Fear the Worst Read online

  I’d been selling cars since I was twenty, and I was good at it, but Susanne thought I was capable of more. You shouldn’t be working for somebody else, she said. You should be your own man. You should have your own dealership. We could change our lives. Send Syd to the best schools. Make a better future for ourselves.

  My dad had passed away when I was nineteen, and left my mother pretty well fixed. A few years later, when she died of a heart attack, I used the inheritance to show Susanne I could be the man she wanted me to be. I started up my own dealership.

  And fucked the whole thing up.

  I was never a big-picture guy. Sales, working one-to-one, that was my thing. But when I had to run the whole show, I kept sneaking back onto the floor to deal with customers. I wasn’t cut out for management, so I let others make decisions for me. Bad ones, as it turned out. Let them steal from me, too.

  Eventually, I lost it all.

  And not just the business, not just our big house that overlooked the Sound. I lost my family.

  Susanne blamed me for taking my eye off the ball. I blamed her for pushing me into something I wasn’t cut out for.

  Syd, somehow, blamed herself. She figured that, if we loved her enough, we’d stay together no matter what. The fact that we didn’t had nothing to do with how much we loved Syd, but she wasn’t buying it.

  In Bob, Susanne found what was missing in me. Bob was always reaching for the next rung. Bob figured if he could sell cars, he could start up a dealership, and if he could start up one dealership, why not two, or three?

  I never bought Susanne a Corvette when I was going out with her, like Bob did. At least there was some satisfaction when it blew a piston, and she ended up getting rid of it because she hated driving a stick.

  On this particular day, I went home, somewhat reluctantly, at six. When you’re on commission, you don’t want to walk out of an open showroom. You know, the moment you leave, someone’ll come in, checkbook in hand, asking for you. But you can’t live there. You have to go home sometime.

  I’d been planning to make spaghetti, but figured, what the hell, I’d order pizza, just like Syd wanted. It’d be a kind of peace offering, a way to make up for the sunglasses thing.

  By seven, she had not shown up, or called to let me know she’d be late.

  Maybe someone had gone home sick, and she’d had to stay on the front desk for an extra shift. Ordinarily, if she wasn’t going to make it home in time for dinner, she’d call. But I could see her skipping that courtesy today, after what had happened at breakfast.

  Still, by eight, when I hadn’t heard from her, I started to worry.

  I was standing in the kitchen, watching CNN, getting updated on some earthquake in Asia but not really paying attention, wondering where the hell she was.

  Sometimes she got together with Patty or one of her other friends after work, went over to the Post Mall to eat in the food court.

  I called her cell. It rang several times before going to message. “Give me a call, sweetheart,” I said. “I figured we’d have pizza after all. Let me know what you want on it.”

  I gave it another ten minutes before deciding to find a number for the hotel where she worked. I was about to make the call when the phone rang. I grabbed the receiver before I’d checked the ID. “Hey,” I said. “You in for pizza or what?”

  “Just hold the anchovies.” It wasn’t Syd. It was Susanne.

  “Oh,” I said. “Hey.”

  “You’ve got your shorts in a knot.”

  I took a breath. “What I don’t get is why you don’t. Bob and Evan giving Syd the eyeball? Thinking she should model?”

  “You’ve got it all wrong, Tim,” Susanne said. “They were just being nice.”

  “Did you know when you moved in there with Sydney that Bob was taking his son in? That okay with you?”

  “They’re like brother and sister,” she said.

  “Give me a break. I remember being nineteen and—” The line beeped. “Look, I gotta go. Later, okay?”

  Susanne managed a “Yeah” before hanging up. I went to the other line, said, “Hello?”

  “Mr. Blake?” said a woman who was not my daughter.

  “Yes?”

  “Timothy Blake?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m with Fairfield Windows and Doors and we’re going to be in your area later this—”

  I hung up. I found a number for the Just Inn Time, dialed it. I let it ring twenty times before hanging up.

  I grabbed my jacket and keys and drove across town to the hotel, pulled right up under the canopy by the front door, and went inside for the first time since Syd had started here a couple of weeks ago. Before heading in, I scanned the lot for her Civic. I’d seen it the odd time I’d driven by since she’d started, but it wasn’t there tonight. Maybe she’d parked out back.

  The glass doors parted before me as I strode into the lobby. As I approached the desk, I hoped I would see Syd, but there was a man there instead. A young guy, late twenties maybe, dirty blond hair, his face cratered by the ravages of acne a decade earlier. “May I help you?” he asked. His name tag read “Owen.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I was just looking for Syd.”

  “I’m sorry. What’s his last name?”

  “It’s a she. Sydney. She’s my daughter.”

  “Do you know what room she’s staying in?”

  “No, no,” I said, shaking my head. “She works here. Right here on the desk, actually. I was expecting her home for dinner, just thought I’d swing by and see if she was going to be working a double or something.”

  “I see,” said Owen.

  “Her name’s Sydney Blake,” I said. “You must know her.”

