Fear the Worst Page 9

  “Hey,” I said, an edge in my voice.

  He looked over at me. His eyes narrowed. He was trying to place me.

  “Next time you take a truck for a test drive, you mind cleaning out all the shit before you bring it back?”

  Now he knew.

  Fletcher straightened up, ran his hand back over his head, and looked at me, not saying anything.

  “You’re a real fucking piece of work, you know that?” I said. “Who the fuck do you think you are? I got a bulletin for you. We’re not a fucking truck-rental agency.”

  He moved his mouth around, like he was trying to think of what to say to me but couldn’t find the words.

  The front door of the house popped open, squeaking on its hinges. Fletcher turned his head around. A young girl poked her head out and said, “I’ve got dinner ready, Dad.”

  She was maybe ten, twelve years old. I couldn’t see that much of her. Just enough to see that she was on some kind of metal braces.

  Fletcher said, “Be right in, sweetheart.”

  He turned back to look at me. “You’ll have to excuse me,” he said. “I’ve got to go have dinner with my daughter.”

  He walked back to the house, climbed the steps to the front door. I stood there, watched him go inside, and suddenly felt very small.

  I SPOTTED KATE WOOD’S SILVER FORD FOCUS in the drive as I came down my street. She was standing by the back of it, a large brown takeout bag in one hand and what appeared to be a bagged bottle of wine in the other.

  I parked, came over to her, and something primal took over. I needed her. I needed her to comfort me. I slipped my arms around her and pulled her close, resting my head on her shoulder. Her hands still full, she squeezed me with her outstretched arms.

  “Oh, baby,” she said. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just held her.

  “Has something happened?” she asked. I still had no words. “Come on, let’s go inside. Come on.”

  I found my house key on the ring as she led me to my own door. Once inside, she said, “I’ll get some plates, we’ll get some food into you, we’ll talk. I swear, you look like you’ve lost ten pounds.”

  I’d noticed my pants had seemed looser the last few days but hadn’t really given it much thought.

  “You want to open the wine?” Kate asked.

  “Let me check something first,” I said.

  “When you get back, I’ll tell you what’s happened with Edith,” she said. “She totally fucked up an entire order.”

  “In a minute,” I said.

  “Good God!” she said as she entered the kitchen. “What happened here?”

  My earlier outburst. “Don’t worry about it,” I said.

  I went up the stairs, two at a time. I didn’t even bother to sit in front of the computer, just leaned over, moved the mouse around, hit the button to see whether there had been any responses to the website, other than offers for discounted Viagra.

  There were two messages. One said there was a problem with my eBay account. I did not have an eBay account. I deleted it.

  Then I opened the second email.

  It began:

  “Dear Mr. Blake: I’m pretty sure I’ve seen your daughter.”

  EIGHT

  I WAS TREMBLING EVEN BEFORE I SAT DOWN.

  The email, from a Hotmail address that was preceded by the letters “ymills” and a series of numbers, read:

  “Dear Mr. Blake: I’m pretty sure I’ve seen your daughter. I work at a drop-in shelter for teens in Seattle—”

  Seattle? What the hell would Syd be doing in Seattle? No, wait. What mattered was: Syd was alive.

  Having just seen traces of blood on my daughter’s car, this email already had me fighting back tears.

  I started reading again: “I work at a drop-in shelter for teens in Seattle, and because I’m in that line of work I’m often scanning websites about kids who are missing, and I came to your site and when I saw the pictures there of your daughter Sydney I recognized her because she’s very pretty. At least I am kinda sure that it was her but of course I could be wrong. I don’t think she said her name was Sydney, I think she might have said Susan or Suzie or something like that.”

  She was using her mother’s name. I wondered, for a moment, whether there was something wrong with the computer, because the cursor was jiggling all over the place. I glanced down and saw that my hand on the mouse was shaking.

  “Feel free to get in touch at this email address,” the note continued. “It must be very stressful not to know where your daughter is and I hope that maybe I can help.”

  The note signed off with “Yours in Christ, Yolanda Mills.”

  From downstairs, Kate shouted, “Come get this while it’s hot! This chow mein looks pretty decent.”

  I hit the reply button and wrote: “Dear Ms. Mills: Thank you so much for getting in touch with me. Please tell me how to reach you other than email. What is the name of your drop-in shelter? What is the address in Seattle? Do you have a number where I can reach you?”

  I was typing so quickly I was making numerous typos, then backspacing and fixing them.

  “Tim? Everything okay up there?”

  I typed, “Sydney went missing nearly a month ago and her mother and I are frantic to find her, to know that she is okay. When did you see her? How long ago? Has Syd been in there several times or just once? Here’s how you can get in touch with me.” I then typed my home phone number, my cell number, my number at the dealership. “Please get in touch the moment you receive this email. And call collect, please.”

  I double-checked that I hadn’t entered in any of the phone numbers wrong, typed my name at the end, and hit Send.

  “What’s going on?” Kate said. She was at the door, leaning into the frame.

  I turned, and I know I must have had tears on my cheeks, because Kate suddenly looked horrified, as though I’d just gotten bad news.

