Chapter Fifty-One
Back on the beach after moving her car, Kelly finds Ben and Caleb still splashing around in the lake and Talia reclined in her beach chair, scrolling on her phone. She looks so relaxed that Kelly wonders if she should even mention Sarah Greene’s disappearance.
“Have you heard from Hayley?” she asks, settling in her own chair.
“No, but I can see her.”
“What do you mean?”
Talia tilts the screen so that Kelly can see it.
She peers at a map with a pulsating red dot in the center of a square. “Hmm . . . Are you sure it’s her? I don’t see much of a resemblance.”
Talia laughs. “It’s a locator app.”
“Seriously? So you . . . what, did you have her ear microchipped like a pet?”
“No! Ben and I can track her phone. Which is pretty much as attached to her as her ear is.”
“I’m glad they didn’t have technology when we were her age. My parents didn’t trust me as it was.”
“It’s not that I don’t trust her.”
“Oh, come on, Tal’. Of course you don’t trust her. She’s twelve. Remember what we were doing when we were twelve? Sneaking around, making out with guys, smoking cigarettes in the gazebo . . .”
“That was just you, Kelly. The rest of us were playing Polly Pockets.”
“You’re right, it was me.” She grins. “I wouldn’t change a thing, though. I had a damned good time back then.”
“You’ve had a damned good time all your life. Just please don’t share the details with my daughter.”
Kelly draws an X over her heart with her finger. “Not until she’s eighteen.”
“Twenty-one.”
“Deal. So does this give you peace of mind? Is she where she’s supposed to be?”
Talia zooms in on the pulsating dot that indicates Hayley’s location and again tilts the screen toward Kelly. “She is, see?”
“Wow. That’s pretty precise. She’s in the house. What a good, obedient daughter you have.”
“She really is.” Talia smiles and closes the app.
Kelly leans back in her chair, again weighing whether to say anything about the missing girl. If she does, Talia will probably overreact and want to rush back to Hayley, thinking there’s a crazed kidnapper on the loose in Mulberry Bay.
What if there is?
What if it’s Bauer?
Either way, she reminds herself, Hayley is safely ensconced at Haven Cliff.
Opening her phone to see what she can uncover about Sarah Greene, she finds that Toby has sent her another email. The attachment is titled Bauer Family. She forwards it to Midge and is about to open the file when Talia groans.
“Again?”
Kelly glances over to see that she, too, is holding her phone.
“What’s wrong, Tal’?”
“Just . . . this friend of mine back home keeps texting me. Well, she’s not really a friend, but . . . this is the third time she’s asked me to call her.”
“About what?”
“She’s going through a divorce. She probably just needs someone to talk to.”
“Block her.”
“Kelly! I can’t do that.”
“Why not? You just said she’s not a friend.”
“Her daughter is Hayley’s best friend.”
“Chloe? The sleepover kid?”
“How do you know?”
“Hayley mentioned it yesterday.”
“‘Mentioned’? You mean she didn’t rant about the unfairness of it all?”
“Oh, she ranted.”
“I hope you told her she was being unreasonable.”
“I thought she was being perfectly reasonable,” Kelly says. “Don’t worry. I kept that to myself. But if my parents dragged me away for the weekend when you or Midge or Caroline were having a slumber party, I’d be acting just like Hayley is.”
“Yeah, well . . .” Talia shrugs. “Caroline never had slumber parties. She wasn’t even allowed to come to ours.”
“True. But her parents had no problem letting her hang out with Gordy, or with Bauer the pedophile.”
“Right. And one of them got her pregnant.”
Kelly nods. “I wish I could believe it was Gordy.”
“You don’t?”
“Do you?”
Talia hesitates. “I want to. But no.”
“Same. And if I ever see that man again, I might strangle him with my bare hands.”
“Unless you’re planning a trip to Mexico, I doubt you’ll see him again. But I feel the same way. I could kill him for what he did to Caroline.”
“I know that’s why Mary Beth went after Gordy,” Kelly says. “Because she loved Caroline as much as we did. And she thought he was the one who ruined Caroline’s life.”
“Yes, but Gordy was Caroline’s boyfriend, not some sick predator.”
Kelly nods. “Imagine if Mary Beth knew about Bauer and could have gotten her hands on him; he’d be dead right now instead of poor old Gordy.”
“We could be dead right now too. She blamed us as much as she did him. That night in June . . . she had a gun. She was going to kill us.”
“She could have. But she didn’t. I know it sounds crazy, Talia, and I know she’s done a lot of terrible things in her life, but I kind of feel sorry for Mary Beth.”
“How can you, after what she did to us, and to Gordy?”
“I just think there’s a lot more to her story than we’ll ever know.”