Secrets She Left Behind

“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.

“Flip wants to know if you have a more recent picture of your mom than the one you gave him at the trailer. Trish is going to do up another press release and she needs one.”

I got a grip on myself. “Be out in a minute,” I said.

“Okay.”

I heard her walk away. I splashed water on my cheeks until I felt settled down enough to face them all again.

Walking back to the family room, I thought of the pictures in the trailer. My mother had pictures of me—the pre-fire me—framed on the bookcases and her dresser, but the one I gave Flip was of both of us, taken on my twelfth birthday. Not exactly recent.

“Keith,” Miss Trish said when I walked into the room. “Do you have a more recent picture of—”

“No.” I cut her off. Then I felt like an asshole. She was only trying to help. “Sorry,” I said. “That was the only one.”

“I might have a picture somewhere,” Laurel said. Good ol’ Laurel, coming to the rescue.

“Me, too,” said Dawn. “I’ll look when I get home.”

“You’ll need a good one for the flyer and the Web sites,” Flip said. He looked at me again. “How about your father?”

My father? The question caught me totally off guard. I glanced at Laurel as I sat down again. I knew she knew about her two-timing dead husband. Marcus knew, of course. Probably Dawn, too. But did Flip?

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Steven Weston.”

Oh. That father.

“I know your parents split up a long time ago, but did your mother stay in touch with him? Or did he stay in touch with you?”

“No, man.” I rammed my hands into my pockets. I still felt kind of shaky and I didn’t want everyone looking at my jittery hands. “He was out of our lives.”

“Do you know his whereabouts?”

“No clue.” Steven Weston deserted me and my mother when I was a baby. I had military insurance because of him, but that was it. I’d never met him and never wanted to. “Me and my mother’ve always been on our own.”

“Is it possible your mother was still in touch with him?” Flip was barking up the wrong tree. “Or maybe just recently got back in touch with him?”

“Why would she?” I asked. “Believe me. He wanted nothing to do with us and we wanted nothing to do with him.”

“I think Keith’s right,” Dawn said. “Sara never mentioned him at all.”

The meeting went on like that awhile longer, with Flip saying what the cops would do and Laurel making her notes and divvying up the workload. I was tired when it was over. Tired and so damn frustrated, because my mother was somewhere out there and we’d been talking and arguing and getting nowhere except further and further from finding her.

And the whole time, nobody said what they were all thinking. What I refused to think, myself. That my mother was probably dead. Nobody said a word about that at all.

Chapter Ten

Maggie

“DO YOU WANT ME TO DRIVE YOU TO THE THERAPIST?” Mom looked at me across the kitchen table. It was just her and me. Uncle Marcus had left for work at the fire station and Andy’d caught the school bus an hour ago. I knew Mom had made his breakfast and probably eaten with him, but she was drinking coffee while I ate my cereal. To be with me. Just to be with me.

Yes, I wanted her to drive me. I knew how all those stars felt with the paparazzi following them around. The reporters were in front of the house again. I’d heard Uncle Marcus out there when I first woke up, telling them to leave Andy alone as he walked to the bus stop. It was one thing for them to hound me, another for them to go after Andy, and I hoped Uncle Marcus walked with him to the corner. Andy wouldn’t know what to say to the vultures, or else he’d say too much. You never knew with him.

If Mom drove me, I could lie down in the backseat until we were past the news vans. But I had to face this mess sooner or later, and it was my mess. Not Mom’s.

“I’ll be okay,” I said. I wasn’t just dreading getting past the reporters, but the appointment itself. What was I supposed to say to a shrink? Open up with my deep dark secrets? Everyone already knew mine. I was an arsonist. A murderer.

“Can you work on the flyer this afternoon?” Mom asked.

“I’m almost done with it already,” I said.

“You are?”

