy—Surf City’s mayor—opened the front door for us.
“Dawn.” She hugged Dawn, then reached for me. “Keith, dear,” she said. “How are you holding up?”
“All right.” I let her hug me. I was surprised she was there. The mayor. Maybe people were finally taking this seriously. As far as I could tell, the cops weren’t doing much. They told me the first forty-eight hours were critical, and tonight made it about forty-nine.
Miss Trish changed places with Dawn, putting her arm around me as she led me toward the kitchen. I saw the bright lights in there. Saw Laurel and Emily Carmichael’s mother and another lady I didn’t know yammering with each other while they did something with food on the island. I didn’t want to go in.
I stopped walking. “I’ll just wait over there,” I said to Miss Trish, pointing to the empty family room, where it wasn’t as bright. One of the windows had no glass and was shuttered from the outside. I liked that it was a little dim in the room. In the kitchen, I’d stand out like a lightbulb.
“Sure, dear,” Miss Trish said.
“I’ll come with you,” Dawn said.
“You don’t need to babysit me,” I told her.
“Don’t you think I know that?” She grinned, mussing up my hair with her hand. Then she leaned close to my ear. “I’d rather hang out with you than those people in there,” she said.
Yeah, right, I thought. But it was nice of her, so I wasn’t going to give her any grief.
We sat next to each other by the fireplace with its fake-o gas logs. I remembered the house had three fireplaces in it. One in here, one in Laurel’s bedroom and one on the porch. The Lockwoods had more money than God.
Marcus came out of the kitchen carrying a plate of food. “Hey, Dawn. Keith,” he said as he sat down on the other side of me. “Frankie with you, Dawn?”
“He’s still at work,” she said.
I was glad Frankie wasn’t there. Dawn had been seeing him for a while now, but I thought he was an asshole. He was always staring at my face.
“We’ll get some action going today, Keith,” Marcus said to me.
I nodded. My eyes were on the kitchen door. I figured Maggie was in there, and I wanted to prepare myself for seeing her. I’d pretend I didn’t see her. I’d look right through her like she didn’t exist. That’s how I’d handle it.
Dawn stood up. “I’m going to get us some food,” she said to me. “You stay.”
Like I was going anywhere.
“How’s the PT?” Marcus dug his fork into the macaroni salad on his plate.
I shrugged. Marcus was all right. Of the Lockwoods, he was the only one I could stand, and not just because he started that college fund for me years ago with a honkin’ chunk of his own money. But I didn’t want to talk about the PT. I’d skipped this morning. PT was the last thing on my mind. I wasn’t keeping up with the exercises and my arms and shoulders were killing me. I’d popped an extra half a Percocet before Dawn picked me up, but it hadn’t kicked in yet.
“Who all’s here?” I asked.
“Well, let’s see.” He chewed some. Swallowed. “Flip Cates, for starters.”
Yeah. The whole point of this meeting was for the cops to update us and tell us how we could help.
“Who else?”
“Laurel, of course. Robin Carmichael. Sue Charles. You know her?”
I nodded. Sue was one of my mother’s old book-club friends, so it made sense she was there. I didn’t realize Emily’s mother cared much about mine, though. Emily had been in the fire, too, so I guessed that was the connection. Emily’d gotten a few cuts and bruises, but she was basically okay. Or at least as okay as she’d been before the fire, which wasn’t saying much.
“Is Maggie here?” I couldn’t take the suspense anymore.
“She’s upstairs,” Marcus said. “She’s only been home a couple of days and isn’t ready to face the world.”
Chickenshit, I thought. But I knew how it felt, not wanting to face the world, and her staying upstairs was fine with me.
“And Andy’s at school,” Marcus said.
“Right.” Where I was supposed to be. Fuck school.
Dawn came back and handed me a plate covered with food. “Here you go,” she said.
I looked down at the ham-and-biscuit sandwich and five different kinds of salad—macaroni and potato and egg and who knew what else—and my stomach lurched. I should’ve told Dawn not to bother. I hadn’t eaten anything since Monday night. I had the feeling the Percocet were doing a nice job carving out a hole in my stomach.
Everyone else came in. They all said hi to me, and Laurel leaned down to hug me, which just pissed me off. Nothing was really her fault, but she was, like, an extension of Maggie and that was enough to get to me.
“So.” Flip sat down on the sofa with Miss Trish and put his plate on the coffee table. Everyone turned to look at him. “Keith,” he said, “we all share your concern about your mother. As you know, we’ve put out a BOLO bulletin on her. We checked her bank records this morning. There were no large recent withdrawals or anything out of the ordinary there. We put a tracer on her car.” He yammered on about what they’d done. I already knew everything he was talking about. They’d even searched the trailer for blood and semen, which freaked me out. I mean, I was a teenage guy who hadn’t gotten any in more than a year. There was definitely semen in that trailer. But nobody said anything to me about what they found.
