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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.