Fear the Worst

  As I went up the steps, the door opened and Evan came rushing out, his face red, his jaw set angrily. He looked ready to explode.

  “Hey,” I said, but he brushed past without seeing me, charged off between the used cars, then stopped abruptly next to a red Jetta with a “One Owner!” banner in the windshield, and kicked the rear fender with everything he had.

  “Fuck!” he shouted. “Fuck her! Fuck that bitch!”

  And then he stormed off, heading down the sidewalk, away from the lot.

  I went inside, where Susanne was posted at a desk just to the right of the door, the crutches she’d been managing without leaned up against the wall, the cane hanging from a coat hook. She was shaking her head, then looked up when she saw me.

  “Jeez, perfect timing,” she said. She was obviously rattled. “Did he run into you?”

  “He just beat up a Volkswagen,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  “All I did was ask him about the petty cash,” she said.

  “What petty cash?”

  “In the desk here. I swear, there was two hundred dollars there yesterday, and today there’s forty. I asked him whether he’d had to go into it for something and he flies off the handle, says I’m calling him a thief. I never did any such thing. All I did was ask him whether he—”

  She stopped herself, looked at me. “What’s happened?”

  “They found Sydney’s car,” I said.

  Her face didn’t move. She waited.

  “In Derby. Left in a Wal-Mart lot. It may have been there since she vanished. There are traces of blood on the door handle and steering wheel.”

  Her face still didn’t move. She took it in, waited a moment, and said, “She’s not dead. I refuse to believe she’s dead.”

  “She’s not,” I said, because that’s what I had to believe, too. “They’ll have to do DNA tests to know whether it’s Syd’s blood.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Susanne said. “She’s not dead.” She raised her chin, as though defying unseen forces.

  The door flung open and Bob walked in. Before he’d set eyes on either of us, he barked, “What the hell did you say to Evan?” Then, seeing me, he said, “Oh.”

  To Susanne, I said, “I’ll go. I’ll keep in touch.” To Bob, I said, “Take care of her. And if I ever hear Evan call Susanne a bitch again, I’ll put his head through a windshield.”

  I’M NOT SURE HOW I GOT HOME. I had no memory of driving there. Hot blood was clouding my vision.

  There was a police vehicle parked out front when I got there. A van instead of a cruiser. A nattily dressed black man identified himself as a member of the city’s forensic investigations unit. He’d been sent by Detective Kip Jennings to retrieve a DNA sample of Sydney’s. I let him in, showed him Syd’s room and the bathroom she used to get ready for work in the morning. He zeroed in on the hairbrush.

  While he was doing that, I went down to the kitchen. The light was flashing on the phone. I hit the button to hear the message.

  “Hey.”

  Kate Wood.

  “I just wondered how you were doing. I don’t know whether you got my message at work. My offer still stands. I could bring something over. I know you probably don’t feel like cooking. You could even come over here if you want. Anyway, get back to me? Okay?” And then she rattled off her cell number, which I knew better than my own, she’d reminded me of it so many times.

  I deleted the message.

  I went upstairs to the spare bedroom where I keep my computer and pay the bills and went online to see if there’d been any action on the website.

  Nothing.

  I sat there for a while, stared at the screen.

  The guy from the forensics department popped his head in, said he’d find his own way out.

  “Sure,” I said. “Thanks.”

  Finally, I went back down to the kitchen. I opened the fridge and stared into it for a good twenty seconds, thinking if I looked long enough something edible would magically appear. I hadn’t bought groceries in a couple of weeks, and—on the nights when Patty didn’t show up with fast food—was surviving mostly on a cache of microwavable dinners that had been collecting in the freezer over the last year or two.

  I closed the door and put my palms on the kitchen counter, leaning into it. I took several deep breaths, letting each one out slowly.

