Missing Pieces Read Free Page A

all this happen? When did my once steady and comfortable life begin careening out of control, like acar without brakes on a high mountain road, gaining speed and momentum until it crashes into the abyss and bursts into flames? At what precise moment did Humpty-Dumpty fall off the wall and shatter into thousands of tiny pieces, impossible to repair or replace?
    Of course, no such moment exists. When one part of your life is coming apart at the seams, the rest of your life doesn’t just sit back and patiently wait its turn to continue. It doesn’t give you time to cope, or space to adjust and refocus. It just keeps piling one confusing event on top of the next, like a traffic cop rushing to make his quota of tickets.
    Am I being overly dramatic? Maybe. Although I think I’m entitled. I, who have always been the steady one, the practical one, the one with more common sense than imagination, or so Jo Lynn once stated, am entitled to my few moments of melodrama.
    Do I start at the very beginning, announce myself like a label stuck to a lapel: Hello, my name is Kate Sinclair? Do I say that I was born forty-seven years ago in Pittsburgh on an uncharacteristically warm day in April, that I’m five feet six and a half inches tall and one hundred and twenty-five pounds, that my hair is light brown and my eyes a shade darker, that I have small breasts and good legs and a slightly lopsided smile? That Larry affectionately calls me funny face, that Robert said I was beautiful?
    It would be much easier to start at the end, to recite facts already known, give name to the dead, wipe away the blood once and for all, instead of trying to search for motivations, for explanations, for answers that might never be found.
    But the police don’t want that. They already know the basic facts. They’ve seen the end results. What they want are details, and I’ve agreed, as best I can, to provide them. I could start with Amy Lokash’s disappearance, or the firsttime her mother came to my office. I could begin with my mother’s fears she was being followed, or with the day Sara’s teacher called to voice her growing concerns about my daughter’s behavior. I could talk about that first phone call from Robert, or Larry’s sudden trip to South Carolina. But I guess if I have to choose one moment over all the others, it would have to be that Saturday morning last October when Jo Lynn and I were sitting at the kitchen table, relaxing and enjoying our third cup of coffee, and my sister put down the morning paper and calmly announced that she was going to marry a man who was on trial for the murder of thirteen women.
    Yes, I think I’ll start there.

Chapter 2
    I remember it was sunny, one of those perfect Florida days when the sky is so blue it seems artificial, the temperature balancing on the comfortable side of eighty, with only a warm whisper of a breeze. I swallowed the balance of coffee in my cup, inhaling it as lovingly as a chain-smoker with her last cigarette, and stared out the back window at the large coconut palm that curved from behind the pool toward the terra-cotta tile roof of the house. It was the kind of picture you see on postcards that trill, “Having a wonderful time, wish you were here.” The sky, the grass, even the bark of the trees, were so vivid they seemed to vibrate. Diamondlike sparkles of air reflected from their surfaces. “What a day,” I said out loud.
    “Hmm,” Jo Lynn grunted from somewhere behind the morning paper.
    “Look at it,” I persisted, not sure why I was bothering. Was I looking for confirmation or conversation? Did I need either? “Look at how blue that sky is.”
    Jo Lynn’s eyes flashed briefly over the top corner of the local news section of the
Palm Beach Post.
“Wouldn’t you just love a sweater in that shade?” she asked, her voice a lazy Southern drawl.
    Somehow this wasn’t quite the response I’d been hopingfor, although it was typical Jo Lynn, for whom nature was merely backdrop.