Her Sister (Search For Love series) Page 6

  Max cut a glance to Joe. "This isn't a conversation for right now."

  "It hasn't been a conversation at all for the past twenty-seven years, but we can move on. I know the first few hours are important…so important."

  Her father didn't come closer to comfort her. He didn't fling his arm around her neck, something he'd never done again after Lynnie was abducted. But he did gentle his voice. "I'm going to contact a veteran on the police force who was a rookie and there when Lynnie was abducted. We will get to the bottom of this, Clare. We'll find Shara. Now why don't you call your mom. She'll be horribly upset if we don't let her know what's happened."

  Her mother was going to be horribly upset. But Clare went to the phone anyway, knowing she had no choice but to call and give her mother bad news.

  ****

  As Amanda let herself into Clare's house, she was somewhere between stunned horror and tears. Yet she knew Max hated the tears. Shara was missing. Missing.

  Yet this was different from what had happened to Lynnie, she told herself. So different. Shara had probably left of her own accord.

  However, when Amanda saw the expression on her daughter's face, she knew Clare was feeling everything she herself had felt so many years ago. Her daughter was stiff, resisting, holding herself tightly together, just like Amanda had done.

  Clare motioned to Joe. "I called him because I didn't know what else to do. He suggested I call you and dad...since you'd been through it before."

  In spite of the turmoil Amanda felt at the thought of Shara being out in the world alone, she knew it was telling that Clare had called Joe. Did she depend on him? Might they be involved?

  Amanda found herself hoping they were, though Clare had never given any indication of that. Her daughter needed something special in her life...someone special.

  There was another man in the room, too, dressed in a suit. Amanda suspected who he was.

  Max took over the introductions this time. "This is Detective Sergeant Hobart."

  Amanda extended her hand, thinking the detective appeared a bit familiar. She guessed he was in his late forties, with sandy blond hair and a midriff that might be proof he'd eaten too many donuts. He had a round face and blue eyes and tortoise shell glasses. Those glasses rang a bell, too.

  "We met a long time ago," he said to Amanda. "I was a rookie working on your daughter's case."

  "You worked with Detective Grove?"

  "Yes, I did. Not his right-hand man or anything. Mostly ran errands then, took calls on the hotline. That type of thing."

  "Have you found out anything about Shara?"

  "No ma'am, not yet. I'm doing this as a favor for your husband. At sixteen, well the truth is, we usually give it twenty-four hours because sometimes they do come home. It's not like with—" He stopped abruptly.

  "You can say it," Amanda assured him, being strong, showing Max she could be. "Lynnie didn't leave of her own free will. Shara probably did." Her gaze went to Clare but her daughter looked away. She was pale and drawn and Amanda could only imagine the emotions roiling inside of her.

  "I was just about to ask your daughter a few more questions," Hobart said.

  Amanda knew all about questions, thousands of them, most of them having no answers.

  The detective asked Clare, "Did you daughter have access to any money?"

  "If she had any, it wasn't much. She'd just had a shopping spree at the mall. I made her take a few things back. It would have been less than a hundred dollars."

  He frowned. "That would be her own money. I was thinking more of your money. Have you checked your wallet?"

  "Shara would never—"

  "Ms. Thaddeus, kids who want to run away do lots of things you wouldn't expect. You said she's not on drugs or drinking to your knowledge, but that doesn't mean she's not going to pull from any resources she can. Do you mind checking your wallet, and any place you might keep some funds?"

  Amanda wanted to hold Clare and comfort her as she saw understanding sweep through her. But she was Max's daughter clear through, independent and rebellious. That might hold her in good stead right now.

  Without another word, Clare went to the freezer.

  Max began, "The detective asked you to check your purse."

  "I know, Dad, I’m checking something else first. Shara knows I keep extra money in a zip-lock bag wrapped in foil in the freezer. So just back off a bit until—" She reached her hand into side of the freezer and along a pack of frozen bacon. She pulled out a zip-lock bag with a slim foil package inside. She took out the foil package, hoping the bills were still there. They weren't. Her gaze met the detective's. "There was probably about three hundred dollars in here. It's gone."

