When we sat down at the kitchen table to eat, Kimmie said grace, something we never bothered with, although I’m pretty sure we did when Daddy was alive.
“Thank you, heavenly father, for this beautiful food,” she said, “and for bringing Andy’s sister, Maggie, home safe and sound. Amen.”
“Amen,” Andy and Mom said. Clearly, they knew this new-tome routine with Kimmie. As for me, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to swallow any of the “beautiful food” around the lump in my throat.
“Thank you, Kimmie,” I said. “That was really nice.”
We started passing plates and bowls around the table.
“So,” Kimmie said to Andy after we’d been eating awhile, “I don’t understand why you had to look at all those boxes.”
Andy remembered to swallow whatever he was chewing before he answered. “Because of Miss Sara going missing, and she had a box,” he said.
Kimmie rolled her eyes. “That makes no sense,” she said.
I wanted to come to his defense. I didn’t like it when anyone put down my brother. I opened my mouth to say something, but Mom held up a hand to shush me.
“Yes, too, it makes sense,” Andy said.
“Explain it better,” Kimmie said. “I know Mrs. Weston went missing. Where did she have a box?”
“In the trailer.”
Kimmie waited. If it had been up to me, I would have asked him another question, like when did she have the box? What was she doing with it? That’s how Mom and Uncle Marcus and I always handled Andy. But Kimmie had her own way, and although I itched with discomfort that she wasn’t doing it “right,” Mom obviously didn’t want me to jump in.
“I woke up and she carried a box with a pot on it,” Andy said. “Outside. I think she carried it outside. But I got confused at the store.”
“I can picture it now,” Kimmie said. “The police wanted to find out if you saw a box at the store like the one she carried.”
“Right.” Andy looked at me. “Kimmie’s real smart.”
“Everybody’s got things they’re good at and things they’re not good at,” Kimmie said.
“Like I swim good,” Andy said. “Even though not as good as I used to.”
“You’re an awesome swimmer,” Kimmie said. She looked at me. “My father said I’m the brains and Andy’s the brawn, and together we make a perfect person.”
Oh, wow. I felt that lump in my throat again. What was with me? What she said was so sweet. At the same time, though, I wanted to reach over, clench her wrist in my hand and say, “Don’t you ever, ever hurt him!”
I was trying to figure her out. She was not quite all there when it came to brainpower, but she was more all there than Andy. IQ-wise, she was probably somewhere around his low normal range, but she didn’t have his developmental issues. His “concrete thinking,” as Mom always called it. Kimmie didn’t seem to have that burden. Plus, unlike Andy, she had some definite social skills.
“Andy said you’re going to do community service at his school,” she said to me, like an adult might say to start a conversation.
“Not at his school,” I said. “At the elementary school right near his.” I’d start there on Monday. Way too soon. I wished I had another week—better yet, another month—before I had to be so public.
“Why don’t you do your commutity service at my school?” Andy asked.
“Community,” Mom corrected.
“Because Mom already got the okay for me to do it at Douglas Elementary, since she works there.”
Andy stuck his fork in a piece of green pepper. “My friend Max’s sister goes there,” he said, “and his father doesn’t want you there. So you should come to my school.”
I stopped my glass of water halfway to my mouth and looked at my mother. “Is it going to be a problem?” I asked.
“I don’t think so,” Mom said. “Not with Ms. Terrell’s and Mrs. Hadley’s blessings.”
“We can watch a movie after dinner,” Andy said to Kimmie, as if he’d already forgotten we were talking about my community service.
“You have some makeup work to do, Andy,” Mom said.
“I’ll help you with your homework and then we can watch,” Kimmie said.
“Don’t do it for him, Kimmie,” Mom warned.
Kimmie rolled her eyes. She had that move perfected. “I never do, Miss Laurel,” she said.
I started clearing the dishes once Kimmie and Andy’d left the room. “She’s really cute,” I said to Mom.
“She’s good for him, I think.” Mom opened the dishwasher.
“It’s weird, though,” I said.
