Praise for Diane Chamberlain

Before the Storm

“This is powerful stuff…it is certainly as compulsive and issue-led as Jodi Picoult with whom she is being compared. I couldn’t put it down.”

—The Bookseller

“Chamberlain lays out her latest piece of romantic suspense in a shattered chronology that’s as graceful as it is perfectly paced…her engrossing prose leads the way to redemption.”

—Publishers Weekly

The Bay at Midnight

“This complex tale will stick with you forever.”

—Now Magazine

“Emotional, complex and laced with suspense, this fascinating story is a brilliant read.”

—Closer

“A moving story.”

—Bella

“A brilliantly told thriller.”

—Woman

The Lost Daughter

“A strong tale that deserves a comparison with Jodi Picoult.”

—www.lovereading.co.uk

Secrets She Left Behind
Diane Chamberlain

ONE PLACE. MANY STORIES

For the families of the missing

Acknowledgements

Many people pitched in as I wrote Secrets She Left Behind, helping me understand everything from the juvenile justice system to the plight of a family when someone “goes missing” to the geography of Topsail Island.

For answering my many questions about the police response to a missing adult, my thanks go to Sergeant Art Cunio and Chief Mike Halstead of the Surf City, North Carolina, Police Department. My fictional police department will never measure up to yours!

For helping me understand the impact on a family when a loved one disappears, thank you to Project Jason founder Kelly Jolkowski and Project Jason volunteer Denise Gibb. You two give families hope.

For their unflagging support, thank you to my favourite booksellers, Nancy Olson of Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh and Lori Fisher of Quarter Moon books in Topsail Beach.

For always being there, ready and willing to brainstorm at a moment’s notice, thanks go to my Scribbler buddies: Mary Kay Andrews, Margaret Maron, Katy Munger, Sarah Shaber, Alexandra Sokoloff and Brenda Witchger.

For allowing me to use their Topsail Island homes for my research trips, thank you to Susan Rouse and Dave and Elizabeth Samuels.

For writing Topsail Island: Mayberry by the Sea, my favourite book about the area, thank you, Ray McAllister.

For their various contributions, I’d also like to thank Jean Beasley, Ken and Angie Bogan, Sterling Bryson, BJ Cothran, Evonne Hopkins, Kate Kaprosy, Lottie Koenig, Holly Nicholson, Glen Pierce, Adelle Stavis and Roy Young.

For listening patiently to my story ideas, reading my first drafts, being my resident photographer, smoothing my furrowed brow when I hit a snag in the plot and cooking when I’m on deadline, thank you to John Pagliuca.

As always, I’m grateful to my editor, Miranda Indrigo, and my agent, Susan Ginsburg. I’m lucky to have you two in my corner.

Chapter One

Andy

I SAT ON MISS SARA’S COUCH AND KILLED ALL THE MEGA Warriors. I could usually kill them better, but her TV was way littler than ours and I was sick. That’s why I was in Miss Sara’s trailer. Only I wasn’t supposed to call it a trailer. “It’s a mobile home,” Mom reminded me when she brought me here this morning. Even though she sometimes called it a trailer, too.

Things were different since the fire. Mom said I should call Sara “Miss Sara” like I did when I was little. It’s politer. Miss Sara used to hug me and be real nice and Mom’s best friend. Since the fire, Mom and her hardly even talk. The only reason I was in the mobile home was because Mom was desperate. That’s what she said to Uncle Marcus this morning.

I was still in bed, tired from getting sick from both ends all night long. Uncle Marcus slept over, like he does a lot. I heard Mom say, “I’ve tried everybody. I’m desperate. I’ll have to ask Sara.” Uncle Marcus said he could stay home with me and Mom said, “No! Please, Marcus. I need you with me.”

“I can stay alone,” I called, but it came out quiet on account of being sick. I was sixteen; I didn’t need a babysitter. I was sure I was done barfing, too. I couldn’t be sick anymore because Maggie was coming home today. I wanted to jump up and down and yell “Maggie’s coming home!” but I was too tired. I could only jump up and down in my imagination.

I heard Mom on the phone with Miss Sara. “Please, Sara. I’m sure it’s just a twenty-four-hour bug. I know it’s a huge favor to ask, but I can’t leave him alone. It’ll only be for a few hours.” In the before-the-fire days, Mom would say, “Can you watch Andy today?” and Miss Sara would say, “Sure! No problem!” But this wasn’t those days anymore.

After a minute, Mom said, “Thank you! Oh, thank you so much! We’ll drop him at your house about ten-thirty.”

I pulled the blanket over my head. I didn’t want to get up and get dressed and go to Miss Sara’s trailer. I just wanted to go back to sleep till Maggie got home.

I brought my own pillow with me to the trailer. In the car, I leaned against the window with my head on it. Mom kept turning around from her seat. “Are you okay, Andy?”

“Mmm,” I said. That meant yes, but I was too tired to open my mouth. I knew she wanted to reach back and touch my forehead. She was a nurse and she could tell if you had a fever by touching your forehead. Nurses are very smart like that.

“Just think, Andy,” Uncle Marcus said. “When we pick you up at Sara…Miss Sara’s this afternoon, Maggie will be with us.”

Free, I thought. Maggie would finally be free. I hated visiting her at that stupid prison.

At the trailer, I laid down on Miss Sara’s couch with my pillow. Miss Sara got a blanket and Mom covered me over. She got to put her hand on my forehead then. She gave Miss Sara ginger ale and crackers for me. I started falling asleep as Mom said, “I can’t thank you enough, Sara,” and things like that.

Then she left and I fell asleep for a long time. I woke up and Miss Sara was walking across the living room. She looked right at me. She was carrying a big box with a picture of a pot on it. She stopped walking and put it on the floor.

“How are you feeling?” she asked. She had some lines on her forehead and by her eyes. So did Mom, but not as many.

“’Kay,” I said. My mouth tasted icky.

“You ready for some ginger ale and crackers? Think you can keep them down?”

I nodded. Except for feeling tired and kind of shaky, I was fine. I could’ve stayed home alone, no problem.

I sat up and Miss Sara brought me ginger ale in a glass with ice and crackers on a plate. Her eyes looked like she’d been crying. They were red how your eyes got. She smiled a funny smile at me. I smiled one back at her. People sometimes cried when they were happy and I knew that’s what was going on. Mom had red eyes all week. Miss Sara was probably as happy about Maggie coming home as we all were.

I drank some ginger ale, which tasted good. Miss Sara carried the box outside. When she came back in, she said, “Do you want to play some of Keith’s video games?” Which is how I started playing Mega Warrior.

Now I shot another Mega Warrior and then a Super Mega Warrior, which are the ones with the arrow things on their heads. At least it was a school day and Keith wasn’t home. Keith was one of the people I couldn’t save at the fire. Mom said he could actually die at first, but he didn’t. He got scars, though. His hands and his arms look like they have maps on them, only without the country names. One of his hands is scrunched up, kind of. Part of his face has that map look on it, too. He got held back and now we’re both juniors. He hated me even before I couldn’t save him. I felt sorry for him, though, because of his scars.

The phone rang in the kitchen. I could see Miss Sara pick it up. She made a face.

“You said no later than one-thirty, Laurel!” she said. Laurel was my mom.

One of the regular warriors killed my littlest man. That happened when you forgot to concentrate, like I was doing because I wanted to know what Mom was saying.

“All right,” Miss Sara said. She hung up the phone without saying goodbye, which was rude.

I wasn’t doing so good at Mega Warriors now, but I had good determination and kept trying.

Miss Sara came in the room again. “Your mom said she won’t be back till around four-thirty,” she said.

“Okay.” I killed two Super Mega Warriors in a row. Bang! Bang! Then one killed me.

“Andy? Look at me.”

I looked at her face even though I didn’t stop pushing the controller buttons.

“I need to run to the store,” she said. “Keith’ll be home soon. When he arrives, I need you to give him this envelope, all right?”

She put one of those long white envelopes on the coffee table. It said Keith on it.

“Okay.”

She was in my way. I had to move my head to see the TV.

“Andy!” Miss Sara said. “Look at me!”

I stopped pushing the buttons. She was using an I-mean-business voice.

“Did you hear me?” she asked. “What did I just say?”

“Mom won’t be here until…later.” I couldn’t remember the time she said.

“And what else?” Miss Sara used to be so nice. She’d turned into another lady this year.

“You’re going to the store.”

“And this, Andy.” She picked up the envelope and kind of shook it in front of my face. “What did I say about this?”

“Give the mail to Keith,” I said.

“It’s very important.”

“I’ll give it to him.”

She looked at her watch. “Oh, never mind. I’ll put it where he’ll see it.”

“Okay,” I said.

She walked in the kitchen, then came back again. “All right,” she said. “I’m going now.”

“Goodbye.” I wished she would just go.

I started playing again when she left. Then I got thirsty and my glass was empty. I walked into the kitchen to get more ginger ale. I saw the mail that said Keith on it on the table. She said it was important. What if Keith didn’t see it there?

I took the envelope back in the living room and stuck it in my book bag so I couldn’t forget to give it to him. Then I sat down again to kill some more warriors.

Chapter Two

Maggie

THEY MOVED ME FROM MY CELL HOURS LATER THAN I’D expected because of some paperwork issue Mom had to straighten out. I was afraid they weren’t going to let me go. There’d been some mistake, I thought. A prison official would show up at my cell door and say, Oh, we thought you were in prison for twelve months, but we read the order wrong. It’s really twelve years. It’s amazing the things you can imagine when you’re alone in a cell.

I sat on my skinny bed with my hands folded in my lap and my heart pounding, waiting. An hour. Two hours. I couldn’t budge. Couldn’t open the book I was reading. Just sat there waiting for them to come tell me how twelve months was a mistake and I couldn’t get out today. I deserved the twelve years. Everyone knew that, including me.

But finally, Letitia, my favorite guard, came to get me. I let out my breath like I’d been holding it in for those two hours and started to cry. Outside the bars of my cell, Letitia’s face was nothing more than a dark, wavy blur.

She shook her head at me, and I knew she was wearing that half sneer it took me a few months to recognize as a kind of affection.

“You crying?” she asked. “Girl, you cried the day you come in here and now you crying the day you leave. Make up your mind.”

I tried laughing but it came out more like a whimper.

“Let’s go,” she said, unlocking the door, sliding the bars to the left, and I thought, that’s the last time I’ll ever have to hear that door scrape open. I walked next to Letitia as we started down the broad central hall between the rows of cells, side by side like equals. Two free women. Free. I needed a tissue, but didn’t have one. I wiped my nose with the back of my hand.

“You’ll be back!” one of the women called to me from her cell. Others hooted and hollered. Cussed and shouted. “Yo, bitch! Gonna burn some more kiddies, huh?” BB they called me. Baby Burner, even though the people who died in the fire were two teenagers and an adult. I didn’t fit in. It wasn’t just that I was white. There were plenty of white women in the prison. It wasn’t that I was young. Sixteen was the age at which you were tried as an adult in North Carolina, so there were plenty younger than me. It was, as Letitia told me the first week I got there, that “they can smell the money on you, girl.” I didn’t see how. I didn’t look any different from them, but I guessed everybody knew my story. How I’d laid a fire around a church to let my firefighter boyfriend shine in the department. How I didn’t set the fire when I realized kids would be in the church, but how Keith Weston lit a cigarette, tossing the match on the fuel I’d poured without realizing it was there. How people died and burned and had their lives totally screwed up. They all knew the details, and even though some of them had murdered people, maybe sticking a knife in their best friend’s heart, or they sold drugs to junior-high kids or robbed a store or whatever, they stuck together and I was the outcast.

At the beginning of the year I’d thought about Martha Stewart a lot, how even though she was a rich white woman, she made all these friends in prison and they loved her. Adored her, even. How she came out on top. I told myself maybe that’s how it could be with me.

As Letitia and I went down the wide corridor between the cells, I remembered the first time I’d made that long walk. The hooting and name-calling. I didn’t think of the women as people then. They seemed like wild dogs and I was afraid one of them would break loose and run after me. Now I knew better. They couldn’t get out. I learned it wasn’t when they were in their cells that they could hurt me, but out in the yard. I was beaten up twice, and for someone like me who’d never even been hit, it was terrible. Both times, it was a girl named Lizard. She was six feet tall with thin, straggly, almost colorless hair. She was skinny and her body seemed out of proportion to the long arms and legs she could wrap around you like strands of wire. She let me have it, for no reason I could think of except that she hated me, like so many of the others hated me. I wasn’t good at getting beaten up. I didn’t fight back well. I cowered, covering my face with my hands, while she pounded my ribs and tore handfuls of my dark hair out by the roots. I had one thought running through my mind: I deserve this. You see people getting beaten up in the movies and TV all the time. There’ll be cuts and some blood, but you don’t get to feel the fear while it’s happening. The not-knowing-how-bad-it’ll-get kind of fear. Or the pain that goes on for days. Letitia saved me both times. Then I was “Letitia’s pretty baby.” LPB. They had initials for everything. A lot of the initials I never did figure out because I wasn’t part of the in crowd. I wasn’t the only outsider, though. Not the only one getting picked on. I wasn’t the weakest by far. They’d find the ones who were least able to defend themselves and move in for the kill. All I could think was, thank God Andy wasn’t the one to land in prison. He would never have survived.

