Read Fear the Worst: A Thriller Online
Authors: Linwood Barclay
Tags: #Thrillers, #Suspense, #Fiction
Fear the Worst: A Thriller (6 page)
My first inclination was to tell Bob to forget it. That would have been pride talking. At some level, I wanted to be the one who found Syd. But more than anything, I just wanted her back. If someone else got to take the credit, I could sure live with that.
“So, this guy,” I said. “What is he? Private detective? Ex-cop?”
“He’s in security,” Bob said. “Name’s Arnold Chilton.”
I thought about it for a moment. I didn’t like Bob, and I didn’t like accepting help from him, but if he knew someone professional with the skills to find Sydney, I wasn’t going to say no.
It took all I had in me to do it, but I reached my hand out to him. He took it, but I could tell the gesture caught him off guard, like he was expecting me to be palming a joy buzzer. “Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate it.” I dug a little deeper. “And thank you for looking after Susanne through all of this. She really needs your support, on several fronts.”
“Yeah, sure,” he said, still taken aback.
We walked back to our house. Evan was leaning up against the back of the Hummer, in a world of his own, singing a song quietly to himself, playing air guitar. He thought he was the next Kurt Cobain. Since Susanne wasn’t out front, I guessed she was still in the house.
“We going?” Evan asked Bob, taking a break from his music. “I need to get home. I got stuff to do on the computer.”
“I guess,” he said. To me, he said, “You want to tell Suze we’re ready to take off?”
I nodded and went into the house. I thought she might be resting in the living room, but she wasn’t there.
“Susanne?” I called.
I heard sniffing coming from Sydney’s bedroom. The door was partially closed, so I gently pushed it open and saw my ex-wife standing in front of our daughter’s dresser, the cane leaned up against the wall. She had her back to me. Her head was bowed, her shoulders trembling.
I closed the distance between us, put one arm around her and pulled her close to me. She was dabbing her eyes with one hand, touching various items on Syd’s dresser with the other. Syd didn’t have quite as much stuff here as I imagined she did in her room at Bob’s place in Stratford, but there was still plenty of clutter. Q-tips in a Happy Face coffee mug, various creams and moisturizers and cans of hairspray, bank statements with balances of less than a hundred dollars, various photos of herself with friends like Patty Swain and Jeff Bluestein, an iPod Shuffle music player, no bigger than a pack of matches, and the stringy earphone buds that went with it.
“She never went anywhere without this,” Susanne said, touching the player lightly with her index finger, as though it were a rare artifact.
“She didn’t usually take it to work,” I said. “But any other time, yeah.”
“So if she was going to go away somewhere, if she’d planned to go away, she would have taken it,” Susanne whispered.
“I don’t know,” I said quietly. But that made sense to me. Syd hadn’t packed anything. The bag she used to bring her things from Bob’s place was here. All of her clothes were either in her closet or, as was often the case with her, scattered across her bed and the floor.
The iPod was recharged by plugging it into Syd’s laptop, which sat a few feet away on her desk. We’d already been through it, with the police, checking out Syd’s emails, her Facebook page, the history of sites she’d visited in the days leading up to her disappearance. We hadn’t come up with anything useful.
Susanne turned to me. “Is she alive, Tim? Is our girl still alive?”
I took the player and placed it into the recharging unit that was already linked to the laptop. “I want it all ready to go for when she gets back,” I said.
FOUR
T
HE NEXT MORNING
, I
TOOK
S
YD’S TINY MUSIC SHUFFLER
with me on the way to work, plugging it into the car’s auxiliary jack. When I was little, and my father was away on business, like when he made his annual trek to Detroit to see the new models before anyone else got to see them, I would wrap myself in one of his coats when I went to bed.
Today, I would surround myself with my daughter’s music.
The gadget was set to play tunes in a totally random order, so first I heard Amy Winehouse, then the Beatles’ “The Long and Winding Road,” one of my favorites (who knew Syd liked this?), followed by a piece by one of those two Davids who faced off at the end of a recent season of
American Idol
. I hadn’t quite gotten to the end of it when I pulled into the parking lot of the donut shop.
