Read Fear the Worst: A Thriller Online
Authors: Linwood Barclay
Tags: #Thrillers, #Suspense, #Fiction
Fear the Worst: A Thriller (19 page)
“No,” I said. “I thought we’d pretty much established that. She’s an invention. She was made up by these people, the ones working with that guy who wanted to kill me, who probably shot up my car. They wanted me out of town so they could plant that cocaine in my house. They tore the place apart so it would look like someone had been searching the place for it, but missed it. Their whole plan was for the cops to find it, and arrest me. Then I’d be out of the way.”
“And just who is it who wants you out of the way?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Detective Marjorie grinned and shook his head.
“My daughter’s missing and you think the whole thing is a fucking joke,” I said.
“Do I?” Marjorie said. “I think it’s a joke? You give me a story that’s straight out of
The Twilight Zone
and I’m the one making a joke? Okay, let me ask you something very serious, then, Mr. Blake. Did you make up Yolanda Mills?”
It was like getting hit in the side of the head with a two-by-four.
“I’m sorry?” I said.
“You heard me.”
I looked at Detective Jennings. “Is he fucking kidding?”
Jennings held my gaze. “Answer his question, Mr. Blake.”
I said to her, leaning closer to her, “From him, I can accept this kind of horseshit. But you? From the beginning, I’ve always thought you were in my corner.”
“This will all go a lot better, and be over a lot quicker, if you just answer the questions,” she said.
“No,” I said, sitting upright. “I did not make up Yolanda Mills.”
Marjorie said, “You sure? You sure you didn’t make her up, and use Kate Wood to back up your story? Use her as a witness?”
“What the hell did she tell you?” I asked. “There’s something you need to know about Kate Wood. No, two things. First, she’s got it in for me because I didn’t want to see her anymore. And second, she’s a nutcase.”
“Isn’t it possible,” Marjorie said, “that you waited until she came over to discover that first email, then later when you took the laptop downstairs, you sent yourself an email from a bogus Hotmail account in Yolanda Mills’s name, which Ms. Wood discovered upstairs? And then you placed your call to her, but you didn’t really place a call to anyone? That you faked it, all for Ms. Wood’s benefit?”
Now it was my turn to smile. Not with amusement, but astonishment. I said to him, “And you thought my story was inventive. You’re out of your fucking mind.”
Jennings remained stone-faced, but Marjorie’s cheeks flushed red with anger. “That’s not exactly answering the question, Mr. Blake,” Jennings said.
“You have to understand something about Kate Wood. She sees conspiracies all over the place. She thinks everyone’s got it in for her, like everyone gets up in the morning and has a meeting to figure out how they’re going to stick it to Kate Wood today. That’s why I felt I had to call her. Because I know how her mind works.”
“So that’s your defense,” Detective Marjorie said. “She’s a nut.”
“I’m just saying you need to know how she sees the world. Is this really what she believes, or did you lead her this way? Because I know it wouldn’t take much. Does she honestly think I was manipulating her? That I set this whole thing up so she’d corroborate some crazy story?” I looked directly at Jennings. “You saw my house when I got back from Seattle. You saw what they did to it.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “It is possible, in theory,” she said slowly, “that you could have done that before you left for Seattle.”
“Is that what you believe?” I asked her point-blank.
“You have to admit it’s possible,” she said.
“That’s not exactly answering the question, either,” I said. “Is that what you believe?”
She grimaced, as though she didn’t want to have to answer. Was that because she didn’t want Marjorie to know she thought I was innocent, or because she didn’t want me to know she’d given up on me?
“Why would I do something like that? Set up a call from someone who didn’t exist? Tear up my house and make it look like someone else did it? Plant cocaine so you could find it? Where would I get cocaine? And if I could get my hands on some, why would I do that? What possible reason could I have for doing something like that?”
Neither of them said anything. I guess they wanted me to figure it out on my own.
“Mr. Blake,” Jennings said, “what started out as an investigation into your daughter’s disappearance has fanned out in a number of directions. For example, there’s this man named Eric who supposedly was trying to kill—”
“Supposedly?” I said, pointing to my nose. “Does that look like a
supposedly
busted nose?”
Jennings continued, “And now a second missing girl. Who’s a very close friend of your daughter’s. You know what the common thread in all these incidents is?”
“Yes,” I said. “Sydney.”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” Detective Marjorie said. “The way I see it, what’s most common is you. You know what I think?”
I waited.
“I think you’re a pretty smart guy, but not smart enough. I think it’s even possible there are some people hunting for you. Maybe you’ve jerked some people around and they’re looking for payback. That part I haven’t worked out yet. But I do think it’s possible you’ve staged some of these things to make it look like your daughter was mixed up in something. Divert the attention away from yourself.”
“Why the hell would I want to do that?”
“You’re at the center of everything,” Marjorie said. “You’re the last one to see your daughter. The last one to see Patty Swain. We’re not stupid, Mr. Blake.”
“No,” I said. “You are.” I shook my head. “Whatever you’re getting at, this is crazy.”
“Is that why you had to get rid of Patty?” Detective Marjorie asked. “Because she figured out you killed your own daughter?”
I didn’t even think about what I did next. Even if I had, I can’t say that I would have behaved any differently.
I do know it was something instinctual. Someone suggests you killed your own daughter, that you took the life of the person more dear to you than anyone else in the world, what else are you going to do but try to get your hands around his neck and choke the life out of him?
I came out of the chai
r like it was an ejector seat and went straight for Marjorie, my hands outstretched. I wanted to kill him. And not just for what he was suggesting about me. I was doing it for Syd. These people were supposed to be helping find her, but weren’t getting anywhere because they—maybe not Jennings, but I was no longer sure about her—were wasting their time trying to find a way to put the blame on me.
“You son of a bitch,” I said, reaching for his throat.
But I couldn’t get my hands around it. You weren’t a cop for as many years as I guessed Detective Marjorie had been without learning a thing or two about how to defend yourself. He took hold of one of my arms and used my own force and momentum to throw me into the wall behind him.
Then he turned, grabbed hold of my hair with his meaty fingers, and shoved my face up against the wall. My neck felt like it was going to snap.
“Adam!” Jennings shouted at him.
“You motherfucker,” he breathed into my ear.
“Adam,” Jennings said again. “Let him go.”
“You just assaulted a police officer,” he whispered. “Nice going, dickhead.”