I got over the whole Martha Stewart fantasy real fast. After the first couple of days, I didn’t even try to make friends. I kept to myself, reading, thinking about how I was supposed to be in college at UNC Wilmington this year. Maybe a business major, which seemed totally ridiculous to me now. Business? What did that matter, really? Who could I help with a degree in business? What good could I do for anybody but myself and maybe some blood-sucking company? I tried to keep a journal, but I threw it away after a couple of months because I couldn’t stand rereading what I’d written in the first few days about Ben and how I still loved him even though he betrayed me. How I did something so stupid out of love for him. How I killed people. I took lives. I wrote those words over and over on four or five pages of the journal like some third-grade punishment. I’d touch the latest cut on my lip from Lizard or the bruises that crisscrossed my legs and think these are nothing.

Letitia led me into a room that was the closest thing to freedom I’d seen in a year. It was the room where I’d checked into the prison, but it didn’t look the same to me now that I was facing the windows instead of the door that led to the cells. There was a long counter, a few people working at desks behind it. There were orange plastic chairs along one wall. The windows looked out on a sky so blue I barely noticed the rows of barbed wire at the top of a tall chain-link fence. There was something else out there, too: a crowd on the other side of the fence. News vans. People with microphones. People carrying signs I couldn’t read from inside the room. People yelling words I couldn’t hear, punching the signs in the air. I knew that the crowd was there for me, and they weren’t there to welcome me home.

“Yo, girl,” Letitia said when she saw them. “Sure you don’ wanna stay here wit’ the devil you know?”

Letitia was a mind reader. I was shaking so hard my teeth chattered. There was a kind of protection I had in my cell that I wouldn’t have once I walked through the prison gate.

“You sign over here, Lockwood.” A man behind the counter handed me a sheet of paper. I didn’t bother reading it. Just scribbled my name. My hand jerked all over the place.

I spotted my mother and Uncle Marcus on the sidewalk leading up to the building. Delia Martinez, my tiny but tough lawyer, was with them, along with two guards, helping them push through the crowd. I reached for the doorknob.

“It’s locked, girl,” Letitia said. “They goin’ buzz ’em through. Just hold on.”

I heard the buzzer. One of the guards opened the door, and Mom and Uncle Marcus burst into the room, Delia behind them.

“Mama!” I said, though I’d never called her “mama” before in my life. We crashed into each other’s arms, and then I started crying for real. I held on to her, sobbing, my eyes squinched shut, and I couldn’t let go. I didn’t care who was watching or if anyone thought I was holding on to her for too long. I didn’t care if I seemed nine instead of nineteen. I didn’t care if Mom had had enough—though I could tell she didn’t care about anything either. It felt awesome, knowing that. Knowing she’d hold me as long as I needed to be held.

Uncle Marcus hugged me when Mom and I finally let go of each other. He smelled so good! If anyone had asked me how Uncle Marcus smelled, I would have said I didn’t have a clue. But now that I could breathe in his aftershave or shampoo or whatever it was, I knew I’d been smelling that scent all my life. His hand squeezed my neck through my hair and he whispered in my ear, “I’m so glad you’re coming home, babe,” which started me crying all over again.

“When we go out there, Maggie,” Delia said when I finally let go of Uncle Marcus, “you don’t say a word. Okay? Eyes straight ahead. No matter what you hear. What anybody says. No matter what questions they throw at you. Not a word. Got it?”

“Got it.” I looked over my shoulder at Letitia, and she gave me her weird sneer.

“Don’t ever wanna see you in here again, hear?” she said.

I nodded.

“Okay,” Delia said. “Let’s go.”

The guards led us out, and the moment my feet hit the sidewalk, the people went crazy. I could see some of the signs now: Life for Lockwood. Murderer Maggie.

“Eyes straight ahead,” Delia repeated, her hand on my elbow.

Mom’s car was parked right outside the gate so I wouldn’t have to walk very far through the crowd. Still, when we got close to the car, the camera crews threw microphones toward us on long poles. They shouted so many questions I couldn’t separate one from another, not that I planned to answer any of them. I nearly dived into the car, Mom right behind me. Delia got in front, and Uncle Marcus jumped in the driver’s seat.

People pressed against the car as Uncle Marcus slowly drove through the crowd. The car swayed and shook, and I pictured the mob of people lifting up one side of it and rolling it over, crushing us. I put my head down on my knees and protected it with my arms—the crash position for flying. I felt Mom lean over me, covering me like a blanket.

“All clear,” Uncle Marcus called as we turned onto the road.

I lifted my head and the angry shouts of the crowd faded away. Would they follow us to our dead-end street in North Topsail? Surround our house? Who would protect me then?

I could hear Delia and Uncle Marcus talking quietly, but not what they were saying. After about a mile, we pulled to the side of the road behind a black Audi.

Delia turned around and reached for my hand. “I’m getting out here,” she said. “Call if you need me. You stay tough.”

“Okay,” I whispered, thinking that I wasn’t the tough one in the car. Delia was, and I owed my puny twelve-month sentence to her. She’d gotten a bunch of charges against me dismissed or reduced. I had mandatory counseling ahead of me, where I guess I was supposed to figure out why I did what I did so I never did it again. The fire had been a one-time deal. No question there. I didn’t feel like talking to anyone about the whole frickin’ mess. I wasn’t sure what I needed, but I knew it had to be some kind of total overhaul, not a few sessions with a shrink. Then I had three hundred hours of community service. No college for me for a while. Restitution to the families, but Mom was managing that by taking money out of my inheritance from Daddy. How did you pay families for their dead kids?

You’d think after a year in prison, we’d have a lot to talk about, but it was quiet in the car. Sometimes there’s so much to say that you don’t know where to begin.

I’d seen my mother and Uncle Marcus a couple of times a month while I was in prison. Each time, they sat closer together on their side of the table. I knew Uncle Marcus had loved my mother for a long time and I was glad she’d stopped with the ice-queen routine. They were probably lovers by now, but I didn’t want to go there. It was strange enough that my mother was dating my father’s brother.

“How’s Andy?” I asked. I saw my brother about once a month, enough to know he’d grown at least an inch this year, which only made him about five-one. He was filling out a little more, though. He was swimming with the Special Olympics team in Wilmington now and he had a girlfriend named Kimmie. I hadn’t met her, but I was nervous about anyone who could possibly hurt my brother, who had fetal alcohol syndrome.

“Actually,” Mom said, “he had a stomach bug all night.”

“Oh, no.” I hated to think of him sick.

“I hope we don’t all catch it now,” Uncle Marcus said. “Especially you, Mags. Nice homecoming that’d be.”

“Is he home alone?” I asked.

“I left him at Sara’s,” Mom said. “We’ll have to stop there and pick him up.”

Could that be any more bizarre? Sara babysitting Andy while Mom picked me up? Mom’s words just hung there in the car. “You and Sara are friends again?” I asked finally.

Mom sighed. “It’s a little better between us,” she said, “though I wouldn’t use the word ‘friends’ to describe our relationship. I couldn’t find anyone else this morning and he was really so sick I didn’t want to leave him alone. Sara wasn’t thrilled about it, but she said yes.”

Mom looked older than I remembered. I hadn’t noticed it during her visits, but now I could see that the skin above her eyes sagged a little. She’d cut her dark hair short, though, and it looked good. Actually kind of cool. Our hair was the same color, but mine was much thicker and wilder, like Daddy’s had been. I had it in a long ponytail, which is how I wore it the whole year in prison.

“I don’t think it’ll ever be the same between Sara and me,” Mom said. “I’ve let it go, though. My end of it.” I knew she meant the part about Sara having an affair with my father while he was married to Mom. It turned out that my father was also Keith’s father. Surprise, surprise. Andy didn’t know that, though.

“But she’s still upset,” Mom said. “You know.”

Yeah, I knew. Upset about Keith getting burned in the fire. I didn’t blame her. I cried every time I thought about how I’d hurt him. “I won’t go in when we stop there. Okay?” I didn’t want to see Sara and I sure didn’t want to see Keith.

“That’s fine.” Mom sounded relieved, or maybe it was just my imagination.

We drove over the swing bridge that crossed the Intracoastal Waterway.

“Oh, the ocean!” I said, looking toward the horizon. The water was a blue-gray, the sky a bit overcast, but it was beautiful. I’d never take living on the island for granted again.

We were practically the only car on the bridge. Although I usually liked September on Topsail, when most of the tourists were gone and it felt more like home, the lack of cars—of people—suddenly made me realize I would stand out. If the summer crowds had still been there, I could blend in with them. Now, I would know everyone and everyone would know me. I felt sick thinking about the girl I’d been a year ago. The girl who hid out in the Sea Tender and who did crazy things for love. Who led a secret life.

“Mom?” I said.

She rested her hand on mine. “What, sweetie?”

“I’m going to drive you nuts at first,” I said. “I mean, I’m going to tell you everything that I think, okay? I need someone to tell me if I start thinking like a crazy person again.”

“You can tell me anything you like,” she said.

“Remember—” Uncle Marcus looked at me in the rearview mirror “—you’ll have a counselor, too, Mags. You can be completely open with her.”

We pulled into the trailer park and I scrunched down in the seat when Uncle Marcus stopped in front of the Westons’ faded gold double-wide.

“I’ll stay here with Mags,” Uncle Marcus said.

“I’ll just be a minute,” Mom said as she got out of the car.

Uncle Marcus turned in his seat to smile at me. “It’s going to be all right,” he said. His brown hair was really short. Shorter than I’d ever seen it, and he had amazing blue eyes that I’d loved my whole life. He was one of the best people I knew. I could always trust him to be in my corner no matter how I screwed up, and that thought made my eyes prickle.

I bit my lip. “I hope so,” I said.

“Here he comes.”

I sat up to see my brother fly down the steps from the trailer’s small deck and run across the sand. He pulled open the back door and flung himself toward me. I caught him, laughing.

“You’re free!” he said.

“Yup, Panda Bear,” I said. He seemed so much bigger. I brushed his thick hair off his forehead. “Now you’re stuck with me.”

Mom got back in the car, this time in the front passenger seat. “Everything okay with Sara?” Uncle Marcus asked her.

“She wasn’t there,” Mom said.

“She had to go to the store,” Andy said.

“I left a note, thanking her,” Mom said.

No one said it, but I knew why Sara wasn’t there: she didn’t want to see me any more than I wanted to see her.

Chapter Three

Keith

BRIDGET HAMMETT WAS SITTING NEXT TO ME IN ALGEBRA. TO my left. That mattered. I didn’t like anybody sitting on my left side. In most of my classes, I made sure to get the seat next to the window so nobody was on my left, but the first day of algebra, I was late to sixth period and all those seats were taken. So now, Bridget, who was the hottest junior—maybe the hottest girl in all of Douglas High School—was sitting on my left side and texting Sophie Tapper who sat on my right. I knew the text message was about me. It was like I could feel when people were talking about me.

My left arm was killing me and I needed another Percocet. Ten minutes till the bell rang. I needed to get out of there. Not just out of algebra—out of the whole damn school. I came in early today to do this stupid makeup exam, and now I was wiped. I used to leave after seventh period. These days, it was after sixth. Soon it would probably be after fifth. I couldn’t stand being there. Being a fucking junior again. A seventeen-year-old junior. The guy everybody pretended not to stare at. Before the fire, girls were always staring at me. I liked it back then, feeling them watch me in class, knowing they were texting their friends about me. I’d get these e-mails about how they wanted to do it with me. Lots of details in them. Now it was different. I got, like, no e-mails at all. I knew what the girls were saying about me now. How if they looked at me from the right side—as long as they didn’t see my hands and arms—I looked hot. If they looked at me from the left side, I was like something out of a horror flick. There was only so much of that kind of staring I could take before I wanted to toss all the desks out the windows.

The bell finally rang and I was outta there without looking back. I walked straight to my car and got in. Some dealership in Jacksonville donated the car to me after I got out of the hospital. It was a total dork of a car and I wanted to sell it and get a motorcycle, but my mother said that would be an insult and I needed to be grateful and blah blah blah.

I took a Percocet with what was left in a can of Dr Pepper I had stuck in my cup holder that morning. Then I laid rubber pulling out of the parking lot, heading toward the bridge and the beach. I wasn’t going home, though. First, because Mom would be there and I never let her know I was cutting. I didn’t want any grief from her. Second, today, for some total crap reason, Andy was at our house. Today! The day Maggie was getting sprung. The day I’d really like to forget the Lockwood family existed. Mom left a message on my cell about Andy being there, but said he’d be gone by the time I got home. She also said I should come straight home from school, probably because she knew I’d be freaking about Maggie getting out. “If you see any reporters,” she said, “walk right past them. Don’t engage them. You owe them nothing.” Reporters? Shit. They’d better just stay out of my way.

No way was I going home until I was sure Andy was outta there. I wasn’t taking any chances of seeing any Lockwood. Not Andy or Laurel or the bitch who burned my face. It was for her own sake. I might kill her if I saw her. Money could buy you anything, including a get-out-of-jail-free card. She visited me in the hospital before she went to jail and I swear, if I’d known then what I knew now, I would’ve found a way to kill her even with my arms bandaged up to my shoulders. I had this really tasty fantasy of setting her on fire—only someone else would have to light the match. I wasn’t big on flames of any kind these days. But I liked to imagine her getting burned at a stake, like they used to do to witches. She was a witch all right. It was a sick fantasy, but not as sick as burning a church full of kids.

