Read The Sea Glass Sisters for Free Online Page B

against my ear. My brain sloshes back and forth in my skull, and it’s a minute before I can form a coherent thought.
    “What do you mean, you’re staying?”
    “I’m not leaving. That’s it. She can’t be here by herself. And she won’t let any of her friends stay over with her because they have houses of their own to look after. And she refuses to weather this thing at their houses because she wants to keep a watch on this place.”
    “Mom, you can’t stay here.”
    “Oh yes, I can. And I am. What’s my sister going to do? Throw me out in the ocean? Once you leave, she’ll be stuck with me, whether she likes it or not. If she’s that worried about my safety, well then, she’ll have to get in her vehicle and drive to the mainland, now won’t she?” My mother gives me a lemon-lipped smirk, pleased with herself. All those doctoral classes are paying off. She has outmaneuvered everyone. She thinks.
    “I’m not going to drive off and leave you here with a hurricane coming.” No way. Nohow. Not happening.
    “Oh, it’s not even supposed to be that bad. You saw the weather report last night. Just a little brush.”
    “Yes, and I see the eighty-seven gas cans piled on the deck out there too. It’s a hurricane, Mother. You can’t tell from one minute to the next what these things will do. Even assuming that it doesn’t cause some kind of catastrophic damage around here, there could be travel problems on the East Coast for days, maybe weeks. Who knows?”
    She focuses out the window, as in, La la la, I can’t hear you. “I’m capable of making my own decisions, Elizabeth. They may have put some young know-nothing in charge of the school that should’ve been mine, but I’m still a fully competent adult.”
    This is a fine way to prove it. My cell phone rings in my pocket, and if it weren’t for the fact that the kids might need me and the investigation into Emily’s kidnapping is still ongoing, I wouldn’t pull the phone out to look at it. As it is, Mom gives me a disgusted look as I check.
    It’s Carol.
    Something cold and solid sinks slowly from my throat to the pit of my stomach. “I need to take this.” I can barely get the words out.
    Mom lodges a complaint about young people and bad cell phone manners as I head outside to the second-story deck and pull the door closed behind me.
    I answer, and Carol sounds emotional on the other end. I know before she says the words. It’s bad news.
    “Elizabeth, they’ve found a body out by Palmer Lake. They haven’t got a positive ID yet, but I didn’t want you to hear it somewhere else if you were following the local news over the Internet. Jason says it’s her.” Carol’s son, Jason, is one of the officers on the case. He’s looked at that picture on the flyer a thousand times. If he says it’s her, it is.
    “Is he sure?” I ask anyway. I can’t think of what else to say. I feel myself breaking inside. Shattering into a million pieces.
    How can this be? How can this be happening?
    “Yeah. But they haven’t done an ID yet,” she repeats as if that extends a ray of hope. As if it would be better for some other little girl’s lifeless body to be found in the woods. “You okay?”
    I don’t really need to answer. She knows me well enough to guess. “No.”
    Once again, I cycle through those moments. Those moments after the call came in, the time wasted because my mind was lost in a fog of my own problems. Could it have made the difference? Would the outcome have changed if Carol had taken the call?
    “They don’t know any details yet,” she warns. “Elizabeth, don’t go jumping to any conclusions. That won’t help anything, okay?”
    I don’t answer. I can’t.
    “Okay?” Carol repeats, louder this time.
    “I have to go.” Somehow I manage to thank her for letting me know. Then I’m walking across the deck. And then I’m running, down the stairs, across the lawn of wispy salt grass and weeds, down the path through the scrubby