  “Oh my God, Tim, what’s happened?”

  “Someone’s seen her,” I said, feeling overcome. “Someone’s seen Syd.”

  Kate closed the distance between us, pulled my head to her breasts, and held me while I tried to pull it together.

  “Where?” Kate asked. “Where is she?”

  I pulled away and pointed to my screen. “This woman in Seattle. She works at a drop-in shelter. Some place, I guess, where runaways can go.”

  “Seattle?” Kate asked. “What would Syd be doing in Seattle?”

  “I don’t know and right now I don’t care,” I said. “Just so long as I know where she is, I can go get her and bring her home.”

  “Have you got a number? Call this woman. It’s what, three hours earlier out there? She might even still be at work.”

  “She didn’t send me a phone number,” I said. “I just wrote her back, asked her for one.”

  “How about the shelter? Did she say what it was called?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know why the hell she couldn’t have been a bit more specific.”

  “What’s her name?”

  I glanced back at the screen. “Yolanda Mills.”

  “Shove a bum,” Kate said, motioning for me to get out of the computer chair. I stood while she sat down. “We go to the online white pages, find her, call her.”

  Kate tapped away on the keyboard, went to a site with some empty fields where she entered the woman’s first and last name and the city where she lived. “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got…. We got nothing yet. There are Y. Millses but none of them Yolanda.”

  “So maybe she’s married and the phone number is listed under her husband’s name. Her last name might still be Mills.”

  “Let me see how many Millses there are.” Kate whistled under her breath. “Okay, there’s like more than two hundred of them.”

  I put a hand on the edge of the computer table to steady myself. Blood was pulsing in my ears.

  “We could wait for this woman to get back to you, or we could just
start calling all of them.”

  “Maybe we can narrow it down another way,” I said. “Do a search on teenage drop-in shelters in Seattle.”

  Kate’s fingers danced across the keyboard. “Holy shit,” she said. “There’s all kinds of them. Not as many shelters as there are Millses in the Seattle directory, but there’s quite a few. Hang on, I think I can narrow it down. Some are men’s shelters, so we can skip those…. Let me see. Okay, look here.” She pointed to the screen. There were half a dozen listings for Seattle-area shelters aimed at youths.

  I grabbed a pen and a pad and scribbled down web addresses. “I’ll grab Syd’s laptop and work on these downstairs. I’ll use my cell, and you can use the landline for some of the women’s shelters. She might be attached to one of those, for all we know.”

  “I’m on it,” Kate said. She snatched the receiver off the cradle and punched in a number as I ran downstairs, grabbing my daughter’s laptop on the way. The house was equipped for wireless, so I could use Syd’s computer anywhere. I found my cell in the pocket of my jacket, which was hanging over a kitchen chair, and dialed the first of the five numbers that came up on the screen once I had the laptop up and running.

  “Refuge Place,” a woman answered.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m trying to get hold of Yolanda Mills. I think she might work at your shelter.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “No one here by that name.”

  “Okay, thanks,” I said, ended the call, waited a beat, and then dialed the second number. Upstairs, I could hear Kate murmuring on the phone.

  “Hope,” a man said.

  “Is this the shelter?” I asked.

  “Yeah, Hope Shelter.”

  “I’m calling for Yolanda Mills.”

  “What’s that name again?” he asked.

  I repeated it. “I think she may be an employee there.”

  “I know everyone here,” he said. “We got no one by that name.”

  I thanked him and hit End.

  “How’s it going?” Kate shouted from upstairs.

  “Nothing yet,” I said. “You?”

  “Ditto.”

  There were two plates of shrimp fried rice, chow mein, sweet and sour chicken, and egg rolls on the counter, but I wasn’t hungry. I had next to nothing in my stomach and already felt like I was going to lose what was there.

  I tried the next two numbers, struck out with both. I was just entering the last of the five I’d jotted down when Kate shrieked, “Tim!”

  I flipped my phone shut and bolted up the stairs two steps at a time. “You got somebody?” I said breathlessly as I came into the computer room.

  “You have mail,” she said, hopping out of the chair and letting me sit down.

  It was Yolanda Mills. Her reply read:

  “Dear Mr. Blake: Thank you for getting back to me. That was foolish of me not to give you more information. I work at a Christian youth center called Second Chance in the west part of the downtown area. There’s a number there but I’m in and out all the time (one of the things I do is arrange for the meals there, so I’m out a lot getting groceries and things) but I always have my cell with me, so you can usually get me on that. Here it is.” The number followed.

  I had the receiver in my hand and was dialing, looking back and forth between the screen and the phone.

  “What if she’s a nut?” Kate asked as I hit the last digit. “What if it’s someone just running a scam or something? A lot of people, they’re always thinking up ways to get innocent people to fall for things.”

  I knew that, in a nutshell, was Kate’s worldview, but realized it was something I had to consider. As the phone began to ring at the other end, thousands of miles away, Kate said, “If she starts asking about money, about whether there’s a reward, that’ll be your tip-off that she’s—”

  I held up my hand for her to stop talking, expecting the cell to be answered at any second.

