Secrets She Left Behind (12 page)

Maggie

U
NCLE MARCUS WAS AT THE FIRE STATION, SO IT WOULD JUST
be Mom, Andy, Kimmie and me at dinner. I wanted to meet this girl Andy was so nuts about. I still had trouble picturing him with a girlfriend.

Mom had asked me to grill the chicken while she made mashed potatoes and snap peas, but I didn’t want to be out on the deck. There were still a couple of news vans in front of the house, plus anyone in a boat would be able to see me from the sound. I was getting paranoid. I’d already made the late-afternoon news. When I got home from my appointment, Mom said they’d showed film of me racing backward down the driveway like a maniac.

“Why did you do that, sweetie?” she’d asked me. “Were you scared?”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said. She hugged me and I got teary all over again. I was a mess today, and I was mad at myself for giving the stupid reporters such a perfect opportunity to talk about me again. I wasn’t going out on the deck to give them another Maggie Lockwood display.

Mom understood, and she grilled the chicken while I made the mashed potatoes and snap peas and Andy made the salad. I whipped Mom’s potatoes without butter in a separate bowl. That part of
Mom hadn’t changed—she was still a health freak. Still jogged all the time and took a dozen vitamins in the morning and watched every smidgen of trans-fat she put in her mouth. But she’d changed a lot in other ways. I could honestly say I never knew what it felt like to have a real mother before. Now I knew. It felt like a safety net, made out of self-healing fabric, that would always be there for me. I guessed I’d always loved her, but I never felt like she loved me back until now. Until this year. Bizarre. Screw up royally and suddenly I had a mother.

Kimmie’s father dropped her off just as Mom finished grilling the chicken. Oh my God, I so got why Andy was gaga over this girl! In person, Kimmie’s looks were even more intriguing than in the picture Andy showed me. Her thick dark hair hung nearly to her waist, and those green eyes were beautiful, though almost eerie, against her dark skin. I’d never seen anything like them before. She had a pronounced limp that I forgot the second I saw her wide, white smile. Her personality wasn’t exactly typical, either. I loved my brother with every bit of my heart, but I never honestly thought a girl could love him, too. Kimmie did. I was sure of it. When she walked into the kitchen with Andy, I saw how she was looking at him. She could barely take her eyes off him to glance at me. I’d always thought of Andy, with his curly brown hair and big dark eyes, as cute. All of a sudden, I could see what a girl his age might see in him. He was very short, true, but he was good-looking. The right girl might even think he was hot.

“I’m making the salad,” he told Kimmie after he finally got around to introducing me to her. He pointed to the cutting board. “I’m cutting the green pepper.”

“I’ll cut the tomato,” she said, pulling a knife from the knife block near the stove.

I watched them as I covered the bowls of mashed potatoes with aluminum foil to keep them warm. Kimmie directed his chopping, and it was like she was half girlfriend, half mother to him. That was exactly the kind of girl he needed in his life.

When we sat down at the kitchen table to eat, Kimmie said grace, something we never bothered with, although I’m pretty sure we did when Daddy was alive.

“Thank you, heavenly father, for this beautiful food,” she said, “and for bringing Andy’s sister, Maggie, home safe and sound. Amen.”

“Amen,” Andy and Mom said. Clearly, they knew this new-tome routine with Kimmie. As for me, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to swallow any of the “beautiful food” around the lump in my throat.

“Thank you, Kimmie,” I said. “That was really nice.”

We started passing plates and bowls around the table.

“So,” Kimmie said to Andy after we’d been eating awhile, “I don’t understand why you had to look at all those boxes.”

Andy remembered to swallow whatever he was chewing before he answered. “Because of Miss Sara going missing, and she had a box,” he said.

Kimmie rolled her eyes. “That makes no sense,” she said.

I wanted to come to his defense. I didn’t like it when anyone put down my brother. I opened my mouth to say something, but Mom held up a hand to shush me.

