“Thanks, Mom,” he said as she handed him a napkin.
“Love you,” she said, and he grunted something past the food in his mouth as he pushed open the screen door with his good shoulder.
She watched him drive off, his headlights picking up the sea oats before he turned onto the dark, empty main road toward the bridge. Then she walked, still barefoot in her robe, down to the beach and sat in the sand to watch the sunrise bleed into the sky.
Walking back to the trailer a short time later, she spotted three vans on the sandy road in front of it. As she got closer, she saw the network logos on the sides of the vehicles. She started to run, and by the time she reached the trailer, six reporters, some of them wielding cameras, had gotten out of their vans and were descending on her.
“Has Keith left for school yet?” one of them asked.
Her face burned with anger. She ignored the reporters as she marched toward the deck of the trailer.
“We’d like to talk to him about Maggie Lockwood’s release today from prison,” another said, close on her heels.
“How do you feel about her getting out today?” a third asked as she climbed the steps.
“Can you ask Keith to come out to speak with—”
“No!” she shouted, turning toward them from the deck. “No, I will not ask him a thing about Maggie Lockwood, and neither will you! Get out of here!” She pointed in the direction of the mainland, the sleeve of her robe ballooning in the breeze.
“Is he upset that—”
“Don’t you think he’s been through enough?” Her voice sliced through the pink morning air, echoing off the other trailers. “Don’t you dare…don’t you dare…go near my son. Ever. Do you hear me? And don’t you fucking dare go near his school, either!”
The reporters stared up at her, jaws hanging open. Some of them knew the mild-mannered Sara Weston. This woman was someone different. A lioness protecting her cub. They must have realized she would kill for him.
Sara’s hands were knotted up in fists. “Don’t you dare, or I swear I’ll come after you all. Every one of you!”
She ran inside the trailer, slamming the door behind her, sinking to the living-room floor as her trembling legs gave out. She pressed her face into her hands. Thank God he’d had to go in to school early today! Though maybe she shouldn’t have let him go at all. Maybe she should have hidden him inside with her. She’d been trying to treat this day like any other, but she hadn’t counted on the damn media. They would hound Keith. They’d show his scars on TV. He’d never be able to take the public exposure. The exploitation. He was holding on to his sanity by a thread.
She knew all at once she’d made a grave error by not moving away when they had the chance. Her unwillingness to leave the island had kept them there, and now it was too late.
Or was it?
She got to her feet, suddenly energized, and began to formulate her plan as she tossed the leftover pancakes in the garbage. She had no appetite for them now.
The phone rang, and she stared at it a moment, answering it only because it might be Keith.
“I’m so sorry to ask you this.” Laurel sounded breathless. “I don’t know where else to turn. Andy was sick during the night, and Marcus and I need to pick up Maggie. Is there a chance you could just keep him at your house for a few hours? I’m desperate, Sara.”
For a moment, Sara could think of nothing to say. How dare Laurel ask a favor on this day! Was she completely dense?
“Please, Sara,” Laurel pleaded. “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.”
Sara thought of all Laurel had done for them after Keith got out of rehab. She remembered the way she’d used her, taking advantage of Laurel’s guilt, and she heard the rare panic in her old friend’s voice. Could she really say no to her now?
“What time will you be back?” she asked.
“We should be able to pick him up by one. One-thirty at the very latest.”
One-thirty. That would be all right. She could pack while Andy was there. He wouldn’t have a clue what she was doing, and she didn’t need to take much. She’d come back in a few weeks to get the rest of their belongings. The important thing was getting away from the island now. Today.
“All right,” she said. “But I need to run an errand and I won’t be back until about ten-thirty. Will that still work?”
“Yes, yes!” Laurel said. “That’ll be fine.”
“All right,” Sara said. “I’ll see you then.”
She was at the bank the second it opened. She didn’t look inside the jewelry case, not wanting to see the necklace or to remember Jamie fastening it around her neck. She slipped it into the box she’d already prepared for it, then rushed to the post office and mailed it to the online auction house—insured for a thousand dollars. She would have felt conspicuous insuring it for any more than that.