I’d gotten to work on my “assigned tasks” right after the meeting, before Mom even came upstairs to tell me what they were. I’d been sitting at the top of the stairs during the whole meeting, taking my own notes. I’d heard how angry Keith sounded. I got a glimpse of him storming out of the family room, but didn’t see any of his face. I couldn’t blame him for being totally pissed off. He probably had plenty of anger to go around ever since the fire, most of it aimed at me. The least I could do was my part to help find Sara. “I just need a picture of Sara. Did you find one?”

“I did.” Mom stood up and walked over to the refrigerator. She pulled a photograph from behind a magnet. “Will this do?” she asked, handing it to me. It was of Sara and Dawn at Jabeen’s, both of them smiling from behind the counter.

“Yeah.” I wondered if she thought it bothered me to see Dawn in the picture. “I can crop Dawn out and blow Sara up bigger,” I said, like it was no big deal. God, Dawn was so pretty and so mature looking! How could I have thought Ben would be seriously interested in me? I’d been such an idiot.

We still had my white Jetta, only now Andy was learning to drive it. I couldn’t picture it. Andy, behind the wheel of a car? Watch out. Today, though, the car was mine. I got into the Jetta inside our garage. I’d missed driving and that sense of freedom it could give you, but I felt kind of nervous since I hadn’t driven in a year. I had to go through a mental checklist, like a pilot. The car’s in Park. Press the button on the remote to raise the garage door. Turn the key. Give it a little gas. Put it in Reverse. I started backing out of the garage.

Suddenly, there they were in my rearview mirror—the reporters with their cameras, jumping out of their vans. Oh, God. I took my foot off the gas, letting the car come to a stop. Exactly the wrong thing to do. The faster I got past them, the better off I’d be. I floored it. I’d had a few frightening moments in the last couple of years, but flying backward down my driveway toward a bunch of reporters was one of the scariest. I was totally out of control. People jumped out of the way. The crazy girl’s coming! I hit the brake when I got into the street, shifted into Drive and took off with a squeal of my tires.

I raced down our short street and turned onto the main road, glad now that the summer traffic was gone and I could go fast. I’d driven a half mile before I slowed down. Another half mile before my heart did the same.

I wasn’t free at all. Not even a little bit.

I was driving into Hampstead when I noticed the white van behind me. I couldn’t believe it! I should have been more careful. No way was I letting them follow me to the therapist’s office. Maggie Lockwood was seen walking into psychologist Marion Jakes’s office for her court-mandated counseling. I zigzagged all over Hamp-stead until I was a hundred percent sure I’d lost the van. I spotted the little parking lot behind the therapist’s building, but I drove past it to a nearby veterinarian’s office, where I hid the Jetta between a van and a pickup. I felt like I was in a movie. A thriller. By the time I walked into the therapist’s office, I was sweating.

The small waiting room was empty. I sat down in one of the eight chairs and picked up an old copy of Us from the coffee table, but I didn’t open it. I was thinking about the Web sites where I could post Sara’s information. Wow, so many missing people on those sites! It was discouraging, and I wondered if everything I was doing was for nothing. The whole situation didn’t make sense. Sara wasn’t the type of woman to just take off. At least, the Sara I knew before the fire wasn’t. But who knew how this year had changed her? It had changed me plenty.

An enormous man walked through the office door, and I figured he was another patient, maybe waiting for a different therapist. I glanced up just long enough to catch his eggplant-shaped body before quickly lowering my eyes to the magazine cover again.

“Miss Lockwood?” he said.

I was confused. Oh, God. I hoped he wasn’t one of the reporters. “Yes,” I said.

“I’m Dr. Jakes.”

“No,” I said. “Dr. Jakes is a—”

“A woman?” He smiled, and his eyes nearly disappeared above his round cheeks. “I’m Marion Jakes.”

Oh, no. I didn’t budge. The only thing that had made the idea of counseling tolerable was imagining a kindly, maternal sort of woman, maybe my mother’s age, as my shrink. This guy was not only obscenely fat, but he was ancient. The small amount of hair he had on his round head was gray. The buttons of his blue shirt strained at their buttonholes, and he wore ridiculous red, white and blue striped glasses.

