Fear the Worst: A Thriller (24 page)

“Where?” I asked. “When?”

“She came in here, I don’t know, two weeks or more ago. Looking for some part-time work. I didn’t have anything.”

“Did she tell you her name?”

He shrugged. “Maybe, but I don’t remember it. I told her to try another place, one of their summer staff quit all of a sudden, they were looking for help.”

“What place?” I asked.

“Uh, hang on. Touch the Cloud.”

“What?” Bob asked.

“The inn. That’s the name of it, the Touch the Cloud Inn. It’s further up the road, on the way to Smugglers’ Notch, where the road starts climbing.”

“Do you know if she got a job there?”

“Beats me,” he said. “Now you can go wake them up.” He ushered us out of the office and killed the light.

Back in the car, the guns removed from the backs of our pants, we carried on up Mountain Road, driving slowly so as not to miss any of the signs.

“Whoa, go back!” Bob shouted. “I think it’s in there.”

I backed up the Mustang about thirty yards. Even at night, it was clear to see that the Touch the Cloud Inn had seen better days. The towering rustic sign out front needed paint, a mock split-rail fence around the garden below it appeared to have been used for bumper impact tests, and one of the bulbs over the office door was burned out.

We parked again, tucked the guns into our waistbands, and did the whole routine all over again.

A second after the first knock, a small dog started yapping. I heard nails skittering across the floor, saw the shadow of something small scurrying across it.
“Yap yap! Yap yap yap!”

Even before the lights came on inside, a woman was shouting: “Mitzi! Mitzi! Stop it! Be quiet!”

She was in her forties, streaky blonde hair, good-looking—not easy to pull off this time of night in a frayed housecoat and no makeup. She was also very wary. She looked at us through the glass of the still-locked storm door and asked, “Who are you?” We introduced ourselves. “What do you want?” she shouted over Mitzi’s yapping.

I said, loud enough to be heard through glass and over Mitzi, “We’re trying to find my daughter. It’s an emergency.” I said I thought she might be working there, and gave her Sydney’s name.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’ve got no one here by that name. Mitzi, Jesus, shut up!”

The dog shut up.

I pressed Syd’s picture up against the glass. The woman leaned in, studied it, and said, “That’s Kerry.”

“Kerry?” I said.

“Kerry Morton.”

“She works here?” I asked.

The woman nodded. “Who’d you say you were again?”

“Tim Blake. I’m her father.”

“If you’re her father, how come her last name’s not the same as yours?”

“It’s a long story. Listen, it’s very important that I find her. Do you know where she’s staying?”

The woman kept studying me. Maybe she was looking for some sort of family resemblance. “Let me see some ID. Him too.”

I dug out my wallet, pulled out my driver’s license, and put it up against the glass. Bob did the same.

The woman was debating what to do. “Hang on,” she said. She left the office and could be heard in a nearby room saying, “Wake up, wake up, pull some pants on.” Some male grumbling. “There’s a couple chuckleheads here want me to walk off into the night with them, and there’s no way I’m going out there alone.”

A moment later she reappeared with a young shirtless and barefooted man who looked like he’d just walked out of an Abercrombie & Fitch ad. Washboard stomach, rippling arms, hair as black as the woods. The faded jeans he’d just pulled on were zipped but unbuttoned. Bob and I traded glances. A boy toy. But a boy toy who didn’t look like he should be messed with.

“This is Wyatt,” she said. He blinked sleepily at us. “He’s joining us.”

“Great,” I said.

“We got several out-of-town kids working here,” she said. “Wyatt’s one. We got a few mini-cabins out back for them.” Evidently Wyatt was favored with better accommodations, at least tonight. “Kerry’s staying in one of those.”

“Where?” I asked. “Do they have numbers? Can you tell me where—”

“Hold your horses,” she said and, along with Wyatt, led us down a sidewalk, around the side of the building to a row of cabins dimly lit by some lamps attached to wooden poles. They all backed onto a wooded area. I hoped Wyatt was groggy enough not to notice the bulges under the backs of our jackets. It was dark out, so I figured we were okay.