  Owen shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Are you new here?” I asked.

  “No. Well, yeah.” He grinned. “Six months. I guess that’s new.”

  “Sydney Blake,” I repeated. “She’s been working here two weeks. Seventeen, blonde hair.”

  Owen shook his head.

  “Maybe they’ve got her working someplace else this week,” I suggested. “Do you have an employee roster or a schedule or something that would tell you where I could find her? Or maybe I could just leave a message?”

  “Could you wait just a moment?” Owen asked. “I’ll get the duty manager.”

  Owen slipped through a door behind the front desk, returning a moment later with a lean, good-looking, dark-haired man in his early forties. His name tag read “Carter,” and when he spoke I pegged him as from the South, although what state I couldn’t guess.

  “Can I help you?” he asked.

  “I’m looking for my daughter,” I said. “She works here.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Sydney Blake,” I said. “Syd.”

  “Sydney Blake?” he said. “Don’t recognize that name at all.”

  I shook my head. “She’s only been here a couple of weeks. She’s just working here for the summer.”

  Carter was shaking his head, too. “I’m sorry.”

  I felt my heart beating more quickly. “Check your employee list,” I urged him.

  “I don’t need to be checking any list,” he said. “I know who works here and who doesn’t, and there’s nobody here by that name.”

  “Hang on,” I said. I dug out my wallet, fished around in a crevice behind my credit cards, and found a three-year-old high school photo of Sydney. I handed it across the desk.

  “It’s not real recent,” I said. “But that’s her.”

  They took turns studying the picture. Owen’s eyebrows popped up briefly, impressed, I guessed, by Sydney’s good looks. Carter handed it back to me.

  “I’m real sorry, Mr.—”

  “Blake. Tim Blake.”

  “She might be working at the Howard Johnson’s up the road a bit.” He tipped his head to the right.

  “No,” I said. “This is where she said she works.” My mind was racing. “Is there a day man
ager?”

  “That’d be Veronica.”

  “Call her. Call Veronica.”

  With great reluctance, Carter placed the call, apologized to the woman on the other end of the line, and handed me the receiver.

  I explained my situation to Veronica.

  “Maybe she told you the wrong hotel,” Veronica said, echoing Carter.

  “No,” I said firmly.

  Veronica asked for my number and promised to call me if she heard anything. And then she hung up.

  On the way home, I went through two red lights and nearly hit a guy in a Toyota Yaris. I had my cell in my hand, phoning Syd’s cell and then home, then her cell again.

  When I got back to the house, it was empty.

  Syd did not come home that night.

  Or the next night.

  Or the night after that.

  ONE

  “WE’VE ALSO BEEN LOOKING AT THE MAZDA,” the woman said. “And we took a—Dell, what was it called? The other one we took out for a test drive?”

  Her husband said, “A Subaru.”

  “That’s right,” the woman said. “A Subaru.”

  The woman, whose name was Lorna, and her husband, whose name was Dell, were sitting across the desk from me in the showroom of Riverside Honda. This was the third time they’d been in to see me since I’d come back to work. There comes a point, even when you’re dealing with the worst crisis of your life, when you find yourself not knowing what else to do but fall back into your routine.

  Lorna had on the desk, in addition to the folder on the Accord, which was what Lorna and Dell had been talking to me about, folders on the Toyota Camry, the Mazda 6, the Subaru Legacy, the Chevrolet Malibu, the Ford Taurus, the Dodge Avenger, and half a dozen others at the bottom of the stack that I couldn’t see.

  “I notice that the Taurus has 263 horsepower with its standard engine, but the Accord only has 177 horsepower,” Lorna said.

  “I think you’ll see,” I said, working hard to stay focused, “that the Taurus engine with that horsepower rating is a V6, while the Accord is a four-cylinder. You’ll find it still gives you plenty of pickup, but uses way less gas.”

  “Oh,” Lorna said, nodding. “What are the cylinders, exactly? I know you told me before, but I don’t think I remember.”

  Dell shook his head slowly from side to side. That was pretty much all Dell did during these visits. He sat there and let Lorna ask all the questions, do all the talking, unless he was asked something specific, and even then he usually just grunted. He appeared to be losing the will to live. I guessed he’d been sitting across the desk of at least a dozen sales associates between Bridgeport and New Haven over the last few weeks. I could see it in his face, that he didn’t give a shit what kind of car they got, just so long as they got something.

  But Lorna believed they must be responsible shoppers, and that meant checking out every car in the class they were looking at, comparing specs, studying warranties. All of which was a good thing, to a point, but now Lorna had so much information that she didn’t know what to do with it. Lorna thought all this research would help them make an informed decision, but instead it had made it impossible for her to make one at all.

  They were in their mid-forties. He was a shoe salesman in the Connecticut Post Mall, and she was a fourth-grade teacher. This was standard teacher behavior. Research your topic, consider all the options, go home and make a chart, car names across the top, features down the side, make check marks in the little boxes.