“Come in,” he said.

What choice did I have? I got up and followed him into a room even smaller than the waiting room. This one had four leather chairs facing each other, and I sat down in the one closest to the door.

Dr. Jakes took up most of the space in the room. “How are you today?” He dropped into one of the big leather chairs. It creaked beneath him.

“Fine,” I said.

He looked like he didn’t believe me. “You’re very pale,” he said.

“I…I’m fine.”

“Well—” he folded his hands across his belly “—I know why you’re here, of course, since this is court-ordered psychotherapy. I know what you were convicted of doing and that you were released Monday after twelve months in prison. What I don’t know is how you feel about being here.”

He waited for me to speak, but I looked past him, out the window. I wanted to be outside again. I wanted to be home.

“Okay.”

“Just okay?”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to say,” I said.

“Have you ever been in therapy before?”

I shook my head. “Just…you know, the high-school counselor about college, but that’s not therapy, I guess.”

“You had college plans?”

“I was going to go to UNC Wilmington,” I said. “Before…everything happened.”

“Well,” he said, “here’s the way this goes.” He leaned forward and I was afraid he might roll right out of his chair. “We’ll be a team, you and me. Together, we’ll figure out what we should be working on. Set some goals.”

“I don’t really have anything to work on.”

“No?”

I shook my head. “I’m basically a normal person. I just got…sidetracked.”

“I don’t doubt that you’re normal,” he said. “But what you did was not, and it would be good for us to explore why you did what you did so you understand it. So you see the parts of yourself you need to pay attention to in order to prevent something like that from ever happening again.”

“It won’t,” I said.

He smiled, his eyes disappearing again behind his striped glasses. “I’m not a cop,” he said. “You don’t have to give me the answers you think you should be giving. What we talk about in this room stays in this room. The only time I would ever break confidentiality is if I believe you’re going to harm yourself or someone else. I’ll need to let your case manager know that you’ve kept your appointments with me, but not what our sessions are about. All right?”

He had to have some hefty psychological problems himself to be so fat. I couldn’t see how someone like him could help me, but I nodded. I would just nod my way through these sessions.

“What’s it been like for you since Monday?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Being out of prison? Being free?”

“Okay.”

He waited for me to go on. I stared out the window with its view of the parking lot until my eyes watered. Then I looked at my ragged fingernails. He wasn’t going to talk until I did. It was like a standoff. A war, but I had the feeling he could take the silence longer than I could.

“The reporters are everywhere,” I said finally.

“Ah,” he said. “What’s that like for you?”

I shrugged. “I hate it,” I said. “It’s not fair to my family, either. If it was just me…well, that’s bad enough, but I get why they have to be after me. I’m the story. But I want them to leave my brother and mother alone.”

“Tell me about your family.”

“You probably know all about them already. You know about Andy, for sure.”

“I know what everyone else who followed the news about the fire knows, Maggie,” he said. “But even when I listened to the news back then and heard all the details, I couldn’t help but wonder…It’s being in this business, you see.” He smiled. “I couldn’t help but wonder what it was like for you. For the young woman at the center of it all. So, yes. I know about Andy as he was presented by the news media. I want to hear about him—and the rest of your family—from you.”

I sighed. “Okay,” I said, giving in. “Andy’s very sweet and cute and a perfect brother. He’s…You know about the fetal alcohol syndrome?”

He nodded.

I twisted my watchband around and around on my wrist. I was thinking, I almost killed my baby brother. But I wasn’t going to give this guy that much of a peek inside me. “So,” I said, “Andy’s learning to drive and he’s got a girlfriend. He’s really grown up while I’ve been away. And my mother…she’s nice. She looks older than I remember her looking. She and my uncle Marcus…He was my father’s brother—”

“The fire marshal.”

