Secrets She Left Behind

Seeing her, I felt deep concern that the pretty woman from the chapel had been replaced by a ghost. I could see that she had a long recovery ahead of her. Maggie’s delivery must have been horrendous.

“You have a gorgeous baby.” I lowered my eyes to Maggie to hide my shock at Laurel’s appearance.

“Thank you.” Laurel sat down in a rocking chair.

Jamie brought me a glass of iced tea I knew I wouldn’t touch. It would be sweet, no doubt. That Southern abomination.

“You two remember each other, of course,” Jamie said as he sat down on the other end of the sofa.

“Of course,” I said. “Your house is beautiful, Laurel.”

“Thanks.”

“I…Jamie and I thought I should meet with you to see if you have any special instructions about Maggie.”

Laurel shrugged as though she didn’t really care how I took care of her daughter. “Just don’t kill her,” she said.

“Laurel!” Jamie said.

My body must have jerked at Laurel’s words because Maggie started to whimper.

“Shh, honey.” I tightened the blanket around the baby, wondering if Laurel could possibly know about Sam. Who could have told her? I was afraid to look up. I didn’t want to meet her eyes.

Laurel laughed, breaking the tension in the room. “You know what I mean,” she said.

“Well, okay.” I attempted a laugh myself. “I think I can manage that.”

Jamie had a tiny office in the chapel, and that’s where I spent most of my time with Maggie because Laurel didn’t want me in the house.

“It’s not you,” Jamie reassured me. “It’s anyone right now. She’s too tired to have someone around.”

Or the baby around, I thought. It was unspoken between us, but Jamie and I both knew there was something more going on with Laurel than tiredness. Laurel wanted Maggie out of the house. Out of her sight.

The chapel had electricity and Jamie installed a small refrigerator and a hot plate in the little office so I could heat Maggie’s formula. There was also an old-fashioned wooden cradle and a lightweight stroller. I spent my days there with Maggie, reading and teaching myself to knit when I wasn’t feeding, cuddling or changing diapers. I couldn’t believe my luck at being able to spend so much time in the beautiful, simple building. I was drawn to the panoramic windows, and I watched the sea for dolphins and the sky for pelicans. In a way, I finally had beachfront property.

When the weather was mild enough, I took Maggie for walks in the stroller. I’d push the little girl right past the Sea Tender, learning quickly there was no point in stopping in for a visit. Neither Maggie nor I would be welcome.

On Sundays, I sat next to Jamie in the chapel with Maggie on my lap. The first time, Jamie briefly explained to the thirty or so people there that I was helping him and Laurel out with Maggie. When new people came during the summer, though, I wondered if some of them thought I was Jamie’s wife.

It fascinated me to feel Maggie melt into my arms when she heard her father speak. He had a hypnotic quality in his voice that soothed not only Maggie and myself but most of the other people in the chapel as well. With the influx of tourists, the fifty seats were nearly full each week. People stood one after another to say where they recently experienced God, but I rarely stood myself. I felt too raw with emotion in the chapel during the service. In just a couple of months’ time, I’d filled up with such a painful sort of joy that I knew if I tried to speak during the service, I would lose all control. God—Jamie’s God—was with me nearly every minute of every day by then. I had a purpose: I was able to hold a tiny life in my arms. I was able to help Jamie when he so clearly needed my help. Even at home, I caught myself smiling as I made dinner or pressed Steve’s uniform or cleaned the small house we rented. I had enough joy inside myself that the sorrow over Sam, over my loveless marriage, didn’t have a chance to come through.

A few months later, Jamie told me he thought Laurel needed a friend.

“She doesn’t have any friends with babies,” he said. “Not that you have a baby. But you’re so warm and nice and kind.” He looked away from me, as though he’d said more than he meant to. “She’s depressed. She’s not taking care of herself. You know. Grooming. Hygiene.”

“Maybe she needs more help than a friend can give her,” I suggested gently. The truth was, Laurel was unpleasant to be around, and I avoided her as much as possible. There was nothing of the starry-eyed young woman left in her.

Jamie sighed. “You’re probably right.” He sounded tired. “Her doctor thinks she needs that new Prozac medication, but neither of us likes the idea of her taking drugs. I think she just needs a girlfriend.”

He looked so lost. I would have done anything to bring a smile back to his face.

“I’ll visit her one day while you have Maggie,” I said. “Then maybe she and I can have a good talk.”

It had sounded possible when I said it, but I’d had no idea how bad things had gotten with Laurel. She was incapable of having a “good talk” with anyone.

I visited her under the guise of taking over a chicken-and-rice casserole. I found her lying under a thin blanket on the sofa watching a rerun of I Dream of Jeannie. The air in the cottage smelled stale in spite of all the windows being open.

“I brought you a casserole for dinner.” I headed for the kitchen after letting myself in through the unlocked door. “I’ll just put it in the fridge, okay? It should last you at least a couple of nights.”

“Where’s the baby?” Laurel asked.

I looked at her across the breakfast bar. “With Jamie. He’s doing some paperwork in the chapel office. I thought I’d just bring this over and say hi.”

Laurel actually wrinkled her nose as though visiting with me was the last thing she felt like doing.

Tough, I thought. Someone needed to get through to her. She was hurting her husband, not to mention her baby.