I parked by the pier where the surfers hung out, though the surf was so lame only three other guys were there. I didn’t really know them. The cool thing about surfing was you could be with other people but not really have to be with them. Like talk to them or be close enough so they could stare at your face. The water was still warm enough that I really didn’t need my wet suit, but I put on the top half anyway because I wasn’t supposed to get sun on my arms. I spread sunscreen over my screwed-up face. Then I paddled out and waited for a wave worth riding in. My physical therapist thought surfing was good for me, as long as I could “do it safely.” He meant, as long as I could manage the board with my screwed-up left hand and had enough flexibility in my arms. We worked on that in PT. Talk about pain! But if I skipped the exercises for even one day, I paid big-time.

From the water, I could see our trailer park, though I couldn’t get a good look at our double-wide. It was three back from the road and I could just make out one pale yellow corner of it. Was Andy still there? My half brother? Not that I’d ever let anyone know I was related to that loser.

The three other surfers started talking to each other. Their voices bounced around on the water, but I couldn’t really hear what they said. Then they started paddling toward shore, so I guessed they’d had enough of waiting for a decent wave. I wondered if they’d go somewhere together. Maybe get a burger. Talk about girls. While I just sat alone in the water paddling in place, looking at the corner of our trailer, wishing I had someplace to go myself.

Chapter Four

Sara

The Free Seekers Chapel

1988

THE FIRST THING I NOTICED WAS THE SIMPLE BEAUTY OF THE small, pentagonal building. The scent of wood was so strong, it made me woozy. I felt grounded by it, connected to the earth, as if the smell triggered a primitive memory in me. Through the huge, panoramic windows, I saw the sea surrounding the tiny chapel and I felt as if I were on a five-sided ship, bonded together with twelve fellow sailors.

The second thing I noticed was the man in jeans and a leather jacket. Even though he hadn’t said a word, I could tell he was in charge. Physically, he was imposing in both height and mass, but it was more than that. He was a sorcerer. A magician. Even now, writing about him all these years later, my heart is pounding harder. Without so much as a glance in my direction, he cast a spell over me that was both mystical and intoxicating and—if I’m being completely honest—sexual. In that moment, I realized I’d been missing two things for a long time: I had nothing in the way of a spiritual life, and nearly as empty a sensual life. And really, when those two things are taken away, what’s left?

I sat with the others in an awed silence; then the man got to his feet. Morning sun spilled from the long window nearest the ocean, pooling on his face and in his dark, gentle eyes. He looked around the room, his gaze moving from person to person, until it landed on me. I couldn’t look away. I didn’t want to. He looked inside me to the vast emptiness of my soul. Fill it for me, I was thinking. Help me.

After a moment, he shifted his gaze away from me and back to the others in the chapel. “Where did you experience God this week?” he asked.

Nowhere, I thought. I wasn’t even sure what he meant. All I knew was that I felt at home for the first time since Steve dragged me from Michigan to Camp Lejeune. I didn’t belong in this little Southern enclave, with its hundreds of churches and its thousands of churchgoers with whom I had nothing in common. I didn’t know a grit from a tomato, a moon pie from a potato chip. I felt completely lost when I tried to connect with the other military wives. They missed their husbands who were on temporary duty assignment, while I guiltily looked forward to Steve’s absences. Many of the women were my age—twenty-one—yet I couldn’t seem to breach the gulf between myself and them as they gushed about their men while shopping for groceries at the commissary. I felt as though something was terribly wrong with me. Terribly lacking. Suddenly, though, there I was in an actual church—of sorts—and I felt at home.

There was a long silence after the man asked the question about God, but it wasn’t at all uncomfortable, at least not to me. Finally, the woman next to him stood up. I saw the glitter of the ring on her left hand and thought: his very lucky wife.

“I was lying on the beach last night,” she said, “and I suddenly felt a sense of peace come over me.”

She was pretty. Not beautiful. There is a difference. She was thin in a reedy way. Her hair was incredible in that wash of sunlight. It hung well past her shoulders, and had the slightest wave to it—just enough to keep it from being straight. It was very dark and nearly Asian in its shininess, the polar opposite of my short blond cap of hair. She was fair-skinned with plain brown eyes—nothing like her husband’s—and her face was the shape of a heart. When she looked at the man, though, her eyes lit up. I was jealous. Not of the woman, specifically, but of any woman who could feel what she clearly felt. Total love. An adoration a man like that would return ten times over.

I tried to picture Steve standing up like the man had done, asking about God. Caring so passionately about something. Creating that tiny masterpiece of a building. I assumed, correctly, that the man was the one everyone talked about—the crazy, motorcycle-riding guy who’d built his own chapel. I couldn’t imagine Steve doing anything like that. I couldn’t picture him smiling at me the way the man smiled at his wife as she sat down again. Frankly, I had no idea what went on inside Steve’s mind. I’d married a near stranger because I felt like I had no choice. When you’re young, you have more choices than you’ll ever again have in your life, yet sometimes you can’t see them. I’d truly been blind.

Steve had been so handsome in his uniform on the day of our wedding. I’d convinced myself he was a fine man for offering to marry me when I told him about the baby. I’d accepted his offer, although neither of us talked about love, only about responsibility. I told myself that love would come later.

But that morning, the man with the sun in his eyes made me doubt that loving Steve would ever be possible. Maybe if I’d never set foot in the chapel, everything would have turned out okay. I would have learned to be satisfied with what I had. As I got to my feet after the service, though, I knew it was already too late. The seed was planted for everything that would follow. The damage was already done.

Chapter Five

Maggie

WHEN WE TURNED ONTO OUR SHORT STREET THAT DEAD-ended at the sound, I saw the news vans parked all over the place and people running around, and I suddenly knew what my life was going to be like for the next few days. Or maybe forever.

“Oh, no,” Mom said.

Uncle Marcus let out a noisy, angry breath. “Don’t worry, Mags,” he said. “We’ll pull right into the garage. You won’t have to talk to anyone.”

I scrunched low in my seat, thinking of the prisoners I’d seen on TV hiding their faces with jackets as they walked past the reporters. I always thought they were trying to protect their privacy. Now I understood. It was humiliation that made them want to hide.

Inside the house, I walked from room to room, smoothing my hand over the sofa, the china cabinet, the dining-room table. I loved how familiar everything was. Andy followed me around, talking constantly, like he was trying to make up for all our lost conversations.

In the kitchen, I recognized Uncle Marcus’s Crock-Pot on the counter. I could tell by the smell that Mom was cooking chili. I was glad they weren’t making a big deal out of me coming home. No party or anything like that, where I’d have to see a lot of people. I was totally overjoyed to be home, but it didn’t seem like something we should celebrate.

My room was exactly as I’d left it, with the blue-and-green-striped bedspread on the double bed and framed photographs of Daddy and Andy and some—former—friends on my dresser. There was a white teddy bear I’d never seen before on my pillow, and I picked it up. It was the softest thing! It held a little card that read, Welcome Home! Love, Uncle Marcus. The label on its leg said it was made of angora. A teddy bear might have seemed like a silly present for a nineteen-year-old, but it was totally perfect. How did Uncle Marcus know I needed something exactly like the bear? Something I could hold on to that made me feel kind of innocent, like a little kid who hadn’t meant to do something so wrong.

I carried the bear around with me as I walked through the rest of the house.

Mom’s room was a little different, mostly because of Uncle Marcus. His slippers were on the floor next to the bed. In her bathroom, his shaving stuff and toothbrush and deodorant and everything had taken over the counter around one of the sinks. While I was in her room, the doorbell rang a couple of times. I heard Uncle Marcus talking to whoever it was. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but I figured he was telling them to get lost. Leave us alone.

Andy’s room was exactly the same in every way except one: it smelled different. The air seemed thicker or something. I’d been in the bedrooms of my male friends before I hooked up with Ben, and Andy’s room smelled like theirs did. No longer a little-boy smell. Slightly dirty socks. A little sweat. A little aftershave. It felt weird to be in there.

“Do you want to see pictures?” Andy asked, sitting down at his computer.

“Sure.” I pulled his desk chair next to him and hugged my arms across the teddy bear. “Do you have one of Kimmie?”

“Yeah,” he said, clicking his mouse. He pulled up a bunch of pictures. “This is my Special Olympics team,” he said.

There were ten of them, six boys and four girls, lined up in their bathing suits against a wall. At least seven of them looked like they had Down syndrome. Two of the boys looked totally normal. Then there was Andy. Cute, but much tinier than the rest.

“That’s Matt.” Andy pointed to one of the boys with Down syndrome. “He’s Kimmie’s brother.”

It was coming back to me. Mom had told me Kimmie was one of five kids, all adopted, all special needs. Kimmie wasn’t on the swim team herself, though. Just her brother.

“And this is me and Kimmie.” Andy clicked on another picture.

“She’s so cute!” I said. Kimmie stood a couple of inches taller than Andy. Her dark hair was coming loose from a long ponytail. Ethnically, I couldn’t even guess. Her eyes were sort of Asian. Her skin was nearly as dark as Letitia’s, but she didn’t really look African-American. She wore rectangular glasses and behind them, her eyes were very green. She was beyond cute, actually. She was beautiful. I wondered what her special needs were.

“One of her legs is short,” Andy said as if he knew what I was thinking, which I knew he didn’t. “She was born with a funny foot. They did an operation but it made her limp.”

“Are you in love?” I grinned.

The tops of Andy’s ears turned red and I put my arm around him, hugging him with a giggle.

“Yes,” he said.

“Does she love you back?” She’d better.

“Yes. She helps me. She keeps my stuff in her calendar in case I forget.”

Mom had told me Kimmie’d taken on a sort of second-mother role with Andy, keeping track of his schedule, making sure he remembered things. That used to be my job.

“I can’t wait to meet her, Panda,” I said.

“Don’t call me Panda anymore,” he said. “It’s a baby name.”

For a second, I felt like he was stealing something from me. But I got it. Panda was a baby name.

“Okay, Andrew,” I said, and he laughed.

Suddenly, there was a loud crash from downstairs, followed by a thud. Andy and I looked at each other, frozen like statues.

“Laurel!” Uncle Marcus shouted from somewhere downstairs. “Call the police!”

Andy raced out of the room before I could stop him. I followed him into the hallway, trying to grab his arm.

“Don’t go down!” I said. He was too fast for me, though, and he went flying down the stairs.

“Stay out of there!” I heard Mom yell at him. “There’s glass everywhere.”

“Mom?” I called from the top of the stairs. “What happened?”

“Stay up there, Maggie.” Mom came into view in the downstairs foyer. She was holding the phone to her ear and looking toward the family room. “Someone threw a…I don’t know what it is. A rock, Marcus?”

Uncle Marcus answered her, but I couldn’t hear what he said.

“A chunk of concrete or something,” Mom said. “Someone threw…Yes. Hello?” She spoke into the phone, and her voice was shaking. “This is Laurel Lockwood,” she said. “Someone just threw a piece of concrete through our front window.”

I walked into my bedroom, the teddy bear clutched in my arms. Maybe I should have gone downstairs to help clean up, but I was too freaked out. Things like this didn’t happen on Topsail Island, and I knew it wasn’t any random act of violence. It was me they were after, but it was my family getting hurt.

From my bedroom window after dinner, I could see two of the news vans still outside. What were they going to do, sit there all night? All week? I bet they loved seeing the cops arrive and watching Uncle Marcus put the storm shutters over the broken window.

I closed my blinds. After a while, I got up the courage to turn on my TV and put on the news. Then I sat on my bed, waiting, my chin resting on the teddy bear in my arms. I didn’t have to wait long. Suddenly the screen was full of the people outside the prison, the ones shouting and holding signs.

“Amid protests,” a woman reporter who looked no older than me said, “Maggie Lockwood was released from Kawatchee Women’s Correctional Institution today after serving a twelve-month sentence for the attempted burning of Drury Memorial Church in Surf City.” She went on for a minute about who I was and what I’d done. Then she started interviewing people in the crowd. The first was a dark-haired man who was so angry, little bits of spit flew out of his mouth when he spoke.

“She gets twelve short months in prison and then goes on with her life like nothing happened!” he said.

“I wish,” I said out loud.

“My uncle is dead,” a young woman said. Her face was twisted into a mask of hatred. For me. “He was such a good man. And that girl just scoots out of here with her slick lawyer and everything,” she said. She had to be Mr. Eggles’s niece, since he was the only adult killed in the fire. I thought of my own uncle. Imagined him dead, the victim of someone like me. No! I shuddered, waving my hand in front of my face to erase the thought.

Reverend Bill was on the screen then. I gasped. I so didn’t want to have to look at him! He stood in front of a brick church. The new Drury Memorial? Wow. Totally different. “Many people are angry,” he said. “We’ve managed to rebuild Drury Memorial. We’re nearly finished. But we can’t rebuild those lives that were lost or shattered, and that’s hard for a lot of people. I hope, though, that this can be an opportunity to practice forgiveness.”

Forgiveness? Reverend Bill? What a hypocrite. He hated me. Hated my whole family.

Someone knocked on my bedroom door.

“Come in,” I said.

Mom poked her head inside, glanced at the TV.

“Oh, Maggie. Don’t watch that.”

“It’s all right,” I said.

“Come downstairs and have some ice cream with us. Chocolate-chip mint.”

I shook my head. My stomach hurt. “Stay away from the windows down there,” I said. I was afraid that first chunk of concrete wouldn’t be the last.

“Come on,” Mom insisted. “We want to be with you tonight.”

It was weird in the family room with all the draperies pulled shut. We never closed those draperies, but we didn’t want anyone to be able to look at us while we sat—away from the windows—eating ice cream. At least everyone else was eating, while I pushed the melting green stuff around in my bowl. The phone rang, and Mom picked it up. She looked at the caller ID and shrugged as she handed the phone to Uncle Marcus. I guessed he was the family spokesperson.

