Fear the Worst Read online

  “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.

  ANDY HERTZ 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 math and had to spend four weeks making up the credits, squeezing in her dealership job around the classes. The thing was, Sydney had no trouble doing calculations in her head when it mattered. If you’d promised her five dollars an hour to clean up the garage and she’d spent six hours and forty-five minutes at it, she’d be able to tell you to the penny how much you owed her without the aid of a calculator. But no matter how good you may be with figures, if you don’t do the homework and don’t study for the tests, well, you end up at summer school.

  A couple of days into her summer classes, Patty appeared. They ended up sitting together, and found they had more in common than their contempt for a system that would have them sitting in a classroom when everyone else was outside catching some rays.

  Music, movies—they both had a closet love for Disney flicks from their childhood—boys, junk food. Everything seemed to click, with the possible exception of their backgrounds.

  Sure, Syd was now from what she liked to call “a broken home,” but if ours was broken, Patty’s had been hit with a cruise missile. She didn’t have what you’d call a strong support system, from what I’d heard. Her mother, according to Syd, was pretty much an alcoholic. She had a hard enough time getting through the day herself, let alone monitoring Patty’s behavior. Her father, if I remembered right, worked in a liquor store, for now, but didn’t tend to keep jobs for long. Despite his sketchy financial situation, he still found different women happy to take him into their homes for varying periods of time. Sydney said Patty had told her he’d walked out on them when Patty was little. But he’d occasionally drift back into their lives for a few days or weeks, until her mother got tired of having him in her bed and kicked him out.

  “I’m sort of glad,” Syd had said to me, “that when you and Mom split up, that was it. This getting back together and then breaking up, over and over, that would drive me crazy. You’d get your hopes up, and then everything would go to shit again.”

  Evidently, it hadn’t always been that way with Patty’s parents. They’d started out living the American dream. Good jobs, a house with a rec room, a station wagon in the driveway, a week in Florida every year, a day at Disney World. But then Patty’s dad lost his job at Sikorsky after it was found he’d been stealing tools, and life was a never-ending downward spiral after that. He left Patty and her mother to fend for themselves when Patty was just a toddler. The mother started drinking. Patty learned early to look after herself.

  Susanne and I—separately and together—offered Syd plenty of words of caution. This girl’s had a lot of tough breaks, we get that, but don’t let her lead you down the wrong path. Don’t let her get you into trouble.

  Syd assured us we had nothing to worry about. And she insisted that despite Patty’s somewhat wayward behavior, she was a good kid, and a good friend. “She’s like this soul mate I’ve always been waiting for,” Syd told me once. “We say things at the same time. We finish off each other’s sentences. All I have to do is look at her and she cracks up. I’ll be thinking about her, and right then, swear to God, my cell will ring and it’s her.”

  When Syd was staying at my house, Patty seemed to be there more than half the time. And when Syd was at her mother’s, Patty was often hanging out there. (I didn’t know whether this was true now that Susanne and Syd had moved in with Bob.) Patty, for all her hard knocks and cynicisms, devolved into a little girl when it came to making a batch of chocolate chip cookies. It seemed Syd had a moderating effect on Patty, rather than Patty having a negative influence on Syd.

  “I like it here,” I heard her tell Syd when they were at my house. “No one’s screaming at each other or falling over pissed.”

  My heart went out to her.

  Despite her apparent recklessness, Patty had an instinct for survival. No rose-colored glasses for her. She saw the world for what it was. A cruel place where you couldn’t count on anyone but yourself. That was one reason I liked her and, at some level, admired her. She’d been dealt a bad hand, and was trying to play it as best she could.

  I hadn’t seen her stroll in this time, but she usually turned heads when she came to visit, breasts bobbing and hips swaying as she wound her way through the roomful of Hondas. Patty knew what she had and didn’t mind using it to effect. Today, in addition to the low-cut jeans with rips at the knees and thighs, she was wearing a dark blue tee that didn’t come down far enough to hide her pierced navel, but did come down low enough to offer a tease of a lacy black bra. Her hair was dirty blonde with a few narrow pink streaks going through it, and she seemed to be without makeup except for some very bright red lipstick.

  As I sat down in my chair she said, “Hey, Mr. B. You look like shit. You okay?”

  I nodded. “Hi, Patty.”

  “What’s going on? You look kind of pasty.”

  “Just… no
thing.”

  “That sucks.”

  “Yeah, it does.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “What’s that smell?”

