Missing Pieces (16 page)

“Does she have an address book?” Larry asked finally, and we began searching through Sara’s scattered belongings, as one might search through the rubble of a bombed-out building. We gathered up clothes from the floor, some dirty, some freshly laundered, picked up discarded tapes and closed open books. We found pencils and pennies and scrap pieces of paper, not to mention a half-eaten bran muffin under the bed.

“Look,” I said, hearing a strange note of wistfulness creep into my voice as I held up four empty packages of cigarettes. “She’s still collecting.”

“Here it is.” Larry pulled a tattered, black leather-bound book in the shape of a motorcycle jacket out from
underneath several tubes of makeup. He opened the book, and we watched as flecks of baby powder drifted toward the carpet, like snow. “There’s nothing under R,” he said.

“Try C,” I offered.

Sure enough, there was Carrie, scrawled across the page in dark green ink. No last name accompanied it. Maybe, I thought, Sara didn’t know it either.

We returned to our bedroom and phoned Carrie. The voice that finally answered was heavy with sleep and smoke. It mumbled something unintelligible, more a prolonged sigh than an actual hello.

“Carrie?” I asked, my voice loud, demanding, the auditory equivalent of hands on her shoulders, shaking her awake. “Carrie, this is Sara’s mother. Is Sara there?”

A long pause, then: “What?”

“Is Sara there?”

“Who?”

“Sara Sinclair,” I shouted angrily. Clearly, this was a waste of time.

“Sara’s not here.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“What time is it?”

“Eight o’clock.”

“In the morning?”

I dropped the receiver into its carriage. “Sara’s not there.”

We tried six other names before giving up. My hand was on the receiver, about to call the police, when the phone rang. “Sara?” I all but shrieked.

“Jo Lynn,” came the unwelcome response.

My shoulders slumped forward; my head dropped to my chest. My sister was the last person on earth I wanted to deal with. “Jo Lynn, I’m sorry, I can’t talk to you now. Sara didn’t come home last night …”

“Of course she didn’t come home,” Jo Lynn said. “She’s with me.”

“What?” I barked. “Sara’s with Jo Lynn,” I told Larry quickly. He shook his head and collapsed on the bed.

“You’d know that if you bothered to return your messages.”

“What?”

“I called you twice last night.”

“You didn’t say anything about Sara.”

“I assumed you’d call me back.”

I was about to protest, decided not to. The important thing was that we knew where Sara was and that she was safe. I was so grateful that I almost forgot that Sara had skipped a whole day of school. How long had she been with my sister? I wondered, seized by a different fear. “What’s she doing with you?” The words emerged slowly, almost reluctantly, as if they had to be pushed from my throat.

“Promise you won’t get angry,” Jo Lynn began, as every muscle in my body began twisting into spasms.

“Please don’t tell me she was with you all day.”

“It was very educational for her. She’s never been inside a courtroom before. Which is shameful, when you think about it. I mean, she’s going to be eighteen on her next birthday.”

Assuming she lives that long, I almost said, but didn’t. It was Jo Lynn, after all, whom I wanted to kill. “You took her to court with you,” I said, as Larry gazed up at the ceiling, his eyes frozen in disbelief, as if he’d been shot.

“Well, you wouldn’t go with me.”

So it was my fault, I thought, almost afraid to say another word. “Tell me you didn’t take her with you to the jail.”

“Of course I took her with me. What did you expect me
to do—leave her alone in the middle of North Dixie Highway? That’s not the greatest area, you know.”

“You took her to meet Colin Friendly?”

“No, of course not. She waited in the waiting room. Wait till you hear about this visit, Kate. It was incredible.”

“You took my daughter to the county jail,” I repeated numbly.

“That is some amazing place,” Jo Lynn babbled, oblivious to my hands reaching through the phone wires for her throat. “I was really nervous, but Sara was great. She was my navigator, directing me to the visitors’ parking, and telling me to relax, that I looked beautiful, all that stuff that girlfriends are supposed to say.”

“Sara isn’t your girlfriend,” I reminded her. “She’s your niece, and she’s half your age.”

“What’s age got to do with it?” Jo Lynn demanded testily. “Really, Kate, you don’t give your daughter enough credit. She says you treat her like a child, and she’s right.”

“I treat her like a child because she acts like one.”