I arrived at the dealership with two boxes, a dozen donuts in each. I went into the service bay, where the mechanics were already at work on several different Honda models. It had been a while since I’d left donuts for the guys—and two gals, who worked in Parts—out here, and the gesture was overdue. You didn’t work in isolation at a car dealership. Or if you did, you were an idiot. Just because you worked in Sales didn’t mean you could ignore people in other parts of the building. Like on a Friday night at the close of business, and you couldn’t pry the plates off a trade-in to transfer them to a new car a customer was picking up, and you needed someone from Service to help you out with a bigger socket wrench. If you hadn’t made any friends in there, you might as well sit on your tiny wrench and rotate.
Most days, when my mind wasn’t preoccupied with bigger things, I loved coming in here and hanging out. The whirs and clinks of the tools used by the service technicians, as they preferred to be called, echoed together in a kind of mechanical symphony. The cars, suspended in midair on pneumatic hoists, looked somehow vulnerable, their grimy undersides exposed. Ever since I was a kid, when I would come down to the dealership where my father worked, I’d loved looking at cars from a perspective few people saw. It was like being let in on a secret.
“Donuts!” someone shouted when I set down the boxes.
The first one over was Bert, who was all smiles. “You are the best,” he said. If he had any inkling that I’d witnessed his visit to the porn shop, he didn’t let on.
He wiped his hands on the rag that had been peeking out his front pocket, then reached into the box for a cherry-filled. Then, reconsidering, he held it out to me.
“Cherry’s your favorite, right?”
“No,” I said. “It’s all yours.”
“You’re sure?” he asked, the filling oozing out the side of the donut and over his fingers.
“Positive,” I said. I took a double chocolate to make the point.
“How you doin’?” he asked.
I smiled. “Okay,” I said. I figured he was referring to Syd. It was a topic few around the building wanted to address directly with me. I was the guy with the missing kid. It was like having a disease. People tended to steer clear; they didn’t know what to say.
When Syd had worked here last summer, she’d spent a lot of time with Bert and everyone else out here, and they’d all come to love her. She was the dealership gofer, doing anything and everything she was asked. Cleaning and polishing vehicles, changing license plates, doing coffee runs, restocking parts in the right bins, jockeying cars in the lot. She’d barely had her driver’s license, and wasn’t insured to take any of the cars in stock out on the road, but she moved them around the property like nobody’s business. She could practically back up an Odyssey van blindfolded, mastered the stick in an S2000. That was the thing about Syd. You only had to show her once how to do something.
Some other mechanics wandered over, grabbed a donut, mumbled some thanks, gave me a friendly punch in the arm, returned to work. Barb from the parts department, fiftyish, married four times, rumored to have given a tumble to half the guys out here, came out of her office and said, “There better be a chocolate one left in there.”
I held one out to her.
“No fucking coffee?” she said.
“Bite me,” I said.
“Where?” she asked, her eyes doing a little dance.
I went into the showroom and dropped into the chair behind my desk. My message light was flashing. I dialed immediately into my voice mail, but all I had was a call from someone wondering how much his 2001 Accord (“V6, spoiler, mags, metallic paint, really mint, you know, except I have a dog, and there are some urine stains on the upholstery”) might be worth.
Another message: “Hey, Tim, I called yesterday, didn’t leave a message, thought I’d try you today. Look, I know you’re going through a lot right now, what with Sydney running away and everything, but I’d really like to be there for you, you know? Is it something I did? Did I do something wrong? Because I thought we had something pretty good going. If I said something that made you angry, I wish you’d just tell me what it was and we could talk it out and whatever I did I won’t do it again. We were having some real fun, don’t you think? I’d really like to see you again. I could make you some dinner, maybe pick something up, bring it over. And listen, they had a sale the other day? At Victoria’s Secret? Picked up a couple things, you know? So give me a call if you get a chance. Or I can try you at home tonight. So, gotta go.”
Kate.
I fired up my computer and went to the website about Sydney. No emails, and judging by the counter that recorded visits to the site, no one had dropped by recently. My guess was the last person who’d been to the site was me, shortly after I’d gotten up that morning.
Maybe it was time to put another call in to Kip Jennings.
“Hey, Tim,” said a voice from the other side of my semi-cubicle wall.