“Hello?” he said, then, “Hey. Is everything okay?” I watched a line appear between his eyebrows and wondered who he was talking to. “Okay,” he said. “She’s right here.”

I was afraid he meant me, but he covered the mouthpiece and looked at Laurel. “It’s Keith. He sounds shaken up.”

We were all quiet as Mom took the phone. I tried to picture how Keith looked now. The last time I saw him was in the hospital, when his arms looked like giant white tree stumps, thin steel rods sticking out of the bandages covering the fingers of his left hand. More bandages had covered half his face. I knew he was scarred. No one had told me exactly how bad it was. I could guess, though.

Mom held the phone away from her ear and looked at Andy.

“When Sara…Miss Sara said she was going to the store, did she say when she planned on getting home?” she asked.

Andy licked his spoon. “I don’t think so.”

“Did she say what store? What kind of shopping?”

“I don’t remember.”

She spoke into the phone again. “He doesn’t know anything, Keith,” she said. She stood up, turned her back toward us and walked toward the kitchen. She lowered her voice, but I could still hear her. “Why don’t you try Dawn?” she asked. “Maybe she’ll know something.”

Dawn Reynolds was the woman Ben had cheated on me with. Or, as I admitted to myself this past year, I was the woman—the girl, really—Ben cheated on Dawn with. He’d lived with her, after all. Thank God he’d gone back to his wife in Charlotte and I wouldn’t have to worry about bumping into him. Oh my God. That would be the worst.

“What’s up?” Uncle Marcus asked as Mom hung up the phone and sat down again.

“Keith got home around five, and Sara wasn’t there and she’s still not home.” She picked up her empty ice-cream bowl like she was going to get up and carry it to the kitchen, but she didn’t budge from her seat. “He saw the note I left, thanking her for watching Andy.”

“She probably told him she’d be out and he forgot,” Uncle Marcus said.

“Kind of strange, though.” Mom frowned. “What time did she leave, Andy?”

“Leave where?” Andy asked.

“The trailer. Their mobile home.”

Andy shrugged. “I was killing Mega Warriors,” he said.

Uncle Marcus laughed. “What was your score?”

“My best was 52, 341,” Andy said proudly.

Uncle Marcus smiled at my mother. “The boy has his priorities when it comes to what he remembers and what he doesn’t,” he said. “I’m sure Sara’s fine.”

I listened to the conversation, feeling apart from them all of a sudden. I felt as though I wasn’t really there. Like I was only dreaming that I was home. It was a dream I’d been longing to have all year.

Around ten-thirty, Uncle Marcus went upstairs and I realized he was staying over. I was glad. I didn’t feel safe in our house, and I liked having him there. I thought the news vans were finally gone, but I still felt as though people were sneaking around outside, maybe looking in the windows, maybe carrying something to throw. Oh, God! What if someone torched the house with all of us inside? They might think that perfectly fit my crime.

I went upstairs myself, and for the first time in a year, put on the soft old drawstring shorts and T-shirt I liked to sleep in. The shorts just about fell off me. Wow, I’d lost weight this year. Big-time.

Before I went to prison, I used to always watch some TV from my bed at night, but I’d had it with TV for today. I lay in the darkness for a half hour, imagining I was hearing sounds outside. If someone set fire to our house and it blocked the stairs, what would we do? Andy and I both had these roll-up ladders in our closets that we could hook onto our windowsills, but there was nothing like that in Mom’s room. I started to cry just thinking about how awful it would be.

Finally, I went downstairs, teddy bear in my arms, to make sure everything was locked up tight. I walked barefoot into the dark kitchen. Through the glass door, I could see the moonlight on the sound and our pier. I wanted to go out on the pier and breathe in the smell of the water and feel the salty air on my skin and in my hair. No way did I dare go outside, though.

I walked into the family room and saw that the door to the porch was open, and I froze. I tiptoed toward the porch and peeked around the door frame to see my mother sitting on the glider in the darkness.

“Hi,” I said.

“Can’t sleep?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Come sit with me.”

I glanced toward the street.

“No one’s there,” she said. “Even if they were, they couldn’t see us here, it’s so dark. Sit.” She patted the cushion next to her on the glider.

I sat down. It felt strange to sit next to her like that. I bet I hadn’t sat so close to her since I was a kid. Maybe not even then.

“I’m just biding my time until midnight,” Mom said.

“What’s happening at midnight?”

“I decided if I haven’t heard from Keith by then, I’m calling him to be sure Sara got home all right.”

“She probably did.”

“Probably.”

“Do you know if he talked to Dawn?” I wanted to say her name out loud to let Mom know I could take it. She didn’t need to get weird about it.

“I don’t know. I hope so.” She rocked the glider a little. “You know, Maggie, I’ve gotten to know Dawn better this year.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just…she and I had to clear the air after everything that happened. She was hurt, too, by the situation with…by the triangle between you and her and Ben.”

“I know.” I still felt some leftover hatred for Dawn. It wasn’t her fault, but I couldn’t help it.

“She’s a decent person,” Mom said. “She has a new man in her life now. Frankie. He works at this boat-rental place, and he moved in with her last month. I don’t know him well, but he seems nice.”

I hugged the teddy bear tighter.

“She’s worked very hard to help the victims and their families, getting financial support for them and making sure they had counseling or whatever else they needed.”

“I know,” I whispered. “I saw some of them on the news. Mr. Eggles’s niece was…” I shook my head, not wanting to remember the ugly look on the woman’s face.

“Mr. Eggles’s family is very angry,” Mom said. “A lot of people are still angry. Marcus got a call from the police a little while ago and they said they caught the boy who threw the concrete through our window. It turns out he was a friend of Henderson Wright’s.”

I remembered the poster of Henderson Wright at the memorial service for the fire victims, how he looked like a scared little rabbit. I remembered Reverend Bill saying his family lived in a car.

“Henderson’s family, though, has been more understanding,” Mom said. “They’ve been quite forgiving.”

“Really?”

“Dawn was able to get them into an apartment, and they’re the kind of people who just…” She rocked the glider a little more. “They’re religious. They have a way of accepting what happened that I can’t even imagine.”

I shook my head. I couldn’t imagine it either.

Mom sighed. “I need to tell you about Jordy Matthews’s mother,” she said. “I don’t want you to hear about it through the grapevine.”

Oh, no. Jordy Matthews was the third death in the fire. A really cute blue-eyed blonde with the future ahead of her. I had those posters memorized. I still saw them when I closed my eyes at night. “What about her mother?” I asked.

Mom looked toward the moonlit sound. “She couldn’t get over her grief,” she said. “Not that I blame her for an instant. She tried to kill herself after Jordy died and they put her in a psych hospital for a few months. I guess she seemed better when she got out, but a few weeks ago, she was killed when she flipped her car off the high-rise bridge.”

I sucked in my breath. “She was—” I pictured the bridge, how incredibly hard it would be to drive a car off it. That couldn’t happen by accident. “Suicide?” I asked.

Mom nodded. “It was all too much for her. She was a single mom. She had another daughter in college, but I don’t think she had a good relationship with her, so I guess she felt like she didn’t have anyone or anything else to live for.”

I rested my chin on the teddy bear. “It just goes on and on, doesn’t it?” I said. “What I did.”

Mom put her arm around me. “I know you feel terrible,” she said. “And I didn’t tell you about Ellen—Jordy’s mother—to make you feel worse. But I wanted you to hear it from me.”

I leaned close to her until my head rested on her shoulder. “I’m glad you told me,” I said.

She touched the teddy bear. “Isn’t that the softest thing?”

“You must think I’m nuts, carrying it around.”

“Not nuts at all. I thought it was sweet Marcus got it for you.” “It was.

“Is it uncomfortable for you?” she asked. “Having him stay over?”

I sat up straight again.”It’s awesome,” I said. “It’s like this family’s the way it should be, finally.” I ran my fingers through the angora on the back of the teddy bear. “Are you going to get married?”

“Probably. Would you like that?”

“Yes,” I said. “Definitely.”

She squeezed my shoulder. “Oh, sweetheart, do you have any idea how happy I am to have you home again?” I heard tears in her voice.

“Not as happy as I am to be home.”

“I worry about how this year’s changed you. Hardened you.”

The last thing I felt was hard. “I think it softened me,” I said. “I’m nervous about what happens now, though.” I couldn’t remember the last time I’d confided in my mother. It felt both strange and good.

“We’ll take it one step at a time,” she said. “And I’ll be by your side every minute.” She ran her hand over my cheek. “I forgot to tell you that I made an appointment for you for Thursday with the court-ordered therapist.”

“Already?” I didn’t feel like talking to anyone. Not yet.

“They said you needed your first appointment within a week of your release. And I have an idea for your community service. Do you want to hear it now or maybe tomorrow or later this—”

“Now.” I hadn’t thought about where I would do my community service. Topsail Island wasn’t exactly crawling with opportunities. Plus, the idea of maybe running into all those hurt and pissed-off people was enough to make me nauseous.

“My school,” Mom said. “Douglas Elementary. I spoke to Ms. Terrell—you know, the principal?—and she said you could help out in one of the classrooms. She’s already talked to the first-grade teacher, Mrs. Hadley, who you’ll love, and she said she’d like to have you.”

“Really? I’m an ex-con, Mom.”

“Don’t use that term. You don’t really think of yourself that way, do you?”

Yeah, actually, I did, even though the word made me think of disgusting old men. “That’s what I am,” I said.

“Well, Ms. Terrell didn’t seem to think it would be a problem. She and I have talked a lot this past year and I think she understands who you really are and what led you to do what you did. Would you like that? Working at the school?”

“Yes,” I said. “As long as the teacher, you know, thinks it’s okay.”

I loved that my mother had figured it out for me. Made all the arrangements. She’d left me to take care of myself for most of my life, and this felt good. Plus, she’d made a good choice for me. I wanted to make up to everyone for the fire, but how could I do that when I was afraid to walk out my front door? Little first graders had to be the safest possible choice. They wouldn’t know who I was or what I’d done.

The next best thing to a stuffed teddy bear.

Chapter Six

Keith

MY MOTHER COULD ANNOY THE CRAP OUT OF ME SOMETIMES. She hovered over me, like I was going to die if she didn’t keep her eye on me every second. I almost did kick the bucket after the fire, so I guess that gave her the right to freak out, but it could really get to me. So when I came home from the beach and she wasn’t there, I was glad. And after a couple hours, when I could heat up my own mac and cheese for dinner and eat it in front of a Simpsons rerun without her giving me grief about it, I was still liking it.

The Simpsons was still on when I heard someone on our deck and then a knock on the door. I opened it and saw a couple of guys out there. One was on the other side of our screen door, the other back a ways, holding a camera. The sun was starting to go down behind his head.

“Keith?” the guy closest to me said. “Today Maggie Lockwood was released from prison. As one of the fire victims, can you tell us how you feel about that?”

It took me a couple of seconds to realize what was going on. Reporters!

“No fuckin’ way!” I slammed the door shut in his face, then walked around the trailer yanking down the shades. Like I needed this! Where was my mother? She would’ve answered the door and told those bastards to take a hike off the end of a pier.

When The Simpsons was over, the news came on. I never watched the news, but I wanted to make sure they didn’t say anything about me. They didn’t. Not by name, anyway. But the first thing they showed was this mob outside the prison and Maggie coming out the door, looking pale and scared. The crowd was vicious, shouting and holding these protest signs and everything. I loved it.

“You deserve it, bitch!” I shouted at the TV.

I watched the news awhile longer, then looked at the clock on the stove, which I could see from the couch. Almost seven-thirty. Where was my mother? She probably told me she was going out with Dawn or something and I forgot. I didn’t listen all that much when she talked. But by eight o’clock, which was when she always helped me with my physical-therapy exercises, and she still wasn’t home, I got…worried is the wrong word. Mad. I was mad she hadn’t left a note or anything. She knew I forgot things she told me, and if she was going to miss eight o’clock, then she should have left a note or a message on my cell or something.

I sat in the living room and dialed her cell number. It rang and rang and finally cut to her voice mail.

“It’s eight o’clock,” I said. “Where are you?”

So I called Laurel to see if my mother had said anything to Andy. A sign of total desperation—me calling Laurel. After I talked to her, I called Dawn. Frankie answered the phone and tried to make chitchat with me.

“Just put Dawn on,” I said. I didn’t know what Dawn saw in that dude.

She sounded worried when I said Mom wasn’t home. Dawn’d had no plans with her, and my mother didn’t have much in the way of friends, really. She’d been best friends with Laurel all those years and then this last year she’d been glued to my hip, so she didn’t get out much. Dawn said she hadn’t talked to my mother since the day before at Jabeen’s Java, where they worked together.

I tried to do my exercises by myself. I got out the exercise bands. My mother would pull against them while I pulled back, working all the muscles in my arms and trying to keep the scar tissue from tightening up. It was brutal shit. Without my mother there, I wrapped the bands around the leg of the heaviest chair in the living room, but every time I pulled on the band, the chair moved. My mother would always kind of cheer me on. You can do it. I know it hurts. Keep going. I hated her rah-rah stuff, but without it I wasn’t doing all that good.

I sat like I was supposed to, with my legs stretched out wide on the floor, and got the red band into position on my left arm. I pulled, leaning way back, and the damn chair flipped over on my ankle.

“Goddamn it!” I managed to push the chair off my foot. I threw the band to the floor and stood up, grabbing my cell phone again, punching the number for my mother’s phone.

“Where the hell are you?” I shouted, then rammed the phone into my pocket. Screw the exercises. Screw them. Now my ankle was killing me on top of the whole arm agony. I took a Percocet even though it was a couple of hours before I was supposed to.