“You sound just like our mother.”

“Someone has to sound like an adult.”

“Anyway,” Jo Lynn continued, “we had to walk across a bridge to get to the inmate visitation area. It was like a moat, you know, like around a castle. Actually, it’s quite a pretty building,” she said, one word running into the next, as if she were afraid I might hang up were she to take a breath.

I’d been considering doing just that, and I’m not sure why I didn’t. I tried telling myself that I was waiting to speak to Sara, which necessitated wading through the rest of Jo Lynn’s story, but I’m not sure that’s the truth. Listening to Jo Lynn was akin to driving by the site of a bad accident. No matter how hard you tried not to look, you couldn’t turn away.

“You go in the front entrance, and there are all these signs.
Stop! Read! The following personal items will not be allowed into the facility past the metal detector!
And then it lists fourteen things, fourteen! And you wouldn’t believe what some of them are—cell phones, diaper bags, hats. Hats!” she shrieked with obvious disbelief. “And then you get to security, and there are these other signs, the usual ones about no smoking, stuff like that, but then this really funny one that says,
No Firearms, Ammunition, or Weapons of any kind beyond this point.
We had a good laugh about that one. I mean, who would be stupid enough to bring a weapon to a jailhouse?”

Probably someone stupid enough to bring their seventeen-year-old niece, I thought but didn’t say.

“I told them my name and who I was there to see, and they looked at me like, I don’t know, like with new respect or something, because I wasn’t there to see some nobody who’s robbed the local 7-Eleven. And I had to sign in and everything, and we sat down in this waiting area, which wasn’t the greatest place in the world. Just a bunch of uncomfortable blue chairs, and the rest of the room was this icky shade of gray. But there were vending machines, so I bought us some Cokes, but I only got to have a couple of sips before they called my name, and I had to leave my Coke behind because they won’t allow any food or beverages into the visitors’ rooms. Not even gum. Can you believe that?”

“So you left Sara in the waiting room by herself.”

“There were other people there. It’s not like I abandoned her. She was fine. She was enjoying herself.”

“Can I speak to her?”

“She’s still asleep.”

“Then wake her up. And bring her home. Now.”

“Why? So you can yell at her? She didn’t do anything wrong.”

“She skipped school,” I reminded my sister. “She didn’t come home last night.”

“She was with me. And I tried to reach you. Several times. Trust me, she learned more yesterday out in the real world than she would have at school. She’ll write an essay about it, get an A.”

“You had no right …”

“Lighten up,” Jo Lynn said. “It’s over, and the kid had a great time. Don’t ruin it for her.”

“Just wake her up and bring her home,” I instructed.

“Soon,” Jo Lynn said stubbornly.

“Not soon. Now.”

Jo Lynn’s response was to hang up the phone. I turned toward Larry. He shook his head and walked from the room.

It was almost four o’clock when I heard Jo Lynn’s car pull into the driveway. Larry had left the house at two for the driving range, afraid that if he waited one more minute for my sister to show up with our daughter, he would explode. I encouraged him to go. I was way past anger by this time.

Michelle was off with her girlfriends, and I was alone in the house. I moved from room to room, compartmentalizing my anger, tucking it away, like knickknacks into a drawer, rationalizing it out of reach. Sara was safe, I told myself, and I knew where she was. No harm had befallen her. Missing one day of school wasn’t the end of the world. She’d easily make it up. She’d spent the night with my sister, and my sister had called twice. It was my fault that I hadn’t returned her calls. I couldn’t be angry with my daughter for my sister’s lack of judgment. And what was the point in being angry with Jo Lynn? Had it ever done me any good?

By four o’clock, I’d settled into an eerie calm. I would greet them at the door, thank my sister for bringing Sara
home, get rid of her as quickly and as painlessly as possible, then wait till Larry got home to talk to Sara. We’d already agreed the best way to deal with her was without the fireworks she’d be expecting, and possibly even counting on. We would give her nothing to rage at. The less said, the better. Sara wasn’t stupid; she knew what she’d done wrong. There would be consequences for her actions; it remained only for Larry and me to decide what those consequences might be.

Jo Lynn pushed past me as soon as I opened the front door.

“Where’s Sara?” I asked, staring toward the old red Toyota leaking oil on my driveway.

“She’s in the car.”