  And then it was.

  “Hello?”

  A woman. It was only one word, but she sounded on the young side.

  “Is this Yolanda Mills?”

  “Is this Mr. Blake?” she asked.

  “Oh God,” I said, breathing a huge sigh of relief. “We were trying to track you down using the online phone directories and Google and everything, and then you got back to me. Thank you so much. You don’t know what this means to me.”

  “I just don’t know how much help I can be.” I wasn’t picking up any noticeable accent. And trying to pick up someone’s age from their voice is tricky, unless the person is very young or very old. Yolanda Mills sounded right in the middle.

  “When did you see Syd?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “Sydney,” I said. “I call her Syd.”

  “It was two or three days ago, I think.”

  “How was she? Was she okay? Did she look hurt? Was she sick?”

  “She looked fine. I mean, assuming it was her. She came in a couple of times to get something to eat.”

  Jesus Christ, my daughter eating in a shelter for runaways. What had brought her to this? Why was she on the other side of the country?

  “Did you speak to her at all?”

  “Nothing much. Just, you know, ‘How ya doin’, darlin’?’ That was about it.”

  “Did she say anything?”

  “She just kind of smiled.”

  “Was she with anyone? Was she traveling alone?”

  “As far as I could tell, she was by herself. I have to say, she looked sad.”

  It was as if someone had reached into my chest and given my heart a twist.

  “And you said you last saw her a couple of days ago?”

  “Okay, let me think a minute,” Yolanda Mills said. “I think the first time I saw her was about four days ago, then she came in two days after that when we were serving lunch. And that was day before yesterday.”

  Which meant that Syd had been in Seattle for a while. Maybe she was popping into Yolanda’s drop-in every couple of days. So if I got out there, hung around the shelter long enough, she might show up.

  “Do teens, runaways, do they come to your place to eat even if they aren’t staying there?”

  “Oh, sure. We only have so much space. And this isn’t meant to be someplace where you come to live permanently. It’s a stopgap measure, you know? So kids, sometimes they find a place to bunk in with a friend, or they sleep in a car, and sometimes, I hate to say it, sometimes they just find a place in the park or something for the night.”

  Syd, sleeping on a bench. I tried to push the image out of my head.

  “How did you find out about Syd?” I asked.

  “Didn’t I tell you, in the email? Because of where I work, because I know so many of these kids are runaways and homeless, and because I know they’ve got parents who are looking for them, I Google websites where parents post pictures of their kids who’ve run away or are just missing. This is just the second time I’ve seen someone who’s actually been in our shelter.”

  “Were you right the other time?”

  “As a matter of fact, I was,” she said proudly. “There was a young man, his name was Trent, and he was from just outside of El Paso, and his parents were going out of their minds trying to find him. And he was actually staying at the shelter, and this time, I was sure it was him, and I thought about telling him that I knew his parents were looking for him, that he should call them, but I thought that might scare him off, so I called his folks instead and they were on the next flight up here.”

  A flight. I would have to book a flight the moment I was done talking to Yolanda.

  “If she comes in again, don’t tell her you’ve spoken with me,” I said. “I don’t know why she’s run off, I don’t know whether I did something, I just can’t figure it out. I’ve been wracking my brain, trying to think why she’d do something like this and—”

  “That’s what a lot of the parents say, but sometimes I think they know the answer and they’re just not acknowledging it
, you know what I’m saying?” Yolanda said.

  “I suppose.” As grateful as I was to Yolanda Mills for giving me a lead on where to find Syd, I didn’t want to get into a discussion with her about why all this might have happened.

  “Here’s the thing,” she said. “I can’t say for a hundred percent that that’s your little girl. I could be wrong.”

  “But you might be right,” I said.

  “Would it help if I sent a picture?”

  I felt as though I might fall out of my chair. “A picture? You have a picture of Sydney? In Seattle?”

  “Well, it’s not a very good one. I’ve had this phone for ages that will take pictures, but I’ve never been able to figure out how to do it, you know? I’m not really a gadget person. So I was fiddling with it at the shelter, taking random shots just to see if I could figure out which buttons to push, and your daughter happened to walk by when I was taking one of them. Her and a few others, but there’s one shot where it’s just her.”

  I knew that if I saw that picture, I would know.

  “Can you email it to me?” I asked.

  “I know that can be done, but like I was saying, it’s been all I can do to figure out how to make it take a picture. I haven’t any idea how to upload it or download it, or whatever it is you do, to a computer. But my husband understands all that and he’ll be home in the morning. He works an overnight shift. But when he gets home, I could have him do it.”

  Even though things suddenly seemed to be happening quickly, it would be an eternity waiting until morning to see that picture.

  Kate, who’d been standing a few feet away, unable to hear the other end of the conversation, gently tapped my shoulder, rubbed her thumb and two fingers together, the money sign.

  “Listen,” I said to Yolanda Mills, “is there any way I can repay you for this? Are you looking for a reward or anything?”

  “A reward?” she said, and nearly sounded offended. “That wouldn’t be very Christian, would it?”

  NINE