Sadie caught her breath, and her mother’s face twisted as her emotions overcame her. She pulled Sadie into a hug. “The greatest peace came over me, baby, and I felt clean for the first time. I knew He broke that cycle of curses on my children for my sins. I can pray now, for her protection. Maybe God will give us a miracle, if it’s not already too late.”
Sadie wept with her mother, gratitude mounting up to equal her despair. “It’s not, Mom. She’s not dead. I know she’s not.”
“How do you know?”
She thought of telling her about Scott Crown’s gut feeling, but then she realized she had it too. “I can feel it.” She let her mother go and looked out that window, into the sunlight. “It’s just something inside of me, Mom. I don’t think she’s dead.”
“Baby, we’re not immune to this kind of tragedy just because we’re Christians.”
She couldn’t believe her mother thought she had to say those words to her. “I know tragedy, Mom. Do you really think I don’t know that?”
Sheila stood behind her and put her hands on her shoulders. “I know you know it. Maybe I just needed telling myself. I’m trying to look at things in a new way, baby. Trusting God, no matter what He does. The old me would have ranted and raved and run to a bar to drown my sorrows.”
Sadie turned around. “The old you. But you’re new now, Mom.”
Sheila nodded. “I guess that’s what being on the other side of salvation does for you. It shows you that there’s nothing for you but to keep moving through the pain. Feeling it, every nerve-prick of it, because if you numb it, it waits for you and ambushes you as soon as you come down. Dealing with it is your only hope of coming out clean on the other side.”
She smiled weakly. “Don’t worry, baby. I’m not going back to the bottle, or to a needle or a pipe. That person is dead. And now that she is, I can do what a good mother would do. I can pray for my daughter.”
“That’s all you can do, Mom. That’s the most important thing.”
“The thing is, I don’t know her well enough to know how to pray for her. I don’t know the first thing about her.”
“I do.” She reached into her bag and pulled out the stack of pages she had printed out from Amelia’s journal. “Look what I found today. It’s her journal. She had it posted on the Internet on a blog. I printed it out. We can read it now, Mom, and find out all about her.”
Sheila grabbed the first few sheets, sat down on her bed, and began skimming the pages. “This is her? She wrote this?”
“That’s right.”
“We’ve got to read it, baby. It might have clues. Here, you take this part, and I’ll take this one.”
Sadie did as she was told. She’d really wanted to read it alone, curled up on her own bed, but her mom needed this. So she took her part and lay beside her mother on her bed and started reading where she was told, in the middle of the journal.
After several pages of mundane stuff, Sadie decided to skip to the end. She turned to one of the last few entries and almost caught her breath when she saw that it was dated June 2—the day of Amelia’s disappearance.
Sadie started to show her mother, but something told her to keep it to herself until she could process it.
I don’t know why I thought it would be easier than this. I always pictured myself riding into town, looking her up in the phone book, and knocking on the door. But it wasn’t that simple. Soon as I found out that Sheila Caruso was out of prison, it took a lot of doing to locate her. And now that she’s in Cape Refuge, I’m not sure what good that knowledge does me. I plan on starting at some of the businesses on the strip, and find out if anybody here has ever heard of her. Meanwhile, we’re having to sleep in this two-bit motel room with dead roaches all along the floor. The clientele here is pretty low class. There might even be some illegal activity going on in some of these rooms. We couldn’t afford better. Besides, even if we could have, everything seemed to be booked up.
The guy next door is playing his music too loud, but I’m afraid to knock on the wall and ask him to turn it down, for fear he’ll come through the wall and shoot me or something.
Sadie frowned. Had the police questioned whoever it was next door?
The air conditioner is broken and it’s hot in here. Maybe when we get back we’ll open a window and air the stench out. Meanwhile, we’re going out to see what we can learn. I’m almost wishing I had never come. There has to be a better way to do this.
She dropped the last page, picked it up.
“You find anything yet, baby?”
“Not yet.” Sadie wasn’t ready to share this with her mother yet. She wanted to read to the end before the pages were taken away from her.
We’re back now. Got the information I was looking for. This nice lady at an antique shop told me my mother lives at a place called Hanover House. She told me where it was, but then she mentioned that she lived there with her daughter and son, and all of a sudden I got cold feet. I wondered what they would think if I showed up at the door and told them I was their long-lost sister, and I started feeling pretty cruddy, as if I couldn’t go through with it. So we came back here so I could get my bearings. I don’t think I can do it like that. But there is one other option. She told me where she worked. She’s typing for some writer guy that lives on the beach, and she told me where he lives, too. I’m thinking that I might be waiting there when she shows up for work tomorrow. Maybe then I’ll catch her alone, and I won’t have to disrupt her family if she doesn’t want them to know.
Sadie sat up, her heart wanting to scream out, “No! Amelia, don’t go there!” But it was too late. If she’d gone, and encountered Marcus Gibson …
She kept reading.
