Fear the Worst: A Thriller (17 page)

This is before she gets her summer job at the dealership, where she shows herself to be quite adept at getting into a strange car and whipping it around the lot, driving it into the service bay, lining it up over the hoist
.

I’m driving a Civic this particular week. Sydney says she wants to drive it to her mother’s house to pick up some homework she’s left there, and drive back. On her own
.

“Come on,” she says
.

I give in
.

About an hour later, there’s a knock at the door. I find Patty standing there, smiling nervously. She and Syd have been friends a couple of months now
.

I open the door
.

“Can I come in?” she asks
.

“Syd’s not home,” I tell her. “She drove over to her mom’s to pick something up.”

“Can I still come in?”

I let her in
.

“Okay, the first thing you have to know,” Patty says, holding her
hands in front of her as though she were patting down a cloud, “is that Sydney’s okay.”

I feel the trapdoor opening beneath me. “Go on.”

“She’s fine. But this thing happened, and you need to know that it wasn’t her fault at all.”

“What’s happened, Patty?”

“On the way back from her mom’s, Sydney picked me up and we decided to go to Carvel for some ice cream?” It’s just down the hill from us. Patty must have walked up here from there. “So, she’s parked, and she’s not even in the car, and this guy, this total asshole, he’s driving some beat-up old shitbox, and he’s backing up, and he goes right into the car door.”

“You weren’t in the car? You and Syd?”

“Like I said, we saw the whole thing happen while we were getting our ice cream. And then the guy, he just takes off before we can get down a license plate or anything. But it was totally not Sydney’s fault.”

I started going for my coat
.

“You’re not going to be mad at her, are you?” Patty asked
.

“I just want to be sure she’s okay.”

“She’s cool. Mostly, she’s worried about you. That you’re going to freak out.”

Later, I say to Syd, “Is that what you thought I was going to do? Freak out?”

“I don’t know,” she says
.

“Why’d you send Patty?”

“Well, she offered, first of all. And I kind of thought, okay, because, ever since you and Mom got divorced, well, even before you got divorced, every time there’s anything about money, it’s like, watch out, it’s freak-out time.”

“Syd—”

“And a dented door, that’s going to be a fortune, right? And you’re not going to want to put it through insurance because they’ll put your rates up, and, like, I’d pay for it but I don’t have any money
anyway, and you’ll ask Mom for half but she’ll say it’s your car, you let me drive it, you should pay for it all, and you’ll get all pissed, and it’ll be like when you had the dealership and everything was going wrong and every night you and Mom were fighting and she said this was all supposed to give me a better life and it was like if it wasn’t for
me
you wouldn’t be fighting all the time and—”

The next day I ask Susanne to meet me for lydney. Yalwayme qtionbnevnynews forme Onydneybocaof cedrivalacodashowydpictuundredsof peoplHy peoplhownpictuodamy gazomentarilnWmoinminuta>
came,yd. T. Tgonstumoment latepocketphond likgoig. WnpickPattyup,nbouomei big dealmKip Jmbp:pagebreak/a><20centerfont sizeb>TWENTY-NINETfont size">HIS MUCH Kfont size">IP Jfont size">ENNINGS TOLD ME:

So around six o’clock, Patty’s mother called the police. Almost apologetic about it. Probably nothing, she said. You know what girls are like today. But had there been, you know, any teenage girls who looked like her daughter run down at an intersection or anything?

The police said no. They asked Carol Swain if she wanted to file a missing-persons report on her daughter.

She thought about that a moment, and said, “Hell, I don’t want to make a federal case out of this or anything.”

The police said, “We can’t do anything to help you find her if you’re not going to report her missing.”

So Carol Swain said, “Oh, why the hell not?”

Jennings told me all this, finishing up with “I just made a couple of calls in the last few minutes, and she hasn’t turned up.”

“I tried to call her a couple of times today,” I said. “She never answered.”

“At the moment,” Jennings said, “it seems that you’re the last person who’s seen her.”

That seemed to be more than just an observation. “What are you saying?”