I strained to see her through the glass of the car’s dirty front window. “Where? I don’t see anybody.”

“She’s hiding.”

“Hiding? That’s ridiculous. What does she think I’m going to do?” I was about to step outside.

“Don’t go out there,” she warned, her voice stopping me. “I promised her I’d talk to you first.”

“I think we’ve talked enough,” I said, calm giving way to anxiety.

Jo Lynn reached over and closed the front door. “I promised her,” she repeated. “You don’t want to make a liar out of me, do you?”

I’d like to make mincemeat out of you, I wanted to say, taking note of her white T-shirt and short shorts, her newly trimmed hair. I restrained myself, forced a smile onto my lips.

“You’re angry,” she said. Obviously my smile lacked a certain degree of sincerity, and besides, Jo Lynn had always been very good at stating the obvious.

“You got your hair cut,” I said.

She fluffed at the sides of her blond curls. “This afternoon. You like it? It’s only a few inches.”

“It looks very nice.”

“Look, I know I shouldn’t have asked Sara to go with me without first clearing it with you,” she said, catching me by surprise. Jo Lynn was not one who apologized easily. “But I was really nervous, and I didn’t want to go alone, and I really needed someone to go with me, and I knew you wouldn’t come.”

“You’re saying it’s my fault?”

“No, of course it’s not your fault. It’s nobody’s fault. There is no fault. I’m just saying that if you’d been a little more understanding, a little more sympathetic …”

“I would have gone with you, and you wouldn’t have had to drag my daughter down with you,” I said, completing her sentence. This was more the sort of apology from Jo Lynn that I was used to.

“Well, yes,” she said. “I really needed you. And you weren’t there for me.”

I nodded, took a deep breath. I was no longer anxious. I was on fire. Beads of sweat broke out across my forehead and upper lip. Jo Lynn didn’t notice.

“It was so incredible, Kate,” she was saying. “It was the most amazing thing being there in that jail with Colin.”

I opened my mouth to protest, then instantly thought better of it. The more I protested, the longer this scene would drag out. So I said nothing, wiped the perspiration from my lip, and waited for her to finish.

“I was wearing this new white dress I bought that I thought he would like, and I was right, he loved it. It’s very classy, not too short, not too low-cut. Subtle, you know.”

I nodded. My definition of subtle and Jo Lynn’s definition of subtle were not to be found in the same dictionary.

“Anyway, I was a nervous wreck all afternoon. But Colin was really great, he kept looking over at me in the courtroom, giving me his little smile, like he was telling me not to worry, that it was all going to work out fine. And, of course, Sara was so sweet. She was holding my hand, and telling me how cute he was, and how romantic the whole thing was, kind of like Robin Hood and Maid Marian, and making me feel better. And I was telling her not to believe all the awful things people were saying about him on the witness stand.”

“So you went to the jail,” I said, trying to hurry her along.

“We went to the jail, and I told you about the moat and the signs and everything.”

“You told me.”

“Well, the room where you visit with the prisoners is on the second floor. Longest walk of my life, I tell you.” She giggled. “I was so nervous. It was this long room with a glass partition, and you sit on one side of the partition and the prisoner sits on the other and you talk into these phones. It’s really silly. I mean, they’ve already made us leave everything behind, our cell phones, our diaper bags, our hats, for God’s sake, so why do we have to be behind glass? They don’t even let you touch. I mean, I think that’s cruel and unusual punishment, don’t you?”

I said nothing.
This
is cruel and unusual punishment, I thought.

“So, I’m waiting there behind the glass. There are a few other people in there too, talking to their husbands or whatever, but everybody stops and looks up when they bring Colin into the room. I mean, he’s really a celebrity. He has this aura, you know.” She paused. I assumed this was for effect, and I tried to look suitably impressed. “So, the guard directs him over to his chair, and all the while he’s looking at me and smiling that sad little smile of his,
and I’m thinking that he is so gorgeous, I’m about to wet my pants, and then he sits down and he picks up his receiver and I pick up mine, and we just start talking, like we’ve known each other all our lives. He has a little bit of a stutter that’s just so endearing. He tells me how grateful he is for my support, how he loves coming to court every day because he knows he’s going to see me, and how much he appreciates my faith in his innocence. He’s so polite, Kate. He’s a real gentleman. And he has a great sense of humor. I think you’d like him.”