  His voice was soothing. "You have to remember, that for whatever reason, she might have been desperate."

  "She didn't have to be desperate. She has me." Clare's emotions shook in her voice and now Amanda did go to her and take her hand.

  "We'll find out what's going on with Shara. We'll find her. You have to believe that."

  "Oh, Mom, how can I?"

  "Check your wallet," Max said in a gruff voice.

  Amanda could have socked him. For once in his life, couldn't he just show a little compassion? She gave him a glance that said exactly what she was thinking.

  His face reddened a little, but he didn't back down. "We have to know how far she can get. We don't even know if she ran off by herself, or if she's with someone else."

  Hobart said, "I'll be stopping over at the school when I'm finished here. I'll check if Brad Hansen is there. If he is, I'll question him. If he isn't, I'll let you know."

  Clare's movements seemed almost robotic as she went to the counter and unzipped her hobo purse. After she pulled out her wallet, she checked the contents. White-faced, she leaned against the counter. "My ATM card's gone and so is one of my credit cards."

  Amanda's heart sank along with her daughter's. With what she'd taken, Shara could go farther than any of them had thought possible.

  ****

  Chapter Five

  After the detective left—Joe had excused himself before the questioning began—Amanda had wandered into Shara's bedroom. He'd reassured them that often teens decided against being on their own and returned that night. Yet from the questions he'd asked and the evidence of the money, the credit card and the bank card that was missing along with Shara, Amanda knew he didn't believe that any more than they did. She couldn't stand any more of the police talk, the questions, the underlying insinuation that as a parent, you'd done something wrong.

  Had Clare done something wrong? From the story that had come out about what had happened with this Brad Hansen in the past week, it just sounded as if Shara didn't want to abide by Clare's rules. But who knew what was going on in a young girl's mind?

  As Amanda sank down onto Shara's bed, she scanned the room that was so totally her granddaughter's. She didn't have teen idols on her walls. No, she seemed to go for older men. Because she'd never had a father? Because Max hadn't been present in her life any more than he had in Clare's? The poster was Alex O'Loughlin from Hawaii Five-O. Good looking and sexy. Hot.

  Since when had Amanda thought in those terms? Not in years. All that had ended with Max leaving. She had no desire to go to the church's social next Thursday, or the community's single parent get-togethers. No, she had her business. At home, she had hobbies. She only wished Clare let her into her life more completely.

  And if Lynnie was found? What difference would that make to their family?

  Lynnie. Shara. It all swirled in Amanda's head.

  Max found her sitting there, thinking about the past as much as the present.

  "This isn't going to be the same," he said in a grim voice, as if he could fathom exactly what she was thinking. "Shara's not three. She has a free will and a loud enough mouth when she wants it to be. She took off and somehow we'll find her, but that doesn't mean she's going to want to come back."

  Gazing up at Max, Amanda felt her
heart fill up with sudden anger. "And why wouldn't she want to come back?"

  "Clare has the answer to that. I don't."

  She was already shaking her head. "That's not true, Max. We all have the answer. You and I split and created a separation that hurt everyone. Clare became pregnant because of it. She had Shara to prove a point. Even when Shara's dad skipped town and was never heard from again, Clare took very little assistance from us because she wants distance between us. Distance is what caused this problem. If we'd been here, really been here, to support her in raising Shara, maybe this never would have happened." She knew there was accusation in her tone and recrimination in her eyes, but she couldn't help it.

  "Don't get side-tracked into the past again, Amanda. You live in that shop and you spend too much time there. Moving forward is the only way to go, and we will move forward with this. The detective's doing his part unofficially and we're going to do ours. When more time goes by, he'll make this an official investigation."