I went outside and ran down the deck stairs to my car, moving fast in case the reporters were still hanging around. She went to the store, Andy’d said. Not that I trusted Andy to remember things right, but what else did I have to go on? I couldn’t believe Andy and I were now in the same year when he was dumb as a toad. What did I care, really? School was a waste of time. My mother kept pressuring me, like, what do you want to do when you graduate? I didn’t know the answer to that question before the fire. Now it was as if my choices had been reduced by thousands. Everyone at school was talking about college and how they were going to visit different ones this year, and since so many kids were poor—like us—how they’d get loans or try to get scholarships and all that crap. My counselor said if I could get my grades up, I might be able to get a scholarship myself, but the whole time he was talking to me, he was looking at my right eye so he could avoid the left side of my face. Didn’t want to be caught staring at the freak. Pretending it was a normal dude he was talking to. I was thinking, oh sure, buddy. Once I was out of Douglas High, the last thing I wanted was more school with more kids staring at me. I didn’t bother telling him that if I wanted to go to college, I didn’t need a scholarship. I had a college fund. Guilt money given to me by Marcus Lockwood after Jamie Lockwood—my real father—died. I could only use the money for college, but if I didn’t do college, I could have it when I was twenty-five. Twenty-five! What was I supposed to do till then?

So I headed toward the Food Lion in Hampstead where my mother usually shopped, checking the ditches along the side of the road for her car. It was dark and I had to use a flashlight and I thought, this is so lame. So fucking dramatic. Like what did I think, I was in some movie or something? But then I kept coming back to the fact that it didn’t make sense she was gone. I called her, like, fifteen times. Maybe her cell battery was shot, but still, couldn’t she find a phone somewhere?

Her car wasn’t in the Food Lion parking lot. Then I drove back to the island and checked out the parking lots at Jabeen’s and the restaurants and anyplace else I could think of, mostly because I didn’t know what else to do. I wondered if I should call the police, but that seemed like even more drama. I went home after a while and sat in front of my computer and got online. We didn’t have high-speed Internet, but I could piggyback on someone else’s connection nearly every time I tried. I did what I usually did online. I Googled stuff like suicide and burns and ostracism and grief and all that shit. Sometimes I went to porn sites, but that was so pathetic. I didn’t like thinking about how those sites would probably be the only place I’d get any for the rest of my life. Instead, I liked reading about how burn victims like me felt. Most of them were older. Some of their wives and husbands left them. Couldn’t take the stress, they said, but I bet it was more like the embarrassment of having a partner who looked like a monster.

Most of the burn victims I read about took antidepressants. So did I. If I didn’t, I probably would have offed myself months ago. I still thought about suicide, but not like I used to. Back then, I thought about how I could do it. Get a gun. Hang myself. OD on meds. Every time I thought about my mother finding me dead, though, I’d start crying. Pathetic. I’d turned into a sissy this year. Then I got on the Zoloft and stopped feeling like I wanted to die, but I still wasn’t sure why I should want to live. My mother was worried because they said some kids on antidepressants were more likely to kill themselves. I thought that was interesting and paid attention to how I felt. The truth was, I wanted the Zoloft to push me over the edge. To give me the guts to do it. I started thinking that I could hang myself from this tree over by the police station. I could do it at night so no one would see me until it was too late, and then the cops would be first to find me and they’d cut me down before my mother could see me like that. But on the Zoloft, I started losing the urge. I got more pissed than sad. I felt more like hanging other people than hanging myself. It was Maggie Lockwood I wanted to see dead. Not myself.

I was still surfing the Net around midnight when the phone rang. The caller ID said it was the Lockwoods’ house and I stared at the number for a few seconds, worried it might be Maggie calling to say she was sorry or something. But around the fourth ring, I thought maybe it was Laurel and she knew where my mother was, so I picked it up.

“Did your mom get home okay?” Laurel asked.

“No,” I said. “I don’t know where she is. Dawn doesn’t know either.”

Laurel was quiet. “Did you try her other friends?”

I wasn’t going to let her know there were no other friends. “Nobody knows where she is,” I said.

“Keith, you should call the police. Or if you want, I’ll call them for you.”

“No.” I didn’t want Laurel Lockwood to do anything for me.

“Will you call them, then? Please? I’m worried.”

“Yeah, I’ll call,” I said. It was like she was giving me permission to dive into the drama. Like it wasn’t just me overreacting.

“Let me know what happens, Keith,” she said. “Do you want me to come over there and stay with you?”

Right, I thought. That’s just what I want.

“No. I’m good. I’m getting off so I can call the police.”

A cop showed up half an hour after I called. Must’ve been a slow night in Surf City.

“Hey, Keith,” he said when I opened the door. “I’m Officer Pryor.” His name didn’t register. He was an old guy, and he seemed to know me. But then, everyone knew who I was: the most damaged living victim of the fire. My claim to fame. “Okay if I come in?” he asked.

We sat in the kitchen. He took off his hat, leaving ridges in his gray hair. He knew my mother from Jabeen’s, he told me. Nice lady. Where did I think she was?

“If I knew, I wouldn’t’ve called you,” I said.

He asked me the expected stuff about her description, even though he knew her. A couple of inches shorter than me, I told him. Blue eyes. Short blond hair. Tan. She had that kind of skin that went dark just from walking between the trailer and her car. She’d looked exactly the same my whole life. Never changed that hair or the way she dressed or her routine or anything. She never changed anything. That thought freaked me out. Made me realize how serious this was.

“She’s always home at night to do my exercises with me,” I said. “My physical therapy. And she always makes dinner, unless she’s working and she didn’t work today. Makes no sense.”

He wrote things down on a notepad as I talked. He had fat hands and a gold band on his ring finger.

“Does she have any medical conditions?” he asked.

“No. I mean, except for some arthritis in her knees.” She groaned like an old lady when she got down on the floor with me to do the exercises.

“No seizures or anything like that? Diabetes? Heart problems?”

“No.”

“Did she take any medication?”

I couldn’t ever remember seeing my mother take anything, except maybe cough syrup or vitamins.

“Nothing.”

“How about mental-health problems? Been a hard year for her and you both, with the fire and all. Do you know if she was depressed?”

“Nah,” I said, but I wondered. How would I know? I didn’t think much about what this year had been like for her. “She’s not the depressed type.”

“What does that mean?”

“You know. She’s tough. If she went on one of those Survivor shows, she’d win.”

“Some of those tough survivor types are cream puffs inside.”

“Not my mother.”

“Did you call any of her friends?”

“Dawn Reynolds and Laurel Lockwood.”

He raised his eyebrows when I mentioned the name Lockwood. Probably because of Maggie getting out of prison.

I explained about Andy being sick and staying in our trailer while Laurel went to get Maggie. How Mom told him she was going to the store and just didn’t come back.

“What store would she go to?”

“I guess the Food Lion in Hampstead. I mean, I guess she meant food shopping. I don’t know where else she’d go.”

He had his eyes on his notepad even though he wasn’t writing, and I figured he’d had enough of looking at my face.

“Can you tell me the names of her other friends?”

“She didn’t have a lot,” I said. I didn’t want her to seem totally pathetic, so I named some ladies she used to be in a book club with.

“What church does she go to?”

“She doesn’t.”

“How about men? Was she dating anyone?”

“No.” My mother didn’t date. I couldn’t even imagine it. I couldn’t even imagine her getting close enough to Jamie Lockwood to get pregnant with me.

“Are you sure? Did you ever suspect she was—”

“Trust me,” I said. “Especially this year. I’ve been her date. She made me her full-time job.”

“You angry about that?” he asked. “You sound angry about it.”

“Not angry,” I said. “Just…I don’t want to be babysat.” I noticed him looking into the living room, where the chair that had fallen on me was still on its side. I realized he might suspect me of something. Foul play. Whatever. Like if I was angry at her, maybe I’d hurt her. That pissed me off even more.

“Have you looked around to see if anything’s missing?” he asked.

“You mean, like someone broke in and stole something and she caught them and—”

“It’s just a general question.” He stopped me. “Did she have a suitcase?”

I didn’t know the answer. “She never went anywhere,” I said.

“Well, everyone has a suitcase.”

Actually, I didn’t have one. But, I supposed with all that time my mother spent in Chapel Hill when I was in the hospital, she must have owned a suitcase.

“Can we take a look in her room?” he asked, getting to his feet.

“Sure.” I tried to sound more cooperative, now that I thought he might be suspicious of me.

We had to walk through the living room to get to her bedroom, and he whipped out a camera and took a picture of the chair on its side.

“I was trying to do my exercises,” I said, reaching for the red exercise band I’d tossed on the sofa.

“Leave that there,” he said. I dropped my hand and he snapped a picture of the band.

“Like I said, she always helped me with the exercises, so I put the band around the leg of the chair and when I pulled on it, the chair fell over.”

“Uh-huh.”

We reached my mother’s room. It was small and neat. The bed was made—she was one of those people who made their bed the second they got up in the morning. She tried to get me to do the same, but gave up a long time ago.

The cop stood in the doorway and looked around. My mother would’ve known if I’d moved my comb from one side of my bathroom counter to the other. But in her room, I was totally lost. I never went in there. I had no reason to.

Officer Pryor opened her closet door. “Does this look like more or fewer clothes than she usually has in here?” he asked me.

I leaned around him to look in the closet. “No clue,” I said. “I never…I don’t pay attention to her clothes.”

He walked into her bathroom. “Toothbrush is here,” he said. “Did she have more than one?”

“I don’t know.” Why would she have more than one toothbrush?

“I don’t see any makeup bag,” he said.

Makeup bag? “She didn’t wear much.”

“How about a hair dryer?” he asked. “Did she have one?”

“Nah. Her hair was really short.”

He took a few pictures while I stood in the doorway, then he walked back in her bedroom and started opening the drawers of her dresser, one after the other.

“Really not a lot in here,” he said. “Most women, especially if they live in a small space like your double-wide, have their dresser drawers so full you can’t get them open.”

It bothered me that I was letting this guy paw through her stuff. Through her underwear drawer, for Christ’s sake. I was making way too much out of this. I expected her to come home any minute and say, “What are you doing? I told you I’d be out late tonight.”

“I don’t see a suitcase anywhere.” He was still going through her dresser, like he might find a suitcase in there.

“Maybe she told me she was going away for the night and I forgot or something,” I said. Though, where would she go?

He headed back toward the living room and I followed him. He was looking all around the room while he walked. Taking everything in. “You’re what?” he said. “Eighteen?”

“Yeah,” I said, though I wouldn’t be eighteen for a few months.

“So, she didn’t abandon a minor.” He stood between the kitchen and the living room, his arms folded over his chest. He was staring at the couch. At the red exercise band. Did he think I tried to choke her with it or what? “It looks to me like she left of her own volition,” he said, “since there’s no suitcase—”

“I told you. I’m not even sure she had one.” And she wouldn’t leave me! Did I have to club him over the head with it?

“Look.” He reached into his pocket. Handed me a card. “I’m going to get someone out here to do a more thorough search. Don’t touch anything, all right? Don’t move that chair back upright.”

“The chair doesn’t have anything to do with—”

“Just don’t touch anything,” he said. “Do yourself a favor. Meanwhile, we’ll put a BOLO on her car.”

“What’s a BOLO?”

“A ‘Be on the Lookout’ bulletin. That’ll get authorities to keep an eye out for her. We’ll get Pender County to check the Food Lion parking lot and contact the hospitals.”

“I already checked the Food Lion parking lot.”

“You did? When?”

“A while ago.”

“We’ll be checking it, too,” he said. “We’ll subpoena her phone records and put a tracer on her car, but most likely, she’s out with a friend and lost track of time and forgot to turn her cell on. By the time I get an officer back out here, she’ll be home safe and sound.”

“Right,” I said, trying to calm myself down. I was making a mountain out of a molehill.

I watched him get into his cruiser and drive out to the main road. Then I looked next to my car, to where her car should have been. Where her car always was. And I knew something was very, very wrong.

Chapter Seven

Andy

I WAS STILL IN BED WHEN MY CELL PHONE RANG. KIMMIE! I got out of bed quick and ran over to my desk to get my phone.

“Hi!” I said, probably too loud.

“You better be up,” she said.

“I’m up.” I smiled even though she couldn’t see me.

“Just checking.” She checked on me every morning. “Do you feel better today?”

I had to think. I almost forgot I was sick yesterday. “It was only a twenty-four-hour bug.” That’s what Mom called it. I felt pretty good now.

“I’ll text you later,” she said. “Or you can text me.”

“Okay!”

I hung up and went into the bathroom to take my shower. That was what the chart on my corkboard said for me to do first, but I didn’t need to look at it for every little thing anymore. I was getting smarter.

I met Kimmie at a Special Olympics party. We started out just friends. She was pretty, but not the kind of pretty of any other girl I knew. We danced at the party. Special Olympics people dance really good and are nice. We played games and ate cake and things. The next time I saw Kimmie was at a swim-team practice. She came with her mother and father to watch my friend Matt swim. Her mother was a white lady with yellow hair and her father had brown hair like mine. After swim practice me and Kimmie went in the corner and talked. I made sure to stand four shoe lengths away, which was hard because I had bare feet. And she kept moving closer to me. I didn’t care, though.

“How come you’re America Africa and your parents are white?” I asked her.

“I’m adopted,” she said. “My birth mother is black and I don’t know about my birth father, except they think he was probably part Caucasian and part Japanese or maybe Indian.”

