Breaker's Reef (20 page)

He leaned over and set his elbows on his knees, clasped his hands in front of him. “So are you going out with Scott Crown?”

“No. I mean, just that once. We’re not an official couple or anything.”

The pain in his eyes made her heart ache. Was his interest brotherly, or did he have feelings for her?

He looked at her through his glasses. “Do you like that guy?”

“Who? Scott? Yeah, he’s pretty nice. Do you know him?”

He breathed a laugh. “Yeah, he was in my graduating class. I know him a little too well. That’s why I was surprised to see you with him. He doesn’t seem like your type.”

“I didn’t know I had a type. What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s just … not the most sincere guy in the world. And he has an ego. He can be a real jerk.” He sat up straighter and set his elbow on her desk. “I just want you to be careful. You deserve someone who treats you like a princess.”

Their eyes met, and she saw the longing there. Suddenly she knew he hadn’t come to give her brotherly advice. A soft smile tugged at her lips. “Do you have anyone in mind?”

He smiled then and looked down at his hands, began trying to rub off a callous. “You know, I’ve been wanting to ask you out for a long time. The age thing bothered me a little.”

“We’re not that far apart, Matt. Two years, maybe. I’m eighteen.”

“Yeah, but I’m in college and you’re in high school.”

He had nice eyes. And the glasses gave him an attractive air of intelligence.

“I thought it might be more appropriate to wait.” He shrugged. “Until you graduated.”

“Another whole year?”

“Seemed like a good idea at the time.” He laughed softly. “But when I saw you with Scott, I realized you were old enough to date someone out of high school, and if it wasn’t me, it was going to be someone else. Now it’s probably too late.”

“I didn’t marry him, Matt. I just had a burger with him.”

His eyes met hers. “Then, you’d consider going out with me?”

“Of course I would. When all this is over, and my sister is found …”

The hope in his expression crashed, as if he interpreted that as rejection. “I shouldn’t have even brought it up with all this going on. I really didn’t come in here to do this. I was worried about you, wondering if you were all right.”

“I appreciate that. And I mean it. When all this is over, I want to go out with you. I’ve been hoping you’d ask.”

A slow grin crept across his face. “You have?”

“Yes. Why would that surprise you?”

“I don’t know.” He leaned back and looked at the ceiling as he drew in a deep breath. “Okay, then. I’ll call you when it’s all over, and we’ll go out.”

“Okay.”

“Good.” He smiled into her eyes, and she wished she could just drop everything and go have a Coke with him right now. But she had to find Amelia.

“I’m just … really distracted right now. I’m trying so hard to find Amelia, or to figure out what might have happened to her.”

“I can imagine. I’m like that too, always trying to look out for people in my family. It’s not always a good idea, you know. Sometimes it gets out of hand. You could get hurt, or in trouble.”

“I know. I’ve been warned. I’m being careful.”

“I hope so. You never know who you’re getting tangled up with. And you’re kind of … well … innocent. I’d hate to see anything happen to you.”

It surprised her that he thought of her that way, given her background. The kids at school who talked about her behind her back considered her anything
but
innocent.

She heard a car in the driveway and stood up to look out the window. Scott Crown was getting out.

Matt got up and saw him too. “What’s
he
doing here?”

“I think he came to help me.”

The door opened, and Scott stepped in. He looked surprised to see Matt. “Hi. I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

“No, of course not. Scott, you know my friend Matt Frazier, don’t you?”

“Yeah. How ya doing, Matt?”

Coldly, they shook hands. “Doing fine. You?”

“Pretty good.” Scott looked at Sadie, and she saw he wasn’t any more pleased with the situation than Matt was.

“I was just leaving.” Matt headed for the door. “Let me know if I can do anything, Sadie. I’ll check back on you later.”

“Okay, Matt. Thanks for coming by.”

He didn’t say anything more to Scott as he walked out. Scott waited until the door was closed and turned back to her. “What was that guy doing here?”

“He’s a good friend. He just came by to check on me.”

“You need a better class of friends.” He plopped down in the chair Matt had abandoned. “So have you found anything?”

“Not yet. I just finished going through her yearbook.” She backspaced to the search engine and found the next hit for Amelia.

Scott pulled his chair around to sit beside her. “Look, it’s a blog.”

“A blog? One of those daily journals?”

“Yeah. Never knew why anybody would post personal stuff on a website for all to see.”

Sadie clicked the link, and Amelia’s journal came up. It looked like she’d kept it for the past couple of years. “It’ll take me all night to read all this. I’m going to print it out so I can take it home.”

“Good idea.”

She clicked
print
, then scanned each page as it came off the printer. Amelia had filled the blog with mundane stuff, ramblings about her teachers and her challenges at school. Still, it fascinated her. It was a glimpse into the person most closely related to her by DNA, a person she might never get to know any other way.

“I’m so afraid she’s dead.” Her whisper caught in her throat.

Scott shook his head. “I just have a gut feeling she’s not.”

Sadie appreciated that, even if it wasn’t true. “Gut feelings are sometimes right.”

“Yeah, they are. It was a gut feeling that led me to look in that boat where I found Emily.”

The blog had finished printing, so she pulled the rest of it out. There had to be seventy-five pages or more.

“I’ll tell you what you can do to cut through the rambling.” As he spoke, he selected the text on her blog, copied it, then opened Sadie’s word processing program and pasted it in. “Now, you can do a search for the words
birth mother.
See what she said about her.”

Sadie wouldn’t have thought of that, so she watched, fascinated, as the search took her to an entry Amelia had posted just last month.