“I didn’t kill my daughter!” I shouted, my lips moving on the pale green surface.
“Adam,” Jennings said, “let’s talk.”
He held me another second for effect, then let me go. Then he and Jennings left the room. I heard the door lock.
I leaned up against the wall, panting, trying to regain my composure. I stood there a good five minutes before the door opened and Detective Jennings came in alone.
“You’re free to go,” she said, holding the door open.
“What, that’s it?”
“You’re free to go.”
“I don’t believe you people.”
“Mr. Blake—”
“Let me guess. Your friend wants to hold me, to charge me, but there’s no evidence against me. Just his wacko theories.”
“Really, Mr. Blake, you should just go.”
“He’d like to charge me with assault, but he’s thinking if you let me go, maybe I’ll make some sort of mistake, something that’ll stick.”
Jennings didn’t speak.
“I’ll tell you the mistake I made. The mistake I made was trusting you. I mean, I know parents are usually primary suspects when something happens to their kids, but I never got the idea I was one in your eyes, not until now. But now, if you’re thinking the way he’s thinking, then I guess I can’t count on you for help anymore. I guess I’m on my own to find my daughter.”
She was still holding the door open. I went through it.
“Thanks,” I said.
THIRTY-ONE
I
WAS IN A SWEAT AS
I
WALKED OUT
into the police station parking lot. It wasn’t just from anger. It was hot. I turned on the AC when I got into the car and powered up the windows. I adjusted the vents so they’d be blowing on me, but even after a couple of minutes, all that was coming out of them was hot air. I tried adjusting the settings on the AC controls, but things didn’t get any better.
“Goddamn it, Bob,” I said under my breath.
I drove into the Riverside Honda lot, circled around until I saw a demo—a blue Civic hybrid—I was pretty sure Andy Hertz was using these days, and parked next to it. I walked into the showroom, heading straight for Andy’s desk, but when I passed Laura Cantrell’s office she called out, “Tim!”
I whirled around.
“Bringing back the CR-V?” she asked.
“Try the cops,” I told her.
Andy was leaning over his desk, on the phone. I reached over his shoulder, tapped the receiver base and disconnected him.
He saw my arm and followed it until he realized who’d cut him off. “What the fuck, Tim? What are you doing?”
“We’re going to have a chat,” I said.
“I had a solid lead there,” he said. “Guy wants to get his wife a Pilot for her birthday and—”
I grabbed him under the arm and yanked him out of his chair. “Let’s go,” I said.
“Where? Where we going?”
“Tim! What are you doing?” It was Laura, hands on hips, trying to look like she was running the place.
I ignored her and steered Andy toward the door. I took him outside and walked him around back of the dealership, where I’d chewed him out for stealing a commission out from under me.
“What’s with you?” he asked. “I didn’t swipe any more of your customers. Besides, you’re not even working here now, so if someone did come in and dealt with you before, what the fuck am I supposed to do about it?”
“Think back,” I said, putting my face into his. “A year ago. You put Jeff Bluestein in touch with someone for a job.”
“Huh?”
“Jeff. You remember. He and Sydney were going out for a while.”
“Yeah, I know who he is,” he said defensively.
“I’m guessing you know Syd and all her friends. Jeff tells me you used to hang out with them.”
He protested that. “Aw, come on, a few drinks was all.”
“That was the other thing he mentioned. That you used to buy booze for them since they’re underage.”
“Jeez, Tim. Shit, you were their age once, weren’t you? Didn’t you have someone buy beer for you when you were sixteen?”
“Any other day, Andy, I’d carve you out a new one for getting booze for my daughter, but I’m worried about bigger things right now. I want to know about this guy you put Jeff onto.”
“It was just some guy,” he said.
I pushed him up against the side of a minivan. “I want a name.”
“I only knew his first name,” Andy said. “It was Gary. Just Gary. That’s all I knew.”
“Where’d you know him from?”
“I used to see him at this bar I go to, kept seeing him there, then one day, I’m walking into the Dairy Queen, and he’s sitting there having a milk shake with Patty.”
“What?”
“Yeah. They were just kind of hanging out and talking. Patty waved and I went over and said hi, told Gary I recognized him from that place, and that was about it.”
“Patty?” I said. “Patty Swain?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you ever ask Patty about him?”
Andy shook his head. “Not really. I just figured they knew each other. Anyway, not long after that, I ran into the guy at a bar, I go, ‘Hey, I know you.’ It’s like we already know each other, and we got talking.”
“What’d this guy do?”
“He was, like, a businessman, you know? He was into a lot of things. Asked me if I wanted to make some extra money, but that was around the time I started here and things were going pretty good, you know? But I said if I knew anybody who was looking for some work I’d send them his way.”
“So the guy gave you a number?”
“He gave me a card, but it wasn’t his own business card. It was another card he happened to have on him, so he wrote his number on the back.”
“You still have that card?”
“Yeah, probably, at home. I’ve got a jar I toss business cards into.”
“You remember whose card it was?”
“I don’t know. Like I said, it wasn’t his own card. It could have been for a body shop or a hotel or something, maybe a lawyer’s. I just don’t remember. It was a whole fucking year ago!” I still had his head pressed up against the minivan, his neck arched at an awkward angle. I moved back half a step so he wouldn’t have to contort himself.
“Okay, tell me about Gary.”
“He said he remembered Patty saying I worked with cars. He wondered what, exactly, that entailed. Like, did I service them? Run a Mobil station, what? And I told him I sold cars, and he said I wasn’t the kind of guy he was looking for. He wanted people in the restaurant business, gas stations, convenience stores, that kind of thing, a place where there are lots of transactions.”
“You didn’t wonder what that was about?”
“Not really,” Andy said. “He wasn’t interested in me, so I wasn’t interested in what he was looking for.”
“Go on.”
“So, you know, one night I’m hanging out after work with Sydney, and Jeff, and Patty, and Jeff is going on about how he wants to get some really cool laptop, one of the new Macs that are really thin or something, and I said, hey, you work in a restaurant, right? And Jeff said yeah, so I gave him the number of this guy—I guess I still had his card at that time—and said he might have something for him. And that was it.”
“Did you ever give that number to anyone else?” I asked him.
“What do you mean?”
I moved in closer again. “I mean, did you ever give that number to anyone else?”
“I don’t know, maybe. Like who?”
“Did you ever give that number to Sydney?”