“What is?”
I tried to find the words. “Seeing someone else talk to him like family.”
“Well, it took a while. You’ve missed out on watching their relationship develop.”
I scraped the leftover potatoes into a plastic container. I’d missed out on so much this year. Watching the relationship between Uncle Marcus and Mom develop, too, for example. So much had changed. Me, most of all.
I snapped the lid on the container. “Are they, like…physical?” I asked.
Mom stopped loading the dishwasher. “You mean, sexual?”
“Whatever,” I said. I couldn’t picture it.
“Oh, please, don’t even think it!” Mom laughed. “Both Marcus and I have talked to him about…you know, not getting too close. We supervise them, and the rule is, when they’re in his room—or Kimmie’s—the door needs to be open. Her parents are on the same page. When we were at Wal-Mart today, though, Andy told me they’ve hugged a few times. I figure as long as he’s so comfortable telling me what’s going on, we’re safe. I’ve seen them hold hands, but that’s about it. It’s cute.”
“It’s what they do when you can’t see them that matters,” I said.
“You sound like Marcus.”
“Well, really, Mom. Did you think I was doing what I was doing?”
She didn’t say anything. Just went back to loading dishes, and what I’d said hung there in the air.
“You haven’t mentioned your therapy appointment,” Mom said when I handed her a rinsed plate. “I don’t want to pry, but were you pleased? Does she seem like someone you’ll be able to connect to?”
I laughed. “Well, first of all, Marion Jakes is a man. He’s old and he weighs about four hundred pounds.”
“No.”
“Really. Well, three hundred, anyway.”
She got the dishwasher soap from under the sink and poured some into the cup. “Aside from that, how was it?” she asked.
I thought about how much crying I’d done in his office. It embarrassed me now to remember it.
“It was okay,” I said. “I think it’s a waste of time, though. I’ve had a whole year to think about what happened with Ben and the fire and everything. But I have to go, so I’ll go.”
“I think it’s important, Maggie,” Mom said as she closed the dishwasher door. “There’s a big difference between thinking about what happened on your own and talking it over with a therapist.”
“I guess.” It was easiest to just agree.
The phone rang and I dried my hands, then checked the caller ID.
“It’s Uncle Marcus,” I said, pressing the talk button. “Hey,” I said.
“Hey, Maggie. How great it is to hear you answer the phone. I’m so glad you’re home.”
“Me, too,” I said. “You have no idea. Did you want to talk to Mom?”
“I’ll tell you first,” he said. “I just heard from Flip that there was an anonymous call to the Crime Stoppers tip line about an hour ago.”
“Really? What did they say?”
“The caller said that he—or she, I’m not sure which—saw a man and woman walk into the woods behind the Food Lion in Hampstead Monday afternoon. They didn’t get a very good look, but the description of the woman could possibly match Sara.”
“Oh, no.” I repeated what he’d said to my mother. She pressed her hands to her mouth. “D
id they say anything else?” I asked.
“The man was walking very close to the woman, so she was possibly being coerced.”
“Oh, no,” I said again.
“What?” Mom said.
I handed the phone to her. Suddenly, the whole bit about Sara disappearing felt real to me. Up until that moment, all the work I’d done—getting her profile up on the Internet, talking to the woman at the Project Jason Web site Officer Cates had mentioned, making the flyer and everything else—had felt like busywork. It hadn’t really sunk in that something terrible might have happened to her. I couldn’t stand the thought of her being forced into the woods by a man, much less what might have happened to her after that. And poor Keith. I remembered again how pissed off he’d sounded during the meeting the night before and thought of something Letitia told me the second time Lizard beat me up. “Her anger comes from her fear,” she’d said. “You remember that.” It had made no sense to me then. Lizard afraid? I didn’t think so. But now I got it. I got that Keith sounded so pissed off because he was scared. Who wouldn’t be scared when their mother went missing?
I sat down at the table, watching my own mother’s worried face while she listened to Uncle Marcus. When she got off the phone, she was pale.