  If this was supposed to relax me, it wasn’t working, because suddenly I took the back of my arm and swept everything off the counter in front of me: toaster, salt and pepper shakers, a day-by-day New Yorker cartoon calendar I hadn’t turned the page on in three weeks, an electric can opener—all were sent crashing to the floor.

  I was filled with all this pent-up rage and frustration. Where was Syd? What had happened to her? Why did she leave?

  Why the hell couldn’t I find her?

  I wanted to explode. I had so much anger and no place to direct it.

  I’d only been home a few minutes, but I needed to go out again. Every moment I spent here, alone, reminded me that Syd was not here. I couldn’t sit around. I had to burn off some steam. Drive around. Keep looking.

  The phone rang. I snatched the receiver off the cradle before the first ring was finished.

  “What?” I shouted.

  “Whoa.”

  “I’m sorry,” bringing my voice down, not knowing who it was. “Hello.”

  “I called earlier. Did you get my message?”

  Then I knew. “I just got home, Kate.”

  It had started about six months ago. I’d met her in a rather unconventional way. She was backing her Ford Focus out of a spot at Walgreens and hit my bumper on the other side of the aisle. I was behind the wheel, engine off, listening to the end of a newscast before I went into the store, and jumped out when I felt the jolt.

  I had a number of lines set to go. Are you blind? Where the hell were you looking? Did you get your driver’s license off the Net?

  But when she got out of the car, the first thing out of my mouth was, “Are you okay?”

  I think that had a lot to do with the fact that she was such a striking woman. Maybe not beautiful, not in some supermodel sense (and here, I would defer to Bob anyway, of course), but arresting, with short brown hair, brown eyes, a slightly Monroe-esque figure. But instead of a squeaky Betty Boop kind of voice, her words came out soft and low and throaty.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “That was totally my fault. Are you hurt?”

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” I insisted. “Let’s see if your car’s okay.”

  It was fine, and there was only a minor scratch on my bumper. Even though it was not something worth repairing, I offered no objection when Kate wanted to give me her name and phone number.

  “You know, later, you might have whiplash or something,” she said. Like she was hoping.

  The next day, I called her.

  “Oh my God, don’t tell me you have a concussion or something.”

  “I wondered if you wanted to get a drink.”

  She told me, over a beer, that when I called she figured I’d be faking a spinal injury and suing her for a million dollars’ worth of hospital bills because that’s the kind of thing people do, that’s the kind of world we’re living in.

  That should have been a clue.

  But I didn’t pick up on it, because things between us seemed to be clicking pretty good. They ended up clicking pretty fast.

  We moved on from drinks to dinner, and from dinner to my house. Five minutes after we’d come through the front door, we were in bed. I hadn’t had sex in several months, and it’s possible I made that apparent more quickly than I would have liked. But it was a long evening, and I was able to redeem myself.

  Kate seemed, at first, almost perfect.

  She was warm. Attentive. Sexually uninhibited. She was addicted to DVD sets of television series. I worked so many evenings I’d never much gotten into TV, so she introduced me to shows I’d only heard of, including one about these people whose commercial jet
crashes on an island, and somehow this is their destiny, they’ve all been brought to this island for a reason, it’s all part of some big plan—I could hardly make any sense of it. But Kate was obsessed with it, how everyone’s lives were being manipulated by unseen forces. “That’s so what happens,” she said. “Other people are always pulling the strings behind the scenes.”

  That should have been another clue.

  The thing was, she was fun to be with. And I hadn’t been with anyone fun in quite some time. But it was when she started opening up about herself that things started to go off the rails.

  She’d been divorced three years. Her husband was a commercial pilot. He fooled around. She got totally screwed over in the divorce. Her lawyer, she believed, was a friend of her husband’s, although she couldn’t actually prove it. Some kind of deal got cooked up behind closed doors, she said, otherwise she would have ended up with the son of a bitch’s house. But guess what? He was still living there, and she was stuck in some shithole apartment in Devon half a block from a bar, and Friday nights you were likely to find some guy taking a leak on your front tire.

