Fear the Worst

  She’d been working with Bob nearly two years now. I gathered, listening to Syd, it was not always the best of working relationships. And now that everyone was living together as one big happy family, troubles from the lot sometimes erupted at home. For example, Bob was often critical of the way Suze kept the books. Reporting all your income, he felt, was highly overrated.

  Sitting shoulder to shoulder in the crowded departure lounge didn’t afford me much privacy, so I relinquished my seat and walked over by one of the windows where I could watch jets landing and taxiing in.

  “Bob’s Motors,” Susanne answered. There was no joy in her voice. There hadn’t been for several weeks now.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  “Hey,” Susanne said, her voice sharpening, cautious. A call from me, these days, could mean very good news or very bad news.

  “I’m at the airport,” I said. “I’m going to Seattle.”

  A short intake of breath. “Tell me.”

  “I have a lead, not a bad lead, that Sydney might be out there.”

  I filled her in. She listened. She interrupted with a couple of questions. Had I told Kip Jennings? Could I believe this woman on the phone?

  Yes. And I hoped so.

  “I’ll pay for your flight,” she said.

  “Don’t worry about that.”

  “I should be going with you.”

  “You need to take it easy.”

  “I’m not a fucking invalid, you know.”

  “Actually, at the moment, you are.”

  “I’m doing pretty good with the cane. I may not be ready for the marathon yet, but—”

  “It’s okay. Just let me do this.”

  “I know. I’d just slow you down. I just hope… I hope I haven’t fucked something up permanent. The hip’s killing me, and the knee still hurts like a son of a bitch.”

  “It just takes time.”

  “Thanks for not rubbing it in.”

  “Rubbing what in?”

  “About Bob, about my doing a stupid thing like parasailing, thinking I’m eighteen or something. It shows a lot of restraint, not making wisecracks about it.”

  “Doesn’t mean I’m not thinking them,” I said. She laughed softly. When she didn’t say anything for a moment, I said, “Suze.”

  “Yeah, I’m here.”

  “What’s going on? With Evan?”

  “I really can’t get into it, Tim. I mean, he’s Bob son. What am I going to say?”

  “I can tell something’s going on. When he came out of the office, he was furious.”

  “He’s… he’s a good kid, mostly.”

  “Mostly.”

  “He’s just… He hardly ever comes out of his room. He’s on the computer all the time.”

  “Kids do that, talking to their friends.”

  “No,” she said quietly. “It’s something else.”

  “Porn,” I said. “He’s whacking off to porn.”

  “No,” Susanne said, stretching the word out, wondering. “I don’t think it’s that either. I think it’s something… worse.”

  “Have you talked to Bob about this?”

  “I’ve told him… that there are things I’ve noticed.”

  “What? What have you noticed?”

  “I think Evan’s stealing.”

  “The petty cash,” I said. “And you mentioned your watch went missing, and money from your purse.”

  “All of that. Bob says I’m just stressed out, that it’s making me absentminded, forgetful.”

  “You think he’s right?”

  “I think he’s full of shit. And the watch came back. I know exactly where it was, in my drawer, and it was gone. And this morning, it was back.”

  “What do you make of that?”

  “I think Evan might have pawned it. And I think Bob bought it back.”

  “He’s covering for him.”

  “Bob’s very defensive about Evan.”

  “Move out, Suze,” I said. “Get out of there. Go back to your own house.”

  She shot back, “Oh yeah, that’s the answer. Don’t try to work things out, just wash my hands of them. Is that what you’d like?”

  “You have enough to worry about. You don’t need to be living under the same roof with some kid who’s stealing from you.”

  “I can’t talk about this. I can’t. Just find Sydney.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “You know,” she said, “I really blew it with you.”

  I didn’t say anything. I was watching one of the terminal clocks. My flight was due to board shortly.

  “I never should have pushed you,” she said. “Our life was good.”

  “I know.”

  “I got caught up in the whole… I thought, if we had more, that’d be good for all of us, right? I mean, sure, I like nice things, I admit that. I was thinking about myself, but I also believed that what I wanted would be good for all of us, good for Sydney. You’d make it big, we could get her nice things, a bigger room, a top-notch college, a better future, you know?”

  “Sure.”

  “So I pushed you. But it wasn’t what you wanted. It wasn’t what you were good at. I should have been smart enough to see that from the beginning.”

  “Suze, you don’t have to—”

  “And then it all went to shit. I pushed you because I wanted more for us, for Sydney, and ended up with so much less. Sometimes, I think she hates us. Hates me. For letting things fall apart. I keep thinking that maybe, if we’d stayed together, this never would have happened. Syd wouldn’t have left.”

  “There’s no way to know that.”

  “Somehow, things would have been different.”

  “I think they’re calling my flight,” I said.

  “You’ll call.”

  “I promise.”

  THE THING ABOUT DRIVING IS, you feel like you’re doing something to get yourself there. You’re in charge. You’re in control. It helps funnel the tension. You’re reading the map, finding a different radio station, looking for an opening so you can pass a pickup driven by an old guy in a hat.