“That’s why Laurel and Dawn put together this meeting,” Flip was saying, “and they asked me to help you all figure out what the community can do. So, that’s the purpose of our get-together here.”
The Perc was starting to kick in, but not the way I wanted it to. It wasn’t taking away the pain as much as making my head fuzzy, the way it did when I took too much. I ate the corner of one of the biscuits Dawn’d brought me to maybe take the edge off the drug, but I could hardly get it down. The smell of the food was making me feel worse. I leaned over and stuck my full plate under my chair.
“We’ve interviewed a few of you who know Sara well,” Flip said, “and there’s no clear-cut reason to suspect foul play. At least nothing that’s leaping out at us. There’s no mental or physical illness that could affect her judgment. And there’s no suitcase in her home, which suggests she left of he
r own volition. Keith’s not a minor, so he’s able to be on his own.”
“This is so screwed up.” I slumped down in my chair and stuck my hands in my pockets. “What are you saying? We just forget she’s gone?”
“Not at all,” Flip said, “and I understand your frustration. That’s why we’re here—to see what more we can do to find her.”
Laurel put her plate on the coffee table and leaned forward. “Flip, doesn’t the fact that Sara’s not mentally ill make her disappearance even more suspicious? There’s no reason for it. No explanation for it.”
“I know it’s hard to hear,” Flip said, “but something we need to consider is this—adults in her age range who are not mentally ill usually disappear to escape from something. Younger women disappear, you think about kidnapping and rape. Older, you think about cognitive problems. In Sara’s age range, where she may have chosen to leave on her own, you think about escaping from financial or relationship problems, maybe an abusive relationship. That sort of thing.” He looked around the room. “Do any of you know if she was struggling with financial problems?”
Everyone looked at me. “Well, we’re not exactly swimming in bucks,” I said. “Gimme a break.”
“She never complained about it,” Dawn said. “The money we collected last year after the fire, along with the restitution money…we were able to pay most of what Keith’s military insurance didn’t cover.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “I know you and your mom didn’t have a lot, but she never made it sound like you were going without. Oh!” She suddenly looked surprised. “I just thought of something, Flip. This probably won’t help, but…I think Sara was sort of writing a memoir. Did you find anything like that when you searched the trailer?”
“A memoir?” Laurel sounded surprised. No more surprised than me, though. Didn’t you have to have an interesting life to write a memoir?
“Yes,” Dawn said. “I talked her into taking a writing class with me at the Methodist church in Jacksonville last year. She really got into it and I think she stuck with it. More than I did.”
Flip leaned forward. “Do you know anything about this, Keith?”
She was always writing this year, carrying a notebook around with her. I never thought much about it. I was into my life, not hers. “I don’t know anything about a memoir,” I said. The spot between my shoulder and neck was seizing up something fierce, and I rubbed it. “She wrote stuff down in a notebook a lot of times, but I don’t have any idea what she was writing.”
“That’s it!” Dawn sounded excited. “She wrote by hand. Drove the teacher crazy the one time he tried to read something she wrote.”
“This teacher,” Flip said, “he might know what was in the…memoir?”
Dawn shook her head. “I think he only read her first chapter, or whatever you’d call it. Everyone else in the class would read aloud, but Sara was shy about it. She let Sean—that was the teacher—read that first bit and she told me he said she was a really good writer…something like that. She didn’t care about typing it. She said it was just for her own eyes.”
“The notebook or notebooks or whatever,” I said to Flip, “they’re not in the trailer. I haven’t seen them and you would’ve found them, right?”
“Think if there might be a place she could have hidden something like that,” Flip said to me. “If she was feeling secretive about them, maybe she really squirreled them away.”
“I don’t know if she was feeling secretive,” Dawn said. “She was just self-conscious about reading aloud to the class.”
“You’ll get me the name and a number for that teacher, Dawn?” Flip asked.
Dawn nodded, and I tried to think where in the trailer my mother might have hidden something like that. The cops went over that place with a fine-tooth comb, though. If they couldn’t find a notebook, I didn’t know how I could.
“We’ve checked her cell-phone records,” Flip said. “Her last call was to you, Dawn, Sunday afternoon.”
Dawn frowned, then nodded. “Oh, right. We just talked for a few minutes. Nothing important, that I can remember.”
“What about tracing her by her cell phone?” Marcus asked.
“No luck there,” Flip said. “Her phone model’s a dinosaur, but the towers still should’ve been able to pick it up. She may have ditched it or the battery may’ve run out.”
“She wouldn’t ‘ditch it,’” I said. It was pissing me off, the way he made her sound like she wanted to run away. “She never keeps that thing charged, though. She always forgets.”