“He said it’s probably a blind lead.” She leaned back against the counter, one hand pressed against her cheek. “He said there are these people who are…serial anonymous tipsters, he called them. They get their jollies leading the police on a wild-goose chase and that’s probably what this will turn out to be.”
“But they can’t just ignore it!” I said.
“No, they won’t. Tomorrow morning, there’ll be a search of the woods behind the Food Lion. Flip’s calling a few searchers with dogs, and he asked if Dawn and I could make calls tonight to get volunteers out to help.”
She opened the cabinet door where we kept a list of phone numbers for friends and neighbors. Then she reached for the phone.
I watched her, scared and ashamed, because I knew I wouldn’t be one of those volunteers. No way could I be out in the open with other Topsail people all around me. I’d do anything I could to help from the safety of my house, but I wasn’t ready to go out in public. Not for my half brother, or for Sara.
Not for anyone.
Chapter Fifteen
Keith
WE WERE SUPPOSED TO WALK NEXT TO EACH OTHER, JUST a few feet apart, as we moved slowly—and I do mean slowly—through the woods behind the Food Lion. We’d move forward ten feet at a time, then stop and examine every square inch of ground and rock and grass and weed and shrub around us. I never realized how much trash was in the woods. Soda and beer bottles all over the place. Food wrappers from Ding Dongs and Twinkies. Paper bags from McDonald’s. Empty cardboard boxes, still soggy from the last rain. Somebody’s shoe. Oh, shit. I nearly had a heart attack when one of the volunteers shouted out that he’d found a shoe. But it was a kid’s shoe. A sneaker. Nothing that could’ve belonged to my mother.
Sue Charles, one of my mother’s friends, was walking on my right side and she said she couldn’t get over how calm I looked. Yeah, well, looks could be deceiving. First, I was in a shitload of pain. I’d only taken one Percocet that morning so my head would be clear. I’d been doubling up on them since Monday and now one just wasn’t holding me. Plus, I ate a can of that chili the night before. Mistake. My gut was doing somersaults, and thoughts—none of them good—flew through my head a hundred miles a minute. I was afraid we wouldn’t find anything, and more afraid that we would. This search felt like too damn little too damn late. My mother went missing Monday and here it was Friday and the cops were only now getting around to doing an actual search. Of course, they didn’t have that anonymous tipster until last night, but they could’ve done more by now than just badger me with questions. Marcus said it was all happening behind the scenes, but as far as I could tell, the volunteers were doing most of the work, taking the flyers all over the place and calling hospitals and stuff. I wished my mother could’ve seen what people were doing to try to find her. I knew she sometimes felt like she didn’t have many friends. Like people didn’t really care.
Now that the cops had this anonymous tip, here was their new theory: She made it to the parking lot of the Food Lion. The checkers working that day didn’t see her, so she probably didn’t make it inside. Instead, some guy got to her in the parking lot and forced her to go with him into the woods. Then he did whatever he did to her—I didn’t want to think about it—and then stole her car, since it wasn’t in the lot. Possibly, he took her with him. Like maybe he raped her in the woods and then forced her back into the car. By now they could be in Siberia.
So now we were searching, and I couldn’t believe how many people had joined in. That was the one cool thing about the whole mess. The cops might’ve been twiddling their thumbs, but nobody else was. Some of the Food Lion employees were out here. A bunch of marines from Camp Lejeune. A couple of cops on horseback. Two volunteers with trained dogs. Strangers from as far away as Raleigh. Miss Trish had made sure the news about my mother was on TV stations all over the state, plus in Virginia and South Carolina. Her press release mentioned me, though, and I wished she’d left me out of it. TV stations talked about how my mother had almost lost me in the big Surf City fire, etcetera, etcetera. They wanted to interview me and I said forget it. If it would help, yeah, okay, I would’ve done it, but I couldn’t see what difference it would make. It’d just give people a chance to look at the burned guy’s screwed-up face. No thanks.