  But in a plane, you just sit there and slowly go out of your mind.

  Of course, driving to Seattle was not an option. A six-hour flight was preferable to a three-day drive. But the fact that I could do nothing more than look out the window, leaf through my magazines, or watch in-flight entertainment that, even with headphones, could barely be heard over the drone of the engines made the trip interminable.

  But it did finally end. While I may have been screaming in my head while I waited for everyone in the seats ahead of me to get their luggage together and exit the plane, I managed to keep my cool. Once I was off the plane, I powered up my cell phone and checked to see whether I had any messages.

  I didn’t.

  I found my way to the taxi stand, got in the back of one, and said to the driver, “Second Chance.” I offered him the address, but he waved me off.

  “I’ve been driving a cab in Seattle for twenty-two years,” he said. “I know my way around.”

  I settled into the seat, gazed out at the unfamiliar territory, feeling like a stranger in a strange land.

  I’m coming, Syd. I’m coming.

  ELEVEN

  THE TAXI WAS HEADING INTO DOWNTOWN in the middle of the afternoon commute home. The regular traffic would have been bad enough, but we got bogged down where three lanes were being narrowed to one for an accident. Just before six, we were pulling up in front of the Second Chance shelter, a light rain coming down. I’d lost all sense of direction coming in, couldn’t guess north from south, east from west, especially with no sun visible.

  I paid the cabby and grabbed my bag. I was in an older part of town. Used-record shops, discount clothing stores, pawnshops. This must have been the only block in Seattle where there wasn’t a Starbucks. Second Chance looked more like a diner than a refuge. There were tables pushed up to the windows, young people in scruffy clothes seated at them, drinking coffee out of c
ardboard cups. They had an aimless look about them, as though they’d already been sitting there a long time, that if I came back a couple of hours from now they’d still be there.

  Already I was looking. Scanning the sidewalk in both directions, searching the faces. Satisfied that Syd wasn’t hanging around the street, just waiting for me to show up, I entered Second Chance.

  Once inside, I started doing the same thing. I scanned. A couple of dozen teens—some actually looked older than that, late twenties maybe, even one who could have been in his early thirties—were milling about, but none of them was Syd. They seemed to sense that they were being studied, and several of them subtly turned their backs to me.

  I was expecting something like a hotel front desk, I suppose, but what I found off in the corner of the room was a door resting on two sawhorses, and sitting behind it, peering through wire-rimmed glasses at a computer, was a man in his late thirties, prematurely balding but with enough hair at the back to make a short ponytail, dressed in a plaid shirt and jeans.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  He held up one finger, resumed typing something, then hit, with some fanfare, one button. “Send,” he said. He turned in his chair and said, “Yeah?”

  “My name is Tim Blake,” I said. “I just flew in from Connecticut.”

  “Good for you,” he said.

  I wasn’t in the mood for attitude, but pressed on. “Is Yolanda around?”

  “Beats me,” he said. “Who’s Yolanda?”

  “She works here,” I said.

  “News to me.” He shrugged, as if to say, So what if I don’t know who works here? “Is there something I can do for you?”

  “I’m trying to find my daughter,” I said. “Sydney Blake. She’s been in here a couple of times in the last week, I think. We’ve been going out of our minds, her mother and I, wondering what’s happened to her. Hang on, I’ve got a picture.”

  I reached into my jacket pocket for reprints of the photos of Sydney that were on the website. I handed a sampling of them to the man, who glanced at them quickly and then put them on his desk.

  “Never seen her,” he said.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Len,” he said.

  “Len, would you mind just taking another look?”

  He gave the shots another cursory glance and said, “We get a lot of kids through here, you know. It’s possible she’s been around, but I don’t recognize her.”

  “You here all the time?” I asked.

  “Nope. So maybe she was here when I was off. How did you hear that she’s been in here?”

  I didn’t want to tell him that Yolanda had tipped me off. She might have violated privacy rules by getting in touch. I was betting one of the reasons runaways felt comfortable coming here was that it was understood the management wasn’t in the habit of ratting them out to their parents.

  So instead of answering directly, I said, “There was a tip to the website I set up when my daughter went missing. That she might have been here. So then I was in touch with Yolanda Mills.”

  “Okay,” Len said.

  “Has Yolanda gone home for the day?”

  “Like I said, I don’t know her.”

  “Is this her day off? Does she work a different shift?”

  “What’s the name again?”

  “Yolanda Mills.”

  Len had a blank look on his face. “And she works here? At this shelter?”

  “That’s what she told me,” I said.

  “You spoke to her?”

  “Yes. By email, and over the phone,” I said. I was getting a strange tingling at the back of my neck.

  “Can you give me a second?” Len got up from behind the desk and went through a door that led down a dark green hallway dotted with notices that had been taped directly to the wall. I saw him go into a room halfway down the hall. He was in there no more than twenty seconds, then came back.

  “We got nobody working here by that name,” he said.

  “That’s not possible,” I said, feeling my anxiety level go up a notch. “I spoke to her. Who were you talking to back there?”