“What does birth mother mean?”

“The woman who gave birth to me. You know, had me. Like your mother had you.” She pointed to Mom, who was talking to my coach.

“Who’s that lady, then?” I pointed to her mother.

“She’s my adoptive mother,” she said. “And the man is my adoptive father.”

“You’re complicated!” I smiled to let her know that wasn’t a bad thing.

“I know.” She smiled back at me.

I knew a lot about Indians. Like she shouldn’t really have said Indian. She should have said “Native American.” “Is your Indian part Cherokee?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Indian. Like from the country India. But they don’t really know exactly where my birth father was from. I just am who I am.”

“I am who I am, too,” I said.

“I think you’re cute,” she said.

I got an instant hard-on. That happened sometimes. I wrapped my towel over my bathing suit so Kimmie couldn’t see how it poked up. I started thinking maybe I didn’t like her as just a friend anymore.

Now, she’s almost the only thing I think about.

After I got all ready, I went downstairs. I hoped Maggie was up. I was so happy she was home!

When I got to the bottom stair, I saw Mom talking to a policeman in the family room. No, no, no! Not again! I didn’t know if I should run back upstairs or what to do. It was like this: first I was a hero, then I wasn’t a hero, then I was a hero again. Sometimes I couldn’t remember which I really was. That’s why I freaked. I decided to sneak into the kitchen so I could get cereal, but Mom saw me.

“Andy, come here, sweetie.”

I didn’t want to turn around. I stayed where I was, looking at the kitchen door.

“It’s okay, Andy,” Mom said. “Remember Officer Cates? He just wants to ask you a few questions about Miss Sara.”

I turned around real slow. I recognized him. He was nice. But I answered three hundred questions after the fire. I knew over a whole year had went by, but I was tired of questions. “I don’t know anything,” I said.

“Hi, Andy,” Officer Cates said. I all of a sudden remembered his first name was Flip. Funny.

“Come sit down,” Mom said.

Her voice told me I had to do it. I sat down on the couch near her. She put her hand on my forehead.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

“Fine.”

“He had a stomach virus yesterday,” she said to Officer Cates, who made an icky face. “Do you want to stay home again today?” Mom asked me. “It might be good to take it easy.”

“I’m okay,” I said. “Is Maggie up yet?”

“Not yet,” she said. “Listen, Andy. I’m very worried. No one’s seen Miss Sara since she left while she was watching you yesterday.”

“Maybe Keith saw her,” I said.

“No, he hasn’t,” Mom said.

“Can you help me out, Andy?” Officer Cates asked. He had a pad and a pen. Police always had them.

“I don’t want to go to jail,” I said. Jail had a little room with a window in the door and mean boys. I would never forget it.

“You won’t be going to jail,” Mom said. “This has nothing to do with you.”

She didn’t think I was going to jail that other time either.

“Tell me exactly what Mrs. Weston said when she left the trailer yesterday,” Officer Cates asked. Mrs. Weston was Miss Sara.

“She was going shopping.” I wasn’t sure about the “exactly” part, but she said something like that.

“Did she say when she’d be back?” he asked.

Mostly what I remembered was the Mega Warriors.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Did she say where she was going shopping?”

I shook my head.

“Did she say grocery shopping or some other kind of store?”

“Grocery shopping, maybe.” Maybe not. I should’ve paid better attention. My leg started jiggling up and down. Officer Cates wrote something on his pad.

“Did you see Keith yesterday?” he asked.

“At his house?”

“Yes.”

“He wasn’t there.”

“Not at all?”

I shook my head. I was sure I didn’t see Keith there.

“What was Mrs. Weston doing while you were there?”

“I don’t know. She was in another room mostly. I was asleep part of the time.”

“Did you see her do anything at all?”

“She got me soda and crackers.”

Mom put her hand on my knee to stop the jiggling.

“Did she talk to anyone on the phone?” Officer Cates asked.

I shook my head. “Oh. Mom,” I remembered. “Mom called.”

He looked at Mom. She nodded. “I called to tell her we’d be late picking Andy up,” she said.

“How did she sound?”

“Annoyed, actually,” Mom said. “I didn’t blame her. She probably wanted to go shopping and was worried about leaving Andy alone. We were three hours later than we thought we’d be.”

“Do you remember exactly what she said?” I liked that he was asking Mom questions and not me.

Mom shook her head. “Something like, ‘you said you’d be home by one-thirty.’ Something like that. I felt terrible. She…we haven’t been close this year and I know it was a big favor to ask her to watch Andy.”

“I could’ve stayed home alone okay,” I said.

“Did she seem angry to you, Andy?” Officer Cates asked.

“No.”

“When she got off the phone with your mom?”

I waited for him to finish the question. He looked at me funny.

“I mean, did she seem angry at all?” he asked. “About anything?”

I shook my head. “She was happy.”

“Happy?” He and Mom both said it at the same time, and I laughed.

“Happy Maggie was coming home,” I said.

“She was?” Mom asked.

“Like how you cried yesterday morning ’cause Maggie was coming home,” I explained. “She kind of did that, too.”

“She was crying?” Officer Cates asked.

“Not exactly.” I knew I had to be very truthful talking to the police. “I didn’t see her cry, but her eyes were red like they get when you cry.” I suddenly remembered the box. “I remember something else she did,” I said.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“She carried a box with a pot on it outside.”

“A pot in a box or on top of a box?” Mom asked.

“No. A picture of a pot. The box had a picture of a pot on it.”

Officer Cates wrote something down. Then he chewed the end of his pen.

“Maybe she was going to return a pot she bought,” Mom said to him. “That’s what she meant when she said she was going to the store.”

Officer Cates nodded. “Possibly,” he said. “So where did she usually shop?”

“She liked the Wal-Mart in Jacksonville, but it could’ve been just about anywhere. I can’t imagine she’d leave Andy that long, though.”

All of a sudden, I heard a brake-screech sound at the end of our street. I jumped up.

“Mom!” I said. “The bus!”

She looked at her watch. “Oh, no. We made you late.” She put her hand around my wrist. “I think we’re done here for now, aren’t we?” She looked at Officer Cates.

He closed his little pad. “For now,” he said.

“You go get some breakfast.” Mom let go of me. “Then I’ll drive you to school.”

I ran into the kitchen and stuck some cinnamon-swirl bread in the toaster. I couldn’t wait to tell Kimmie I was late to school and it wasn’t even my fault.

Chapter Eight

Sara

Stepping into Jamie’s World

1989

I HELD STEVE’S HAND AS WE SLIPPED INTO ONE OF THE PEWS at the Free Seekers Chapel. With Steve home and not interested in going to the chapel, months had passed since my last visit, and the congregation had swollen to thirty people. I spotted Jamie sitting in his usual pew, but Laurel wasn’t with him.

Steve let out one of his long, weary sighs that told me he was already bored, and my chest tightened up at the sound. I’d struggled to explain to him why I wanted to return to the chapel. It was the sense of community, I told him. Being part of something.

“What are you talking about?” he’d asked. “You’re surrounded by military wives. You have a built-in community.”

“This is a spiritual community.”

He stared at me with those steel-gray eyes. “One of the things we had in common is that we weren’t into religion,” he said.

“This is different,” I said. “You’ll see. Please come with me. Otherwise, I’ll go alone.” I felt nervous talking to him that way. Steve wasn’t a mean man, but sometimes I remembered how it felt when he pried my legs apart in the backseat of his car. It hurt, and the animal that took him over didn’t seem to care. I remembered that, and I was always a little afraid to stand up to him. But I needed what I’d found at the chapel. Was it the pull of the beautiful setting or the pull of Jamie Lockwood? I didn’t even want to think about that question.

Steve finally said he would go to the chapel with me, just one time. I felt intimidated by his presence, though, so I didn’t stand up to say where I’d experienced God that week. It would embarrass him. Or maybe I was afraid he’d think I’d been brainwashed. He kept up with the sighing. A few times he shifted in the pew as if longing to get up and stretch his legs. It wasn’t working out as I’d hoped. He wasn’t getting it at all.

After the service was over, Jamie greeted people as he usually did by the exit of the chapel.

“Is there any other way out of here?” Steve whispered as we moved toward the front door.

“I don’t know.” I didn’t care, either. I was already smiling at Jamie, stretching my hand out to shake his.

“It’s good to see you back, Sara,” he said.

“This is my husband, Steve,” I said. “Steve, this is Jamie Lockwood.”

Steve shook his hand. “Nice building,” he said, and I was grateful to him for making the effort to be sociable.

“You have a new baby by now, don’t you?” I asked. The last time I came to the chapel, many months earlier, Laurel had announced her pregnancy. Saying the word baby out loud made my breasts ache.

“I do.” Jamie glowed. “She’s a month old. Her name’s Maggie.”

“Congratulations!” I said. “How’s Laurel?”

He hesitated just long enough to let me know that all was not well with his wife, and I wished I hadn’t asked.

“She’s doing okay,” he said finally. “We’re both a little overwhelmed right now, but I guess that’s to be expected.”

“Let me know if I can help somehow,” I said. “I have plenty of free time.”

Steve nudged me, so I walked forward, making way for the people behind us to talk to Jamie. My offer to help was genuine. I longed to get out of the house, but Steve didn’t want me to work. “None of the guys’ wives work,” he’d said. Anyway, jobs were few, especially for a military wife who might have to move at a moment’s notice.

Jamie caught up to us in the small, sandy parking lot in front of the chapel.

“Were you serious, Sara?” He shaded his eyes from the sun. “About wanting to help?”

“Oh, yes,” I said.

“We can really use it,” he said. “I’ll pay you, of course.”

“No! Please. Let me just help out. Like I said, I have loads of free time.”

I gave him our number, and he wrote it on a small notepad he pulled from the pocket of his jeans.

I felt so happy as I got into the car. I could do something useful for a change. I could help Jamie, touching his life in a positive way, the way he’d touched mine by building his chapel.

Steve and I were nearly to the high-rise bridge before either of us spoke.

“You think that’s a wise thing for you to do?” he asked.

“What do you mean?” I asked, although I knew.

“You know. Taking care of a baby.”

“I want to,” I said.

It was the closest we’d ever come to discussing Sam. I bit my lip, feeling anxious. Finally, Steve was giving me an invitation to talk about him.

“Do you ever think about him?” I asked.

“Who?” he replied.

“Sam.”

He was quiet for so long I thought he was going to ignore the question.

“Doesn’t do any good to think about him,” he said. Then he pointed to a speed-limit sign. Thirty-five miles per hour. “Is that new?” he asked. “I thought it was forty-five along this stretch.”

Jamie suggested I come to the real-estate office where he worked. I supposed he wanted to interview me before accepting my offer of help, but when I walked into his small office, I found him holding the baby. I sat down and he walked around his desk to hand the infant to me.

Every baby looked beautiful to me, even those with cone-shaped heads and scrunched-up faces and homely features. All of them, staggeringly beautiful. Yet Maggie Lockwood was extraordinary even at a month old. She had Jamie’s enormous brown eyes, and they were wide open, already taking in her world. She had a thick crop of dark curls and tiny features carved in pale, flawless porcelain.

“She’s a little colicky,” Jamie said. “But she’s a good baby.”

It was like holding feathers, she was so light. Like holding a miracle. Experiencing God. The thought slipped into my mind, and tears filled my eyes. Could I bear it? Helping to care for this child?

“Are you all right?” Jamie asked.

“She’s just so beautiful.” I felt one tear slip down my cheek, but managed to stop the rest. He’d think I was deranged. Maybe the sort of woman who would steal a baby. I looked up at him, clearing my throat as I grounded myself again in my surroundings. “Is this her first visit to your office?” I asked. “Your coworkers must have flipped over her.”

He tapped his fingers on his desk, not answering right away. “Actually,” he said, “I’ve brought her here all this week.” Leaning forward, he studied his new daughter where she rested quietly in my arms. “Laurel’s having a hard time.”

Was he confiding in me? “I’m so sorry to hear that,” I said.

“She had a very rough start,” he said. “She hemorrhaged during the delivery and is anemic and I think she feels isolated and…unsure of herself.”

“Oh. Poor thing.” I felt sympathy for the woman I’d met only a couple of times. How hard to have a new baby and not feel up to taking care of her. “I hope she feels better soon.”

“Thanks. Me, too.”

I looked at the stack of real-estate brochures on Jamie’s desk. “It’s strange, seeing you here in an office,” I said. “Seeing you look human.”

He laughed. “I’m very human,” he said. “That’s all I am. All I want to be. A good human.”

“I…” I wanted to tell him what my few visits to the chapel had meant to me. I knew I would be going back, with or without Steve. I looked down at Maggie, whose long-lashed eyes were now closed, the lids twitching a little as if she was dreaming. “I don’t know how to explain to you how I feel in your chapel,” I said, raising my gaze to him again. “I’m not religious, so it’s strange. It’s hard to put into words.”

“It’s bigger than words?” he suggested.

I nodded.

“Oh, Sara,” he said. “Welcome to my world.”

Jamie and Laurel lived in a round cottage called the Sea Tender, right on the beach. I didn’t want to feel envy when I walked inside the cottage and took in the ocean view from the living-room windows, yet how could I help it? Clearly, the Lockwoods had money, something I doubted I’d ever have myself.

“Oh, this is fabulous!” I said as Jamie led me through the room to the sofa, Maggie sleeping against his chest. He’d asked me to stop by to “reconnect with Laurel,” since I’d be helping out with the baby. “Have a seat,” he said. He handed Maggie to me. “I’ll let Laurel know you’re here.”