She raced home just in time for Andy’s arrival. He was groggy and wan, and she parked him on the sofa and was glad when he quickly fell asleep.
She left a message on Keith’s cell to come straight home after school and to ignore any and all reporters. She thought about waiting to leave until she could explain everything to him in person, but he might argue with her. He was going to be shaken up by the whole thing, and she wouldn’t have time for a lot of back-and-forth with him. It would probably take her five hours to get to Charlotte, and she needed to get there early enough to find a decent motel in the daylight. She had a few hundred dollars in cash, which would get them through a couple of days before she’d need to hit an ATM. Tomorrow, she’d call Western Carolina Bank to see if they had any new job openings. She’d look for a place to live. They wouldn’t be able to start out in that grand apartment complex, but that didn’t matter. Maybe someday.
Andy woke up, and she gave him some ginger ale and hooked him up with Keith’s video games, so he barely knew she was in the trailer, much less that she was packing.
Suddenly, though, the plan began to unravel.
Laurel called to say they’d be late. Four-thirty or five. Sara was livid. She’d have no choice but to leave before they returned. Andy would be fine. He was sixteen, for heaven’s sake. She wrote the note for Keith, explaining everything, then she told Andy she was going to the store. She left the trailer, got into her car and drove away. With her, she had some clothes, some toiletries, the notebooks she’d never get the chance to write in again and the cell phone she always forgot to charge.
She made it over the bridge before she started crying. Turning the car around in a parking lot, she headed back the way she came. She wasn’t going to her trailer, though. No. Instead, she drove to the northern tip of the island.
She parked at the very end of the road. Then she kicked off her sandals and walked across the sand until she reached the crumbling concrete walls of the chapel, all that was left of Free Seekers.
Did tourists who walked out to this slender bit of sand speculate about the remains of the chapel? Of the five walls, only two still stood, and even they were nothing more than jagged remnants of concrete. They rose a few feet above the sloping sand dunes that had formed around them over the years. Any sign of the chapel’s roof, pews and flooring had long since disappeared. Visitors probably thought the remains had something to do with Operation Bumblebee, maybe debris from one of the old towers. They probably wondered why a tower would have been built in that spot, surrounded on three sides by water, but they’d shrug off the question a moment later. Who cared? Who, besides Sara, cared about this barren spit of land? She’d come often to this spot over the years, the place where Jamie’s ashes had mixed with the water and the sand. Sometimes she could swear he was there with her.
She sat down on the sand, resting her back against one of the remaining chapel walls. She thought about all the days she’d spent inside the small building. Painting the walls the color of wet sand. Sewing yards and yards of fabric for t
he pew cushions. Taking care of Maggie. Oh, Maggie.
The turbulent water of the inlet blurred in front of her. Digging her hands into the sand, the full impact of what she was doing hit her. Her soul was tied to this place. How could she leave?
She thought of how different her life would have been if Jamie’d had the courage to leave Laurel and marry her early on. He never would have been on Marcus’s boat. He’d still be alive, still a part of her future as well as her past. But it was stupid and pointless to think about what might have been. She had to focus on what was best for Keith. She thought Jamie would approve of her plan for their son.
Getting to her feet, she lifted her face to the sky and drew in air from the ocean and inlet and Intracoastal all in one breath. She would never stand there again. She was losing this, letting go of one more fragile thread that connected her to the man she’d always loved.
Bending over, she scooped up two handfuls of sand and folded her fingers carefully around the grains. There had to be some container in the car that would hold them. She could keep the sand forever, she thought as she walked away from the chapel ruins. She’d take this small part of the island, this small part of Jamie, with her.
But as she walked, she felt the sand spilling from the crevices in her fists. The tighter she held on to it, the more it slipped through her fingers, until by the time she reached her car, her hands were nearly empty…but not quite. Opening her hands, she looked at the thin layer of powdery sand coating her palms. She studied the grains of sand for a moment, those beige and white and brown bits of her past. Then lifting her hands close to her face, she leaned forward and blew them away.