  “Lefty.” My look must have told him I thought he was jerking me around. “Morgan. She’s the boss. We just call her Lefty. You want to talk to her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Great. She loves interruptions.”

  He led me down the hall, stuck his head in the doorway, and said, “Guy wants to talk to you, Lefty.”

  She was nearly hidden behind a desk stacked with paper-stuffed folders. Forties, probably, although the thin gray streaks in her brown hair and the wire-rimmed John Lennon glasses suggested to me that she might be older. A blue long-sleeved sweater hung off her thin frame, and when she stood up I could see that she’d cinched her belt tight to keep her jeans, a couple of sizes too large, from falling off her.

  “Yeah?” she said.

  “I’m Tim Blake,” I said, extending my right hand. Instead of returning the gesture with her own right hand, she stuck out her left. She had no right arm. The right sweater sleeve, hanging empty, was tucked into a pocket. I was glad I hadn’t called her Lefty.

  “Morgan Donovan,” she said. “This is my empire.” She waved her hand majestically at the chaos that was her desk. “You’re looking for somebody?”

  “Two people, actually,” I said. “My daughter, Sydney Blake. And a woman who works here. Yolanda Mills.”

  “Nope.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “No one by that name works here.”

  “She told me she worked at Second Chance. Is there another drop-in place with this name?”

  “Maybe in some parallel universe,” Morgan said. “But we’re the only one in Seattle.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Maybe you got the name wrong. She works for some other shelter. God knows the city is full of them.”

  “No, I’m sure I have it right,” I said. I put the pictures of Syd on top of one of the folders. “This is my daughter, Sydney Blake. Yolanda Mills said she’d seen her here. Twice.”

  Morgan gave the pictures a more thorough examination than Len had. “I’m good with faces,” she said. “But this girl, she’s not familiar. She’s a looker. If I’d seen her, I’d have remembered her. So would Len.” She rolled her eyes. “Especially Len.”

  “But you’re back here in the office,” I said. “She could have come in and you wouldn’t have seen her.”

  She nodded. “Yup,” she said. “But if there was a Yolanda Mills working for me, that I’d know. I sign the checks.”

  “Maybe she’s a volunteer. Do you have volunteers here?”

  “Some. But none by that name.”

  I took out a slip of paper on which I’d written the shelter’s address, my flight info, and several phone numbers, including Yolanda’s. “I’ve got her number right here.”

  Morgan asked me to read it out to her. “That’s not the shelter number,” she said.

  “It’s her cell,” I said. “I called this number last night and talked to her. She said she helped with the food orders here, that she was out all the time picking up groceries.”

  Morgan Donovan just looked at me.

  “Hang on,” I said, got out my cell, flipped it open, and punched in the number. “I’ll get her on the phone and you can talk to her yourself.”

  “Why the hell not,” she said tiredly. “It’s not like I have anything else to do.”

  I let it ring a dozen times, thinking that eventually it would go to message, but it didn’t. I ended the call, then immediately tried the number again. I let it go another dozen rings, then snapped the phone shut.

  Morgan said, “You don’t look so good.”

  TWELVE

  I WAS HAVING A DÉJÀ VU MOMENT. First Syd’s not working where she says she is. Now the mysterious Yolanda.

  “You want to sit down?” Morgan said.

  “Something’s wrong,” I said. My legs were rubbery, my stomach was d
oing a slow somersault. “Where the hell is she?” I said, more to myself than the woman sitting behind the desk.

  Morgan sat down, leaned back in her chair, and sighed tiredly. “You might as well fill me in.”

  So I did. Syd going missing. The hotel. The car. Then, a hit on the website I’d set up from a woman claiming to have seen her in Seattle.

  “And she said she worked for us,” Morgan said. “That’s some story. Sounds like a scam. Maybe some kid, jerking you around.”

  “No,” I said. “It didn’t sound like a kid, and she didn’t ask me for anything. Didn’t want a reward.” Wheels were turning. “If you knew someone here was sending tips to parents, telling them their kids were here, would that be against the rules?”

  “Big-time,” she said. “We’d like nothing more than for these kids to get back together with their mothers and fathers, but some of those moms and dads don’t deserve to have them back. You got no idea the kind of crap a lot of these kids have had to put up with. Not that they’re all angels. Seventy percent of them, I’d probably kick them out myself if they were mine. But they’re not all trouble. Some of these girls, when their stepdads weren’t using them for punching bags, they were trying to get into their pants. We got kids out there whose parents are drunks and drug dealers. We had a girl here last year, her mom was pimping her out. She was getting a little too old in the tooth to do it herself and figured her daughter could take over the family business.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, he seems to be M.I.A. at the moment. We had a kid here last week, his skin was a mess, like it had all peeled off and was growing back on again, especially his face. Anything that wasn’t protected. His dad was pissed he hadn’t taken a shower when he’d told him to. So he hauls the kid out to the driveway and takes a power washer to him. You ever feel the pressure of one of those things? You can strip paint with them.”

  I said nothing.

  “So we’re not exactly going to put a call into mommies and daddies like that and say hey, guess what, we found your little angel, why don’t you come on down and take them home.”