“Maybe she bought a new phone?” Miss Trish looked at Flip. “I know this doesn’t sound like Sara, but could she have known you’d try to trace her by her old phone and…if she didn’t want to be found for some reason, she could have—”
“Christ’s sake!” My voice came out a lot louder than I expected. “She didn’t buy a new phone, don’t you get it?”
“We’re just trying to puzzle this all out, Keith,” Sue Charles said.
“She wouldn’t leave me,” I said. “She wouldn’t.” It felt like somebody was hitting my shoulder with a meat cleaver. The Percocet wasn’t working at all.
“He’s right,” Dawn said. “She really wouldn’t, Flip.”
He nodded. “Well, that’s even more reason we have to do all we can to figure out what happened.”
“You mean we have to figure it out.” I sat up straight. “Me and her friends.” The cops said they were doing all this stuff, but I wasn’t convinced. How much did they care about someone they thought took off “of her own volition”? I’d spent practically all the day before searching for my mother’s car in the daylight, driving the same streets I’d driven the night she disappeared. My neck ached from turning my head back and forth, searching every inch of road and every space in every parking lot for her old black Honda. Must’ve put a hundred miles on my car. Fifteen bucks’ worth of gas. I couldn’t keep that up. I had, like, a hundred bucks in my bank account. My mother’d let me keep the donations that trickled in from strangers in my name alone instead of to the fund Dawn had set up. I’d sped through it. After what I’d been through, I deserved that new cell phone, I’d told myself. I deserved the latest-generation iPod and the stereo for my wheels. Stupid. How was I going to eat when that hundred bucks ran out if she didn’t come back? My eyes suddenly burned. Shit. She had to come back.
“It’s a team effort, Keith,” Laurel said. “What can we do, Flip?” She picked up a yellow notepad from the table and set it on her knees, ready to write.
“There are some Web sites where you can put up a page for a missing person,” he said. “Not many legit ones for missing adults, so you need to be careful. Try ProjectJason.org.” He named a couple others, and Laurel wrote them down.
“Maggie said she could do any of the Internet stuff we need,” she said.
I looked at the toe of my sneaker at the mention of Maggie. Was everybody staring at me? I didn’t want to know.
“You can make up flyers with her picture on it,” Flip said. “Along with her vital statistics, etcetera. Then hand them out.”
“Hand them out where?” Sue Charles asked.
“Everywhere,” Robin’s mother said. “Stores. Restaurants. The street.”
“We’ve called the nearby hospitals,” Flip said, “but you can call all the hospitals around the interstates.”
“She wouldn’t be on the interstates,” I said, but everybody ignored me.
“Put my name down for calling hospitals, Laurel,” Dawn said.
“Did we decide who’ll make the flyer?” Trish asked.
“Maggie’ll do it,” Laurel said. “Then we can give each of you stacks of them to distribute.”
“How about contacting the media?” Marcus asked.
Oh, shit. Now the reporters would really be after me, but he was right. They had to get word out.
“We’ve sent out a press release,” Flip said, “but any media contacts y’all have will help.”
“This
is so fucked up!” I said. “You hear about other missing people on the news all the time. Did their friends take care of getting them on TV? I don’t think so. I think the cops had something to do with it.”
“Keith, hon.” Dawn put her hand on my shoulder.
“Again, Keith—” Flip was so damn calm sounding “—the police are on this, but the more we can all work together, the better. In those instances where a missing person’s all over the news? Most times the families have hired a private investigator to generate a lot of media buzz for them.”
“Like I can afford that!” I’d had enough. Everybody was staring at me. I couldn’t take it anymore. “Quit looking at me!” I stood up and walked to the door.
“Keith!” Dawn said, but I ignored her. I needed to go outside. Get into the fresh air. I was just about to turn the door knob when I saw the news van still parked on the street. Damn.
Everyone in the living room was calling to me by then, but no one was coming after me, and I was glad. My head spun, and I turned around and leaned against the wall, and that’s when I saw a pair of bare feet disappear into the upstairs hallway. Maggie? She’d been sitting up there listening the whole time? The thought creeped me out and I thought I was seriously going to puke. I headed for the bathroom under the stairs and locked the door behind me. I closed my eyes and leaned back against the door and this picture of a machete chopping off Maggie’s feet flashed into my mind. I breathed long and steady through my mouth so I wouldn’t get sick.
Where was my mother?
I pounded my fist against the door behind me.
Where the hell was she?
I started to cry like a total jerk-off, and I turned on the water so no one could hear me. In the mirror above the sink, I saw this kid who didn’t look like me. Half his face was tight and red and the skin was twisted into smooth planes and deep gullies and his hairline was all screwed up and it was all so damn unfair!
“Keith?” It was Dawn. Right outside the bathroom. “You okay?”
I knew if I tried to talk, my voice would crack, so I just grunted.
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