  “Manure,” I said.

  Then, another greeting: “Hey, Mr. Blake.” I looked around, didn’t immediately see anyone.

  “Jeff tagged along,” Patty said. “He’s over there.”

  She pointed to an Accord. Patty’s friend Jeff Bluestein was sitting behind the wheel, touching the buttons on the dash, fiddling with knobs. Whenever he came by, he found a car to sit in and stayed there.

  “Hey, Jeff,” I said, offering half a wave.

  He smiled and waved back. Through the windshield he said, “Website still working okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Lots of hits?”

  “A few.”

  Jeff went back to looking at the dash. In the meantime, Patty had been taking in the showroom, looking at the posters for various models. “You think I could get a job here?” she asked.

  “Doing?”

  “Selling cars,” she said, the “duh” left unsaid. “I don’t know how to fix them or anything, so about the only thing I could do is sell them.”

  I didn’t think it was her intention to suggest that if you were without any skills, this was about the only job left for you.

  I said, “So you’re into cars now.”

  Patty shrugged. “I guess not. And I guess I’d have to get a bit of a makeover. The whole crack-whore thing I’ve got going on might put off Mr. and Mrs. Upstanding when they come in for a minivan to take their tiny Republicans to the mall.”

  “It might,” I said. Patty usually had a job, but it was rarely the same one she’d had a couple of months ago. She’d worked a lot of retail, usually in trendy clothing outlets frequented by similarly dressed clientele. Only six months ago, she’d been working at a sports footwear store in Stratford. Now she had something in an accessories shop where she sold cheap jewelry, hair bands, and scarves.

  “Can I tell you something, honestly?” She was moving her jaw around, like she was chewing gum, but there was no gum.

  “I’d expect nothing less, Patty.”

  “This whole thing about putting DVD players in vans, is that, like, evidence of the fucking collapse of civilization or what? Are they thinking, like, little kids aren’t getting enough of a chance to watch TV, that they’ve got to put them in their cars, too?”

  You see what I mean? She had her moments.

  “I get what you’re saying,” I said. “When Syd was little, and we were driving around together, she’d always be asking what everything was. She liked to ask what all the different kinds of cars were. By the time she was six, she could tell a Honda from a Toyota from a Ford. That wouldn’t have happened if she was watching The Little Mermaid instead of looking out the window.”

  I felt a lump in my throat and tried to swallow it away.

  “My point exactly,” Patty said. A few more seconds went by where she didn’t say anything. Maybe she was thinking about the fact that she never spent a lot of time riding around in a car with her father.

  Jeff got his awkward, lumbering frame out of the Accord and got behind the wheel of a Civic. You could almost hear him making “vroom” noises under his breath as he gripped the wheel.

  Patty said, “Syd and I actually watched The Little Mermaid together a few months ago and we cried like we were in fucking second grade.” It was difficult to picture the girl sitting before me now being entranced by anything remotely Disney.

  “You know that cartoon about the monsters?” I said. “How they all work for a big company and their job is to scare little kids?”

  “Monsters, Inc.?”

  “That’s the one,” I said. “I took Sydney to that when she was, what? Ten? The ending, I started tearing up myself. You know the part I’m talking about?”

  Patty Swain nodded. “Oh yeah. My mom took me to that. She snuck in a can of Coke that actually had rye in it. She’s taught me everything I know.” She grinned, hoping she could shock me.

  I leaned forward. “Patty, did Sydney have any friends up in Derby?”

  She looked taken aback. “I don’t think so. Derby? Fuck, no. Nobody in Derby. Why?”

  I weighed whether to tell her about Syd’s car, decided against it.

  “So I’m still putting the word out,” she said. “Facebook, shit like that.” The leg she’d propped over the chair arm was swinging back and forth, plus she was doing some flicking thing with the fingers of her left hand.

  “I appreciate that. You’re probably reaching more people that way than I am.” I watched the leg swing. “You okay, Patty? You seem a bit on edge.”

  She stopped all the seemingly involuntary body movements. “I’m cool.”

  “You’re not, you know, high or something, are you?”

  She laughed. “Shit, Mr. B., you’re something.”

  Laura Cantrell was doing a slow walkabout through the showroom, graceful as a gazelle despite the five-inch heels. She swept by my desk, not saying a word to either of us, wandered between the cars. It felt as though the thermostat had been turned down.