I settled down on the sofa, the sleeping baby on my knees. A few minutes later, Laurel walked into the room. She moved slowly, as though her legs were made of concrete, and I honestly wasn’t certain I would have recognized her. Her hair was long and stringy and dull, her eyes lifeless. Her face was not pale as much as jaundiced, like a tan that was fading in uneven patches. She wore a yellow robe that needed a good washing.

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.

“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.

Inside, we walked to the place where the pots and pans were. The police lady told me to look at all the boxes to see if any of them looked like the one Miss Sara carried. I thought I remembered it perfect. It was red with a big silver pot on it. But when I saw all the different boxes, I got confused.

“Maybe it was blue.” I pointed to a blue box. Then I saw a yellowy one with a funny pan on it, and my memory said that was it. “I think it was this one,” I said.

“That’s an electric wok,” the police lady said. “I thought you said it was a big pot?”

“What’s an electric rock?” I asked Mom.

“Wok,” she said. “It’s a kind of pan. Is that what it looked like?”

I moved my mouth back and forth like I did when I was thinking hard. I felt so mixed up with all those boxes. Maybe it wasn’t even a pot at all. I pointed to a red box that had a white square bowl thing on it. “Maybe it was that one,” I said.

“A casserole?” Mom asked.

I shook my head, because casseroles had lots of different food in them. I didn’t like them. I didn’t like food to touch.

“Memories can play tricks on you sometimes, can’t they?” Mom said. It was her patient voice.

“Can you narrow it down, Andy?” the police lady asked.

I wasn’t sure what “narrow it down” meant.

“Are there any you’re absolutely sure were not the box she was carrying?” Mom asked.

“The little ones,” I said. “It wasn’t little.”

The police lady’s cell phone rang. Mom and me waited while she talked. Mom winked at me.

“Are you excited about Kimmie coming to dinner?” She used a quiet voice because of the police lady talking on the phone.

“Yes!”

Mom put her finger on her lips.

“Yes,” I whispered. I wanted Maggie to meet Kimmie. Maggie wouldn’t come to swim practice because she didn’t like seeing people yet. That was why Mom said Kimmie could come to dinner.

Kimmie told me, “I used to hate going to Matt’s swim practices, but now I can’t wait so I can see you.”

When she said that, I hugged her. I wasn’t supposed to hug people besides my family, but I had to hug Kimmie then. She didn’t mind. She really didn’t. But she said I smelled like cigarettes. She said, “Please don’t smoke.” I threw my cigarettes away.

“Mom?” I said now. She was looking at a can-opener thing.

“What?”

“Me and Kimmie hug sometimes, but she doesn’t mind so it’s okay. Right?”

Mom kept looking at the can opener. It had a handle and she made it go up and down.

“Where are you when you hug?” she asked.

“The pool and her house and our house.”

“In your room?” She looked at me in a way that told me I better say no, even though we did hug in my room once.

“No,” I said. We were allowed in my room with the door open.

“Hugging’s nice,” Mom said. “And Kimmie’s your girlfriend, right?”

I nodded.

“It’s okay to hug your girlfriend.”

The police lady turned off her phone. “That was the manager,” she said. “No pots or pans have been returned in the last few days.”

“So maybe it wasn’t from this store?” Mom asked.

“Right. Or it wasn’t a pot or pan.” She tipped her head funny and looked at me. “Maybe it was actually a wok or a casserole or a potato peeler,” she said.

“What?” I laughed. She was making a joke.

“Or she never made it to the store,” she said.

“Oh, don’t even say that.” Mom had on her worried look. She had it on a lot since Miss Sara went missing.

Everybody was worried about Miss Sara. I got asked a lot of questions by the police and Mom and Uncle Marcus. Even Maggie asked me questions on account of the Web site thing she’s making. Everybody wanted to know what clothes Miss Sara had on. Things like that. I kept telling them I was too sick that day to remember.

I told my friend Max about the questions and he said it was ’cause I was the last person who saw her. He said the police maybe thought I killed her and cut her up in bags. Like her head in a bag and her arm in a different bag. That was stupid. I told Uncle Marcus what Max said and he said, “Max is just yankin’ your chain.”

The police lady looked at her watch. “I’m out of time,” she said. “Can you two go to some more stores on your own? Maybe the Bed Bath and Beyond and the Target?”

Mom nodded. “Of course,” she said. I wished she said no so we could go home and wait for Kimmie.

But we left the Wal-Mart and went to some more stores. I got more confused in every one of them.

“I can’t do this anymore,” I told Mom when we walked outside from the Bed and Beyond store. It wasn’t just because I wanted to go home. My head hurt. Maybe I never even saw a box. Maybe I dreamed I saw it.

“Okay,” she said. “You’ve been a good sport.”

“You be the one to drive home,” I said. I didn’t feel like driving. I felt bad I messed up about the box.

“Okay,” Mom said.

We got in the car. Mom was an excellent driver. She could go real fast in the parking lot around all the cars and everything.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” I said when we got to the road. “I lost the picture of the box in my head. You know my brain.”

Mom smiled at me. “I love your brain, Andy,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”

But I was worried. Miss Sara could be chopped up in bags and I couldn’t even remember if she was carrying a pot or a pan.

Chapter Twelve

Keith

I PARKED IN THE LOT OF THE HARRIS TEETER IN OGDEN. stupid to go all the way there with gas prices like they were, but I couldn’t face seeing people in the Food Lion. People would know me there. Want to talk. They’d ask if I knew any more about my mother’s disappearance, because now it was all over the news. All the time they’d be staring at me. It wasn’t like the people in Ogden wouldn’t recognize me—I wore my ID on my face. But at least there, they wouldn’t try to talk to me.

I got out of the car, grabbed a cart and pushed it into the store, which was pretty crowded. I didn’t have a plan. No list. My mother always had a list and she stuck to it like it was the law. Man, I hated this. I bet it’d been five years since I’d been in a grocery store, and then only because I had to tag along with my mother. If I needed to pick up a snack or something, I did it at the gas station. But our refrigerator was almost empty now, and I was finally starting to get hungry even though thinking about that plate of food at Laurel’s still made me gag.

That was another reason the cops thought my mother left on purpose. “Looks like your mom cleaned out the fridge before she disappeared,” one of them said to me. Screw him. I told him we never had much in the fridge to begin with, but I got the feeling he didn’t believe me.

“She cleans out the fridge, but not her bank account?” I’d asked him. If I needed proof something terrible had happened to my mother, that was it. She never used credit cards, so she wouldn’t take off on purpose without cash. When I started thinking about that, the breathing-tube sort of panic would start again.

The cops had a couple of new theories they were playing with now. First theory: She left on purpose because she couldn’t handle the burden of me anymore. Gimme a break. I was less of a burden now than I’d ever been in my life. I’d had all the fight taken out of me. I knew that wasn’t it, and Dawn and Laurel and Marcus all told them that was crazy. They said how much my mother loved me and how devoted she was to me and all that, which made me feel like a shit for how I treated her sometimes, like she was my maid. I’d be different when she came back.

Second theory: I had something to do with her going missing. They didn’t say that, but I didn’t have to be a genius to know what was going through their heads. A couple of them—a guy named Detective Wiley, and I couldn’t remember the other dude’s name—came to the trailer this morning and went through it again, looking for the diary or memoir or whatever. I’d already looked everywhere I could think of. After they tore the place apart, they talked to me for a couple more hours. Their questions started in one spot and then spun out like a spiderweb, looping all over the place until they had me good and confused. I got angry and told them they were wasting their time, and Wiley said, “Settle down, Keith,” which pissed me off more. Like he could settle down if his mother went missing.

They asked me where I was the afternoon she disappeared.

“In school,” I said. Stupid. I knew the minute I said it, I’d screwed up.

Right in front of me, Wiley called over to Douglas High to check the attendance records. “Uh-huh,” he said into the phone, but he was looking at me with these half-closed, suspicious eyes. “Uh-huh. Right. Thanks.” He turned off his phone and talked to the other guy like I wasn’t even there. “She says he left after sixth period,” he said, and they both looked at me, like, what d’you have to say for yourself now, kid?

“All right,” I said. “I went surfing. By the pier. You can ask anybody.” But I knew the dudes who hung out there wouldn’t be able to say if I was there or not. You could be invisible out in the water. That’s why I liked going there in the first place.

The cops finally left, and I spent the next few hours waiting for them to come back with handcuffs—or worse, with a social worker. I couldn’t believe they still hadn’t figured out I was only seventeen. No one at Laurel’s meeting had ratted on me about it, either. Maybe no one knew? Or cared? That was all right with me. The last thing I needed was to end up in a foster home or something. If the cops thought I was eighteen, I’d be eighteen.

I’d managed to get one of those grocery carts with a squeaky wheel, just so the other shoppers would be sure to notice the burned guy. The wheel made the cart tough to push and probably would have killed my shoulder if I hadn’t doubled up on the Perc again that afternoon. The good news was that, even though I was out of food, I had plenty of Percocet. I got them through the mail and my mother must have just re-upped before she disappeared, because three beautiful bottles arrived that afternoon. When it came to pain meds, at least, I was golden.

I lowered my head as I raced through the store, tossing stuff in the cart, not looking at anybody. I just wanted to make it fast, but I didn’t know where anything was. I found the bread and then got some of those packages of ham and cheese. The cart was getting to me, so I traded it in for a smoother ride. Then I got some toilet paper. Some Coke. I pulled one of the cans from the carton, popped it open and drank it warm as I tooled around the store. I passed the cold beer. Oh, man, what I wouldn’t give for a six-pack! I knew this guy at the gas station who’d buy some for me. He got burned in Iraq, so he knew what it was like. I found the cereal and threw a couple boxes in the cart. Then I noticed the price on the shelf below the Honey Nut Cheerios: $4.49? No way. I put the boxes back on the shelf and started looking through the other stuff I’d stuck in the cart. No prices on anything. How were you supposed to figure this out? I’d planned to get out of there for ten bucks. If everything was as expensive as the cereal, I was screwed. How did my mother do it? She was always cutting coupons, so maybe that was the secret to getting by on the crappy money she made at Jabeen’s. I didn’t want to think about her while I was in the store or I’d end up with another crying fit like I’d had in Laurel’s bathroom. That’d be really smooth in the middle of Harris Teeter.

I stared at the meat counter for a long time. I’d had steak maybe four times in my life, and my mouth actually watered, staring at it. I wasn’t even sure how you cooked it. We had this old charcoal grill, but you needed lighter fluid to grill stuff. Just the thought of spraying the coals with lighter fluid and tossing a match on them made me hyperventilate. I was never going to be one of those guys who got his rocks off cooking things on a grill.

I looked up from the meat counter to see this old lady. She was holding a package of ground beef, and she was staring at me. At my face. I’d let down my guard while I was salivating over the steak.

“What are you lookin’ at?” I asked, shoving my cart past her. I had to get out of there.

I whipped down the first aisle I came to. Canned chili was on sale and I tossed four cans in my cart. Then I saw some rice, which was cheap and had directions on the back, so I couldn’t screw it up. That was enough. I headed for the checkout, wishing I could just steal the stuff and not have to face a checker and count out money and everything. I had twenty dollars in my pocket. What if I had more than twenty dollars’ worth in the cart? Crap.

I spotted boxes of chocolate-covered doughnuts at the end of the cereal aisle for half price. A lot cheaper than cereal. My mother never bought doughnuts, but they looked good. I reached toward one of the boxes.

“I can’t resist them either.”

I looked up to see this totally, totally hot girl smiling at me.

I lowered my head again, fast. “’ Scuse me,” I said, trying to push my cart past her, but her cart sort of had me blocked in. Shit. I started moving backward to get around her.

“Aren’t you going to get the doughnuts?” she asked. Like, what the hell did she care?

“Oh. Right.” I grabbed one of the boxes.

“They’re so yummy,” she said.

I turned my head so the right side of my face was toward her. “Yeah,” I said. I hoped it seemed natural for me to talk to her with my head turned, but it probably just made me look weird. Whatever.

“I totally love Entenmann’s,” she said, and it took me a minute to realize she was talking about the brand. “You put those doughnuts and chocolate together, and I’m powerless.” She looked like she’d never eat a speck of chocolate or anything else that could pack on the pounds, but she was skinny in a good way. Not like one of those anorexic actresses. She had small breasts, the way I liked them, and an inch of flat stomach between her white top and brown pants. Those pants fit her like the chocolate coated the doughnuts. She still had a tan and I could picture her on the beach in a string bikini. Her hair was nearly black and her eyes blue and—Oh, shit! I’d let down my guard again. Turned my head toward her while I was salivating over her. She was still smiling, though. I slipped my bad left hand into my pocket.

“You don’t look like you indulge.” That was out of my mouth before I thought about it. It was the kind of thing I would’ve said to a girl before the fire.

“Well, like I said, chocolate’s my weakness.”

I took my hand out of my pocket long enough to flip open the doughnut box and offer her one. “Your only weakness?” I asked. Whoa. All the way, dude. I felt my smile freeze on my face, waiting for the rejection.

She laughed. Reached for a doughnut. “I’ve got others,” she said. “How about you?”

Was she blind? “Too many to count,” I said.

“So.” She nibbled the doughnut. Licked the chocolate from her lips. “What’re you buying today?” She leaned on my cart to peer inside. Her top wasn’t all that low-cut, but I liked what I could see.

“Shopping cheap,” I said.

“I’m the queen of shopping cheap.” She picked up one of the cans of chili. “Need a little nutrition here, though,” she said.

“That’s good protein,” I said.