Meanwhile, we’re stuck in this place, and I keep trying to get Jamie to go out, but she’s fascinated listening to the conversation outside. We’ve got our curtains closed, but the windows are open, and she’s engrossed in a conversation going on outside our window. Two guys, chewing each other out in harsh whispers, thinking no one hears. One of them has the room next door. Why they don’t fight in there is beyond me. They apparently don’t know we can hear. Guess I’ll go tune in, see what we can find out. It’s better than any other entertainment we’ve got.
Sadie sat up, and her hands began to tremble as she clutched the pages.
I’m thinking I might call my parents tonight, let them know I’m okay. I really miss them and want to hear their voices. After I see how things go with my mother, I might look my sister and brother up, just to see what they look like.
That was the last entry. Sweat drops trickled on Sadie’s hairline, and she put the paper down and stared at the window, trying to think what she should do. She should call the police—let them handle this. But then she’d never have the chance to look into that neighbor’s eye and judge whether he was capable of murder. And she had to know. Just as she’d had to see the inside of her sister’s motel room.
She would call the police after she found him.
Only then would she tell her mother.
She folded those pages, stuck them under her shirt. “I just remembered, Mom. I was supposed to meet Blair. She had a story she wanted me to work on.”
Sheila was engrossed in her reading. She waved at Sadie. “Okay, baby. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be okay.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. I’m gonna read this whole thing.”
Sadie slipped out of the room and went to her own room and read back over the entries again.
Dropping the pages onto her bed, she headed for the stairs, hoping no one would stop her before she got out the door. Then she took off as fast as her feet would carry her to the Flagstaff Motel.
CHAPTER 36
The Flagstaff Motel was not a place for a woman to be alone, day or night, but Sadie didn’t care. She strode across the parking lot, past the two men she supposed to be drug dealers and the women pacing outside their doors, cigarettes in their hands, as if awaiting their next clients.
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How in the world had her sister decided to stay in this place?
The room Amelia had occupied still had crime scene tape sealing it off. Sadie stood and looked at it for a moment before going up the stairs. If men had been talking outside of Amelia’s door, it was likely they were next-door neighbors. Maybe they were still here. If she could piece together what had happened right after Amelia wrote that last entry in her journal, maybe it would lead her to some clues about where Amelia was.
Her feet clanked on the metal and concrete steps. A couple of people stepped out of their open doors to see who was coming, and she felt self-conscious. Did Amelia and Jamie get the same stares as they’d made their walk to their room?
Her gaze went beyond the room with the tape to the one next door. She knocked and turned back, and saw her observers stepping back inside their rooms.
After a moment, the door opened, letting out a smoky draft of air. A man of about twenty, with long, greasy brown hair and gray red-rimmed eyes came to the door. “Yeah?”
“Hi, I’m Sadie Caruso, with the Cape Refuge Journal. I’m working on a story about the two girls who were in this room next door.”
“Yeah?”
“I was wondering … were you here when they checked in?”
He hesitated a moment. “No. I checked in right after all of it happened.”
“All of what?”
“The whole police thing. The girls disappearing. That tape was up when I checked in a couple of days ago.”
He was high and wasn’t making much sense. The tape hadn’t been up a couple of days ago. It had only been yesterday that the room was discovered. “Are you sure? Because I was thinking maybe you’d remember something about them. Anyone they were with, anyone you saw them talking to, that kind of thing.”
“Nope. Sorry.” His tone was defiant.
“Well, okay. Thank you.” She started to walk away, then turned back before he shut the door.
“Can I ask what your name is?”
“For what?”
“I’m just trying to keep up with who said what. For my story.”
“Name’s Nate.”
Clearly, that was all she was going to get out of him, so she jotted his name down as she started away. She stopped at the door on the other side of Amelia and Jamie’s room, and knocked. No one answered.
She thought of going from room to room, poking her head in those open doors, asking questions of the people who lived and worked there. But she would do that later.
For now, she hurried down the stairs into the motel office, where a grubby man with one rotten front tooth greeted her. “Help you, honey?”
Thankfully, he wasn’t the same man she’d conned yesterday. “Sadie Caruso, with the newspaper. I’m working on a story about Amelia Roarke and Jamie Maddox, and I wonder if I can ask you a couple of questions.”
“Sure. I’ll tell you what I told the police.”
“Could you tell me about the man named Nate in the room next to the girls? How long has he been there?”
“Couple of weeks. He’s a regular. Comes and goes.”
Then he had been lying to her. She wondered if the police had questioned him. If so, did they pick up on his contradictions? Her heart began to hammer as she tried to decide what to do.
“It’s a terrible thing, what happened. I try to run a decent establishment here. Hurts business when stuff like this happens.”
His comment shook Sadie out of her racing thoughts. Did he really think this was a decent establishment? How on earth could the kind of business that took place here be hurt? Were the hookers finding another place to hang out? Were the drug dealers looking for classier corners?
“We all been talking about it, piecing stuff together,” he drawled on.
“Oh, yeah? What kind of stuff?”
“Like the girl who saw them with two guys, and that Gibson dude hanging around here.”