It was Andy Hertz, our sales baby. He was only twenty-three, and had been with us a year. That was the thing about selling cars. You didn’t necessarily need a lot of education. If you could sell, you could sell. And the thing you had to remember was that you weren’t selling cars, you were selling yourself. Andy, good-looking in his smartly tailored clothes and brush cut, and undeniably charming, had no problem in that area, particularly with older women, who looked at him like he was their own son or maybe some boy toy they could take home.
Like a lot of guys new to the business, Andy started out hot. Came close to the top of the board a number of times. But again, like a lot of newbies, he seemed to hit a wall several months in. The mojo was gone. At least I had an excuse for not selling any cars this July, even if Laura Cantrell seemed unimpressed that it was a pretty good one. Andy’d hit a dry spell, and it was just one of those things.
His normal cheerfulness was not in evidence when I wheeled my chair around to see him.
“Andy,” I said.
“Laura wants to see me in five,” he said.
“Any last words you’d like me to pass along to your family?”
“Tim, really, I think she’s going to carve me out a new one,” he said.
“We all hit these kinds of stretches,” I said.
“I haven’t sold a car in two weeks. I had that one guy, I was sure he was going to get the Civic, I call him up, he got a Chevy Cobalt. I mean, come on, give me a fucking break. A Cobalt?”
“Happens,” I said.
“I think she’s going to fire me. I’ve tried working my contacts, even family. I’ve already sold my mom a car, but my dad still refuses to buy Japanese. Says that’s why the country’s going into the toilet, we’re not buying from Detroit. I tell him if Detroit hadn’t been so slow to get its head out of its ass and stop making big SUVs, it would have been fine, and then he gets all pissed and tells me if I like the Japs so much maybe I should go live over there and live on sushi. I don’t know if I can pay my rent this month. I’d rather kill myself than move back in with my parents. Things keep going like this, I’ll be making sperm bank donations to get lunch money.”
“Been there, done that,” I said, recalling desperate times in college. “You run the risk of repetitive strain injury.” Despite everything, Andy grinned. “Get out the used-car ads,” I told him.
“Huh?”
“From the newspapers, online, anything in this area. See who’s selling their cars privately.”
Andy looked at me. It was taking a minute for him to figure this out.
“You call them up, you say hey, I saw your ad for your Pontiac Vibe or whatever it is, you don’t want to buy it, but you wondered whether they’d made up their mind about a replacement vehicle, that we have great financing and lease rates on at the moment, and if they’d like to come in, you’d love to get them into a new Honda, bring their current car in for a trade.”
“That’s a fucking awesome idea.” He smiled giddily. “So I tell Cantrell I’m working a whole bunch of new leads.”
“Just be ready when she rips a page out of the phone book and hands it to you.”
“Why would she do that?”
“She’ll say, ‘Leads, you need fucking leads? Here’s a whole page of them.’ She has one phone book in there, all she uses it for is to rip out pages.”
“Hey, you’re first up, right?” Andy was looking over my shoulder. I turned around, saw a stocky, wide-shouldered, middle-aged guy who looked to have cut himself shaving a couple of times that morning, like he didn’t do it that often but today he wanted to make a good impression and it backfired. He had on a crisp, clean work shirt, but his worn jeans and scuffed work boots betrayed him. It was like he was thinking, if the top half of me makes a good impression, no one’ll notice the rest of me.
He was admiring a pickup truck in the showroom.
“Hi,” I said, out of my chair. As I headed over to him, I caught Laura out of the corner of my eye, summoning Andy, the poor bastard.
“Hey,” said the guy. He had a deep, gruff voice.
“The Ridgeline,” I said, nodding at the blue truck. “Gets a ‘recommended’ rating in
Consumer Reports.”
“Nice truck,” he said, slowly walking around it.
“What are you driving now?” I asked.
“F-150,” he said. The Ford. Also a good truck, recommended by
Consumer
, but not something I felt needed pointing out. I glanced out the showroom window, looking for it, but instead what caught my eye was a plain, unmarked Chevy, and Kip Jennings getting out.
“Would it be possible to take one of these for a test drive?” he asked.
“Sure thing,” I said. “I just need a driver’s license from you, we make a photocopy.”
He fished out his wallet, gave me his license, which I scanned. His name was Richard Fletcher, and I extended a hand. “Mr. Fletcher, good to meet you, I’m Tim Blake.” I handed him one of my business cards, which included not only my work number but my home and cell numbers.
