My Lost and Found Life Read Online Free PDF

what my mother’s salary was. All I knew was that when I wanted money, my mother would come up with it. Would my mother steal money to keep me in designer jeans? I wanted to say no, but I was terrified the answer might be yes. I couldn’t help but remember my mother sobbing in the rain two nights ago, “It’s never enough for you. No matter what I do, it’s never enough.”

Chapter Four
    I opened the front door and grimaced at the sight of the two uniformed men standing there. “You again! Have you found her?”
    Strobel gave a negative headshake, but I knew the answer from the expression on his partner’s face. Officer Donahoe looked as if he had poured sour milk on his breakfast cereal.
    â€œWhy don’t you just tell us where she is?” Donahoe snarled. “You don’t seem to realize you’re in a bad spot. If you’re not careful, you could be charged as an accessory. I don’t think you’ll like doing mother-daughter time in San Quentin.”
    His voice sliced through the air with the whine of a weed whacker. Donahoe’s obnoxious tone matched his equally obnoxious manner. Three days had elapsed since my mother went missing, and this was the fourth time the cops had stopped by the house. Apparently, Officer Donahoe never tired of trying to browbeat me into telling him my mother’s whereabouts.
    â€œI confess, copper. Go ahead, put on the cuffs and throw me in the slammer,” I retorted, holding out my wrists. “Theloot is stashed in the cookie jar, and my mother’s at the Four Seasons.”
    â€œThis isn’t a joke, little lady. You’ll start taking this seriously when you find yourself in jail.” Donahoe glared at me and I glared right back.
    â€œOh, yeah, some joke. My mother is missing; she’s probably been kidnapped, but the cops won’t lift a finger to find her and you keep hassling me. That’s my idea of a really big joke.”
    Donahoe snorted, waved what he called a warrant in my face, and pushed past me into the house. Strobel raised his eyebrows and followed his partner inside. The pair of them had arrived to search for evidence or maybe to find out if some of the missing cash was stashed in my mother’s underwear drawer, under her bikini panties.
    Instead of following them inside, I slumped onto the settee on the porch. I could hear a woodpecker
rat-tatt
ing away from the telephone pole across the street. I felt like going over with a hammer and lending a hand.
    I was enduring another gorgeous spring day. It felt as if the weather were mocking me in my misery. The day should have been cold and bitter, with black skies and ominous clouds ready to pour torrential rain down on everyone and everything. I needed pounding hail and savage winds and ear-shattering thunder. I wanted to see wildly destructive tornadoes tearing up the landscape. As it was, all of the storms were raging inside me.
    Yesterday, I had even swallowed my pride and asked Gloria if she would lend me the money for Hawaii, just until my mother came back. She exploded into the telephone.
    â€œYou can’t be serious. Your mother is missing and you want to run off to Hawaii and get a suntan! Why does this not surprise me? Just when I think you couldn’t possibly be as narcissistic as I imagine, you demonstrate you really are that shallow.”
    I hung up on her. What
was
her problem? She had no idea what hell I was going through. What did Gloria expect me to do? There was nothing to do except wait, and that was the hardest thing I’d ever done.
    That night a reporter from the
San Francisco Examiner
had called, asked for Diane Mitchell, then tried to question me when I said she wasn’t home. I slammed the receiver down without answering.
    Today, page six of the
Examiner
contained a four-paragraph article, with the headline:
    Burlingame Woman Sought
in Fraud Investigation
    Burlingame, CA—Police have filed fraud and