Sadie caught her breath. “Marcus Gibson was here?”
“Yeah, a couple of different times. Hung out in the parking lot talking to people. Asking about their families, their dope, how much they use a day, how they shoot up …”
Sadie wondered if Cade knew this. “Did Gibson ever threaten anyone?”
“Nope, most of ’em just laughed at him. Weird dude. Couple of ’em followed him when he left, saw he was sleeping in the woods like a homeless guy.”
“Who followed him? Can you give me their names?”
“No, hon. I didn’t get names. Just heard some of the gals talking about it. Everybody was real surprised when it turned out he was a famous writer. Who woulda thought? And why would a dude like that go around killing people? You’d think he had it made. Money, fame … Unless he was just cracked in the head from the start.”
Sadie thanked him for the information, then stepped outside and pulled her cell phone out of her pocket. She dialed the number of the police station, and got Cade on the phone quickly.
“Yeah, Sadie. What is it?”
“Cade, I was just at the Flagstaff talking to the manager—”
“Sadie, get out of there! You don’t have any business there!”
“But listen. He told me Gibson was hanging around up here. That he—”
“We know all about that. We’re on top of it.”
“You do?”
“Yes. We know what we’re doing, Sadie. You need to get out of there and let me handle the police work. Will you do that? Will you leave right now?”
She sighed and looked around. She had come here to find out about the tenant in the room next to Amelia’s. She still needed to know. “Okay, okay. I’m leaving right now, as we speak.”
“What made you go there in the first place? Does your mother know where you are? Do Morgan and Jonathan? I know Blair didn’t send you there.”
“I was reading Amelia’s journal. I found it on the web. She talked about hearing a conversation outside her window, a conversation between two guys. That was her last entry. Have you talked to the guys in the room next to hers?”
“Yes, Sadie, we have. And I know the journal you’re talking about. We found it too.”
“Well, don’t you think it’s important?”
“Everything is important. Now I want you to get out of there right now!”
She didn’t want to lie, but she wasn’t ready to leave. “I’m already a block away.”
She could hear the relief in his voice. “Good. Keep walking, and don’t turn back.”
“I won’t.”
She hung up and looked back up at the room. Maybe she should just keep her word and leave … but there were still too many questions. The manager had mentioned a girl seeing Jamie and Amelia with two guys.
She pushed back into the managers’ office.
“Excuse me.”
“Yeah?”
“You were saying a girl saw Amelia and Jamie with two guys. Who were the guys? What were they doing?”
“She said she saw them getting into their car. I don’t know who they were.”
“She saw the girls getting into someone’s car? Did she tell the police?”
“Yep, she told ’em. I heard her myself.”
“Did she know the guys?”
“She didn’t know. Said she only saw them from behind, and it was getting dark. Got into a car she didn’t recognize. Couldn’ta been the girls’ car, since the cops found it here.”
“Were the girls going willingly, or were they being forced?”
“Lady, I don’t know. Why don’t you ask her?”
“I will. Which room is she in?”
“212. Name’s Tina.”
Sadie hurried upstairs to 212 and found the door open. A girl who couldn’t have been older than fourteen lay on the bed watching Lizzie McGuire. She looked as if she hadn’t bathed in days and nursed a weeklong hangover. Her hair was greasy, and black makeup was smeared under her eyes, as if she’d just awakened and hadn’t bothered to look in the mirror.
Sadie knocked on t
he door casing, and the girl sat up. “Excuse me, are you Tina?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“I’m Sadie Caruso, from the Cape Refuge Journal. I was just talking to the motel manager about the two girls who disappeared.”
“Yeah, freaky, huh?”
Sadie stepped into her room. “Listen, he said you saw the girls the night they disappeared, talking to two guys.”
“I thought I did. But now that time has passed I think I may have got it wrong.”
Sadie’s heart fell. “Got it wrong? How?”
“Well, I don’t think it was them. And the nights are all blurring together. Might have even been somebody else before they checked in.”
Sadie came into the room. “Look, I know you’ve probably gotten cold feet about talking to the police—”
The girl sprang off of the bed and pushed past Sadie to the doorway. She looked out in both directions, checking to see if anyone was listening. “I didn’t talk to the police, okay? And I’m sure not talking to no reporter.”
Sadie reached for the door. “Can we close this and talk where we won’t be heard? I promise I won’t print anything you tell me.”
Tina shook her head and peered out again. “No. I have to leave it open.”
“Why?”
“Never mind. I’m not talking to you anyway, so it doesn’t matter.”
Sadie stood there a moment as the girl went to her bathroom mirror and leaned in, examining her face. “Man, I look awful.” She grabbed a used tissue and wiped under her eyes.
Sadie came further into the room and stood behind her, meeting her eyes in the mirror. “Look, I don’t know what you’re afraid of, but in some ways I’ve been where you are, and I can understand how real that fear is. I’m not here as a reporter, okay? I’m here because one of those girls—the one who’s still missing—is my sister.”