  Okay.

  And if that wasn’t enough, she was being treated totally unfairly at work. She was clearly the next in line to be head buyer at Jazzies, the clothing store where she worked in New Haven, but they went and gave it to this woman named Edith, if you can believe that any woman with a name like Edith would have a clue about what’s fashionable.

  “Edith Head?” I said. “The Oscar-winning costume designer?”

  “Are you making that up?”

  Anyway, she knew they had it in for her at work, that they didn’t like her, and the most likely theory as far as she was concerned was that it was because she was so much more attractive than the others. They felt threatened. Well, they could all go fuck themselves, that’s what they could do.

  At first I welcomed her calls at work. I was quite okay with her telling me, in some detail, what she wanted to do to me the next time we were together. But sometimes, when you’re trying to clinch a deal for a $35,000 loaded Accord, you have to end things, no matter how much you might be enjoying them.

  Kate’s feelings got hurt easily.

  The more she called my work and home phones, and my cell, the less I called back. “Give me a chance to be the one to make the call,” I suggested gently.

  “But I told you that in my message,” she said. “I told you to call me back.”

  It certainly wasn’t all phone sex. It was often more stories about how her ex was hiding money from her, or how they still weren’t recognizing her talents at work, or how she thought her landlord had been in her apartment when she was out, going through her underwear drawer. Nothing was out of place, but she just had a feeling.

  One night, when I had intended to break it off, I somehow allowed her to talk me into letting her meet Sydney.

  “I’m dying to see what she’s like,” Kate said.

  I’d been in no rush to introduce them. I didn’t see any need for Sydney to meet every woman I dated, and in the last year or two, there certainly hadn’t been many. I figured, if it got to the point where things were getting serious, that might be the time for introductions.

  But Kate persisted, so I arranged for the three of us to meet at lunch one Sunday. Syd, a seafood fan, picked a spot down along the waterfront that, for all I knew, got its “fresh” catch of the day from an ocean half a planet away.

  Kate thought it went fabulously. “We so hit it off,” she told me.

  I knew Syd would have a different take.

  “She was very nice,” she said later when we were alone.

  “You’re holding out on me,” I said.

  “No, really.”

  “Spill it,” I said.

  “Well, you know she’s crazy,” Sydney said.

  “Go on.”

  “She was the only one who said a word all through lunch. And it was all about how this person doesn’t like her and that person she had a problem with, and how she didn’t get along at this job because the people were all against her and gave her an unfair job review, and then she got this other job and even though it’s going okay she knows people are talking about her behind her back, and how she’s pretty sure that she got overcharged by the guy where she gets her dry cleaning done and—”

  “Okay,” I said. “I get it.”

  “But I understand,” Syd said.

  “What do you mean, you understand?”

  “She’s hot. I mean, it’s a sex thing, right?”

  “Jesus, Sydney.”

  “I mean, Dad, come on, what else would it be? If I had a rack like that, I’d be the most popular girl at my school.” I tried to think of something to say, but before I could, Syd added, “But she’s very nice.”

  “But she’s a bit crazy,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Sydney said. “But a lot of crazy people are very nice.”

  “Did she ask you a single question about yourself?”

  Sydney had to think about that one. “You know when you went to the can? She asked me my opinion of her earrings.”

  The thing was, Syd had nailed it. Kate was self-obsessed. She thought everyone was against her. She saw conspiracies where none existed. She jumped to conclusions. She was pushing too hard when I wanted to slow things down.

  The day after the lunch, Kate, who had initially felt it went well, called me at work and said, “Sydney hates me.”

  “That’s insane,” I said. “She thought you were very nice.”

  “What did she say? Exactly?”

  “She liked you,” I said, leaving out the references to “crazy” and “rack.”

  “You’re lying. I know you’re lying.”

  “Kate, I have to go.”