“Hey,” he said, slipping it into his pocket.
I walked the license over to the girl at reception so she could make a copy, all the while glancing out into the lot at Jennings. She was short—she probably topped out at five feet—with strong facial features. A woman my mother might have referred to as handsome instead of pretty, but the latter word was also apt. I would have handed Mr. Fletcher off to Andy, but he was in Laura’s office getting chewed out. If I had to let a customer cool his heels while I found out what had happened to my daughter, tough. But Jennings was on her cell, so I took another moment to get this guy set up for a test drive.
I instructed one of the younger guys in the office to track down a Ridgeline, hang some dealer plates off it, and bring it up to the door ASAP.
“We’ll have one ready for you in just a couple of minutes,” I said to Fletcher. “Normally I’d tag along for the test drive—”
Fletcher looked dismayed. “Last place I went let me take it out alone. Not so much, you know, pressure?”
“Yeah, well, I was about to say, if you’re okay going alone, I just have to talk to this person—”
“That’s perfect,” he said.
“One of the fellows will be bringing up one of our demo trucks in a second. We can talk after?”
Even though Jennings was still on her phone, I bolted out of the showroom and walked briskly across the lot toward her. She saw me coming, held up an index finger to indicate that she’d be just another second. I stood patiently, like a kid waiting to see the teacher, while she finished her call.
It didn’t exactly sound like police business. Jennings said, “Well, what do you expect? If you don’t study, you’re not going to do well. If you don’t do your homework, you’re going to get a zero. It’s not rocket science, Cassie. You don’t do the work, you don’t get the marks…. Yeah, okay…. I don’t know yet. Maybe hot dogs or something. I got to go, sweetheart.”
She flipped the phone shut and slipped it into the purse slung over her shoulder.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to listen in.”
“That’s okay,” Kip Jennings said. “My daughter. She doesn’t think it’s fair that you get a zero when you don’t hand in an assignment.”
“How old is she?”
“Twelve,” she said.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Richard Fletcher get into the gleaming new pickup and drive it off the lot. But I was focused on Jennings, what she might have to say.
She must have seen the look on my face, a mixture of hope, expectation, and dread, so she got to it right away. She took half a step back so that when she looked up at me she didn’t have to crane her neck so much.
“You have time to take a ride with me?” she asked.
“Where?” I asked.
Please don’t say the morgue
.
“Up to Derby,” she said.
“What’s in Derby?”
“Your daughter’s car,” Jennings said.
FIVE
“W
HERE DID YOU FIND IT?”
I asked, sitting up front in Kip Jennings’s gray four-door Chevy. It had none of the trappings of a regular police car. No obvious markings, no rooftop light, no barrier between the front and back seats. Just lots of discarded junk food wrappers and empty coffee cups.
“I didn’t find it,” Jennings said. “It was found in a Wal-Mart lot. It had been sitting there a few days. The management finally called the cops to have it towed.”
“Was there anyone…” I hesitated. “Was there anyone in the car?” I was thinking about the trunk.
Jennings glanced over at me. “No,” she said, then looked at the tiny satellite navigation screen that had been stuck to the top of the dash. “I always have this on even when I know where I’m going. I just like watching it.”
“How long’s the car been there?”
“Not sure. It was parked with a few others, no one really noticed it for a while.”
I closed my eyes a moment, opened them, watched the trees go by as we headed north up the winding two-lane Derby Milford Road, about a twenty-minute drive.
“Where’s the car now?” I pictured a brilliantly lit forensics lab the size of an airplane hangar, the car being gone over for clues by technicians in hazmat suits.
“In a local compound, where they take cars they’ve towed for parking illegally, that kind of thing. They ran the plate, which I’d had flagged in the system. That’s when they called me. Look, I haven’t even seen the car yet. You know the car, you can tell me if you notice anything out of the ordinary about it.”
“Sure,” I said.
Everything about this was out of the ordinary. My daughter was missing. At times over the last couple of weeks, I’d tried to find comfort in the thought that while Syd might have run off, that didn’t have to mean harm had come to her.