“Right. He and my mother have gotten together.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“Good.” I nodded. “Really good. He still has his own place. One of the Operation Bumblebee towers.”

“Ah.” He smiled. You couldn’t think about the houses made from the old towers without smiling.

“Yeah.” I almost smiled myself. “But he stays over our house sometimes. I guess he’s been there a lot this last year.”

“And how do you—”

“Feel about it?” I finished the sentence for him. “I told you. Good. Especially with the reporters around.” I thought again about Andy walking to the school bus that morning, maybe trying to make sense of the reporters and their questions. Struggling to figure out how to answer them. Before I knew what was happening, my eyes filled with tears.

“You love your family very much,” Dr. Jakes said.

I nodded.

He motioned to the box of tissues on the table next to my chair and I took one and pressed it to my eyes. I did not want to cry here. I didn’t want to give this old sloppy fat man the satisfaction of making me cry. But suddenly, that was all I could do. I cried, and he let me. That’s about all I did for the rest of the session. He said that was okay. Good, even. I had a lot of pain inside me, he said, and we’d have plenty of time together to talk it all through.

“Our session’s nearly up,” he said when I’d gone through half the tissues in the box. “But before you leave, I wanted to ask what your plans are for community service. You have three hundred hours, is that correct?”

I let out a long, shivery breath. I needed to pull myself together in case the reporters had tracked me here and were waiting in the veterinarian’s parking lot.

“My mother…she’s a nurse at Douglas Elementary in Sneads Ferry,” I said. “I’m going to help one of the teachers there. I start Monday.”

“Did you arrange this or did your mother?” he asked.

“My mother,” I said.

He looked like he wanted to say something else, but just nodded. “Okay then.” He pushed himself out of the chair with his hands. “We’ll be meeting twice a week,” he said.

“Right.” Mom had scheduled appointments for me into infinity. I didn’t want to have to cry my eyes out twice a week, but it wasn’t like I had a choice. I stood up and gave him what felt like a dopey smile as I walked past him to the door.

It would have been going too far to say I liked him, but I could have sworn he didn’t look as fat when I left as he did when I arrived.

Chapter Eleven

Andy

I HATED POLICE CARS. MOM SAID I WAS JUST SCARED OF THEM because one night a police car took me to jail. So when the police lady wanted me to ride with her to Wal-Mart, I said no. Mom told her I should practice driving, so we’d take our car instead. Mom was being a quick thinker!

I had a cushion thing I put on the driver seat so I could see good through the window. I kept waiting to get taller but it wasn’t happening. Kimmie was taller than me, but she didn’t care. Some girls cared about that but Uncle Marcus said who’d want a girl who cared about something so trivial? Which meant not very important.

I was an excellent driver. We were supposed to follow the police car, so I tried to keep looking at it, but I had trouble.

“You’re losing her, sweetie,” Mom said.

My speedometer thing said thirty-five. “She’s going too fast.”

Mom laughed. “You’re right. You take your time. We’ll catch up to her at the Wal-Mart.”

We came to the corner I hated. There was no light but a lot of cars. I had to look a lot of different ways and wait and wait. A car behind me honked.

“Take your time,” Mom said.

The car honked again. I didn’t know whether to stay stopped or go.

“Brain,” I said. “You gotta stay focused!”

“That’s right,” Mom said. “Ignore that silly horn.”

Finally, when I was really, really sure it was safe, I drove across the street. Then we were at the Wal-Mart, where I got to practice parking between the lines. I was good at that, except for Mom couldn’t get out and I had to do it again.

The police lady leaned against a brick thing with her arms folded. “Thought I lost you,” she said. She was pretty old. She had on a hat, but I saw her gray hair underneath it.

“You went over the speed limit,” I said.

She laughed. “I probably did. Better write myself a ticket.”

“Yup,” I said. “We can wait.”

But she didn’t write herself a ticket at all. Police can get away with things regular people can’t.