Breaker's Reef

  Who would have dreamed how things would turn out for Jamie? Sadie’s eyes filled with tears, and she suddenly couldn’t go any further.

  God, please save Amelia.

  She heard a car outside in the parking lot, heard the door close. Quickly, she wiped her eyes.

  The door opened, and her friend Matt Frazier peeked inside. “Sadie?”

  “Hey, Matt. What are you doing here?”

  He looked a little embarrassed. “I went by Hanover House and they said you were here. I came to see how you were, what with all the stuff going on. I heard that missing girl is related to you.”

  “Yeah. Guess news travels fast. We haven’t even had an issue of the paper since Cade found the body.”

  He came in and sat down at the chair next to her desk. “Have they gotten any closer to finding her?”

  “Well, they found her motel room this morning. I don’t know how helpful that was. I know she had called Marcus Gibson’s house. They took him in again, but the judge already let him out once, so I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

  “You must be so freaked out.”

  “Yeah, I have been. My mom’s a wreck.”

  Her throat seemed to constrict as those tears pushed back to her eyes. Matt seemed to have something else he wanted to say, but clearly hadn’t made up his mind to say it. “I saw you the other night at Beach Bums.”

  So that was it. “Yeah, I saw you too. But you were walking away. Why didn’t you speak?”

  “I didn’t want to horn in on things. You looked like you were having a good time.” His voice held a note of melancholy.

  Sadie didn’t quite know what to say. The fact that he seemed sad about her date with Scott flattered her. Maybe he cared more about her than she thought.

  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.

  It’s not that I don’t love my parents. I do. They’ve spoiled me rotten and they mean everything to me. But sometimes a girl just needs to know where she came from. I have a birth mother out there who might look like me. Maybe she’s thought about me since she gave me up, wondered where I am, and prayed that we would meet up someday. And I’m thinking that maybe she has children—brothers and sisters of mine. How cool it would be to find people who looked like me—the same eyes, the same hair, the same shapes of our hands …

  I know all brothers and sisters don’t look alike, especially if they’re halves, but it’s fun to think about. Sometimes I imagine a big family sitting around a table with a place set for me, because there’s a hole in that family without me.

  I know it’s probably not that way at all. My birth mother’s probably kept it secret, never told a soul, especially any other children she’s had. There wouldn’t be a hole there. She may have gone out of her way to forget me. But maybe if I showed up, she’d be glad I did.

  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.

  CHAPTER 35

  Sheila 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.”

  Sadie just looked at her.

  “Does that disappoint you, baby? That I wouldn’t think of her every day, every hour? I did that first year, you know, until I had you. And then it was almost like you replaced her—like you were her. That little baby I’d held one time and had to give up was back in my arms, and I kind of pretended to myself that you were the same person.”

  It wasn’t what Sadie had expected to hear, and yet it sounded like her mother.

  “Did that work for you, Mom?”

  “Sometimes. Most times. But then there were other times, when I would get down and I would think about the pain I went through that day, and all the agony leading up to that decision, and I would imagine where she was and what she was doing. I would tell myself that some rich billionaire had adopted her, and she was jetting off to Paris, dressing in the nicest outfits, with servants at her beck and call, getting ponies and cars for birthdays. I would convince myself that she was so much better off.”

  “She had nice parents, Mom. She was pretty well off.”

  “And then there were the times when I was at my lowest, when I would sit there and think how lucky that little girl was that I wasn’t the one who raised her. I would look at myself in the mirror and see the lines and the paleness and the bags under my eyes from a hangover or a four-day high, and it was you I felt sorry for. She was the lucky one.”

  Sadie’s throat tightened. “That’s not true, Mom.”

  “You’re sweet,” Sheila said through trembling lips. “You always let me off the hook. He’s in you, Jesus is. All the forgiveness, all the love.” She got up, went to the window, turned back with tears in her eyes. “He’s in me too, baby. I repented yesterday. I did what you said, and I gave it all to Jesus. Asked Him to save me, and I know He did.”