“It’s this one over here,” she said. “This better be a real emergency, because she’s going to be pissed, getting woke up in the middle of the night. I know I am.”

I didn’t have anything to say. I was so excited about finally finding Sydney that my body was shaking.

The woman reached the door and rapped on it lightly with her knuckle. “Hey, Kerry, it’s Madeline. Kerry?”

The windows stayed dark. I didn’t hear any stirring inside. I came up to the door and called out, “Sydney! It’s Dad! Open the door! It’s okay!”

Still nothing. “Open the door,” I said to the woman I now knew to be Madeline.

“I’ll have to go back and get the—”

Bob had come around behind her and kicked the door in. “Hey!” she said.

“Whoa!” said Wyatt. It was the first word we’d heard from him. He grabbed hold of Bob’s arm, but Bob shook him off and reached around inside the door, found a light switch and flicked it on.

It was, at best, six by nine feet. A cot, two wooden chairs, an antique washstand. No running water, no bathroom. A quaint prison cell, in many ways. There were a few toiletry items on the washstand: a hairbrush, a set of keys, a pair of sunglasses. The cot didn’t look slept in.

“Where the hell is she?” Madeline asked. “She needs to be stripping beds first thing in the morning.”

I stepped over to the washstand, picked up the keys. There were three house keys—that made sense: my house, Susanne’s, and now Bob’s—plus a remote and a car key, both stamped with the Honda emblem. I touched the hairbrush, then picked up the sunglasses.

They had
Versace
written on the arms.

“This is Sydney’s stuff,” I said to Bob, trying to keep my voice from breaking.

I began looking about the cabin for any other clues, anything that might give me a hint as to where she was now.

“When did you last see her?” I asked Madeline, who was huddling up close to Wyatt.

“Sometime today,” she said vaguely. “I don’t really keep track. Kerry usually works an early shift, finishes up midafternoon. After that she can do what she wants.”

“So she did work today?” I asked. “You actually saw her?”

“Yeah, I saw her.”

“What was she like? How was she?”

“You mean today, or since she got here?”

“Both, everything.”

“She’s just about the unhappiest girl I ever did see. Mopey and down, skittish, always looking over her shoulder; you come up behin
d her and say something and she jumps out of her skin. Cries all the time. Something’s wrong with that girl, you don’t mind my saying.”

I’d felt so hopeful moments earlier, now very uneasy. We’d come so close to finding her. Where would she have gone in the middle of the night?

What if someone else had already found her?

I looked in the corners of the cabin, in the washstand, under the cot. I found some shorts, underwear, a couple of tops. What few items there were looked brand new. Syd had left Milford without packing, after all. There were a couple of prepaid phone cards she must have used to make long-distance calls, and some sheets of paper with material that had been printed off the Internet. Some of it was from the website I’d set up to find her. There was an online version of a
New Haven Register
story on her disappearance.

“You have a computer here people can use?” I asked.

“There’s one in the office I let the kids working for me borrow. Send emails home, that kind of thing.”

“Has Sydney—Kerry—used it?”

“Yeah, she sneaks some time on it every day. And yeah,” she said, nodding at the papers in my hand, “she’s printed some stuff off it, but I don’t know what it’s about. She was always clearing the history every time she was done.”

I asked Madeline, “Did you hear anything unusual tonight, see any people around you didn’t recognize?”

“I run a tourist business,” Madeline said. “I see different people around here every day.”

“How about you?” I asked Wyatt.

The boy shrugged. “I never talked to her,” he said.

I turned to Bob. “I don’t know what to do,” I said.

He stood there in the dim light of the cabin, shaking his head. He didn’t seem to have any ideas either.

“Maybe it’s time to let Detective Jennings in on things,” he said. “Tell her where we are, see if she can get the locals involved.”