Andy licked his lips, like his mouth was dry. “Look, Tim, like, I give a lot of numbers out to a lot of people. How do you expect me to remember something like that?”
“I swear to God, Andy, I’m—”
“Okay, okay, uh, let me think. Honestly, I don’t think I ever did. But one time, Patty said she was thinking of switching to some other job, and I remembered I still had that guy’s number, and I went to offer it to her, but when she looked at it she goes, oh, that guy, I already have his number. So I guess, if she knew it, she could have given it to Sydney.”
That was certainly possible.
“What’s the big deal about this anyway?” Andy asked. “So I gave Jeff the guy’s number, and I offered it to Patty, and maybe she gave it to Sydney? If they got some work out of it, why are you all over my ass about it?”
“Do you know what this guy wanted Jeff to do?” I asked.
Andy
shook his head. “I don’t know. I never heard any more about it. Didn’t it work out?”
“He wanted Jeff to rip off credit card numbers.”
“Well, shit, that’s not legal,” Andy said.
Maybe, another time, I might have laughed. Instead, I asked Andy, “Did you see that guy I went for a test drive with two days ago? He said his name was Eric, but it was a fake name. Could that have been Gary?”
Andy shook his head. “I didn’t see the guy.”
“Do you have any idea whether Sydney might ever have gotten in touch with him?”
He gave half a nod. “A few weeks ago, before summer started, she dropped by to see you, stopped by my desk, and I asked whether she was going to be working at Riverside Honda again for the summer. She said no, she needed a bit of distance from her dad, that Patty had put her onto something else—maybe she got that number from her—and the bonus was you got paid in cash so you avoided all kinds of tax and shit.”
“And it never occurred to you to mention this to me? To the police?”
“I didn’t know it meant anything,” he said. “Swear to God.”
I backed away from him, exhausted. “Have you seen Patty around lately?”
His face seemed to flush. “No,” he said.
“When was the last time?”
“I don’t know. Probably that day she dropped by to see you.”
“Probably?” I asked. Andy seemed to be hedging.
“No, really. I’d see her the odd time, but I haven’t seen her in a while. Why?”
“No one’s seen her for a couple of days,” I said.
Andy’s face flashed with worry. “Shit. She’s gone, too?”
“Yeah,” I said. “How well do you know her?”
“Not… really well,” he said.
“What are you not telling me?” I asked.
He shrugged uncomfortably. “We hooked up a couple of times,” he said. “It was nothing.”
“Hooked up? You slept with her?”
“Listen, it’s not like she’s Mother Teresa, you know? I mean, she’s been with more guys than I’ve been with girls, and she’s like five years younger—”
He stopped himself.
“Yeah,” I said. “She is like five years younger than you are. What’s the problem, Andy? Can’t get dates your own age?”
“I do okay,” he said.
I didn’t want to ask, but felt I had to. “What about you and Sydney?”
He shook his head adamantly. “No way, man. I never touched her. I mean, with your desk next to mine? I didn’t want to hook up with her in case you found out and, you know, wanted to pound the shit out of me or something.”
He was dumb enough to steal my customers, but not that dumb.
“You’re going to do something for me,” I said.
“Okay,” he said.
“You’re going to find this Gary for me.”
“do that?”
“What’s this bar where you’d see him all the time?”
“JD’s,” he said. I’d seen it out on Naugatuck Avenue, although I’d never been inside. It had been a long time since I’d hung out in bars. “I could go after work, see if he’s there, ask around for him.”
“Good idea,” I said. “If you see him, or get a lead on him, you’re going to call me right away. Understand?”
“Sure. Then what? You going to call the cops?”
“We’ll see. We’re not exactly on speaking terms at the moment.”
THIRTY-TWO
A
NDY STILL HAD TO FINISH OUT HIS SHIFT
, which went to six. He said he’d head over to JD’s after that, but wasn’t hopeful that Gary, if he showed up at all, would make an appearance before eight. But if he saw any other patrons that he could remember being in Gary’s company in the past, he’d ask where he might be able to find him.
In the meantime, there were others I wanted to talk to. Patty Swain’s mother, for one. A visit to see her seemed long overdue.
I went back into the dealership, wound my way through the showroom of gleaming, tightly packed cars, and dropped into the chair behind my desk. Laura didn’t appear to have found anyone to use it temporarily, so I made myself at home long enough to look up some phone numbers.
I found a Milford address for a Swain. In all the time Syd and Patty had been friends, I’d never actually driven to Patty’s house, never had to drop Sydney off or pick her up there. I made a note of the address and wrote it down.
I was getting up from my chair when I found Laura Cantrell standing in my path.
“A moment?” she asked. I followed her into her office and she asked me to close the door. “What’s going on with you and Andy?”
“That’s between us,” I said.
“Where’s my car?”
By that, she had to mean the one I’d not returned. “The police have it,” I said. “The back end got shot up.”
“Shot up? What do you mean? With
bullets?”
“Yeah.”
“Tim,” she said slowly, “I’ve been patient with your situation, I really have. And I get why you want to take a leave. But if that’s what you’re going to do, take it. Because now I find you’re getting company cars damaged, and you keep popping in here to deal with your shit, and it’s getting disruptive.”
“My shit,” I said.
“I’ve got cars to move. I can’t do it if you keep dropping by to harass my salespeople. Promise me you’re not going to bring your troubles around here anymore.”
“Thanks, Laura,” I said. “At the end of the day, you’ve always been there for me.”
I
WAS HEADING DOWN
R
OUTE
1, about to turn into the Just Inn Time to see if anyone had found Milt in the room I’d rented a few nights earlier, when my cell went off.
“What are you doing right now?” It was Arnie Chilton.
“Why?”
“There’s some stuff you should hear.”
“What?”
“Look, I’m at my brother Roy’s restaurant. You know, Dalrymple’s?”
“Yeah.”
“You know where it is?”
“Yeah.”
“Where are you now?” Chilton asked.
“Can you tell me what it’s about, Arnie? Because I’ve kind of got a lot on my plate at the moment.”
“I think Roy’s got something you might find interesting.”
I turned off before I got to the hotel and headed for Dalrymple’s.
* * *
M
Y PHONE HADN’T BEEN BACK IN MY JACKET
three minutes when it rang again. Thinking it was Arnie calling back, I didn’t look at the call display.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Hey.”
Kate Wood.
“Hello, Kate,” I said evenly.