  Lorna asked about the Accord’s rear legroom compared to the Malibu, which might have been an issue if they had kids, or if she’d given any indication they had any friends. By the time she was on to the Accord’s trunk space versus the Mazda 6, I really wasn’t listening. Finally, I held up a hand.

  “What car do you like?” I asked Lorna.

  “Like?” she said.

  My computer monitor was positioned between us, and the whole time Lorna was talking I was moving the mouse around, tapping the keyboard. Lorna assumed I was on the Honda website, calling up data so I could answer her questions.

  I wasn’t. I was on findsydneyblake.com. I was looking to see whether there’d been any recent hits on the site, whether anyone had emailed me. One of Sydney’s friends, a computer whiz—actually, any of Syd’s friends was a computer whiz compared to me—by the name of Jeff Bluestein had helped me put together the website, which had all the basic information.

  There was a full description of Syd. Age: 17. Date of birth: April 15, 1992. Weight: approximately 115 pounds. Eye color: Blue. Hair: Blonde. Height: 5 feet 3 inches.

  Date of disappearance: June 29, 2009.

  Last seen: Leaving for work from our address on Hill Street. Might have been spotted in the vicinity of the Just Inn Time hotel, in Milford, Connecticut.

  There was also a description of Syd’s silver Civic, complete with license plate number.

  Visitors to the website, which Jeff had linked to other sites about runaways and missing teens, were encouraged to call police, or get in touch with me, Tim Blake, directly. I’d gone through as many photos as I could find of Syd, hit up her friends for pictures they had as well, including ones they’d posted on their various Internet sites like Facebook, and plastered them all over findsydneyblake.com. I had hundreds of pictures of Syd, going back through all her seventeen years, but I’d only posted ones from the last six months or so.

  Wherever Syd might be, it wasn’t with extended family. Susanne’s and my parents were dead, neither of us had siblings, and what few relatives we had—an aunt here, an uncle there—we’d put on alert.

  “Of course,” said Lorna, “we’re well aware of the excellent repair records that the Hondas have, and good resale value.”

  I’d had two emails the day before, but not about Sydney. They were from other parents. One was from a father in Providence, telling me that his son Kenneth had been missing for a year now, and there wasn’t a moment when he didn’t think about him, wonder where he was, whether he was dead or alive, whether it was something he’d done, as a father, that had driven Kenneth away, or whether his son had met up with the wrong kind of people, that maybe they had—

  It wasn’t helpful.

  The second was from a woman outside Albany who’d stumbled onto the site and told me she was praying for my daughter and for me, that I should put my faith in God if I wanted Sydney to come home safely, that it would be through God that I’d find the strength to get through this.

  I deleted both emails without replying.

  “But the Toyotas have good resale value as well,” Lorna said. “I was looking in Consumer Reports, where they have these little charts with all the red dots on them? Have you noticed those? Well, there are lots of red dots if the cars have good repair records, but if the cars don’t have good repair records there are lots of black dots, so you can tell at a glance whether it’s a good car or not by how many red or black dots are on the chart. Have you seen those?”

  I checked to see whether there were any messages now. The thing was, I had already checked for messages three times since Lorna and Dell had sat down across from me. When I was at my desk, I checked about every three minutes. At least twice a day I phoned Milford police detective Kip Jennings—I’d never met a Kip before, and hadn’t expected that when I finally did it would be a woman—to see what progress she was making. She’d been assigned Sydney’s case, although I was starting to think “assigned” was defined as “the detective who has the case in the back of his or her desk drawer.”

  In the time that Lorna had been going on about Consumer Reports recommendations, a message had dropped into my inbox. I clicked on it and learned that there was a problem with my Citibank account and if I didn’t immediately confirm all my personal financial details it would be suspended, which was kind of curious considering that I did not have a Citibank account and never had.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said aloud. The site had only been up for nearly three weeks—Jeff got it up
and running within days of Syd’s disappearance—and already the spammers had found it.

  “Excuse me?” Lorna said.

  I glanced at her. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Just something on my screen there. You were saying, about the red dots.”

  “Were you even listening to me?” she asked.

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  “Have you been looking at some dirty website all this time?” she said, and her husband’s eyebrows went up. If there was porn on my screen, he wanted a peek.

  “They don’t allow that when we’re with customers,” I said earnestly.

  “I just don’t want us to make a mistake,” Lorna said. “We usually keep our cars for seven to ten years, and that’s a long time to have a car if it turns out to be a lemon.”

  “Honda doesn’t make lemons,” I assured her.

  I needed to sell a car. I hadn’t made a sale since Syd went missing. The first week, I didn’t come into work. It wasn’t like I was home, sick with worry. I was out eighteen hours a day, driving the streets, hitting every mall and plaza and drop-in shelter in Milford and Stratford. Before long, I’d broadened the search to include Bridgeport and New Haven. I showed Syd’s picture to anyone who’d look at it. I called every friend I could ever recall her mentioning.