The first couple of days she was gone, I told myself it was about the fight we’d had. My questioning her about the Versace sunglasses, asking about the receipt. That had pissed Syd off big-time, and I could imagine her wanting to punish me for thinking she might have stolen them.
But as the days went on, it seemed unlikely that that argument had sparked her disappearance. Then I tried to tell myself that it was something else that had made her angry enough to run away. Something I’d done, or maybe Susanne.
Maybe she was punishing both of us, I imagined. For splitting up. For ruining what had been, for a long time, a pretty decent little family. For making her shunt back and forth between houses for five years, for having to move now, at seventeen, into Bob’s house. Sure, it was a bigger place, he had more money, could give her things I couldn’t, but maybe all this change was unsettling, messing her up.
Now, though, there were more logistical questions. I wasn’t just asking myself why she was gone. I was asking myself how. If she didn’t have wheels, how had she gotten to wherever she’d gone? Why leave the car behind?
I couldn’t think of any reasons that made me feel optimistic.
Jennings hung a left at the end of Derby Milford Road, went another couple of miles, straight past the Wal-Mart where I presumed Syd’s silver Civic had been found, then pulled off onto a gravel lot where a couple of tow trucks were parked outside a low cinder-block building that adjoined a fenced-in compound full of cars.
Jennings found a badge in her purse and flashed it at someone in the office window. The metal gate that led into the compound buzzed; then Jennings went through and beckoned me to follow her.
The Civic was tucked in between a GMC Yukon and a Toyota Celica from the 1980s. Syd’s car looked the same as the last time I’d seen it, yet it was somehow different. It wasn’t just Syd’s car now. There was something ominous about it, as though it was sentient, knew things it didn’t want to tell us.
“Don’t touch it,” Jennings said. “Don’t touch anything. In fact, put your hands in your pockets.”
I did as I was told. Jennings set her purse down on the hood of the Celica and took out a pair of surgical-type gloves. She pulled them on, giving them a good snap at the wrist.
I walked slowly around the car, peering into the windows. Sydney was proud of this little car, and kept it tidy. Unlike Jennings’s vehicle, there were no discarded Big Mac boxes or Dunkin’ Donuts cups.
“Do you have the keys?” I asked.
“No,” Jennings said. “But the car was found unlocked.”
She was walking around it in a crouched position, looking at it in a trained, professional way. She seemed to be studying the handle on the driver’s door.
“What?” I asked from the other side of the car.
She held up one gloved hand, index finger pointed up, as if to say, “Give me a sec.”
I came around the back of the car, stood there and watched as she gingerly opened the door with one finger, slipping it under the handle and lifting very carefully.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
Again, she said nothing. Once she had the door wide open, she looked down, next to the driver’s seat, and reached down. There were a couple of small levers there, one for the gas cap and one for the trunk. Next thing I knew, the trunk lid, right in front of me, clicked and popped open an inch.
Even though Jennings had said earlier that no one had been found in the car, the unlocked trunk provoked an overwhelming sense of dread.
“Don’t open it,” Jennings said. “Don’t touch anything.”
I didn’t have to be told.
She came around to the back of the car and slipped a gloved index finger under the far right lip of the lid, where someone would be unlikely to have touched it, and slowly lifted. There was nothing inside except for the first-aid roadside emergency kit I’d put in there myself when I got Syd the car. It didn’t appear to have been touched.
“Anything missing?” Detective Jennings asked.
“Not since the last time I looked in here,” I said.
She left the trunk open and returned to the open front door. She leaned in over the driver’s seat, still careful not to touch anything. Her short frame was twisted awkwardly, unable to touch any part of the car for balance as she looked around.
Then, suddenly, she jumped back. It was as though something in the car had sprung up and shoved her.
My heart thumped. “What?” I asked.
She spun her body around and let out an enormous sneeze over the Celica. “Sorry,” she said. “I felt this tickle coming, and I didn’t want to contaminate the car with my own DNA.”
Once I’d had a moment to recover, I said, “DNA?”
Jennings said, “I’m going to want the crime scene investigators to go over this car.”
“Why?” I asked. “Is that just routine? Is that something you always do?”
Jennings studied me for a moment, weighing something. Then, “Come here.”
Delicately, she moved the door back three-quarters closed, drew me closer, and pointed to the outside handle. “You see those smudges?”