  Laura Cantrell slipped back into her office. Patty had been aware of her the whole time.

  She said, “Seriously, that chick needs to get banged.”

  “I know I’ve asked you this a thousand times, Patty, but where could she have gone?” I asked. “If she wasn’t working at the hotel, where was she?”

  “I don’t know. It’s totally fucked up.”

  “I’ve been all up and down Route 1, going into every shop and business. No one knows anything about her.”

  That made me think, just for a second, about Ian, from Shaw Flowers, how he could have looked at Syd’s picture a little longer before saying he hadn’t seen her.

  “You were her best friend,” I said. “And yet she didn’t tell you what she was really doing.”

  She nodded. “I swear, I thought she was working at that place. She never told me any different. The thing is, she’s not like me. She wouldn’t be looking for trouble. I was born for it.”

  I flashed her a weary smile. “Thanks for dropping by. If you think of anything…”

  She nodded, blinked furiously several times, like maybe she was warding off tears. “Sure,” she said, getting out of the chair. “The thing is, I was wondering…”

  “What is it, Patty?”

  “You know this new job I got at the mall?”

  “At the jewelry place?”

  She nodded, like this was no big deal. “Yeah. So you have to work for a month before you get your first paycheck, and my mom, well, you know, she’s kind of tapped out herself at the moment, and it’s not like my dad’s sending me a check every month.”

  “You can’t be asking me for money, Patty,” I said.

  “Sure,” she said, her face flushing. “I get that.”

  I looked at her a moment, then took a twenty out of my wallet and handed it to her. She took the bill and stuffed it down the front pocket of her jeans. They were on so tight she had trouble getting her fingers in there.

  “Thanks,” she said. “You want to grab something tonight or anything?”

  Trying to fill the gap left by Sydney, Patty had dropped by half a dozen times in the last few weeks with surprise deliveries of McDonald’s or Burger King or Subway, which I always paid her back for.

  “I don’t think so, not tonight,” I said.

  I could see the disappointment in her eyes. “That’s okay,” she said. “Catch you later.”

  As she walked past Andy Hertz’s desk, hips swaying, she said, “Hey there, Andy Panda,” and kept on walking.

  Andy, who was working his way through the page from the phone book, making cold calls, mumbled a “Hey.”

  Patty had been in here enough to know Andy, but that seemed a little familiar.

  Jeff got out of the Civic and ran to catch up to Patty, dropping a set of keys on my desk as he went by. “Someone left these in the car,”
he said.

  SEVEN

  I USED TO WONDER HOW PEOPLE DID IT.

  You’d watch the news, and there’d be some couple who’d lost a child in a fire. The mother of that girl who went missing in Bermuda and was never found. A father whose son was killed in a bar fight. Once, there was a story about a girl whose class went on a skiing trip, and there was an avalanche and she was buried under several feet of snow and the rescue workers couldn’t find her. And there were her parents, weeping, holding out hope their daughter was still alive, and you knew there was simply no way.

  How the hell do they do it? I’d say to the TV.

  I figured, something like that happens to a loved one, everything just stops. How can it not?

  But I was realizing that everyone does go on. You get up. You have breakfast. You go to work. You do your job. You come home, have some dinner, go to bed.

  Just like everybody else.

  But it’s always there. You go on, but you don’t go on. Because there’s this weight, and you can feel it all the time, like you’ve got a cinder block sitting on each shoulder, pushing you down, wearing you out, making you wonder whether you’ll be able to get up the next day.

  And son of a bitch, you do get up. That day, and the day after, and the day after that. With those blocks on your shoulders.

  Always there.

  * * *

  ON MY WAY OUT, I picked up, from reception, the photocopy of the driver’s license of Richard Fletcher, my manure delivery guy. I made a mental note of his address, on Coulter Drive. I folded the sheet and slid it down into my pocket.

  Once in the car, I turned Syd’s iPod on again and listened to some Natasha Bedingfield (I’d heard Syd listening to her one night in her room and asked who it was), an Elton John number from my own youth, and, astonishingly, pianist Erroll Garner’s “Misty.” I’d mentioned him to Syd one weekend a few months back, and she’d gone and downloaded one of his songs.

  “You’re something else, sweetheart,” I said, as though she were in the seat next to me.

  I didn’t head home. Instead, I drove over to the original Bob’s Motors used-car dealership and pulled up by the office—a disguised forty-foot trailer with the wheels hidden behind decorative vinyl skirting.