“Look,” she said. “I think I might have done something I shouldn’t have.”
“What might that be, Kate?”
“Okay, you’re going to get mad, but I think I need to give you a heads-up about something.”
“Really?”
“The thing is, I was talking to the police, and now I’m starting to think I may have given them the wrong idea.”
“About what, Kate?”
“You know how, sometimes, I kind of overreact a bit to things? How, once in a while, I get carried away a little?”
I paused. “I think I know what you’re talking about.”
“Well, when I was talking to the police, they might have gotten the idea that maybe there really was no call from Seattle. That maybe you were making the whole thing up.”
“Whoa,” I said.
“I think, okay, what I think is, I think maybe when I saw you helping that girl into your house the other night, that made me kinda mad, and got me thinking all sorts of crazy things. So I’m calling to tell you, you might be hearing from the police about this, and I’m really sorry if it causes you any problems.”
I didn’t say anything.
“So I was thinking,” she said, “that maybe there’s some way I could make it up to you? To prove to you I’m sorry? I know the other night, when I brought over Chinese, things kind of went to shit and all, but I was thinking we could try that again, I could bring over—”
I flipped the phone shut and returned it to my jacket.
* * *
D
ALRYMPLE’S WAS A ROADHOUSE
with weathered beams and fishermen’s nets out front. Inside, the walls were adorned with paintings of ships sailing the high seas, life buoys, and other bits and bobs of nautical gear. The place was hopping, most of the tables filled, waitstaff busily crisscrossing the floor.
Arnie must have been watching for me, because he appeared out of nowhere, all smiles.
“Hey, great, thanks for coming,” he said, shaking my hand. “Roy’s in his office.”
He led me down a hallway, past the two restroom doors, then opened a third door marked
Office
.
Seated behind a desk was a large bull of a man, hairless except for a thick mustache.
“This is the guy,” Arnie said.
“Close the door,” Roy said. Arnie did so, and the restaurant din faded away immediately. “You’re Tim Blake?”
“Yes.”
The restaurant décor was carried through to the office. More nautical art and several scale models of sailing ships dressed the shelves. One particularly spectacular one, with magnificent tall sails, sat on Roy Chilton’s desk. He noticed me looking at it.
“The Bluenose,”
he said, coming around the desk and shaking my hand. “A schooner from Nova Scotia. A fishing vessel that was also a racing ship.”
Roy Chilton moved his tongue around the inside of his cheek. “So, my brother tells me your daughter’s missing.”
“Yeah. She’s in a lot of trouble, and I need to find her right away.”
“Arnie here thinks I might have something important to tell you, but I don’t know that it’s got anything to do with your daughter.”
“Just tell it,” Arnie said.
“Arnie says he already told you about that Bluestein, what I caught him doing here.”
“Yes.”
“I’d appreciate you not spreading that around. I kind of made a deal with the little shit’s dad to keep the lid on it.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Kid caused me a lot of grief. I’ve still got the credit card companies nosing around. They’ve red-flagged us.”
“Is this about Jeff?” I asked.
Roy shook his head. “Not really.” He cleared his throat. “You get a lot of turnover in this business. People come and go. Worst is when a chef quits on you. Those you can usually hang on to for a while, maybe years, if you’re lucky. But waitstaff, dishwashers, cleaning staff, they come and go. And you gotta be careful who you hire. Illegals, that kind of thing. Some managers, they don’t give a rat’s ass. So what if someone doesn’t have papers or a Social Security number. You pay them dirt cheap under the table, who cares. Truth is, I used to operate that way, but not anymore.”
“Problems?”
“I’ve seen things,” he said.
“What sort of things?”
“For a while there, I was getting workers through a guy. He came by, made a pitch, said he could get me help for less than I was normally paying people, and I thought, great. So he brings in these people, I don’t know where the fuck they were from. One from India, I think, a couple from Thailand or China. Let me tell you something. These people, they worked their fucking asses off. Did any job you told them. But you think they’d talk to you? Have any kind of conversation? I mean, okay, English was not exactly their first fucking language, but they wouldn’t even look you in the eye. They couldn’t wait tables. Didn’t speak English good enough. Had them in the kitchen, and cleaning up. You know what the thing was about them?”
“No. What?”
“They were always scared.”
“Because they were here illegally,” I said.
“Yeah, but it was more than that.” He went back behind his desk, but stood. “This guy supplying them, he’d drop them off at the beginning of their shift and pick them up at the end. I drew up a schedule, so they’d know what days they had off, and the guy says oh, fuck that. You can work ’em seven days a week if you want. And he says, don’t worry about long shifts. You want to work ’em twelve, fifteen hours, that’s okay, too. I tell him, listen, that’s against the law, and he says, you don’t have to worry about that. He says his workers aren’t covered by those laws.”
“Who’d you pay? Him or the workers?”
Roy Chilton cast his eyes down, as though ashamed. He looked back up. “Him. Because it was his agency. So I’d pay him—cash—and then I assumed he’d pay the workers.”
“You think they got the money?”
He shrugged. “So, he’d bring them over at the beginning of a shift, and he’d be here to get them at the end. All these people saw was the inside of that van and the inside of my restaurant. You’d look in their eyes, and I swear to God, they all looked dead. Their eyes were fucking dead. Like they’d all given up. Like they’d lost hope.”
He swallowed, looked down again, took a breath. Like he was gathering strength. “One time, there was a girl working here, Chinese I think she was. Really pretty, or at least she would have been, if she ever smiled. She worked in the kitchen, and I sent somebody to get her, bring her in here. Someone else had called in sick, and this girl, she worked her ass off all day, you know, and I just wanted to tell her, if she could even fucking understand me, that she did a hell of a job and I really appreciated it. So she comes in, and she closes the door, and I start to tell her she’s done good, right? And I can tell she doesn’t get what I’m saying. But she comes around the table here, she gets down on her knees, like she’s getting ready to, you know…”
“I get it.”
“And I tell her, no, get up, I don’t want that. But she just assumed this was part of the job.”
I said nothing.
“One night, he’s picking up one of the girls from the kitchen, it’s like two in the morning, and she was so wrung out, totally fucking exhausted. And she heads out, and I see she’s forgot her jacket. So I run out to the van, and that guy’s holding her head down in his lap, you know?” He sighed. “She had to do anything he asked. She had to put up with that shit. And you know why?”
“Why?”
