Dead Certain - Mariah Stewart [121]
“Now, Ramona, if something’s happened . . .”
“Oh, something’s happened, all right.” She took a deep breath. “I found Veronica.”
“You found . . .” Greer’s eyes widened.
“Yes. I found our mother.” She looked from Greer to Sean, then back again. “Well, I found her grave, anyway.”
“How did you find her?” Amanda asked.
Ramona turned to her. “Internet search.”
“How did you manage to do that? I mean, I’ve been searching for months. . . .” Greer looked thunderstruck.
“When I couldn’t find any match for a Veronica Mercer who could have been our mother, I started looking up Veronica Michaels, her maiden name. I finally found a match with Veronica Michaels Keenan.”
“Keenan?” Sean asked.
“She apparently remarried about three years after she gave me up.”
“Where . . . where is she buried?” Greer asked softly.
“She’s in a small cemetery down in West Clearbrook.”
“I don’t want to know about this.” Sean pushed back from the table.
“I want to know, Sean.” Greer put her hand out to stop him from leaving. “I want to know everything.”
“Why would you care, after all these years? The woman abandoned you, Greer. She abandoned us, walked away from us”—he glanced at Ramona—“from all three of us—and apparently never looked back.”
“I guess I want to understand, Sean. I guess I want to know why she left us, and where she went after she did. Did she have another family, did she—”
“Leave me out of it, then,” he said abruptly. “I don’t want any part of it. The past is just that. Let’s leave it there.”
“I can’t do that, sweetie,” Greer told him softly, her eyes pleading with him to stay, to understand, to open his heart and his mind.
“You two are on your own, then.” He headed for the door. “Amanda, I’ll talk to you tomorrow. I’m going to need you to sign your statements.”
His back stiff with what everyone recognized as a heavy burden of pain, Sean walked out the back door and closed it softly behind him.
It was close to eleven when Amanda parked her car across the street from Sean’s house. She sat alone in the dark for several minutes, then got out and walked up to his front door and knocked.
“Amanda,” he said when he opened the door. “What are you doing here?”
“I saw the lights on, so I figured you were still awake.”
“I was just about to turn them off.”
“May I come in?”
He stepped aside to let her enter.
She looked around for a minute, then said, “I’ll take the ottoman, you can have the chair.”
She moved a stack of newspapers from the ottoman to the floor, then patted the seat of the chair and said, “Come sit down, Sean, and talk to me.”
“Did Greer send you over here?” He stood, hands on his hips, near the door, which still stood open.
“No. I came because I wanted to. I wanted your company. I wanted to talk. I was hoping you’d want to talk to me.”
“What would you like to talk about?” He closed the door behind him.
“I know how you must feel about your mother—”
“No, you don’t know, Amanda,” he said flatly as he lowered his tall frame into the chair.
“I think you probably feel pretty much the same way about her as I feel about my mother.” She paused. “Did I tell you about my mother, about her other family?”
“You told me she’d remarried and you had half siblings.”
“My mother has four children with her second husband. When I talk to her, that’s what she talks about. How beautiful her daughters are, how brilliant. What excellent athletes her sons are. What perfect grandchildren they’ve given her.” She bit her bottom lip. “My mother can’t remember my birth date and hasn’t sent Evan a Christmas card in years. It’s as if we don’t exist.”
“I’m sorry, Amanda, but it really isn’t the same.”
“In a way, it is,” she insisted. “I have siblings that I don’t know, don’t want to know, because they have a place in her life that I will never have. Because she loves them in a way she will never love me.”
“She didn’t abandon you when you were a very young child, Amanda,” he pointed out.
“No, she didn’t. She waited until I was in my teens.”
“Do you have good memories of her from your childhood?”
“I