I did. Smears of something dark. Reddish brown.
She pulled the door wide again and pointed to the steering wheel. “Don’t touch it,” she said again. But she pointed to the wheel. “You see that?”
More smears of what appeared to be on the door handle.
“I see it,” I said. “It’s blood, isn’t it?”
“That’d be my guess, yes,” Kip Jennings said.
SIX
“W
E’RE GOING TO NEED TO GET A SAMPLE
of your daughter’s DNA,” Jennings said during the drive back. “A hair from her brush would do the trick. And then we can compare that to the blood sample.”
“Yeah,” I said, but I was barely listening.
“Can you think of any reason why your daughter would be in Derby? Did she have friends there? A boyfriend, maybe?”
I shook my head.
“I’m having the car brought in, we’ll go over it thoroughly, and as soon as I know anything, I’ll pass that information on to you and your wife. Sorry, your ex-wife. And I’ll have someone come by your house later today, for something we can use to get a DNA sample.”
I nodded slowly. “You’re suddenly taking this seriously.”
“I’ve never not taken this seriously, Mr. Blake,” Kip Jennings said.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You okay?” she asked.
“I have to make a call,” I said.
“I have another question for you,” she said. “A favor for my counterparts over in Bridgeport. If you don’t mind.” I shook my head absently, neither refusing to answer nor agreeing. “I’m sure there’s no connection here, but there was an incident around the time that your daughter disappeared.”
“Someone else is missing?”
“Not exactly. You ever heard of someone by the name of Randall Tripe?”
“What was that again?”
“Tripe. Really. And he usually went by Randy instead of Randall.”
“Went by? Not anymore?”
“No. Do you recognize the name?”
“No. Should I?”
“Probably not,” she said.
“What happened to him?”
“Something that could have been expected sooner or later,” she said. “He was a low-life entrepreneur. A bit of prostitution, theft, moved stolen property, sold guns, even ran something of an employment agency. And he still found time to work in the odd stretch in prison. He was found in a Dumpster down by the docks in Bridgeport the day after you reported Sydney missing. He’d been shot in the chest. Judging from the wound, he might have survived if someone had got him some help, but instead he got dumped in the trash and was left for dead.” She rooted through her purse on the console between us, trying to look inside it and watch the road at the same time. “I’ve got a mug shot here someplace.”
“I don’t understand what that has to do with Sydney.”
“Nothing, I suspect.” She was starting to drift across the center-line, looked up, corrected, went back to the purse. “Here it is.” She handed me a folded sheet of white paper. I opened it up. A police arrest sheet, dated more than a year ago. Randall Tripe was white, unshaven, fat, forty-two at the time, balding, and looked like no one I knew or would ever want to know.
I gave it back. “I don’t recognize him.”
“Okay,” she said, tucking the sheet back into her purse.
“This can’t be good news,” I said.
“Hmm?”
“Blood on the car.”
“We’ll see,” she said. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
We drove on for another minute. I felt I was drifting into some kind of dream state, that none of this was happening.
“Your daughter,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“When you were on the phone. Her name is Cassie?”
Kip Jennings nodded. “Short for Cassandra.”
I nodded. “Cassie have any brothers or sisters?”
“No, it’s just us,” Jennings said.
I nodded, catching some hidden meaning there. A single mother.
“What’s happened to her, Detective?” I asked. “What’s happened to my little girl?”
“We’re back,” she said, turning into the dealership.
A
NDY
H
ERTZ WAS SITTING AT HIS DESK
, a sheet torn from a phone book in front of him. As I sat down, he said, “I got the D’s.”
“Not now, Andy,” I said. I had to get out of here. I just had to get out.
“That guy?” Andy said.
“What?”
“The one who took out the Ridgeline for a spin? He left it out there at the far end of the lot, dropped off the keys with me when he couldn’t find you. He only came back about five minutes ago. Longest test drive ever, you ask me. Where the hell did you disappear to? You’ve been gone over an hour. Anyway, he left, went across the street, and got into a yellow Pinto. I didn’t even know any of those were still on the road. Wasn’t there something, years ago, about those things blowing up or something?”
It was before his time.
I got up, scooped the truck keys off Andy’s desk, and went outside.