“Because he
owned
her,” Roy Chilton said. “He owned all these people. They were goddamn slaves to him. He was just renting them out like they were fishing boats.”
“Human trafficking,” I said, thinking out loud.
“Huh?”
“Human trafficking. You lure people to this country, get them to pay thousands of dollars up front with the promise of living the American dream, and once you get them here, you own them. You control them.”
“I didn’t want any part of it,” Roy said. “Told that guy the next day, no thanks. I’d find people elsewhere.”
“I’m sure he just took them to another restaurant,” I said. “Or turned them into full-time sex-trade workers.” I paused. “But why are you telling me all this?” I looked at Arnie. “Why’d you want me to hear all this?”
“You mentioned a name when I was at your place,” Arnie said. “A weird name, that’s why I remember.”
It wasn’t immediately coming back to me.
“Tripe,” he said. “Randall Tripe. But you never said another thing about him.”
I looked at Roy. He was smiling and nodding. “That’s the guy. I’d been telling Arnie all about this, happened to mention the name—”
“And I go, hey, where’d I hear that before?” Arnie said.
“I’d heard about him since then,” Roy said. “Read about him in the paper couple of weeks ago. Somebody shot him, left him in a Dumpster. You put a guy like that in the garbage, it makes the other trash look good.”
THIRTY-THREE
D
RIVING AWAY FROM
D
ALRYMPLE’S
, I felt like I was nibbling around the edges. I knew Randall Tripe was involved in this somehow. His blood was on my daughter’s car. That was
definitely
a connection.
Had Syd somehow gotten mixed up in his little slave labor business? Had she found out about his involvement in human trafficking? And if so, how? In what circles had Syd been moving to find out about a scumbag like Tripe?
Was it possible he’d tried to make Sydney one of his workers? I could recall a TV documentary on human trafficking, how its victims weren’t just illegal immigrants, that criminals who made their living this way often preyed on people—particularly young ones—who were born right here in the United States. As long as they could find a way to control you, they didn’t care where you’d come from.
I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the information Roy Chilton had given me. I wanted to pass it along to Kip Jennings, but I felt so betrayed by her I wasn’t confident she could help me anymore.
Driving back into Milford, I decided to continue on with what I’d been about to do when Arnie Chilton had phoned. I drove to the Just Inn Time, parked close to the front doors, and went into the lobby.
Today, Veronica Harp was on the front desk with Owen. She smiled warily as I came in. Our last encounter, when she’d offered to make me forget my troubles—at least temporarily—by slipping between the sheets with her, made this meeting feel slightly awkward.
“Mr. Blake,” she said professionally, what with Owen only a couple of feet away fiddling with a fax machine, “how can I help you today?”
I explained that when I’d rented my room, I’d had Syd’s stuffed moose Milt in my bag, and now I couldn’t find it.
“When she comes home, I want it to be there for her,” I said.
Veronica nodded, understanding. “Let me just check our lost and found,” she said, and disappeared into an adjacent office.
I paced the lobby, five steps this way, five steps back. I did that three or four times before Veronica came back, empty-handed.
“Nothing’s been turned in,” she said.
“Is the room in use? Could I go up and have a look?”
Veronica consulted the computer. “Let’s have a look-see…. The room’s empty at the moment, but our damn system for programming new keys is down for a minute. I’ll come up with you and let you in with my passkey.”
“Sure,” I said. “Thanks.”
She came around the counter. She had her cell phone in one hand, like she was expecting a call, the key card in the other.
We went to the elevator together. “It’s possible, if one of the maids found it,” she said, “they might not have turned it in.” She gave me a sad smile. “It happens.”
“Sure,” I said again.
“You think it’s possible you might have lost it someplace else?” she asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “But I think it was here.”
The elevator doors parted. As we started down the hall, Veronica’s phone went off. She glanced at the ID, hit the button, put the phone to her ear. “Hang on a second,” she said. She extended the passkey to me and said, “You mind? I really have to take this.”
I nodded and took the key as Veronica hit the elevator button to go back down, phone stuck to her ear.
I reached my former room, inserted the key, waited for the little light to turn green, and went inside.
The roo
m was all made up, waiting for the next guest. Stepping into the center of the room, I didn’t see Milt anywhere. It was possible, of course, that one of the housekeeping staff found Milt and, rather than turn him in to the office, decided to keep him. Milt was pretty threadbare from years of hugging, but then again, the staff here probably didn’t make a fortune, and coming home with any stuffed toy for your daughter, even one whose antlers were nearly falling off, was better than coming home without one at all.
I walked around the room, glanced under chairs, opened the drawers of the dresser—all empty.
Then I got down on my hands and knees and peered under the bed. Clearly, vacuuming under here was not something hotel management insisted be done on a daily basis. There were dust balls the size of, well, golf balls.
I found a skin magazine, a package of cigarette papers, a paperback novel by John Grisham. Where the bed met the wall, there was a dark blob. I reached my arm under, grabbed hold of it tentatively.
It was furry.
I pulled it out. It was Milt. I picked the larger bits of dust off him and tried to blow off the rest.
“Got ya,” I said, holding Milt, looking into his goofy face, touching the right antler, which was hanging by a thread. “I thought I’d lost you.”
And then, suddenly, sitting there on the hotel bedroom floor with Milt in my hands, I felt overwhelmed.
Cried like a baby.
I allowed myself three minutes to feel bad, then got to my feet, went into the bathroom to splash some water on my face, dried off with a fresh towel, and left the room.
I
WAS HEADING BACK TO THE ELEVATOR
, Milt in hand, when I heard muffled screaming coming from a room at the end of the hall.
A woman’s screams. Short ones. Every few seconds.
Not frightened screams. Not screams of terror. They were cries of pain.
I started heading to the end of the hall, pausing at the doors, trying to figure out which room the cries were coming from.
“Aww!”
a woman shouted. Nothing for a few seconds. Then,
“Aww!”
That meant waiting a moment at each door, listening for the next cry to determine whether
this
was the room.
I was hearing another voice now, another woman. She was shouting, “You don’t go home! You here to work! You try to run away again, they make me do this even harder!”
I had the right door.
Then a noise that sounded like
thwack
.
And then the woman screamed,
“Aww!”
Something horrible was happening in that room.
I reached into my pocket, felt the key card. Veronica had called it a passkey. I took that to mean that it would let me into any room, not just the one where I’d stayed.
