Secrets She Left Behind. Diane Chamberlain

covered with food. “Here you go,” she said.

      I looked down at the ham-and-biscuit sandwich and five different kinds of salad—macaroni and potato and egg and who knew what else—and my stomach lurched. I should’ve told Dawn not to bother. I hadn’t eaten anything since Monday night. I had the feeling the Percocet were doing a nice job carving out a hole in my stomach.

      Everyone else came in. They all said hi to me, and Laurel leaned down to hug me, which just pissed me off. Nothing was really her fault, but she was, like, an extension of Maggie and that was enough to get to me.

      “So.” Flip sat down on the sofa with Miss Trish and put his plate on the coffee table. Everyone turned to look at him. “Keith,” he said, “we all share your concern about your mother. As you know, we’ve put out a BOLO bulletin on her. We checked her bank records this morning. There were no large recent withdrawals or anything out of the ordinary there. We put a tracer on her car.” He yammered on about what they’d done. I already knew everything he was talking about. They’d even searched the trailer for blood and semen, which freaked me out. I mean, I was a teenage guy who hadn’t gotten any in more than a year. There was definitely semen in that trailer. But nobody said anything to me about what they found.

      “That’s why Laurel and Dawn put together this meeting,” Flip was saying, “and they asked me to help you all figure out what the community can do. So, that’s the purpose of our get-together here.”

      The Perc was starting to kick in, but not the way I wanted it to. It wasn’t taking away the pain as much as making my head fuzzy, the way it did when I took too much. I ate the corner of one of the biscuits Dawn’d brought me to maybe take the edge off the drug, but I could hardly get it down. The smell of the food was making me feel worse. I leaned over and stuck my full plate under my chair.

      “We’ve interviewed a few of you who know Sara well,” Flip said, “and there’s no clear-cut reason to suspect foul play. At least nothing that’s leaping out at us. There’s no mental or physical illness that could affect her judgment. And there’s no suitcase in her home, which suggests she left of her own volition. Keith’s not a minor, so he’s able to be on his own.”

      “This is so screwed up.” I slumped down in my chair and stuck my hands in my pockets. “What are you saying? We just forget she’s gone?”

      “Not at all,” Flip said, “and I understand your frustration. That’s why we’re here—to see what more we can do to find her.”

      Laurel put her plate on the coffee table and leaned forward. “Flip, doesn’t the fact that Sara’s not mentally ill make her disappearance even more suspicious? There’s no reason for it. No explanation for it.”

      “I know it’s hard to hear,” Flip said, “but something we need to consider is this—adults in her age range who are not mentally ill usually disappear to escape from something. Younger women disappear, you think about kidnapping and rape. Older, you think about cognitive problems. In Sara’s age range, where she may have chosen to leave on her own, you think about escaping from financial or relationship problems, maybe an abusive relationship. That sort of thing.” He looked around the room. “Do any of you know if she was struggling with financial problems?”

      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