“Mr. Blake, you seem like a decent enough guy, so I’m just trying to be straight with you. We’ve found bloody towels in your house that you say were used to help a girl who hasn’t been seen in nearly twenty-four hours.”

“I’ve been totally straight with you,” I said.

“I hope so,” she said. “Now we’ve got two missing-girl cases, and you’re at the center of both of them.”

I
N THE MORNING
, I
PHONED
S
USANNE AT WORK
.

“Has Bob got that Beetle ready?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “New tires, new headlight.”

“Oil leak?”

“I’m not a miracle worker, Tim.”

“I need a lift.”

“You had to give the car back already?” she asked.

“It’s gone,” I said. But it was the police who had it, not Laura Cantrell.

“I’m on it,” Susanne said.

I hoped she would come pick me up herself. I thought it was unlikely she’d send Bob.

I was surprised to see Evan drive down my street in the Beetle. There was an ominous rattling sound coming from under the hood. The short wheelbase allowed him to do a tight U-turn in the street, bringing the passenger door right to me.

I got in and he said, “What’s with the police tape around your house?”

I said, “Are you going to be able to pay those guys when they come back for the rest of their money?”

“Yeah,” he said, glancing back at my house as we pulled away.

“From your dad?”

“Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “Thanks for that yesterday.”

“I considered letting them have a go at you,” I said.

“Why?”

“Maybe you need to have the shit beat out of you. It might smarten you up.”

He kept his eyes on the road ahead. “Maybe,” he said.

“You do drugs, you steal, you’re addicted to online gambling,” I said. “And you slept with my daughter.”

He shot me a look. “Maybe she saw something in me that you don’t.”

“She must have,” I said. I didn’t know whether Evan was trying to be on his best behavior because he had me in the car, but he signaled all his turns, kept to the speed limit, and made no improper lane changes.

I said, “Have you seen Syd’s friend Patty in the last couple of days?”

“Huh?” he said. “No. Why?”

I shook my head, not interested in answering his questions since I had more of my own. “You used a fake credit card,” I said. “To pay for some of your gambling.”

“Yeah.”

“How does that work? If you win, doesn’t the money go back to the account of the guy whose card number you’ve ripped off?”

“I hadn’t real
ly thought it through. It’s the playing that matters, not whether there’s money coming in.”

Once you put yourself in the head of a gambler, that actually made some sense. “Where’d you get the card?”

“I don’t want to get anyone in trouble,” he said.

“It was Jeff Bluestein, wasn’t it?” I said.

Evan glanced over. “How did you—” And then he cut himself off.

“I didn’t,” I said. “Not until now.” I leaned back into my seat. “He’s my first visit today.”

Evan seemed to break out almost instantly into a sweat. “Don’t tell him I said anything.”

I said nothing for a moment. I was listening. Finally, I said, “Does the engine sound funny to you?”

I
SLIPPED IN BEHIND THE WHEEL
of the Beetle after we pulled into Bob’s Motors. Susanne, still on the cane, came out of the office as Evan slunk away.

“What’d you say to him?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. I told her, as I always did, that if I found out anything, I’d be in touch. Even though, sometimes, there were things I chose not to tell her. Like what had happened last night at my home.

“What can I do?” she asked.

“Be here,” I said.

“What are you going to do?”

“Poke around,” I said.

As I’d told Evan moments earlier, I planned to start with Jeff Bluestein. I knew where he lived. I’d dropped Sydney off there the odd time before either of them had a driver’s license.

I parked the Beetle out front, strode up to the front door, and leaned on the bell. Jeff’s mother appeared at the door and smiled.

“Good morning,” she said. Her smile seemed forced, like she really didn’t want to see me. I don’t think she’d liked it, from the very beginning, that her son had been helping me. I was a man with problems, and nothing good could come from letting your son associate with a man like that.

“Hi,” I said.

“Jeff’s still sleeping.”

“Wake him up, if you don’t mind. He knows I wanted to see him this morning.”

Still standing in the doorway, Mrs. Bluestein said, “If this is just about some technical questions about the website, can’t it wait until later?”