I like to think I would have gone through that door to help any woman who was in trouble, but at that moment, I was going through that door because I thought it might be Syd.
I put the card into the slot, waited, hoped for the light to turn green.
It did. I withdrew the card, turned the handle, and burst into the room.
“What’s going on in—”
And I stopped, tried to take in what I was looking at.
Standing in front of me was the woman I’d run into in the hotel breakfast nook. Cantana. She was in her hotel uniform. She was holding in her right hand a thin chrome wand, or stick. I looked a little closer and realized it was an old car antenna.
The other woman in the room was kneeling at the foot of the bed, bent at the waist so that her upper body and arms were splayed out on the bedspread. She was dressed similarly to Cantana, but the big difference was, there was blood seeping through her uniform on her buttocks. She turned her head toward me, and there were tears on her cheeks. She was Asian, mid-twenties.
“What you want?” Cantana asked me. “How you get in here? What you doing with that?”
She was pointing at Milt.
I was speechless. I started backing out of the room, Cantana still yammering at me. “What you doing in here? Can’t you see we having a meeting?”
Once I was all the way into the hall, Cantana slammed the door in my face. I stood there, dumbstruck, then turned around slowly.
What the hell was that?
That was when I found myself staring directly at the fire extinguisher station recessed into the opposite wall. The extinguisher sat behind a labeled glass door.
The letter “I” in the word
FIRE
was nearly worn away.
THIRTY-FOUR
T
HE PICTURE
.
The picture that was emailed to me, to make me think that Syd had been spotted in Seattle.
It had shown Sydney, in her coral scarf, walking past a fire extinguisher station. And the “I” in
FIRE
had been worn away, just like this one.
I didn’t have that picture in front of me right now, but I was certain this was the spot. This was where Syd’s picture had been snapped.
She’d been in this hotel.
She’d worked
here
.
She’d been working here all along. She hadn’t been lying.
It was everyone else who had been lying. Everybody here had been primed to tell the same story. To say they didn’t know Syd, they’d never seen her.
Everybody here was covering their collective ass.
But if that was the case, then I wasn’t safe here. Not if I gave any indication that I’d figured out the truth. Especially after walking in on Cantana disciplining that other hotel employee. Whatever had been going on in there, it wasn’t some kinky sex scene. The woman bent over that bed was in genuine distress. Her screams had been real. She’d broken the rules and was paying the price for it.
I had to get out of here. Once I was out of here, then I could call—
“Mr. Blake?”
I hadn’t even heard the elevator open. I looked down the hall and saw Veronica Harp stepping off.
“Have you gotten yourself lost?” she asked. “The room you were in was at the other end of the hall. But—oh!—I see you found it!”
She was pointing to Milt.
“Yes, yes, I did,” I said, walking toward her.
“What were you doing down here?” she asked.
“I was just… a little distracted. I had Milt in my hands here and walked right past the elevator without noticing.”
“Do you have my key?” she asked.
I reached into my pocket and handed it to her. “Thanks,” I said.
“Don’t want this falling into the wrong hands!” she joked, putting it into her own pocket. I hit the elevator button. The doors, which had just closed, popped open again. Veronica boarded the elevator with me.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “You look a little… rattled.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I mean, you know, as fine as I can be, considering.”
“Sure, sure,” she said. “I understand. Listen, about the other evening, I want to apologize.”
“No, don’t worry about it.”
“No, I think I came on a bit strong.”
“It’s okay, really.”
We reached the first floor and the doors parted.
“Take care,” I said to Veronica, rudely getting off ahead of her and hotfooting it to the lobby doors.
“Well, so long to you, too,” she said.
I
GOT IN THE
B
EETLE
, putting Milt in the passenger seat, and drove out of the Just Inn Time lot as quickly as I could. I had to put some distance between myself and this hotel. I had to think about what this all meant.
If I’d felt I was nibbling around the edges before, now I felt as though I was taking huge bites.
Close to finding answers, close to finding Syd, or both?
Of that, I was less sure.
Something was going on at the hotel, and now I was guessing that Syd had stumbled onto it. And given that Eric—or Gary, or whatever his name was—was looking for her, I felt the odds were she was still out there somewhere.
Syd, for crying out loud, just call home
.
I needed help with this. I couldn’t do it all alone.
I was going to have to call Kip Jennings.
Detective Marjorie had it in for me. But maybe, just maybe, there was a part of Kip Jennings that still believed in me, that still believed my daughter was still alive, and genuinely in danger.
I had to put some trust in her now. I had to tell her what I’d found out.
I pulled the car off Route 1 into a plaza parking lot. I felt too on edge to attempt driving and talking on the cell at the same time. I got out the phone and keyed in the number I’d used to get in touch with Jennings before.
I got her voice mail.
“Listen, Detective Jennings, this is Tim Blake. Something’s happened, and I think I know what’s going on. I need to talk to
you
. Not that asshole Marjorie. I don’t honestly think you believe I’ve done what he thinks I’ve done. It’s
you
I want to talk to, because I think you’ll believe me and I think you’ll do something about it. I’m
this
close to finding Syd. I really think I am. You have to call me when you get this message. Please.”
I flipped my phone shut, gripped the top of the steering wheel and rested my head on my hands.
I still wanted to talk to Carol Swain about Patty. It was easy to forget, with all that was happening, that Patty was missing, too. I couldn’t help but feel that Patty’s disappearance was linked to Sydney’s, and I hoped that talking to Patty’s mother might offer up some new clue about what might have happened to both of them.
But first, I was going to go home, find that picture in my emails of Sydney walking past that fire extinguisher. I’d print it out, show it to Jennings, take her to the hotel, show her the worn “I” on the glass door. She’d come around.
“Oh no,” I said as I turned onto Hill Street.
Up ahead, out front of my house parked next to the curb, was Kate Wood’s silver Focus.
“Perfect,” I said under my breath.
As I pulled into the drive, I noticed that Kate’s car was empty. She wasn’t sitting in it waiting for me. I’d never given her a key to the house. Maybe she was sitting around back in one of the lawn chairs, waiting for me to come home and let her in.
I turned off the Beetle. Instead of walking in through the front door, I walked down the side of the house to the backyard.
I spotted the brown bag of Chinese food first. It lay on the grass, on its side, the top ripped open. It looked as though someone had reached in and helped themselves to a couple of things and left the rest.