  Max went over to Shara's computer and booted it up. "He's not going to be interested in this until he gets his preliminary questions asked and interviews kids at the school. In the meantime, I'm going to see what I can find out."

  "On her computer?"

  "Kids live on these things now, along with their phones. I wish Clare would have let Shara have one because maybe then we could trace her. Since she doesn't have one, I'll see what her computer files can tell us. "

  If Max didn't have something to do, he was lost. He couldn't sit still. He couldn't just be. That had been a big problem between them—not insurmountable until Lynnie had been taken. Then Max was out in his car, driving road after road, or at the police station, or talking to search parties, or having flyers printed, or finding money for a reward.

  "Clare," he called in that determined, authoritarian voice that Amanda knew turned Clare off.

  But their daughter came running in. "Did you find something?"

  "Not yet, but I will. I need your help getting into the computer. What's Shara's password?"

  "I don't know."

  "What do you mean you don't know?"

  "When I handed down the desktop to Shara, I let her choose her password."

  "Don't you check what she's doing on here?"

  "Once in a while. I ask her to log in and then I fish around. But I didn't want to invade her privacy."

  "Because of that, she could easily have five thousand dollars at her disposal and flee anywhere. You should have been monitoring her closely."

  "She's sixteen, Dad. If I did that, she wouldn't even go on this computer. She has to know I have some degree of trust in her."

  "And where did that get you?"

  Amanda raised her hand and waved it between the two of them. "Stop! Please. The idea is to work on this together." She looked at Max. "Don't make things worse."

  "How can it be any worse?" he asked her.

  "We can lose Clare, too," she said clearly and succinctly, reminding him he still had a daughter who mattered. Neither of them had remembered that soon enough after Lynnie had been taken.

  Clare looked near tears. Amanda stood, put her own feelings aside, put the tension with Max aside and hung her arm around Clare's shoulders. She gave her a squeeze. "We'll figure this out. Can you make a list of Shara's favorite things, favorite words she uses, anything like that that she might use as a password."

  "Even if we figure out this password," Clare said, "she has different ones for different sites. She used to have a small Rolodex so she wouldn't forget them. If we could find that—" She glanced at her father. "She doesn't leave it out on her desk when she's not here because she doesn't want me snooping, so obviously there's a hiding place."

  Decidedly frustrated, Max ran his hand through his hair. "All right, then we tear up the room. We find that Rolodex."

  They went through the room, inch by inch. At least they thought they did. Clare took the dresser drawers. Amanda searched through the chest. Max looked everywhere else.

  "This room isn't that big," he muttered. "It has to be somewhere."

  "It wouldn't make sense that she took it with her," Clare said. "She left in a hurry and she might not have even remembered it."

  After forty-five minutes of looking in every nook and cranny, they glanced at each other in frustration.

  "Would she have hidden it somewhere else?" Amanda asked.

  "I doubt it. Shara's room is her island, the place she goes to get away from me and everyone else."

  "I should have kept in touch with her more," Amanda murmured. "If she wouldn't talk to you, maybe she would have talked with me."

  "Mom, don't pull the guilt trip again. Please."

  Amanda was startled by her daughter's words.

  "Clare," Max warned.

  But apparently Clare was tired of keeping her thoughts and feelings bottled up. "I mean it. After Lynnie was gone, you two were so filled with guilt, I couldn't stand to be in the room with you. Don't do that now. If anyone should feel guilty, it's me. But I don't have time for self-pity. We have to find her."

  Self-pity. Is that what she and Max had indulged in? Was that the biggest obstacle that had shut Clare out? Maybe it wasn't the search, the phone calls, the police intervention. Maybe it had been their own attitudes toward their daughter. Why couldn't parents and kids figure this out? Why was communication so tough when they had so many words at their disposal? Communication with her husband hadn't been any easier than communication with her daughter. She just couldn't let the same barriers they had erected before become barriers again.

  Amanda sat on the bed and patted the place next to her. "Come here a minute, Clare."