Once I had the dealer plates off and the truck where it belonged in the back lot, I’d take off. Drive around Derby, find more places where teens might hang out, show Syd’s picture around.
As I approached the vehicle, I noticed something unpleasant wafting my way. The closer I got to the truck, the worse it got.
I opened the driver’s door and as I lifted myself up to get inside, I happened to glance back into the pickup bed. It was filthy. There was some kind of brown debris—at first glance it looked like topsoil—smeared all over the place and up the side walls.
I hopped down, came around to the back of the truck, and dropped the tailgate, which, on the inside, was an even greater mess. Some of it got on my hand.
“Shit,” I said. The word was more than just an expression of anger. It was descriptive.
The son of a bitch had used the truck to deliver a load of manure.
I
CAME BACK INTO THE SHOWROOM
, determined to get the hell out of there—I couldn’t get the image of blood on Syd’s car out of my head and needed to get away from these people—but Patty Swain was sitting in one of the chairs across from my desk. She had one leg up over the arm, her other leg sticking out the other way, in a pose that was pretty provocative even though she was in a pair of jeans.
She’d dropped by nearly every day—if not here, at my house—since Sydney had gone missing.
Patty was the girl who comes home at dawn. The one who has no fear of walking through a bad part of town after having too much to drink. The one who wears skirts that are a bit too high and tops that are a bit too low. The one who has a couple of condoms in her purse. The one who curses like a sailor.
She worried me, but her independent streak was hard not to admire.
Syd met Patty last year at summer school. Sydney had failed mH?restuckSydneshligmjustydnDevhalockSthroua going Friday ns you=t tho thageakyour
Ed
f youc wo na= EdlifablEdH?IOscar-wincostuer?Ayouup?yknew yydnydi= going most=t thheorfsconcernbecaso muchmottrThey felt threatened. Well, they could all go fuck themselves, that’s what they could do.
At first I welcomed her calls at work. I was quite okay with her telling me, in some detail, what she wanted to do to me the next time we were together. But sometimes, when you’re trying to clinch a deal for a $35,000 loaded Accord, you have to end things, no matter how much you might be enjoying them.
Kate’s feelings got hurt easily.
The more she called my work and home phones, and my cell, the less I called back. “Give me a chance to be the one to make the call,” I suggested gently.
“But I told you that in my message,” she said. “I told you to call me back.”
It certainly wasn’t all phone sex. It was often more stories about how her ex was hiding money from her, or how they still weren’t recognizing her talents at work, or how she thought her landlord had been in her apartment when she was out, going through her underwear drawer. Nothing was out of place, but she just had a feeling.
One night, when I had intended to break it off, I somehow allowed her to talk me into letting her meet Sydney.
“I’m dying to see what she’s like,” Kate said.
I’d been in no rush to introduce them. I didn’t see any need for Sydney to meet every woman I dated, and in the last year or two, there certainly hadn’t been many. I figured, if it got to the point where things were getting serious, that might be the time for introductions.
But Kate persisted, so I arranged for the three of us to meet at lunch one Sunday. Syd, a seafood fan, picked a spot down along the waterfront that, for all I knew, got its “fresh” catch of the day from an ocean half a planet away.
Kate thought it went fabulously. “We so hit it off,” she told me.
I knew Syd would have a different take.
“She was very nice,” she said later when we were alone.
“You’re holding out on me,” I said.
“No, really.”
“Spill it,” I said.
“Well, you know she’s crazy,” Sydney said.
“Go on.”
“She was the only one who said a word all through lunch. And it was all about how this person doesn’t like her and that person she had a problem with, and how she didn’t get along at this job because the people were all against her and gave her an unfair job review, and then she got this other job and even though it’s going okay she knows people are talking about her behind her back, and how she’s pretty sure that she got overcharged by the guy where she gets her dry cleaning done and—”
“Okay,” I said. “I get it.”
“But I understand,” Syd said.
“What do you mean, you understand?”
“She’s hot. I mean, it’s a sex thing, right?”
“Jesus, Sydney.”
“I mean, Dad, come on, what else would it be? If I had a rack like that, I’d be the most popular girl at my school.” I tried to think of something to say, but before I could, Syd added, “But she’s very nice.”
“But she’s a bit crazy,” I said.