“Yes, too, it makes sense,” Andy said.

“Explain it better,” Kimmie said. “I know Mrs. Weston went missing. Where did she have a box?”

“In the trailer.”

Kimmie waited. If it had been up to me, I would have asked him another question, like
when
did she have the box? What was she
doing with it? That’s how Mom and Uncle Marcus and I always handled Andy. But Kimmie had her own way, and although I itched with discomfort that she wasn’t doing it “right,” Mom obviously didn’t want me to jump in.

“I woke up and she carried a box with a pot on it,” Andy said. “Outside. I think she carried it outside. But I got confused at the store.”

“I can picture it now,” Kimmie said. “The police wanted to find out if you saw a box at the store like the one she carried.”

“Right.” Andy looked at me. “Kimmie’s real smart.”

“Everybody’s got things they’re good at and things they’re not good at,” Kimmie said.

“Like I swim good,” Andy said. “Even though not as good as I used to.”

“You’re an awesome swimmer,” Kimmie said. She looked at me. “My father said I’m the brains and Andy’s the brawn, and together we make a perfect person.”

Oh, wow. I felt that lump in my throat again. What was with me? What she said was so sweet. At the same time, though, I wanted to reach over, clench her wrist in my hand and say, “Don’t you ever,
ever
hurt him!”

I was trying to figure her out. She was not quite all there when it came to brainpower, but she was more all there than Andy. IQ-wise, she was probably somewhere around his low normal range, but she didn’t have his developmental issues. His “concrete thinking,” as Mom always called it. Kimmie didn’t seem to have that burden. Plus, unlike Andy, she had some definite social skills.

“Andy said you’re going to do community service at his school,” she said to me, like an adult might say to start a conversation.

“Not at his school,” I said. “At the elementary school right near
his.” I’d start there on Monday. Way too soon. I wished I had another week—better yet, another
month—
before I had to be so public.

“Why don’t you do your commutity service at my school?” Andy asked.

“Community,” Mom corrected.

“Because Mom already got the okay for me to do it at Douglas Elementary, since she works there.”

Andy stuck his fork in a piece of green pepper. “My friend Max’s sister goes there,” he said, “and his father doesn’t want you there. So you should come to my school.”

I stopped my glass of water halfway to my mouth and looked at my mother. “Is it going to be a problem?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” Mom said. “Not with Ms. Terrell’s and Mrs. Hadley’s blessings.”

“We can watch a movie after dinner,” Andy said to Kimmie, as if he’d already forgotten we were talking about my community service.

“You have some makeup work to do, Andy,” Mom said.

“I’ll help you with your homework and then we can watch,” Kimmie said.

“Don’t do it for him, Kimmie,” Mom warned.

Kimmie rolled her eyes. She had that move perfected. “I never do, Miss Laurel,” she said.

I started clearing the dishes once Kimmie and Andy’d left the room. “She’s really cute,” I said to Mom.

“She’s good for him, I think.” Mom opened the dishwasher.

“It’s weird, though,” I said.

“What is?”

I tried to find the words. “Seeing someone else talk to him like family.”

“Well, it took a while. You’ve missed out on watching their relationship develop.”

I scraped the leftover potatoes into a plastic container. I’d missed out on so much this year. Watching the relationship between Uncle Marcus and Mom develop, too, for example. So much had changed. Me, most of all.

I snapped the lid on the container. “Are they, like…physical?” I asked.

Mom stopped loading the dishwasher. “You mean, sexual?”

“Whatever,” I said. I couldn’t picture it.

“Oh,
please,
don’t even think it!” Mom laughed. “Both Marcus and I have talked to him about…you know, not getting too close. We supervise them, and the rule is, when they’re in his room—or Kimmie’s—the door needs to be open. Her parents are on the same page. When we were at Wal-Mart today, though, Andy told me they’ve hugged a few times. I figure as long as he’s so comfortable telling me what’s going on, we’re safe. I’ve seen them hold hands, but that’s about it. It’s cute.”

