Dirty Little Secrets

I followed her eyes as she looked around the rest of the room. Luckily, it was in such bad shape she couldn’t tell if I’d done any work in here or not. I just had to keep her out of the dining room and the kitchen—not to mention the hallway. “Go ahead, if you want to,” I said. Without knowing it, she could help me get at least one bag out of here.

“Oh, I want to.” She turned to walk out the front door. As she passed me, she grabbed the bag of food I’d forgotten I was holding. “I’m taking this too. Get yourself something else to eat.” Typical. If there was a way to fix things for me and Phil and leave her out of it, I would.

I followed her out the front door and down the walk toward the driveway. She thought I was just saying good-bye, but I was really making sure she was actually going. Sara had gotten a new car a couple of months ago, and even I was shocked to see what she’d done to it in such a short time.

The backseat was full of those cardboard file boxes I was sure she’d swiped from work. You couldn’t see the floor because of the pile of discarded clothes that reached as high as the seat. The front seat could still hold a passenger, as long as that person was willing to wait for her to clear the empty CD cases, tissue boxes, clothes, shoes, and fast-food bags that covered both the seat and the floor.

Sara didn’t seem to notice me staring. “I’ll be back tomorrow to see how Mom’s doing,” she said as she climbed into the relatively clear driver’s seat and grabbed at a water bottle that was rolling around by the brake pedal.

“Tomorrow?” I asked. I could feel the panic rising in my throat. I could never get it all done by tomorrow. Three days was bad enough. Tomorrow was impossible. “Aren’t you working tomorrow?”

She glared at me. “I have a personal day coming, not that it’s any of your business.”

“What time tomorrow?” I could tell I said it too fast, even as the words burst out of my mouth.

Sara turned the key in the ignition. “That’s for me to know,” she said. “Stay away from her stuff.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. I was sure I had enough worry growing in my stomach for both of us.

“Oh, but I do,” she said.

I watched her back out of the driveway and take off down the street. It seemed like I exhaled for the first time since I’d seen her car in the driveway.

As I turned back toward the house, I realized that even when the mess was all cleaned up, it wasn’t over. Mom was gone. But Sara was still very much around—and she was getting to be exactly like her.

chapter 14

7:00 p.m.

I twisted the dead bolt into place and leaned against the secure door. Between TJ, Mrs. Raj, and now Sara, this place hadn’t seen so much action in years.

The smell of Chinese food still lingered in the hallway, and I realized how hungry I was. It was almost seven thirty, and all I’d had was a blueberry scone and a couple of eggrolls. Tomorrow for Sara probably meant somewhere around eleven at the earliest, which meant I had about sixteen hours to put things right in this house. My stomach would have to wait.

The house was quiet even though I could hear the stereo still playing faintly in the kitchen. Mom’s TV sat almost buried in papers and clothes near her chair, but of course the remote was nowhere to be found. It could be buried just about anywhere, so I stood still and tried to think like Mom. If I needed the remote, where would I put it so it wouldn’t get lost?

I couldn’t see it anywhere around the chair or on the boxes that were next to it. Maybe underneath? If I wanted to be sure that I’d know where something was, I’d probably shove it underneath the one thing I knew wouldn’t move.

I sat in the green chair and pushed it into a reclining position with my hands on the armrests, and then reached between the footrest and the chair. Touching something hard, I took a deep breath and stuck my hand as far under the chair as it would go. By flicking whatever it was to the side, I worked a corner of it out until I could grab it with one hand and drag it into the open.

Before I even pulled it out all the way, I realized it wasn’t the remote. It was just a thick spiral notebook with a black cover. I could see from the bulge in the front there was something in it, but there wasn’t anything written on the front. Her diary, maybe? I’d never seen Mom writing in anything, let alone a fairly large spiral notebook, but I had to admit that in the past few years we hadn’t really paid that much attention to each other.

The book was pretty heavy, and it must be important if she kept it separate from all the other piles of junk in this place. If it was her diary, it would be wrong to open it. More wrong than leaving her dead in the hallway for the better part of a day? I shrugged my shoulders as I opened the black cardboard cover. It was all relative.