Chapter Eighty
Keith
One Month after the Fire
I LIKE HOW I CAN SIT IN THE SAND WITH MY BACK AGAINST the old concrete wall of Jamie Lockwood’s chapel and no one can see me. My mother’s service was the first time I’d ever been to that end of the island, even though I’d lived less than ten miles from it all my life. I could see why someone—why my father—would pick that spot for a church. Peaceful and quiet and surrounded by water.
It’s pretty cold, sitting here, though. The breeze is blowing hard off the ocean, but I came prepared with a blanket to wrap up in. I wanted to think about maybe building a house on this spot. I have money now. Lots of it. Three hundred fifty-five fucking thousand dollars, to be exact. Mister Johnson tracked the necklace down to this online auction house. They’d been trying to find my mother, but she’d gotten a new e-mail address to use with them and no one knew about it. I’m probably as rich as I’m ever going to be, and Laurel said I could pick some Lockwood land to build on if I want. But sitting on this bit of land where the chapel had been, with the wind practically blowing me away, I know this won’t be it. First storm that hits the island, my house would be toast. My father must have been a crazy man.
I was spending my days since the fire helping Marcus with the tower. It was still a wreck inside, but we were making progress. The first day after the fire, Marcus asked me to start the cleanup in the living room. When I hesitated, he told me to go upstairs instead. He knew without me telling him that I didn’t want to be in the room where Jen had been found. I didn’t want to think about her or talk about her or ever hear her name again. Man, I’d been played for the fool before, but not like that. She’d handed me that story about her parents being divorced and her father who wanted her to hunt with him and her brother getting burned in chemistry class. All cock-and-bull. Flip put the truth together from talking to her friends: She was a twenty-year-old, very blond art major at UNC in Asheville. Her father left when she was a baby. Her mother, of course, drove off the high-rise bridge. She had one sister—Jordy—who’d wanted to visit her at UNC the weekend of the lock-in. Jen was hung up on some guy and wanted to be with him, though, so she told Jordy she couldn’t come, which was why Jordy was at the lock-in and why she died. I guess Jen had a problem living with that guilt. Andy must have seen her at the memorial service for the fire victims, since the victims’ families all sat in the front row and he was up there for being “the hero” and all.
I keep remembering Jen’s last words to me as she walked backward out of her house the night of the fire. How I was beautiful. How I should remember that. She said it like she meant it, and I’ve decided to believe she did.
A small yacht is sailing into the inlet from the ocean in front of me. I watch it move from right to left, and I can see a couple of guys inside the cabin. Lucky bastards. Not a care in the world. Maybe I should buy a boat and skip the house idea?
I can see the wake from the yacht lapping against the sand a few yards from where I’m sitting. I think, My mother’s ashes are in that water. I remember what Maggie’d said about my father’s ashes being scattered in the same place. My mother really loved him. I could tell that from her notebooks. She’d never gone out with anybody since he died. I hadn’t given it all that much thought—I never wanted to know about my mother’s love life—but maybe she never went out with anyone because no one measured up to my father, at least not in her mind.
Man, I love reading those notebooks. I understand who she was when I read them. I even understand who I am.
When I was about three years old, I stopped crying over things. I toughened up, I guess. Probably some dude told me my mother needed me to be a man, and I took it to heart and never let anything get to me enough to make me cry. During the year and a half after the lock-in fire, though, I cried a lot. My life sucked, and it would catch up to me, and I’d just crack.
But I haven’t cried about my mother. Not even when I read the notebooks. I feel really okay. I feel good. My mother didn’t mean to, but she left me an awesome gift, and I’m not talking about the necklace. The money. What she left me is a whole lot better than that.
She left me her story.
Acknowledgments
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 favorite 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 favorite 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 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!
ISBN: 978-1-4268-3391-5
SECRETS SHE LEFT BEHIND
Copyright © 2009 by Diane Chamberlain.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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