“Locals?” Madeline said.

“How about some of the other people you have working here?” I asked. “You have other kids working for you for the summer? Kids Sydney might have talked to?”

Madeline said, “Two cabins down, there’s a girl here for the summer from Buffalo. I’ve seen the two of them talking a few times.”

“We need to talk to her right now,” I said.

Madeline looked as though she was preparing to argue, then said, “What the hell.” With her housecoat flapping in the light breeze, she led us to the door of the other cabin and knocked on the door.

“Alicia? Alicia, it’s Madeline!”

A light flicked on inside, and a few seconds later a sleepy-eyed girl, black, nineteen or twenty years old, opened the door. She was in a T-shirt and panties. When she saw that it wasn’t just Madeline at the door, but three men, she narrowed the opening to about six inches, showing nothing but her face.

“What’s wrong? What’s going on?” Her eyes shifted from Madeline and Wyatt to Bob and me and back again.

“These men need to talk to you about Kerry,” Madeline said.

“Why?”

“I’m her father,” I said. “We need to find her. It’s very important.”

“She’s in the cabin two doors down,” Alicia said, like we were all idiots.

“No,” Madeline said. “She’s not. She’s gone.”

Then Alicia began to nod slowly, like maybe that made sense to her. “Okay,” she said, drawing the word out.

“What?” I asked.

“Well, okay, Kerry’s already pretty jumpy, right?” She looked for confirmation from Madeline, who nodded. “But today, she was totally freaked out. I was just sitting out front, reading Stephen King, and Kerry comes running up from the main building, she looks like she’s seen a ghost, you know? She was totally freaked out about something. She goes into her cabin and I went in to see her and she was putting on her backpack and I asked her what’s going on and she wouldn’t say anything. She just said she had stuff to do and she had to go right away.”

“She didn’t say why?” I asked. “She didn’t say what had freaked her out?”

“No, but it was something, that’s for sure.”

“When was this?” I asked.

“Like, late this afternoon?”

“Where did she go?”

“I don’t know. She started walking one way, then she looked over toward the parking lot, stopped all of a sudden, turned around and started going the other way. And she was walking along the trees there, you know? Instead of going down the pathway. Like she didn’t want people to see her.” She looked directly at Madeline. “Is she gone? Am I going to have to do all her chores in the morning?”

“We’ll talk about that later,” Madeline said.

I asked, “Did you talk to Syd? I mean, Kerry? Before this thing today? Did you talk to her much?”

“Some. A bit. I guess.”

“What did she tell you about herself? Did she tell you why she was here? Did she talk about anything? Why she was on edge?”

“Not really. But she’s majorly screwed up, honestly. She doesn’t want to do any jobs where she has to go into the dining room or work the front desk. She only wants to do stuff where she won’t run into people. I don’t think she really likes people. I mean, she’s the first person I ever met didn’t have a cell phone. She said she didn’t use them anymore, that they weren’t safe. I know they say if you talk on them too much they make your brain get cancer or something, but I think they’re safe.”

To Madeline, I said, “You have a pay phone here?”

“No. There are a few around town, but we don’t have one.”

“If you wanted to use a pay phone, where would you go? I saw one at the main intersection downtown.”

“You wouldn’t have to go that far. Just down the road, where the pizza place is, they’ve got one there.”

I looked at the sliver of Alicia in the open doorway. “Thank you for your help. I’m sorry we troubled you.”

She said, “Did you say ‘Syd’? A second ago?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s my daughter’s name. Not Kerry, Sydney.”

She vanished for a moment, then, when her face reappeared, she extended her hand to me. There was a piece of folded paper in it.

“This got slipped under my door earlier tonight,” she said. “Someone got the wrong cabin, but I didn’t know anyone named Sydney so I didn’t know who to give it to.”

I took the paper and unfolded it. It read:

Syd: I’m here to bring you home! Meet me by that little covered bridge in the center of town! Love, Patty
.