  Clare eyed her warily. "Why?"

  "Let's just breathe for a couple of minutes and talk."

  Max made a move to leave the room.

  "You, too," she suggested. "We all need to think about our teen-age years, what was important to us, who we told things to and where we hid things."

  Although she seemed unsure, Clare crossed the room and sat beside her mother. The mere six inches between them seemed like the world, but Amanda forged ahead anyway. Her focus switched to her husband. "When you were a teen-ager, where did you put anything you didn't want your dad to find?"

  "He never looked in my room. He didn't care what I had hidden unless it was a bottle of whiskey."

  Clare's head snapped up. "Whiskey?"

  At first Max looked as if he wanted to close down. Amanda knew that was her husband's way of dealing with his emotions. But as he studied his daughter, the curiosity and sadness in her eyes, he pulled out Shara's desk chair and lowered himself into it.

  "You were too young to remember," Max said, as if that were explanation enough.

  "Remember what? That Grandpa drank?"

  "We didn't visit him when you were a baby because he was rarely sober. I spent my life trying to escape everything he represented."

  The problem was, after hope for finding Lynnie had died, Max had fallen on his father's habits.

  His gaze met Amanda's, held for a few moments, then glanced away. "Your mom and I divorced in part because I started drinking."

  "Dad!" Clare's voice was a breathy wisp.

  "I hid it well, most of the time, especially when you were around. But your mom, she knew what my dad had been and she didn't want me turning into him."

  "You could never…" Amanda began.

  He put up a hand to stop her. "You don't know that." He explained to Clare. "My dad was a mean drunk."

  "He abused you?" Clare asked, horrified.

  "Not after I got big enough to defend myself. I got very good at defending myself. When he learned I wouldn't back down, he did. He was essentially a bully and bullies really don't like facing strength."

  "Grandpa died suddenly," Clare remembered.

  "It might have seemed sudden to you, but it wasn't. He died of cirrhosis, mainly because he wouldn't let anybody help him."

  "Did you let someone help you? You're not drinking n
ow, are you?" She sounded horrified that he might be.

  "No, I'm not drinking now. A friend helped me. When I was at my lowest, about a year after your mom and I divorced, he dragged me to an AA meeting."

  "You go to AA?"

  "I do. I've been sober for twenty-four years, but I still need meetings now and then."

  What hurt Amanda most was that Max hadn't let her help him. He hadn't let her intervene. But then maybe he just hadn't been ready...or maybe it had just hurt too much to look her in the eyes and remember what had happened to Lynnie.

  "Why didn't you tell me any of this before?" Clare asked, looking hurt.

  Max shrugged. "What would that have helped?"

  "I would have understood you better. I might have understood the divorce better."

  "The divorce had nothing to do with you," he maintained.

  "No child believes that," Clare said. "I blamed myself for Lynnie's abduction and I blamed myself for your divorce."

  "Oh, Clare." Amanda hung her arm around Clare's shoulders, but Clare shrugged it off.

  "I don't know why you're so surprised, Mom. You hardly paid any attention to me. You were so sad all the time."

  Yes, she had been, and some of that sadness still remained. She doubted if it would ever go away. She wanted to say, Think about Shara. What if you never saw her again? What kind of black hole would that create in your heart? But she couldn't do that to Clare. She and Max had done enough.

  Yet Clare must have realized what she'd been thinking because a terrified look came into her eyes. "What if I never see her again?"

  "That's not going to happen," Max maintained again. "We're going to figure this out." He stared at Amanda. "Where did you keep anything you didn't want your parents to find?"

  Amanda thought about it. "Our farmhouse had a huge attic. We stored everything up there—some furniture, old clothes, the Christmas decorations. There was this old trunk there that belonged to my grandmother. Basically it was filled with blankets and scarves, crocheted doilies. That type of thing. I buried my diary in one of the corners under all of it. That felt safe."

  Clare was looking at her mom as if she'd never seen her before. "You kept a diary?"