“You should get up and about, Mrs. Fitzgerald. Best to find ways to keep yourself busy,” Mrs. Lofter said.
Mother shook her head. She seemed to be dwindling right before my eyes, shrinking into herself. “It’s hard,” she muttered again. “One without the other . . .”
I heard the phone ringing and then the doorbell.
“I’d better go see about that,” I told Mrs. Lofter. “It might be important.”
She nodded.
Mother raised her head quickly, her eyes widening with hope. “She’s back? Kaylee’s back?”
“Haylee is going to see and come back to you,” Mrs. Lofter said.
I turned and fled rather than just leave the room. Mother was making me feel terrible. I didn’t pick up the phone. It went to voice mail. I could hear that it was Daddy’s brother calling from Hawaii. Instead, I went to the door.
This time, it was the two detectives, Cowan and Simpson.
“Have you found her?” I asked the moment I set eyes on them.
“Not yet, Haylee,” Lieutenant Cowan said. They came in. I didn’t like the way they were looking at me. Lieutenant Cowan opened a small notepad. “Your sister’s friend Sarah Morgan,” he began, and paused.
“Yes?”
“Close friend of hers?”
“She’s closer to Kaylee than to me. Kaylee is more generous when it comes to spending time with losers,” I said. “She felt sorry for her, so I put up with her to please my sister. Why? Does she know something that will help?”
“She says Kaylee was very upset these past few days. She wouldn’t tell her exactly why, but she says she had never seen her so agitated. She says your sister promised to tell her why soon.”
I looked at Detective Simpson and wondered if he had a girlfriend. He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.
I shrugged. Was that all they had gotten from her? “No mystery about that. I threatened to tell Mother and Daddy about her Internet romance, so she became nervous. I was going to do it, too, but she talked me out of it by saying that when she met him, if he wasn’t what she thought he was, she’d stop, but I think she was playing me.”
“Playing you?” Detective Simpson asked.
“To get me to go along with her plan about the movie and all.”
“And you thought she might think of running away with him if she did like him?” Lieutenant Cowan asked.
I nodded. “She also threatened to do that if I so much as hinted at what she was doing on the Internet. I never saw her so determined about anything, and I didn’t doubt her.”
“Sarah says she’s your sister’s best friend,” Detective Simpson said. “She says that if Kaylee were even thinking of running away, she would know. She would have told her. They were that close.”
“Like, no,” I said. “She wishes. She never went out with us. She didn’t even go to the parties we went to, and lately, Kaylee didn’t even invite her here. I wouldn’t depend on anything she says.”
“Did you and your sister fight over a boy named Matt Tesler?” Lieutenant Cowan asked quickly, like an attorney trying to break a witness in a court trial.
“What’s the point? Why does that matter now?”
“We’re trying to understand everything, Haylee, so we can figure out what Kaylee’s done and why,” Detective Simpson said.
I shrugged. “That happened a while back. We don’t even talk about it anymore. She’s long over it. Sarah Morgan is pathetic,” I said. “Kaylee wouldn’t go looking for a romance with an older man to spite me or something, if that’s what she’s telling you.”
“We want to be sure you and your sister confide in each other as closely as you say,” Lieutenant Cowan said. “Maybe there are things you don’t know.”
He was beginning to annoy me. “Of course there are things I don’t know. I don’t know where she is or if she deliberately is staying away or what.”
“Okay,” Lieutenant Cowan said. “You keep thinking about it all. Check everything. Maybe there’s something, some clue, in her things.”