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of the time, the way she had regarded her own mother most of the time. A string of women back through
history, she went on, the mothers we don't know, don't dare know.
The headache was a stabbing pain behind her eyes by then. She hurried for her aspirin.
SIXTEEN SHE WAS MISSING something, Sarah thought later that day, watching Winnie's bright hair
appear and vanish as she ducked her head over her camera, straightened up, ducked again. The sun on
her hair was brilliant. Her own hair must have looked much like that a few years earlier, Sarah thought,
and she recalled that her mother's hair had glowed like fire in the sunlight. It was no wonder that poor
old Mrs. Betancort could not keep them straight. And, she mused, how strange it was that her thoughts
came back again and again to Mrs. Betancort, who did not seem to differentiate between the
generations of Kellerman women.
Apparently Mrs. Betancort had seen Uncle Peter with the gas cans, and Sarah's mother, but how?
Where? And presumably she had mistaken Uncle Peter for Sarah's father, whom she accused of stealing
her water. She couldn't keep the men straight, couldn't keep the women straight.
Slowly Sarah walked back inside and upstairs again, and began to read through her mother's account of
that night once more. She was missing something, not only concerning the gas cans, but something else,
she felt certain.
She skimmed through the newspaper stories, paused at the photographs, tried to find the false note that
she knew was there.
Slowly she went back to the start of this section. As far as Sarah knew, her mother never had mentioned
that Uncle Peter had turned up that night, and it seemed obvious that she had not put it in writing either.
There was no personal recollection of that night in her notebook, what she had seen, said, done, and no
mention of the gas. Sarah reread Dr. Jarlstadt's interview, his grief, his regret at not having the boys wait
inside the house, all there, immediate. Then she read part of the interview again, slower: "Wesley said
they would go see the ghost town and come back in two hours. We waited up for them, but they never
returned."
The ghost town and the dry lake that had been called Rabbit Lake at that time, again.
She sat on the side of the bed, staring at nothing, trying to work out the scenario for that night. Her father
had dropped off her mother at the house in the afternoon, and had driven over to Sacramento in order to
meet early the next morning. Uncle Peter had arrived in East Shasta at seven or a little later. That was
the time the boys had shown up at Jarlstadt's house.
Uncle Peter had left and met the boys on the road, and they told him they were going back to the coast.
On foot, he would have gone the closest way to join the boys again, out his driveway, past the property
that later became the gardens, and into the driveway of the institute, less than a quarter of a mile
altogether, and there was no way anyone in town could have seen him if he had stayed at this end of
East Shasta.
But then when did they get the gas, and had Mrs. Betancort seen them do it? Her house was a mile from
his, at the far end of town, and there was no reason for him to have been there, or for her to have been
at this end. Maybe she had meant something else altogether, Sarah admitted, and the reference to
Sarah's mother had nothing to do with gas and that night.
Suddenly Sarah knew what had been bothering her.
Her father had not known that Uncle Peter had taken the gas; that accounted for his anger over being
stranded. She remembered clearly how furious he had been because he did not have enough gas to get
to Susanville one day that week, and not only had there been no gas, but the cans themselves had been
taken.
And she remembered her mother's silence during his rage. She had not told him Uncle Peter had been
there, Sarah realized; Uncle Peter had shown up late on Saturday and told them about the missing
students, and he and her mother had acted as if he had not been there on Friday night.
He had stayed with them for several days, and the following week her father had borrowed enough gas
from the institute to get to Susanville, where he had bought two new cans and filled them. She had gone
with him to the institute to return the gas he had borrowed that afternoon and he still had been furious
with the idiot who had taken cans and all.
Very slowly now she went back to the spiral notebook and examined it, read the entries through once
more about the night Uncle Peter's students had vanished. Often her mother had written very little, let the
events speak through the assortment of things she associated with them-newspaper items in this case.
But she would have mentioned something about this, Sarah argued silently; this was too big for her not to
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