Way down at one end of the search line was this girl I swore looked like that Jen chick from Harris Teeter. She had on a blue cap and her black hair was in a ponytail, and she was skinny, but I couldn’t get a good look at her. It probably wasn’t her, anyway. She was just on my mind, so I thought I saw her everywhere. Besides, this search was about my mother, not about me, and definitely not about the Harris Teeter chick.
After a few hours, some people started peeling off from the search line. The girl who looked like Jen must have been one of them, because I didn’t see her again. I didn’t blame anyone for leaving. The going was so damn slow and boring and we were deep into the woods by then. The day was cloudy, and with all the trees, the ground was pretty dark and it was hard to tell a leaf from a Ding Dong wrapper. I had a killer headache and had stopped to rub my forehead when a man suddenly let out a holler.
“I found something!” he yelled. “I think it’s a body!”
He was a long way from me, and even though we were supposed to stay in line no matter what, I took off in his direction.
“Keith!” Sue Charles called after me. “Stay here!”
I kept going, tripping over branches and rocks and dodging tree trunks. A bunch of people surrounded the guy, and leaves flew through the air as if he was digging through a pile of them to get at whatever he found.
Marcus Lockwood suddenly jumped in front of me, grabbing my shoulders and blocking me from going any farther.
“Let me go!” I was so winded from running, I could hardly get the words out as I tried to twist away from him. My lungs burned.
“Just hold on,” Marcus said.
I pushed against him, but he wasn’t budging. Man, the dude was strong. The pain in my left shoulder felt like a sword cutting through the muscle. “Let me go!” I shouted again. “It’s not your mother. I want to see.”
“Let the police find out what—”
“False alarm!” one of the marines shouted. “It’s just a deer.”
Marcus let go of my arms, and my legs suddenly gave out. I dropped to my butt on the ground, and before I knew what I was doing, I put my head in my hands and cried like a fucking baby.
Chapter Sixteen
Maggie
I FELT LIKE SUCH A FAKE WHEN I DROVE INTO THE FACULTY parking lot at Douglas Elementary. Mom swore that’s where I was supposed to park and she even gave me a placard that said Faculty on it for me to hang from my rearview mirror. But I felt like, by parki
ng there, I was asking for special treatment I didn’t deserve.
Douglas had been my own elementary school years and years ago. As a kid, I’d imagined maybe returning someday as a teacher. I never imagined returning as an ex-con.
I leaned over the passenger seat in my car, pretending to be gathering up my purse and things in case anyone was watching. Really, though, I was gathering up the courage to walk through the parking lot and into the school. It hadn’t scared me all that much when Mom suggested I do my community service there. I was picturing the first graders. I hadn’t pictured the other teachers who would know who I was and why I was there. I’d once been so self-confident. Even a little conceited. Top of my class. Popular and all that. I’d really done a number on my life.
It had taken me just as long to get out of my car near the Food Lion on Friday. I hadn’t planned to join the search for Sara, but I couldn’t sleep Thursday night, thinking about her. I’d spent most of my life loving Sara, but when I found out she’d had an affair with Daddy, I felt nearly as betrayed as Mom did. Sara probably felt just as betrayed by me and what I did, though. Which was more normal? Having an affair or burning kids to death? Right.
I’d wrecked Sara’s and Keith’s lives a year and a half ago. I owed her more than getting her picture up on the Internet and putting together a few flyers. She was in trouble. Maybe lying hurt in the woods. Maybe even dead. All I had to worry about was a little humiliation. Joining the search was the right thing to do.
Friday morning, though, I almost chickened out again. But I put my hair up under a hat and borrowed Mom’s ugly big sunglasses, which I eventually had to take off anyway because it was so dark in the woods. Andy spent the day at the Carmichaels’ house; Mom didn’t think the search was such a great idea for him, not knowing what we’d find—which turned out to be exactly nothing. I told Mom and Uncle Marcus I’d drive myself to the Food Lion so no one would see me get out of Mom’s car and know who I was. I just didn’t want people to go “Hey! There’s Maggie Lockwood. Home from jail.”
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