Diane Chamberlain - Secrets She Left Behind

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.