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Chapter Nineteen
FIRST THING THE NEXT MORNING, I called Scott and left a message on his voicemail telling him what Mrs. Winslow had said about Ashleigh walking off later that Sunday night. The way I figured it, that changed everything. All my appointments for Friday had been canceled and the phones were silent all day. I set up prices for Sydney’s photo packages, ran off twelve hundred order forms, and dropped them off at the dance studio on my way home. The lobby was crammed with moms gabbing noisily and tending to babies while keeping an eye on the monitors.
Sydney was teaching, so I left the forms with the receptionist. I did, however, see Sydney on one of the monitors. She and her class were moving in complete unison like a school of fish darting here and there changing directions at the same instant, controlled by the same remote. She was dressed in a black leotard with a short sheer skirt and her hair was back in a ponytail. Even on that monitor I could see the joy on her face and
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My Sister's Keeper Chapter Twenty
I HADN’T HAD TIME to get a coat and the cold air was almost unbearable as I trailed the Corvette through town. The helmet’s interior support straps dug into my stitches and tormented me with every bump. I took down the man’s license plate number and was about to head back when he made a left turn toward Wrightsville Beach and I decided to stay with him a little longer.He crossed the bridge to the barrier island and turned north where the air got much colder and tasted heavily of salt. The moon accompanied me, its reflection sparkling like diamonds off the ocean.Many of the homes in Wrightsville Beach had been built in the first half of the twentieth century. One-story wooden white structures with colorful shutters and screened porches that sometimes wrapped completely around them. The vegetation was minimal and most driveways were sand, shell, or rock. In summer, there would be cars parked all around the cottages with surfboards on their roofs or le
My Sister's Keeper Chapter Twenty-One
STANDING MOTIONLESS in front of the window, I held my breath and waited to see what Angie was going to do. Her eyes pleaded with mine and mine with hers. The two of us stayed fixed on each other until the lights in the room went off whereupon she bolted across the porch back toward the door from where she’d come.“Wait,” I whispered, spanning the deck behind her.“Please don’t tell,” she pleaded as I got closer. “I’ll do anything you want.” She let her gown fall open and the wind whipped it out like a sail. She wore nothing underneath. “Please?”I stopped a few feet from her. “I don’t work here. I’m just trying to find out what happened to a girl that’s disappeared.”She pulled her robe closed, clasping it at the neck and waist. “I—I don’t know anything about the others. I just started last week.”“What do they do here?&rdqu
My Sister's Keeper Chapter Twenty-Two
BACK AT THE HOUSE, I discovered the cassette had been crushed in the collision. Finding an unopened blank videocassette in the entertainment center, I transferred the tape from the smashed cassette to the new casing and, after a frustrating scuffle, managed to get the cassette closed and screwed back together.Inserting it into the VCR, I pressed “play” and stood back. The tape squealed and the video fluttered as the machine dragged the crumpled magnetic ribbon over the tape heads. Through the static and distortion, the silhouette of a woman quivered on the screen. Wobbly music with a heavy beat began to play and the woman seemed at first confused and embarrassed, but then began dancing and posing for the camera in what appeared to be some sort of amateur audition.I pressed “fast forward” and the jerky images scrolled by as the camera panned slightly to the right and zoomed in past the woman to a man hiding in the shadows. I stopped the tape an
My Sister's Keeper Chapter Twenty-Three
I PICKED UP A FEW THINGS I’d need for the outing: a laminated nautical chart of the waterways from Wilmington to Little River, fresh batteries for a radio, a waterproof flashlight, cans of food with pull-open tops, bottles of Pepsi and water, and a couple of cans of tuna. By the time I got back to the house, my left leg was twice as large as normal and the skin felt like it was splitting open. I pulled myself up the stairs, cleaned the wounds, applied an antibiotic ointment, and wrapped the leg again.I looked up the phone number for Screen Gems’ Wilmington studio and dialed it. The operator reeled off a list of movies in production or about to commence, but said she didn’t know of any Brad Pitt movie scheduled for Wilmington. I thanked her, hung up, unfolded the nautical chart, and laid it out on the dining room table. The Cape Fear River actually runs south from Wilmington and empties into the Atlantic Ocean some thirty or forty miles downstream.
My Sister's Keeper Chapter Twenty-Four
SYDNEY GOT ME INTO THE CAR, drove me home, and helped me upstairs. I was bleeding from wounds over practically every inch of the front of my body, but the shotgun shells had been loaded with rock salt instead of lead shot. Although the injuries were not life threatening, they were painful.The house was still in disarray—“from the visitor,” I told her. “If you think this is bad, you ought to see what he did to the back of my head.”As we stumbled into the bathroom, she pushed my hair to the side, pulled off her sunglasses, and examined the lump and stitches. “Richard, you didn’t tell me it was this bad.”“You mean you didn’t notice it?”She lowered me onto the side of the tub. “No, I didn’t. You should have told me.”“You should have seen it Thursday.”She wet a cloth and touched it gently to my face. As she wiped away the blood and cleaned the sa
My Sister's Keeper Chapter Twenty-Five
AFTER SYDNEY DROVE OFF, I sat alone in my car not wanting the memory of Sydney’s visit to fade just yet—reliving the day over and over, able to still feel her in my arms. Finally, I started the engine and drove to my parents’ house. As I slipped into Martha’s darkened room, she turned her head and blasted me with a radiant smile that I could see even in the faint light.“Hi,” she whispered.“What are you doing laying here in the dark?”“I took a Percocet. I had therapy today.”“Are you okay?”“Fair,” she whispered. “I’m glad you came by. You need to straighten things out with Daddy.”I sat on the edge of the bed. “He’s the least of my worries.”She exhaled slowly. “No, you need to.”“He doesn’t care about me. He’s just humiliated by this whole thing and wants me to get it straight
My Sister's Keeper Chapter Twenty-Six
PRESSING THE THROTTLE FORWARD, I steered the open boat into the choppy waters of the Intracoastal Waterway and turned southward into the wind. The boat bounced hard across each wave and a light spray moistened my face making it feel as if the temperature had suddenly dropped another twenty degrees. I reached for the ski mask and pulled it over my head.The channel was no more than a hundred feet wide, but the waterway itself varied from a few hundred yards wide in places to a mile wide in other places. In the wider stretches, there were strings of islands and shallow grounds on either side of the marked channel. A mid-sized yacht with a dinghy dragging behind it approached from the south and cruised past me twenty yards to my left with a rolling wall of water streaming outward behind it. Cutting toward the wave, I slammed through it, slipped into the smooth draft behind the yacht, and resumed my southward trek.A fisherman in a workboat much like mine pulled at a net a
My Sister's Keeper Chapter Twenty-Seven
SYDNEY SAT ACROSS THE TABLE from Scott and stared down at her plate. She hated it when he mimicked her eating. If she lifted her fork, he lifted his. When she took a bite, he took a bite. She dropped her fork onto her plate and lifted her champagne glass. “What pleasure could you possibly get from doing that?”He lifted his own glass. “Doing what?” His dark hair was overdue for a trim, hanging over deep-set gray eyes.The eyes of a fox, she thought. Or a weasel.Sunday brunch used to be their favorite meal together. They’d lay around in their bedclothes all morning, sip champagne, make love, eat a large breakfast around noon, and then spend the afternoon sailing.But Scott had changed. He found more pleasure in tormenting her now and playing games with her head, making her feel stupid and clumsy, and Sydney’s love had faded.She sipped her champagne and looked away at her cat, Tux, stationed on
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