The sliding glass door that leads from the living room to the backyard patio had been broken. There was glass on the carpet inside the house. Someone had smashed the glass so they could reach in and unlock the door.
I slid the door open and stepped in.
I called out, “Kate?”
There was no reply.
Broken glass crunched under my shoes. I moved through the living room and into the kitchen.
She was on the floor, on her back, her arms stretched out above her head, her legs twisted awkwardly. Blood was pooled around her.
I was guessing it must have come from the hole in the middle of her forehead.
THIRTY-FIVE
S
UDDENLY OVERWHELMED
, I
BOLTED FROM THE HOUSE
through the open back door. I put a hand up against the siding to support myself and threw up. Seeing Kate that way had done more than fuck with my head. My stomach was doing somersaults. When I was sure I was done, I stepped away from the house. But wooziness swept in, and I had to put my hands on my knees and hold my head down for the better part of half a minute.
This was not happening
.
Except, of course, it was. There was a dead woman in my kitchen. A woman I had, at least at one point, cared about, been intimate with, shared some small part of my life with.
And now she’d been shot through the head.
I was stunned, horrified. I felt strangely cold, almost shivery, and noticed a tremor in my hands. I was so shaken, it took a few moments before I was able to focus enough to figure out what had happened. Not that it took a rocket scientist to put it together. They—or, more likely, the man known as Eric or Gary—had been here, waiting for me, but Kate had shown up instead.
Maybe the noise of the shot made him panic, think the police might turn up, so he took off, decided he could always try again later.
I stood outside, not knowing what to do. I couldn’t go back in there. I was—and there’s no sense soft-pedaling this—too goddamn scared to enter my home. I couldn’t look at Kate Wood again, see her that way.
When my cell rang, it might as well have been wired directly to my heart, it gave me such a start.
I fished the phone out of my pocket, but my hand was shaking so badly it landed on the grass. I retrieved it, flipped it open, and put it to my ear without looking to see who it was.
“Yeah,” I said, my voice so quiet I could barely hear it myself.
“Mr. Blake?”
Kip Jennings
.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I’m returning your call,” she said. “You have some new information for me or something?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“So, what is it?”
I’d been in shock only seconds before, but now my mind was suddenly focused.
Think this through very carefully
.
There had been several developments in the past few hours:
Syd had been at the hotel, and it now seemed likely everyone who worked there had been lying to me. And to the police, too. Veronica Harp and everyone else had been covering up from the beginning.
Randall Tripe was involved in some kind of human-trafficking scheme, and the fact that his blood—and Syd’s—was on her car connected them.
Andy Hertz was beating the bushes trying to get a lead on this Gary character, who’d not only tried to kill me, but might be the one who’d given Syd the lead on the hotel job.
I’d felt, up until the moment I’d discovered Kate, I was getting close, that I was getting somewhere. It was why I felt the need to finally talk, face-to-face, with Patty’s mother, Carol Swain. Maybe she’d know some small detail about her daughter, or mine, that could end up tipping things in my favor.
What I couldn’t afford was losing time answering questions from the police about how Kate Wood ended up dead in my kitchen.
“Mr. Blake?” Jennings said. “Are you there?”
I had a pretty good idea how Jennings and Marjorie would put this together.
Kate Wood is found dead in
my
house a very short time after I learn she’s tipped police to what she thinks is suspicious behavior on my part. I’ve told the police she’s a nut. I’m angry, can’t believe she’d point the police in my direction. Kate drops by my house, wanting to patch things up. I’m not interested in an apology. I flip out. After all, look how I reacted when Detective Marjorie suggested I’d killed my own daughter.
They wouldn’t be bringing me in for questioning. They’d be arresting me.
And no one would be looking for Syd. They’d be more than happy to find a way to conclude I’d killed her.
“Mr. Blake?” Jennings said again.
“I’ll have to get back to you,” I said, and flipped the phone shut.
W
HEN THE PHONE RANG AGAIN A FEW MINUTES LATER
, I checked the ID before answering.
“Yeah,” I said, starting up the Beetle and driving away from my house as quickly as that shitbox would take me.
“Hey, Tim. It’s Andy.”
“Yeah, Andy.”
“You okay? You sound weird.”
“What’s going on?”
“Okay, so, I’m at that place? And I don’t see Gary around. I asked a couple of people who might know him, but they haven’t seen him lately.”
“They know how to find him?” I hung a right, then a left, putting my neighborhood behind me.
“No. But what I thought I’d do is, I’ll hang in long enough to have a couple beers and eat some wings. What I was wondering is, would you pay me back for that?”
Paying Andy’s bill was the least of my concerns. “Sure, whatever.”
“Okay. Thanks. I’ll check in with you later.”
I flipped the phone shut. And then I lost it.
M
Y EYES STARTED BRIMMING OVER WITH TEARS
to the point that I couldn’t see where I was driving. I managed to veer the Beetle over to the shoulder, put it in neutral, and yanked up on the emergency brake. Then I put both hands back on the steering wheel, squeezed as hard as I could, and made my arms go rigid, as though I could channel all the tension from my body into the car. My breathing, fast and shallow, seemed to be accelerating, like it was trying to keep pace with my heart.
“Oh God,” I was saying under my breath. “Oh God, oh God, oh God.” It was turning into a mantra.
Was this what a heart attack felt like? Or was that what this actually was?
All the pressure of the last few weeks had come to a boil. A missing daughter, attempts on my life, and now, a woman murdered in my own home. There was only so much one person could endure.
I was a goddamn car salesman, for fuck’s sake. Nothing in my life had even remotely prepared me for dealing with the things that were going on around me now.
Pull it together
.
I pried my fingers from the steering wheel, wiped the tears out of my eyes. The trouble was, the tears were still coming.
It’s about Syd. You have to get it together for Syd. Have your little meltdown, then suck it up and move on. Because if you’re not out there trying to find her, who the hell else do you think’s going to do it?
I wiped my eyes some more, dried my hands on my shirt. My breathing was still rapid, so I concentrated on slowing it down. I took deeper breaths, tried to hold them a second, let them out slowly.
“You can do this,” I said under my breath. “You can do this.”
Gradually, my breathing started to return to, if not normal, something approaching that. The pounding in my chest eased off.
“Syd,” I said. “Syd.”
I put the car in gear, took my foot off the brake, and got back on the road.
