Fear the Worst Read online

  “In a sec, Evan,” his father said. I’d only met Evan three or four times—just once since Syd had disappeared—and I don’t think he’d said more than ten words to me on all those occasions put together. Nineteen, out of high school—I didn’t know whether he’d left with a diploma or not—and not planning to go anywhere in the fall, so far as I knew. Since Bob had brought him into Susanne’s house, he’d been doing little more than hanging around there and a few odd jobs on one of Bob’s lots. He was tall like his father, with dark locks of hair hanging sheepdog-like over his eyes.

  “Are we getting some food on the way back?” he asked. He hadn’t even looked at me.

  “Hold on, for Christ’s sake,” Bob said, rolling his eyes, and for a moment there, you had to wonder whether he was thinking the wrong kid went missing.

  “I need to go inside for a minute,” Susanne said. She started hobbling toward the front door, putting a lot of weight on the cane.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “I just… I need to go in and sit down for a moment,” she said. “My hip’s really throbbing today.”

  I tried to catch Bob’s eye, give him my “Nice boat driving” look, but he looked away.

  “The house is locked,” I said, handing her my set of keys. She might still have had a key to the house on her key ring, but I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t had the locks changed since our split. It wasn’t as if I expected her to sneak back and make off with the furniture. Anything decent we still had after the divorce went to her place. It looked as though, ultimately, it would end up at Bob’s.

  “You said we were going to stop and get something to eat,” Evan said, waving the scratched lottery tickets in the air to blow off the leftover debris.

  “Just get in the car,” Bob said. “Open the doors if you need some air.”

  Once Susanne was in the house, I said to Bob, “How is she?”

  He looked down at the ground. “She’s fine, she’s good. Getting better every day.”

  “What were you doing, anyway?” I asked. “Watching teenage girls sunbathing on the beach while Suze got dragged behind the boat?”

  He glared.

  “Any of them look like future models? I know how you’re always on the lookout for prospects.”

  He shook his head in exasperation. “For fuck’s sake, Tim, let it go. I told you, weeks ago, that was a totally innocent comment. Okay, maybe it was inappropriate, I get that now. But for Christ’s sake, can we move on?” He stopped the head shake, lowered his voice. “Don’t you think there are bigger things to worry about right now?”

  “Of course,” I said, keeping my voice even.

  “Susanne, she’s on the phone night and day. Calling shelters across the state. Police departments. Faxing pictures.” He shook his head disapprovingly. “She can’t do this all alone, Tim. She needs help.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You have to pick up some of the slack. Syd’s your daughter, too, you know.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “I know you’re not a detail guy, Tim, that you kind of let things slip a bit, that that’s how you lost the business and all, but you gotta pick up the ball and run with it this time, you know what I’m saying?”

  I wanted to slam his head into the Hummer.

  “Suze can’t do it all,” Bob said. “The other day, she wanted me to drop her off at the Stamford Town Center so she could wander around, look at all the kids who were there in case she spotted Syd. You know how huge that place is, and with that pitlike thing in the middle with the tiered seating? And her on a cane, likely to fall over half the time if she’s not careful.”

  I turned away for a moment, forcing the anger down, like trying to swallow a brussels sprout as a kid. I took a few steps down the driveway, motioning Bob to follow me.

  “This van on your street,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “You think it’s watching the house?”

  “I don’t know. It seems pretty crazy to me.”

  “Any reason why anyone would want to be watching you?”

  “You mean us?”

  “I mean you. If there really was someone watching your house, maybe they were watching you, maybe it’s got nothing to do with Suze, or Syd.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Did you sell somebody another Katrina?” I asked him. “They might be coming around looking for payback.”

  “Oh, for crying out loud, Tim, you really never let anything go. I sell one car, a car I bought in good faith three years ago from a wholesaler who swore it was clean, and okay, it turned out to have been underwater for a while in New Orleans, and it made the news. I’m not happy it happened, but sometimes in this business you get jerked around. Maybe, if you’d hung in running a business instead of just working at one, you’d have a better understanding of that.”

  My neck felt like it was on fire.

  “I run an honest business, Tim,” he added.

  I didn’t bother to mention the Honda S2000 sports car he’d tried to wholesale to me once, arguing it would sell faster off an authorized Honda lot than any of his. Said he wanted to do me a favor, that the car was pristine, low miles, still loads of warranty left. Almost got me, too. I checked the car out, top to bottom, and it wasn’t until I looked at the washers under the bolts that held the fenders to the frame that I noticed they weren’t original Honda parts. So then I took down the VIN number, made some calls, traced the car back to a dealership in Oregon that had reported it stolen ten months before. The car was finally recovered, at least what was left of it. It had been stripped of wheels and seats and airbags and enough other parts to make half a car. The insurance company paid off on the vehicle, acquired its remains, and auctioned them off. The buyer replaced the missing parts, sold the Honda to Bob, who then tried to fob it off on me as an original.

  Bob hadn’t gotten to where he was today without cutting the occasional corner.

  “Find another sucker,” I’d told him at the time.

  Today, he said, “I’m clean, Tim. I’ve got nothing to hide. You want to come in and see my books, check the history of the cars on my lot, be my guest.”

  Neck still prickling, I said, “A jealous husband, then.”

  Bob was briefly speechless. Then, “How dare you even suggest I’d be seeing another woman.”

  The thing was, I had no reason to suspect Bob of stepping out. The words were out of my mouth before I’d given much thought to them.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “I love Susanne,” he said, and after a couple seconds added, “And I love Syd, too. I’m sick to death about this. She’s a great kid. I want to do anything I can to help.”

  I didn’t want to hear him say he loved my daughter, no matter how much he meant it. I said, “What’s all this about her missing watch, and stolen cash?”

  Bob shook his head sadly. “Like I said, I think it’s the stress. Susanne gets distracted. She could have lost the watch anywhere. And the cash… I don’t know. She could have spent it on something and it slipped her mind.”

  I supposed it was possible.

  “About Syd,” Bob said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “There’s a guy I know.”

  “A guy?”

  “I mean, the police, what are they really doing, right? She’s just another runaway to them. They’re not going to do anything unless, like, a body turns up, right?”

  The comment cut like a knife. My eyes narrowed. For a second, the houses on Hill seemed to blur.

  “Okay,” he said. “Bad choice of words. But if the cops aren’t going to put any effort into this, then maybe we have to bring in someone who will.”

  “I’m working on this every day,” I told him. “I’ve got the website, I’m making calls, I’m driving around, going to the hotel, I’m—”

  “All right, I know, I know. But this guy, he’s a good guy. The thing is, he owes me a favor, so I thought I could let him pay me back by ask
ing around, check this and that, beat around the bushes a bit.”

  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

  THE NEXT MORNING, I TOOK SYD’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.