I sat down in the rocker near the sofa. “How are you?” I asked.

“Okay.” Laurel kept her gaze glued to the TV.

I leaned toward her. “Seriously, Laurel. How are you feeling?”

She sighed. “Tired.”

“Jamie said your doctor suggested Prozac.” I thought Jamie was wrong to discourage antidepressants.

“That’s none of your business,” Laurel said.

Was she right? Maybe. But I was taking care of her baby and that did make it my business in a way.

“I have a really good friend in Michigan who takes Prozac and it’s made a world of difference for her,” I said.

“I’m not depressed,” Laurel said. “I’m tired. You’d be tired, too, if you had to be up all night with a screaming baby.”

“You’re a nurse,” I said. “You must know depression can be a medical problem. Jamie said you don’t care about anything. Not even Maggie.” I worried I might be going too far. “You were excited about having a baby. I saw that when you announced your pregnancy in the chapel. I think it’s a definite sign of depression that you’re so…disinterested in her.”

Laurel looked at me. “I want you to leave,” she said.

I was blowing it, handling it all wrong. The last thing I wanted to do was make things worse for Jamie, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself. “You’re not being fair to Jamie,” I said. “It’s like he’s a single parent. He’s great with Maggie, but she’s not even going to know who you are.”

I turned at the creaking of the screen door. A young guy walked into the living room and it took me a second to remember that Jamie’s brother, Marcus, lived with them. The rebel, Jamie had called him. He looked harmless. Slender, tan and messy-haired, wearing a T-shirt and green bathing suit.

“You must be Marcus.” I stood up. “I’m Sara Weston.”

“The babysitter.” He’d been drinking, and it was not even noon. I could smell it on him.

“Right. I wanted to stop in to see Laurel.”

“She came over to tell me I’m a shitty mother and a shitty wife,” Laurel said.

“Laurel!” I was stunned. “That’s not what I meant. I’m sorry if I—”

“I told her to leave but she won’t,” Laurel said to Marcus.

I felt my cheeks blaze.

“If she wants you to go, you’d better go,” Marcus said.

“All right.” I raised my hands in surrender. “I’m sorry,” I said, walking to the door. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

In the chapel office, Jamie looked up from his small, wooden desk.

“How’d it go?” he whispered so he wouldn’t wake Maggie, asleep in the cradle.

I was embarrassed when I started to cry. “I didn’t handle it well at all.” I sank into the only other chair in the office. “She kicked me out, and I don’t blame her.”

“Why? What happened?”

I told him about the conversation, grappling in my diaper bag—yes, I had come to think of the diaper bag as mine—for a tissue. I pressed it to my eyes.

“Sara.” Jamie’s chair was on wheels and he moved it closer to take both my hands in his. “It’s not your fault, all right? I set you up for failure. You worked such miracles for Maggie and me that I guess I hoped you could work them for Laurel, too.” He smoothed his thumbs over the back of my hands as he spoke. I curled my own hands involuntarily around his, gripping his fingers.

How do you stand it? I wanted to ask him. How do you stand her? I’d wanted to feel sympathy for Laurel because clearly the woman was ill. But my sympathy could reach only so far. Laurel had a live, beautiful child and she was doing nothing to mother her.

“I didn’t realize what you were coping with at home,” I said. “How bad it is.”

“I hope it’ll pass,” he said. “It’s just going to take more time than I thought.”

“Maybe she does need antidepressants,” I said.

“Maybe,” he acknowledged.

“What keeps you going?” I asked.

“Oh, Sara.” He smiled. “Silly question. I have so much to keep me going. The chapel, to begin with. And her.” He nodded toward Maggie in her cradle. “And the fact that I love Laurel.” He looked at me as if reminding me that he and I were only friends, nothing more.

But the way his thumbs stroked the back of my hands told me something completely different.

Chapter Nine

Keith

DAWN PARKED AT THE END OF THE ROAD BY THE LOCKWOODS’ house so that Stump Sound was right smack in front of us. You could drive straight into it if you wanted. No guardrail or anything. I thought about Jordy Matthews’s mother flying off the high-rise bridge. What would it be like to be inside a car with water pouring in through the windows? If you wanted to die, would you panic or could you peacefully let yourself drown?

The Lockwoods’ house was on our left. There were a few other cars parked nearby, and I wondered how many people would be at this thing, whatever it was.

Dawn looked at me. “You all right, sugar?” she asked. “You look a little green.”

“Never better.” This was the last place I wanted to be. Maggie Lockwood’s house. I was doing it for my mother. Otherwise, no way in hell I’d be there.

The past two mornings, the second I woke up, I looked out the window above my bed, hoping to see my mother’s car. Hoping it had miraculously reappeared overnight. When I saw that it hadn’t, I felt this panic building inside me. It was like when I woke up in the hospital with that effing breathing tube down my throat. I’d never wanted to have that feeling again.

“Okay.” Dawn unsnapped her seat belt. “Let’s go.”

We walked up the sidewalk to the house, which was yellow, the only thing it had in common with our trailer. The house was big for Topsail. Grand, my mother called it. I wouldn’t have gone that far, but having the sound in your yard was nothing to sneeze at.

I’d been there plenty of times back before Maggie torched me and my mother and Laurel’d been friends, but not since then. Not since I found out that I was a Lockwood, too.

“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 her 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.