'Hello?' she repeated, then, for no reason, ' Lena?'
There was a soft click, then the quiet of a dead line.
Sara returned the phone to its cradle, shivering. She looked at her watch, then checked it against the alarm clock on the bedside table. Jeffrey had left almost two hours ago to meet with Nick Shelton. He had told her he'd call on his way back, but there was no telling when that would be.
She saw a takeout menu on the table, the notes she had scrawled on the back. Sara picked up the menu, tried to decipher her own handwriting.
Jeffrey had left Sara an assignment. She loved him for trying to make her feel useful, but the fact was a monkey could've performed the task. After her coffee run to the convenience store, she had called Frank Wallace, Jeffrey's second in command, and asked him to track down the license plate from the white sedan they had seen at the hospital last night. Even Frank had sounded puzzled when he'd heard Sara's request. He had played along, though, typing the plate into the computer, humming under his breath. Sara had known Frank for as long as she'd been alive – he was a poker buddy of her father's – but she had felt uncomfortable talking to him on the phone, mostly because they both knew that she had no business doing policework,
Frank had the registration in under a minute. Sara had scrambled for something to write on and found the takeout menu in one of the bedside drawers. A corporation named Whitey's Feed amp; Seed owned the Chevy Malibu.
So, the Nazi in the white sedan had a sense of humor.
Sara had rung off with Frank and decided to take some initiative – something a monkey surely could not do – and run down the articles of incorporation for Whitey's Feed amp; Seed. After spending almost twenty minutes on hold with the secretary of state's office, she knew a man named Joseph Smith was listed as CEO and president of Whitey's Feed amp;c Seed. Going on the assumption that this was a valid name and not some allusion to the founder of the Mormon Church, Sara called directory services. There were over three hundred listings for the name of Joseph Smith in the state of Georgia. Oddly enough, none of them lived in or around the Elawah area.
Frank's computer search had yielded a post office box as the address for the vehicle's registration, but the woman at the secretary of state's office had given Sara a local address, 339 Third Avenue. If Reece was like every other small town in the world, it was laid out on a grid pattern. The Elawah County Medical Center was on Fifth Avenue. Sara knew that the hospital was less than a ten-minute drive from the motel, which meant that Third Avenue had to be within a few miles.
Sara stared at the menu, her scribbled letters crisscrossing the dessert selections. She'd talked to her mother, cleaned the bathroom, refolded all the clothes in their suitcase and left three messages on her sister's cell phone to please call before boredom atrophied her mind. Short of sweeping the motel parking lot, there really was nothing else left for her to do.
A motorcycle revved outside, the pipes so loud that the plate glass window rattled. Sara looked out the slit in the curtains, but she could only see the back of the bike as it pulled onto the main road. Overhead, the sky was turning dark, but she guessed that any rain was at least a few hours away.
Sara tore off the address she'd written on the menu and wrote Jeffrey a note on the entree section. She had seen some local maps at the convenience store when she'd walked over earlier that morning. Third Avenue had to be close by.
She snatched the motel key off the table and left the room before she could stop herself.
LENA
FIVE
'Tell us about our mother,' Lena and Sibyl begged Hank, almost as soon as they could talk. They were desperate for information about the woman who had died giving birth to them. Hank would always protest – he had a bar to run or a meeting to attend – but eventually he would settle down and recall a summer picnic or a trip to see long-lost relatives. There was always something that happened – a stranger on the side of the road that their mother helped, a relative she nursed back to good health. Angela the Angel always put others ahead of herself. Angela happily gave her life so that her twin daughters would live. Angela was looking down on Sibyl and Lena from heaven.
Even to a child's ears, the stories were unbelievable fairy tales full of goodness and light, but Lena and Sibyl had never tired of hearing about their mother's generosity, her open, loving heart. Sibyl had tried to emulate their mother, to be the sort of person who only saw good in others. For Lena 's part, Angela Adams had been the invisible yardstick, the woman she would never meet and never measure up to.
And now Hank was telling Lena that her mother had not died in childbirth but had been killed by a drug dealer. Not just any drug dealer – Hank's drug dealer.
One of the first things Lena could remember
Hank telling them about their mother was that Angela had been unequivocal on the subject of drugs and alcohol. After years of watching her older brother slowly dig his own grave, she had finally cut him out of her life and vowed never to let him back in. Hank had not cared at the time. He was twenty-six years old. He didn't want family or sex or money or cars. All he was interested in was finding his next high.
According to Hank, the first promise that Angela extracted from her husband, Calvin Adams, was that he would never go out drinking with his fellow officers. Calvin adhered to this – they were very much in love – and seldom touched a drop; certainly, he never drank in front of his young wife. Of course, no one would ever know how long that would have lasted. The couple shared only three months of wedded bliss before Cal pulled over his last speeding violation. The driver shot him twice in the face and drove off, never to be seen again. Lena 's father was dead before his body hit the ground.
Angela's first sign that she was pregnant came at her husband's funeral. Not normally one to be weak-kneed or emotional, she passed out at Calvin's gravesite. Seven months later, she went into the hospital to give birth to twin girls and never came out. Septicemia is rare, but deadly. It took two weeks for the infection to overtake the new mother's systems, shutting down her vital organs one by one until, finally, a decision had to be made to take her off life support. Hank Norton, Angela's closest living relative, had made the decision.
It was, Hank often said, the most difficult thing he had ever done in his life.
It was, evidently, all a lie.
Angela Norton had been a petite woman, very plain looking until she smiled, then there was no way you could not notice her. She had the dark coloring of her Mexican-American mother, unlike her brother, who was pasty as a jar of buttermilk. Another quality Hank did not share with his sister was her extreme devoutness, courtesy of their mother's Catholicism. Angela was passionate about helping people while Hank was passionate about helping himself.
As an adult, Lena knew that every good story has its darkness and light, and now she could see that Hank had always painted himself in the blackest of hues.
Angela Norton had met Calvin Adams at a church fair. He'd been working the raffle for the sheriff's department and despite the fact that gambling was a sin, she wanted her chance to win the basket of baked goods being offered as prize. Angela was a shy girl, just a teenager when she