Sadie couldn’t stop the tears coming to her eyes. She pursed her lips together and bit the inside of her cheek. Scrolling to the next entry, she saw more thoughts on her mother. “I wonder if this might be helpful to the police.”

Scott nodded. “I was just thinking I need to call my uncle Joe’s attention to this. It’s crazy to put stuff like this up on a public
website. Predators can use it. Maybe someone did, and that’s why she’s missing. If she talked about where and when she was going to look for her mother, someone could bait her and be waiting for her. Maybe there are emails from someone. They could be clues.”

“They confiscated the laptop in her room. I’m sure they’re looking into that.” She sighed. “I wonder if I should show this to my mom.”

“How is she?”

“She’s been in the room crying her eyes out ever since this happened. I can only imagine how she feels.”

“So how old was your mom when she had Amelia?”

“Fifteen. She had me at sixteen.”

“Slow learner, huh?”

Sadie didn’t appreciate the slam against her mother. “I guess so.”

“You know, we have a lot in common, you and I.”

Sadie frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, I came from a teenage pregnancy too.”

“Really, how old was your mom?”

“A little older than yours. Around seventeen.”

“Did she ever marry?”

“Three times.” His face hardened. “To the meanest jerks you could ever imagine. In fact, my mother had a knack for attracting men like that. She was weak.”

“Mine was too.”

He backed off of the blog and went back to Google. “So who do you think was better off? You or your sister?”

She watched the screen as Amelia’s list came back up. “How could I know that for sure?”

“Well, did you have a good life?”

She didn’t want to speak ill of her mother. She loved her. But the truth was that she had not had a particularly good childhood. It had been tough and dangerous and stressful.

Scott read her hesitation. “You don’t have to answer. I can tell you I didn’t. I would have been a lot better off if my mother
had put me up for adoption instead of dragging me around like a ball and chain, working two jobs to keep food on the table. Her life would have been better, too.”

“Maybe from a financial standpoint. But I know my mom’s life wouldn’t have been better without me. She loves me. I’m sure yours loves you too.”

He didn’t answer.

“You don’t think your mother loved you?”

He stopped typing and looked up at the ceiling, as if thinking that over. “Whether she did or not doesn’t make much difference to me. It doesn’t change anything about my life.”

“Of course it does. She loved you enough to keep you, even though she got off to a bad start. I mean, what if she’d chosen the alternative? What if she’d had you aborted?”

He sighed and looked into her eyes. “That’s the thing I don’t get. Abortion.”

Sadie agreed. “Yeah, I don’t get it, either.”

“I’ve always thought that instead of killing the babies, they should kill the mothers.”

She caught her breath. Was he serious? He went back to typing, then broke out in a grin. “Look, here’s something.” He typed a few keys, and she saw a database coming up.

“What’s that?”

“Driver’s license records.”

“How’d you get those?”

“I use them all the time at the station,” he said.

“Yeah, but that’s the police database. You can’t just sign on to it here.”

He grinned and laughed under his breath. “That’s what they think.” While he spoke, his fingers worked on the keyboard, and finally, up came Amelia Roarke’s driver’s license.

Sadie leaned in and studied the picture of the girl who looked so much like her. Amelia had probably fixed up the day she’d gotten her license, had curled her hair and applied her makeup perfectly, as if she’d been going for a photo shoot instead of the line at the
DMV. Her smile was all teeth, as if she giggled deep in her throat at having passed her driver’s exam.

Sadie remembered feeling that giddy too, even though she hadn’t gotten her license until last year. Morgan and Jonathan had taught her to drive and taken her down to the driver’s license office themselves. But she had felt just as giddy that day. Her sister’s stats read that she was a blue-eyed blonde, 5’5″, 120 pounds, with 20/20 eyesight. And she was an organ donor.

Those tears ambushed her again. Scott looked over at her, surprised.

“Hey, what is it?”

She put her hand over her mouth and shook her head. “Nothing. Can I print it out?”

“Sure. Just don’t let on where you got it. In fact, don’t show anybody. I don’t want anybody knowing I can do this. I could get in a lot of trouble.”

She waited for it to print, then took it out and gazed down at it.

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah, fine. It just hit me all of a sudden.”

“What did? That she’s your sister?”

She suddenly wanted to be alone. Glancing down at her watch, she said, “Oh, gosh, look at the time. I really need to go check on my mom.” She got up and looked down at him. “Thanks for coming by, though. You’ve been a big help.”

“I’ll keep working on it, Sadie.” He got up and slid his hands into his pockets, and she saw the sympathy on his face. Matt was wrong about him, she thought. He was sincere.

Any other time she might have been flattered by his attention, even excited that he wanted to spend time with her. But now was not the time. She had important things to do, and working on her love life was not among them.

“Well, I guess I’ll see you later, then, okay?”

“Okay,” he said. “Call me if you need me? I have a few other tricks up my sleeve. I’d be willing to use them if the price was right.”

She didn’t want to ask him what the price was, but when she gave him a strange look, he laughed. “I meant the pleasure of your company over a milkshake or something.”

She smiled then. “When this is over, we’ll go do that.”

When he left, she locked up the place, then took off walking the perimeter of the island to Hanover House. As she walked, she tried to figure out what to do next.

S
heila was still locked in her room when Sadie got home, so she knocked on the door and pushed it open. She saw her mother, scrunched up in a chair, hugging her knees and looking out the window. “Hey, Mom. I just wanted to see if you need anything.”

Her mother’s eyes were swollen and red, and her nose was crimson. She reached out. “Come here, baby.”

Sadie came and sat down on the arm of her chair.

“I’m sorry I fell apart like this. Surprised even me. I go for such long periods of time without even thinking about her. You would think this would just roll right off my back.”