“Need some veggies. And fruit.”

“Too expensive.”

“Uh-uh,” she said. “Come with me.”

I followed her, both of us pushing our carts, back to the place where all the fresh stuff was. Her ass was perfectamundo. I had her undressed, legs wrapped around me in a death grip, by the time we reached the apples.

“What do you like?” she asked.

I looked at the stacks of vegetables. “Asparagus,” I said.

“Okay, that is too expensive. How about spinach?”

“I don’t know how to cook it.”

“Just zap it in a little water in the microwave. Covered. Not with plastic, though. That’s toxic. Just stick a paper towel over it. But wash it real well first.” She wrinkled her nose. “It’s gritty.”

It sounded like too much work, but I didn’t complain when she picked up a bag of spinach and handed it to me.

We went through the stacks of fruit and she put a few things in my cart, a few in hers. I started feeling weird. She was being way too sweet, like Dawn or somebody hired her to be nice to me. Something felt off about the whole thing.

“So where do you live?” she asked.

“Surf City.”

“Really? I’m staying in Topsail Beach.”

We were practically neighbors. “Why are you shopping way out here?”

“On my way from an appointment,” she said. “How about you?”

“Same,” I lied.

“Listen—” she suddenly stopped her cart in front of the eggs “—I’m from Asheville and I don’t know people around here. How about I cook you something tonight? Make you dinner?”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “I don’t have many friends here,” she said. “Like none, really.”

“I don’t think so, thanks.” The old me would have given anything for a few hours with a babe like her.

“Oh, come on. Please?” she said. “I don’t usually have to beg guys to spend time with me.”

She didn’t have friends in Topsail, so I’d do for now. Then she’d meet some good-lookin’ dude and sayonara Keith. I could skip the pain. I had bigger things on my mind, anyhow.

“Thanks. I’m just not in a great place right now.”

She tipped her head to one side. “Excuse me for prying,” she said, “but were you one of the people in that fire I heard about?”

I looked away. “Depends on what fire you heard about.” I sounded mean.

“Sorry,” she said. “That was way too personal.”

“No, it’s okay. Yeah. The lock-in fire.”

“You’re still really good-looking,” she said. “I don’t think you know that, but I mean it.”

Oh, man, did I want to believe her, but I had a mirror in the trailer. I knew the truth. What the hell was her game?

“Going through something like that…like a fire and all the recovery and stuff. It’s got to be hard.”

“I really gotta check out.” I started to push my cart past hers.

“I did this all wrong,” she said.

I stopped walking. Couldn’t help myself. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“I came on too strong. Made you feel uncomfortable.”

“I’m not uncomfortable.”

“See? I did it again.”

“Don’t give yourself so much credit.” I started pushing my cart again. “You’re not all that powerful.”

She grabbed the corner of my cart. “I’ve been hurt, too.” She had the kind of blue eyes you could go swimming in. “Only difference is my scars are on the inside,” she said. “But I know what it’s like.”

“You don’t have a fucking clue.”

Her cheeks turned red. “All right,” she said. “Sorry I upset you.” She let go of my cart and began pushing her own away. Why was I being such a prick? She scared me. She could look right at my face and not freak, and that just seemed too damn weird.

“Wait,” I said.

She turned around. Her hair swept through the air like she was in a shampoo commercial. “Sorry,” I said. “You can cook me something. Not tonight, though. I feel like crap today.” Not really the truth. I was nicely medicated, but I needed some time to adjust to a girl like her being interested in me.

“Soon?” she asked. “Can I have your cell number?”

She pulled a scrap of paper from a tiny purse and wrote down my number. She wrote hers down, too, then tore the sheet in two pieces and gave me the half with her number on it.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Keith.”

“Well, hey, Keith,” she said, sticking her hand out toward me. “I’m Jen.”

Chapter Thirteen

Sara

Angel’s Wings

1990

SOMETIME DURING THE FIRST YEAR THAT I BABYSAT MAGGIE, I began leading my double life. It crept up on me gradually until, before I knew it, it had me by the throat. By then it was too late for me to change a thing.

I hadn’t given up trying to help Laurel, despite being so rudely kicked out of the house the first time I visited. Or, I supposed, it was really Jamie I was trying to help. I’d pick up groceries for the Lockwoods when I went to the commissary and I brought over the occasional meal. Laurel tolerated me. She was nearly always on the couch when I arrived, her expression flat as she watched TV. If Maggie was with me, Laurel barely seemed to notice her. I sometimes felt as though I was Maggie’s mother instead of Laurel.

In early January, Jamie’s father was hospitalized with pneumonia. Since Steve was in Monterey studying Arabic, I kept Maggie at our small rental house outside Camp Lejeune while Jamie spent most of his time at the hospital in Wilmington. Jamie called often, ostensibly to check on Maggie, but the conversations quickly began to shift to something deeper. He told me how afraid he was that his father might die. I had lost my father when I was sixteen and it was easy for me to sympathize with him.

“I can’t talk to Laurel about any of this,” he said at the end of one of our phone conversations. “I…It’s not her fault. She loves my father, and I know she’s worried about him, but it’s as though she can’t really see outside herself right now. It’s like she has nothing to give me anymore.” He hesitated. “Or Maggie. Or anyone.”

“I know.” I was sitting in a rattan rocker in the third tiny bedroom of my house—the room that had become Maggie’s nursery away from home. Jamie’d furnished it with a crib, the rocker and a changing table. “It must be so hard for you,” I said.

“I keep reminding myself that she’s sick,” Jamie said. “If she had a physical illness, I’d take care of her, so this shouldn’t be any different. But you’re right. It is hard. I sometimes feel like I’m losing my ability to empathize with people.”

“Oh, no, Jamie,” I said. “I watch what happens when you’re in the chapel on Sundays.” People would file into the small five-sided building, talking quietly among themselves as though the morning was nothing special. Then Jamie would walk into the chapel, and the atmosphere would shift to a higher plane. I could see the change in the faces of the people. I could feel it happening inside my own skin. “Think of how many lives you touch there.”

“Yeah. The lives of strangers.” He sounded annoyed with himself. “Yet Marcus pisses me off, and now I’m scared I’m losing it with Laurel. She doesn’t take care of herself. We have…no physical life anymore. I look at her sometimes and don’t even know who she is.”

I decided to take him into my confidence, the way he was taking me into his.

“It’s not great with Steve and me either,” I admitted.

Jamie hesitated. “I haven’t gotten to know Steve,” he said finally, “but you two do seem like a mismatch. You’re friendly and warm and positive and he’s very…reserved.”

That was putting it mildly. “I’m not sure I’ve ever been in love with him,” I said.

“But you married him,” Jamie said. “There must have been something there.”

I looked over at the crib where Maggie was sleeping. “There was a baby there,” I said finally.

“A baby…?”

“It was so stupid,” I said. “I got pregnant on our second date. We barely knew each other. I was so naive.” And a virgin, I thought, but I was already saying more than I should. “I let things go too far and then it was too late for him to stop.”

“It’s never too late to stop,” Jamie said.

“I let it go too far,” I repeated, remembering the sudden pressure of Steve’s penis pushing against me. Into me. “I asked him to stop, but he was…you know. He was so far gone he couldn’t hear me.”

“He heard you,” Jamie said. “Don’t make excuses for him.”

“He said he didn’t. I believe him. He was—”

“You were date-raped.”

“No.” That was too extreme a description of what had happened. “It was my fault.”

Jamie hesitated again. “But…what happened to the baby?” he asked.

Gripping the phone hard, I started to cry the tears I’d learned to hide from Steve. “He died,” I said. “He was born at thirty weeks. He only lived a few hours.” I could remember the shape of his fingernails and the narrow bridge of his tiny nose as clearly as if I’d given birth to him only a moment before.

“Sara,” Jamie said quietly. “I’m so sorry. Why didn’t you tell me? And here you’ve been taking care of Maggie. I never would have asked you to if I’d known.”

“Taking care of her has helped.” I wiped my tears away, thinking, so this is what it feels like to unburden yourself to a man. I hadn’t even known it was possible.

“Well,” Jamie said after a moment. “At least Steve married you. He took responsibility. A lot of men wouldn’t, especially after dating for such a short time. You two barely knew each other.”

“You’re right. But I had to marry him.”

Jamie was quiet. “You don’t have to stay married to him,” he said finally.

I bit my lip. “And you don’t have to stay married to Laurel.”

“I do,” he answered. “It’s like I said, Sara. She’s sick. That’s different.”

My phone conversations with Steve during that same period were very different from those I had with Jamie. Steve called nearly every day from Monterey. He told me about the other guys in his classes and how hard the work was, but he was always talking about nuts and bolts. Never about his feelings.

“Will that baby be gone by the time I get back?” he asked one time when he heard Maggie crying in the background.

“Would it bother you, having her here?” Maybe having a baby around would remind him of Sam, even though I was quite sure Steve had put Sam completely out of his mind. I imagined the sort of father he would have made. He wouldn’t be like Jamie, that was certain. Where Jamie was open, expansive and uninhibited with his daughter, Steve would have been wooden and mechanical. Jamie cuddled Maggie, cooing to her, telling her flat-out that he loved her, while Steve had never even spoken those words to me.

“It’s just…weird,” Steve said. “It’s like he’s turned that kid over to you to raise. I don’t like it.”

“Well, it’s just while Jamie’s father’s in the hospital,” I said.

“What’s with that whole situation?” Steve asked. “What’s with his wife?”

“They…the baby put a lot of strain on their marriage,” I said. “Especially on Laurel. She’s depressed and not managing things well.”

“Hey!” Steve said abruptly. “If they split up, one of them could rent our spare room. For some extra money, they could even bring the baby. She’s practically living with us for free as it is.” He was always talking about renting out the extra room to one of the guys in his unit. We could use the cash. But Jamie and Laurel split up? I couldn’t imagine it.

The day after that conversation with Steve, Jamie showed up at my house while Maggie was napping. His eyes were red, and I knew before he said a word that his father had died. Without thinking, I wrapped my arms around him while he wept. He clung to me, and I felt the comfortable bulk of him against my body. I wanted to take the hurt away, even though I knew it was one of those hurts that would never disappear completely. I was glad he’d come to me. Laurel didn’t have the capacity to comfort him the way he needed comforting.

After a few minutes, I drew away. “Can you eat?” I asked. “I made beef stew yesterday. I can heat some up.”

He reached for my hand as he sat down at the kitchen table. “Just sit with me awhile,” he said. “Okay?”

I sat across the corner of the table from him while he told me about his father. How smart he was. Tolerant and good-hearted. People called him Daddy L, even those outside the family. Jamie wished I could have met him. He’d been so shrewd, buying up the Topsail Island property when it was cheap, making money that would keep the Lockwoods wealthy for generations.

We sat that way for a long time, Jamie holding my hand while he talked. I focused on the sensation of his skin against mine, so I could remember later exactly how it felt. That’s when my double life truly began to take hold. I pretended to care about Laurel, wanting her to get better for the sake of her husband and daughter, yet at the same time hoping she didn’t, so I could hang on to the part of Jamie and Maggie that I had. Without them, my life would have been too empty to bear.

I was shocked when I realized I was fantasizing about both Steve and Laurel dying. It was easy enough to picture with Laurel. She’d starve herself to death. Maybe even kill herself. Then there was that whole big Iran and Iraq mess heating up in the Middle East and maybe Steve would be deployed there and maybe he would be killed. Then Jamie and I would gradually get closer and closer, comforting each other in our grief until we finally realized we belonged together. We’d get married, and I would adopt Maggie. Maybe we’d go on to have kids of our own.

The fantasy came with a terrible, gut-wrenching guilt, but it was hard to control. I could be sitting in the living room with Steve while he studied for an exam, and I’d be knitting a scarf and killing him off in my mind at the same time.

And then, everything changed.

One day, while Maggie was with Jamie at the chapel, I took some groceries to the Sea Tender. I knocked on the door and when I didn’t get an answer, I went inside to find Laurel sitting on the kitchen floor. It was so unusual to see her off the sofa that I dropped the groceries on the counter and rushed to her side.

“Laurel!” I said. “Are you okay?”

She looked up at me. There was an electric drill in her hand.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Screwing up,” Laurel said with a small laugh. She looked at the drill. “In a couple of months, Maggie’ll be crawling and then walking, and I got worried she could get into the things under the sink here and in the bathroom.”

I saw the small plastic clip in Laurel’s left hand and realized she was trying to childproof the cabinets. Trying to protect her daughter. The brittle part of my heart that I’d reserved for Laurel cracked into slivers like a broken window.

I sank down next to her. “Can I help?”

Laurel stared at the drill. “I think I did it wrong,” she said. “I don’t think the part on the door is exactly in the right place to match up with this piece.”

“Let me see.” I checked the plastic piece she’d screwed into place on the door. It was off just slightly. In the plastic latch and the small crooked screw and the cumbersome drill, I saw the love of a mother for her child. The love that Laurel’s stubborn depression—her stubborn mental illness—could not extinguish.

My eyes suddenly filled with tears. “It’ll be okay,” I said. “We can just put this one a little to the right.” I considered taking the drill from Laurel’s hand and making the hole in the door myself, but it would be better if she did it. With a pencil, I marked the spot for her to drill. I held the door steady and Laurel, biting her lip in concentration, drilled the hole. When she screwed the plastic hook in place, she sighed with exhaustion, as if she’d swum a few laps in a pool.

“Beautiful, Laurel!” I said.

Laurel closed the cabinet door and saw that it hooked. She unhooked it. Hooked it again.