  We still saw each other, occasionally. Out of guilt, fearing I was using her, I made excuses not to sleep with her.

  Most of the time.

  After Syd disappeared, I stopped returning any of her calls. I had enough on my plate. Occasionally, I’d pick up without checking the caller ID.

  “Let me be there for you,” she’d say.

  I was reluctant to accept her offers of comfort.

  “So you didn’t mind my being around when you needed to get off,” Kate said at one point, “but you don’t want me there when the going gets tough?”

  And now she was on the phone as I stood here in my kitchen, the floor littered with debris after my explosion, still unable to think of anything but my daughter’s car, bloodstains on the door and steering wheel.

  “Hey, you there?” Kate asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m here.”

  “You sound terrible.”

  “Long day.”

  “Are you alone?”

  “Yeah.”

  The truth was, I felt very, very alone.

  “I know you’ve got a lot on your mind,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Neither of us spoke for a moment.

  “Have you eaten?” she asked.

  I had to think. Hadn’t I just been staring into the fridge? That must have meant I’d not had dinner.

  “No.”

  “I’ll bring something over. Chinese. And I’ve got some new DVDs.”

  I thought a moment, and said, “Okay.” I was hungry. I was exhausted. And I felt very alone.

  I said, “Can you give me an hour? No. An hour and a half?”

  “Sure. I’ll be there.”

  I hung up without saying goodbye, stared out the kitchen window. There was still an hour or more of good light left.

  I locked the house, got in the car, checked Susanne’s empty house again, then drove up to Derby. Cruised through plazas, drove slowly through the parking lots of fast-food joints, always looking, scanning, searching for anyone who might be Sydney.

  No luck.

  I knew, in my heart, what a futile hope this was, that somehow, by chance, I was going to spot my daughter walking down the street. How likely was it she’d be taking
an evening stroll or sitting by the window of a McDonald’s as I happened to drive by?

  But I had to do something.

  I was heading back south when a street sign caught my eye.

  Coulter Drive.

  I hit the brakes and hung a right before I’d even had a chance to think about the decision. I pulled the car over to the shoulder and reached down into my pocket for the sheet of paper I’d taken from the dealership.

  I unfolded it, studied the photocopy of Richard Fletcher’s driver’s license. He lived at 72 Coulter. I glanced at the closest house, which was 22. The next one down was 24. I took my foot off the brake and moved slowly down the street.

  Fletcher’s house was set back from the street, shrouded in trees. It was a simple two-story house, four windows, a door dead center. The front lawn was spotty and full of weeds. Used tires, several rusted bicycles, an old lawn mower, and other bits of assorted junk were crowded up against a separate one-car garage. In the drive were the yellow Pinto Fletcher had used to make his escape earlier today, as well as a Ford pickup that had seen better days. The hood was propped open, and I could just make out someone leaning over the front to examine the engine.

  Richard Fletcher, I guessed. The son of a bitch.

  I came to a stop at the end of the gravel driveway. Any other time, I might have had the sense to drive on. So the guy pulled a fast one. Took a truck out for a spin, used it to pick up some manure. Next time you’ll know better, you won’t let a guy test-drive a truck without tagging along. Fletcher got lucky with me today. Not next time. Live and learn.

  I was too on edge to be that rational.

  I got out of the car and started striding up the driveway. A dog I’d not seen before started loping up the lane toward me. But this was no guard dog. He was a mutt of undetermined heritage, limping, gray in the snout. His frame had the same sag in it as the Fletcher house roof. His weary tail wagged like a sideways metronome at the slowest beat.

  I walked on past the dog. As I came up around the truck, I saw that it was, indeed, Richard Fletcher staring into the engine well. He had his elbow on the rad, and his head was resting on his hand. He held no tools, wasn’t actually repairing anything. He was looking at the engine the way a washed-up fortune-teller might gaze into the bottom of a teacup. Trying to come up with answers, not having much luck.