“It’s what they do when you
can’t
see them that matters,” I said.

“You sound like Marcus.”

“Well, really, Mom. Did you think I was doing what I was doing?”

She didn’t say anything. Just went back to loading dishes, and what I’d said hung there in the air.

“You haven’t mentioned your therapy appointment,” Mom said when I handed her a rinsed plate. “I don’t want to pry, but were you pleased? Does she seem like someone you’ll be able to connect to?”

I laughed. “Well, first of all, Marion Jakes is a man. He’s old and he weighs about four hundred pounds.”

“No.”

“Really. Well, three hundred, anyway.”

She got the dishwasher soap from under the sink and poured some into the cup. “Aside from that, how was it?” she asked.

I thought about how much crying I’d done in his office. It embarrassed me now to remember it.

“It was okay,” I said. “I think it’s a waste of time, though. I’ve had a whole year to think about what happened with Ben and the fire and everything. But I have to go, so I’ll go.”

“I think it’s important, Maggie,” Mom said as she closed the dishwasher door. “There’s a big difference between thinking about what happened on your own and talking it over with a therapist.”

“I guess.” It was easiest to just agree.

The phone rang and I dried my hands, then checked the caller ID.

“It’s Uncle Marcus,” I said, pressing the talk button. “Hey,” I said.

“Hey, Maggie. How great it is to hear
you
answer the phone. I’m so glad you’re home.”

“Me, too,” I said. “You have no idea. Did you want to talk to Mom?”

“I’ll tell you first,” he said. “I just heard from Flip that there was an anonymous call to the Crime Stoppers tip line about an hour ago.”

“
Really?
What did they say?”

“The caller said that he—or she, I’m not sure which—saw a man and woman walk into the woods behind the Food Lion in Hampstead Monday afternoon. They didn’t get a very good look, but the description of the woman could possibly match Sara.”

“Oh, no.” I repeated what he’d said to my mother. She pressed her hands to her mouth. “Did they say anything else?” I asked.

“The man was walking very close to the woman, so she was possibly being coerced.”

“Oh, no,” I said again.

“What?” Mom said.

I handed the phone to her. Suddenly, the whole bit about Sara disappearing felt real to me. Up until that moment, all the work I’d done—getting her profile up on the Internet, talking to the woman at the Project Jason Web site Officer Cates had mentioned, making the flyer and everything else—had felt like busywork. It hadn’t really sunk in that something terrible might have happened to her. I couldn’t stand the thought of her being forced into the woods by a man, much less what might have happened to her after that. And poor Keith. I remembered again how pissed off he’d sounded during the meeting the night before and thought of something Letitia told me the second time Lizard beat me up. “Her anger comes from her fear,” she’d said. “You remember that.” It had made no sense to me then. Lizard afraid? I didn’t think so. But now I got it. I got that Keith sounded so pissed off because he was scared. Who wouldn’t be scared when their mother went missing?

I sat down at the table, watching my own mother’s worried face while she listened to Uncle Marcus. When she got off the phone, she was pale.

“He said it’s probably a blind lead.” She leaned back against the counter, one hand pressed against her cheek. “He said there are these people who are…serial anonymous tipsters, he called them. They get their jollies leading the police on a wild-goose chase and that’s probably what this will turn out to be.”

“But they can’t just ignore it!” I said.

“No, they won’t. Tomorrow morning, there’ll be a search of the woods behind the Food Lion. Flip’s calling a few searchers with dogs, and he asked if Dawn and I could make calls tonight to get volunteers out to help.”

She opened the cabinet door where we kept a list of phone numbers for friends and neighbors. Then she reached for the phone.

I watched her, scared and ashamed, because I knew I wouldn’t be one of those volunteers. No way could I be out in the open with other Topsail people all around me. I’d do anything I could to help from the safety of my house, but I wasn’t ready to go out in public. Not for my half brother, or for Sara.