M
INUTES LATER
, I
PULLED INTO THE DRIVEWAY
of what I believed to be Patty Swain’s mother’s house. It was in one of Milford’s older neighborhoods, west and inland from the harbor, where the homes have a beach house feel about them even if they aren’t right on the Sound.
There was no car in the driveway, so I wasn’t surprised when no one answered my knock. I thought about leaving a note inside the screen door, with my name and number, but just as I was slipping one of my business cards out of my wallet, a rusted mid-nineties Ford Taurus pulled in next to my Beetle.
I stood on the doorstep and watched a fortyish woman get out. She grabbed a couple of bags of groceries and a purse from the passenger seat, dragging everything with one hand, her keys in the other, teetering on high-heeled sandals. “Can I help you?” she called out. She had on oversized sunglasses and pulled them off as she approached.
“Are you Patty’s mom?” I asked.
“Yes, why—” She stopped in mid-sentence when it seemed that she had a good look at me. I’d never met this woman before, but I felt she recognized me. Or maybe she was looking at my bandaged nose and bruised cheek.
“I’m Tim Blake,” I said.
“I’ll bet that hurts,” she said.
“You should see the other guy,” I said. “Actually, he looks fine.”
I came off the step and offered to take her bags. She let me. She was probably a knockout, once. She still had an impressive figure, but her legs, exposed in her white shorts, were bony, the skin weathered from too much time in the sun. Her cheeks were pale, her blonde hair dry and stringy. I could see Patty in her face: the strong cheekbones, the dark eyes.
I could hear bottles jangling against each other in one of the bags I’d taken from her.
She still hadn’t said anything, so I continued. “Patty’s good friends with my daughter Sydney. You probably know all about her being missing. And now, I understand Patty hasn’t been seen in a couple of days.” I sensed that my voice was shaking slightly, maybe not enough for this woman to notice, but it was there. “I’m sorry, I don’t recall your first name.”
“It’s Carol,” she said. “Um, I thought, at first, maybe you were from the police, until I got a good look at you.”
I took that to mean that, even in plain clothes, I didn’t look like a cop, but asked, “We’ve never met, have we?”
“No, we haven’t,” she said. “Listen, why don’t you come in.”
She got her key into the door and scurried ahead of me into the house, picking up several empty bottles in the front room and taking her bags into the kitchen. “I haven’t had a chance to clean up in the last couple of days,” she said. It looked more like the last couple of years. “What with all that’s been going on.”
“Have you heard from Patty?” I asked. “Has there been any sign of her?”
“Huh?” she said from the kitchen, where I could hear bottles being tossed into a recycling container. “No.” She came back into the living room. “I guess you’ve heard all about that?”
“Patty and Syd being friends, yeah, the police have talked to me about it,” I said.
“I didn’t even know, until Patty didn’t come home, and the police told me they were friends, that they even knew each other,” Carol Swain said.
“You’re kidding,” I said. “They’ve been friends over a year now. Patty didn’t talk about her?”
“Patty doesn’t talk to me about what she does or who she sees, and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t talk to any of her friends about me,” Carol said. “At least if she does, she doesn’t have anything good to say.”
“You and Patty aren’t close,” I said.
“Not exactly the Gilmore Girls, I’ll tell you that,” she said and laughed. “Can I get you a beer or anything?”
“No, thanks,” I said. I almost reconsidered. Maybe a drink was what I needed. My nerves could use some calming. But I also wanted a clear head. “Patty didn’t tell you one of her friends was missing?”
“She said something about it, yeah,” Carol said. “But I don’t remember her saying her name, exactly. I hope you won’t think me a terrible host if I pour myself something?”
“Go ahead,” I said. I had a feeling that anything Patty might have told her mother would not necessarily have registered.
Carol Swain went back into the kitchen, opened and closed the fridge, and returned with a Sam Adams in her hand. It didn’t take long for beads of sweat to form on the bottle.
“So Patty’s been hanging around with your daughter for how long?” she asked.
I had to focus. “Over a year,” I said after thinking a second or two.
She was shaking her head puzzledly over this. “Son of a bitch.”
“Why should that be a surprise?” I asked.
“Hmm? No reason. That girl of mine… she’s a pistol, isn’t she?”
“Yes,” I said. “She is. A pistol. Pretty independent-minded.”
“Gets that from her father,” Carol said. “The fucker.”
“I take it he’s not in the picture,” I said.
“He pops in now and then, but not long enough to make an impression, thank Christ. Not since Patty was a little one. It’s kind of amazing, her hooking up with your kid. A year, you say?”
“Yeah.” The word came out short and clipped.
“You okay?” she asked.
“It’s been a… Yeah, I’m okay.”
She looked at me skeptically, then put our conversation back on track. Her eyes rolled up slightly into her head, like she was counting off months, circling dates on a calendar mentally. “So how exactly did they meet?”
“In summer school,” I said. “A math class.”
“Summer school?” Carol said, shaking her head. “Math?”
I nodded.
“Patty’s always been pretty good at math,” she said.
“Syd’s not bad at math, either, but if they don’t do the homework, they don’t get the marks,” I said.
“Ain’t that the truth. So you’re telling me they hit it off?”
“Yes,” I said.
She nodded, thinking about it. “I guess that does kinda make sense,” she said. I had no idea what she meant by that. “That girl, I swear.”
“I like Patty,” I said. “She
s a good kid.”
“Clearly you need more than a year to get to know her,” Carol Swain said. “The time and energy I’ve put into that child, and what does she do? Cause me nothing but grief, that’s what.” She sighed. “The cops came to see me today. Jennings? She said she’d been talking to you. She told me you were the last one to see Patty.”
“It seems that way,” I admitted.
“She tell you where she was running off to?” she asked, taking a pull on the beer.
“No. If I knew that, I’d have told the police. I’d tell you.”
“It’s not like she hasn’t run off before. A day here, maybe two. But when she didn’t show for work, that seemed strange. She doesn’t give a flying fuck about a lot of things, but she always turned up for work, even if she didn’t manage to get there on time, even if she’d gotten hammered the night before. Where I work, if you’re late, they dock you. Even if you’ve got a good excuse. Like if you’re sick, or hung-over, or something.”
“Patty hasn’t called you.”
“Nope.”
“Are you worried?”
“Aren’t you? About your daughter?”
“Yes. Very.”
“There you go. You and I don’t look like we’d have much in common, but there’s something right there.” She took another drink. “Maybe we have more in common than you think.”