“I’m afraid not,” I said.

“Just a moment,” she said, letting the storm door close. It was a one-story house, and I watched her cross the living room, go down a hall, and tentatively enter a door on the right side. She was in there about half a minute, then came back.

“Just another half hour? He’s very sleepy.”

I moved past her and went down the hall, Mrs. Bluestein trailing after me, saying, “Excuse me! Excuse me!”

I pushed open the boy’s door, saw Jeff huddled under his covers, and said, making no effort to keep my voice down, “Jeff.”

“Hmm?”

“Let’s talk.”

He blinked his eyes several times, getting me in focus. “It’s really early,” he said, hunkering down.

“Throw some clothes on. We’ll go get some breakfast.”

“Mr. Blake!” his mother shouted. “He was out late with his friends.”

I leaned in close to Jeff, putting my mouth to his ear, enduring his early-morning breath. “You get your ass out of bed and come talk to me or I’m going to ask you all about Dalrymple’s in front of your mother.”

I didn’t actually know whether she knew about what had happened with Jeff’s restaurant job, but judging by how that made him jump under the covers, I was betting not.

“Mr. Blake,” his mother persisted, “please leave right now.”

I backed away from her son. He was already throwing off his covers. He said, “It’s okay, Mom. I just kind of forgot when we were supposed to meet.”

I flashed his mother a smile. “See?” To Jeff I said, “I’ll be out front. Five minutes.”

“Yeah,” Jeff said.

Mrs. Bluestein attempted to ask me if this was about something other than the website, but I deflected all her questions. I went out to the car, got in behind the wheel, and would have passed the time listening to the radio if the knob hadn’t broken off in my hand.

Jeff came out in four minutes, walked across the lawn, and got in next to me.

“What do you want?” I asked him.

“Huh?”

“For breakfast.”

“I’m not really hungry,” he said.

“McDonald’s it is, then,” I said, and cranked the engine.

I drove us to the closest one, led the way inside, and ordered an Egg McMuffin with coffee and a hash brown. As we slipped into a booth sitting across from each other, I noticed Jeff eyeing my hash brown.

“You want that?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Take it,” I told him, and he did.

“How did you hear about Dalrymple’s?” he asked.

“That’s not important right now,” I said. “But I want you to tell me all about it.”

“Why?”

“Because I do,” I said.

“What’s it to you?”

“I won’t know that until you tell me,” I said. “Maybe nothing, but maybe something.”

He took a bite of hash brown. “It’s got nothing to do with Sydney. I mean, that’s why you’re asking, right?”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“It was no big deal. Nobody really got ripped off. The credit card companies don’t make people pay for stuff they don’t buy.”

I wasn’t up for giving a lecture on how theft drives up the price of everything, so I let it go.

“You’d been doing it for a while before the manager caught you, is that right?”

“Not that long, but yeah, it was for a while.”

“If it had been somebody else who caught you, it’d be a different story now, wouldn’t it? We might be holding phones and looking at each other through a pane of glass.”

Jeff looked mournful. “I know it was a stupid thing to do. I did it to make some extra money.”

“Tell me what you did, exactly,” I said.

Jeff hung his head down, ashamed, but not so ashamed that he couldn’t finish the last bite of my hash brown. I took a sip of coffee.

“I had this little thing, you could swipe Visa and MasterCard and American Express cards through it, and it kept all the data, you know, like the numbers and all that stuff. It could hold the information from lots and lots of cards.”

“Who gave it to you? Who wanted you to do it?”

“I don’t know.”

I put down my sandwich and leaned across the table, so close our heads were nearly touching. “Jeff, I’m not fucking around here. I want answers.”

“You’ve never liked me, have you? Like, when Sydney and I were going out, you didn’t like that.”

“Don’t try that with me, Jeff. Maybe you know how to pull your mother’s heartstrings, make her feel guilty, but I don’t care. Does she even know about any of this? Did your dad tell her?”

“How do you know my dad knows?”

“I’m guessing that means no. You want me to go back and tell her what you did?”