“Yeah,” Sydney said. “But a lot of crazy people are very nice.”
“Did she ask you a single question about yourself?”
Sydney had to think about that one. “You know when you went to the can? She asked me my opinion of her earrings.”
The thing was, Syd had nailed it. Kate was self-obsessed. She thought everyone was against her. She saw conspiracies where none existed. She jumped to conclusions. She was pushing too hard when I wanted to slow things down.
The day after the lunch, Kate, who had initially felt it went well, called me at work and said, “Sydney hates me.”
“That’s insane,” I said. “She thought you were very nice.”
“What did she say? Exactly?”
“She liked you,” I said, leaving out the references to “crazy” and “rack.”
“You’re lying. I know you’re lying.”
“Kate, I have to go.”
We still saw each other, occasionally. Out of guilt, fearing I was using her, I made excuses not to sleep with her.
Most of the time.
After Syd disappeared, I stopped returning any of her calls. I had enough on my plate. Occasionally, I’d pick up without checking the caller ID.
“Let me be there for you,” she’d say.
I was reluctant to accept her offers of comfort.
“So you didn’t mind my being around when you needed to get off,” Kate said at one point, “but you don’t want me there when the going gets tough?”
And now she was on the phone as I stood here in my kitchen, the floor littered with debris after my explosion, still unable to think of anything but my daughter’s car, bloodstains on the door and steering wheel.
“Hey, you there?” Kate asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m here.”
“You sound terrible.”
“Long day.”
“Are you alone?”
“Yeah.”
The truth was, I felt very, very alone.
“I know you’ve got a lot on your mind,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said.
Neither of us spoke for a moment.
“Have you eaten?” she asked.
I had to think. Hadn’t I just been staring into the fridge? That must have meant I’d not had dinner.
“No.”
“I’ll bring something over. Chinese. And I’ve got some new DVDs.”
I thought a moment, and said, “Okay.” I was hungry. I was exhausted. And I felt very alone.
I said, “Can you give me an hour? No. An hour and a half?”
“Sure. I’ll be there.”
I hung up without saying goodbye, stared out the kitchen window. There was still an hour or more of good light left.
I locked the house, got in the car, checked Susanne’s empty house again, then drove up to Derby. Cruised through plazas, drove slowly through the parking lots of fast-food joints, always looking, scanning, searching for anyone who might be Sydney.
No luck.
I knew, in my heart, what a futile hope this was, that somehow, by chance, I was going to spot my daughter walking down the street. How likely was it she’d be taking an evening stroll or sitting by the window of a McDonald’s as I happened to drive by?
But I had to do something.
I was heading back south when a street sign caught my eye.
Coulter Drive.
I hit the brakes and hung a right before I’d even had a chance to think about the decision. I pulled the car over to the shoulder and reached down into my pocket for the sheet of paper I’d taken from the dealership.
I unfolded it, studied the photocopy of Richard Fletcher’s driver’s license. He lived at 72 Coulter. I glanced at the closest house, which was 22. The next one down was 24. I took my foot off the brake and moved slowly down the street.
Fletcher’s house was set back from the street, shrouded in trees. It was a simple two-story house, four windows, a door dead center. The front lawn was spotty and full of weeds. Used tires, several rusted bicycles, an old lawn mower, and other bits of assorted junk were crowded up against a separate one-car garage. In the drive were the yellow Pinto Fletcher had used to make his escape earlier today, as well as a Ford pickup that had seen better days. The hood was propped open, and I could just make out someone leaning over the front to examine the engine.
Richard Fletcher, I guessed. The son of a bitch.
I came to a stop at the end of the gravel driveway. Any other time, I might have had the sense to drive on. So the guy pulled a fast one. Took a truck out for a spin, used it to pick up some manure. Next time you’ll know better, you won’t let a guy test-drive a truck without tagging along. Fletcher got lucky with me today. Not next time. Live and learn.
I was too on edge to be that rational.
I got out of the car and started striding up the driveway. A dog I’d not seen before started loping up the lane toward me. But this was no guard dog. He was a mutt of undetermined heritage, limping, gray in the snout. His frame had the same sag in it as the Fletcher house roof. His weary tail wagged like a sideways metronome at the slowest beat.
