The contents of his stomach were geysering up into his throat as he stumbled back into the weeds behind the station. He bent over and a column of fiery liquid gushed from his mouth. He staggered away from this first mess and knelt in the weeds, waiting for the rest to come. It surged up and he gagged, forcing it back. Again it rose and again he choked it back, leaving a searing trail in his throat.
He remembered a scene from many years back, when he’d had the flu: his father kneeling beside the toilet bowl and holding him in his arms.
“Let it go, Tim,” he’d said. “Give it all up. Don’t hold it back.”
The next time it rose, he let it go. He crawled away and, head hanging, tried to gather enough saliva to clear his mouth of the foulness. He gulped a few times, spit, wiped the sweat off his face, and got to his feet unsteadily. At a drinking fountain by the rest rooms he rinsed his mouth out, took a long drink, and splashed some water over his face.
Turning to go back to the car, he stared stupidly at the dark, empty bays of the service station, and thought, “This can’t be happening.” Knowing the car couldn’t possibly be hidden there, he nevertheless walked around to the front of the pumps looking for it. He actually gazed down at the grease-stained concrete, as if it might have opened up and swallowed the car. He looked up and down the highway; there were no taillights to be seen in either direction.
Dazed, he walked over to peer at the contents of the deserted office: a U-Haul calendar on the wall, a coffee maker on a shelf, stacks of motor oil, a pay phone. The Rolodex file on the desk fascinated him like an artifact from an alien spaceship. Finally he shuffled away to sit on the edge of one of the concrete pumping islands while he tried to puzzle out the meaning of this almost preternatural event.
Why had his mother stopped at a closed filling station? The obvious answer was that he’d told her he was going to be sick. He didn’t remember doing so, but why else would she have stopped?
But then, if she’d stopped because he was sick, why didn’t she wait for him?
He was certain that the lights over the pumps had been dark when he got out of the car. But it seemed to him that the office had been lighted when he stumbled past. Half asleep and his stomach boiling, he might have imagined that.
But suppose he hadn’t imagined it. Suppose there had been a light—and someone inside the office.
Perhaps someone at the filling station had flagged Ellen down—someone with information about David. But how could anyone just standing on the highway recognize their car rushing by in the dark? No, it couldn’t have been that way.
It had to have been a planned meeting.
Suddenly, in imagination, he saw his mother slip into the office and heard her say to the faceless person inside: “It’s all right—Tim’s sound asleep. We can talk now.” Perhaps they talked about his father.
A thrill of terror chased itself up his spine.
Perhaps the man she talked to was his father. After the strangeness of this day and this week, nothing at all seemed farfetched. The obvious, commonplace solution to the puzzle didn’t even come to mind for consideration.
For the next twenty minutes he watched cars flashing by in both directions. Then, as he stared dumbfounded, his father’s green Volvo turned into the station from the east and slowed to a stop beside him. The stranger inside rolled down the window and said:
“You got a water hose?”
Paralyzed, his mouth hanging open, Tim gawked at him.
“Hey!” the man said again.
“Wh-what?”
“You got a water hose?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t you work here?”
“No.”
“Shit.” The man frowned. “I got a hole in my radiator or something, and the thing’s gonna blow if I don’t get some water.”
“Where did you get my father’s car?”
The stranger turned his frown on Tim. “Are you stoned or something?”
“No.”
“Well, if this is your father’s car, it’s news to me. I been paying on it for five years.”
“Oh.”
The man opened the door, got out, and looked around. Then, spotting a hose beside the office, got back in and pulled the car over to it. Watching him, Tim was struck by his resemblance to his father, of middle height, slender but broad-shouldered, dark-haired. Although completely unalike in manner, the two men had the same neat, economical style of movement.
After raising the hood, he gave the radiator cap a cautious half turn and leaped back as if expecting an explosion of steam. When nothing happened, he lifted off the cap, peered inside, and grunted.
He turned to Tim and said, “I think I better let it cool off for a while.” He blinked at the boy curiously, as if seeing him for the first time. “What the hell are you doing out here, anyway?”
“I’m not sure myself,” Tim said, then added: “It’s a long story.”
The man propped his backside on the fender of his car and folded his arms. “I got time to kill.”
Again sitting on the edge of one of the pumping islands, Tim put his forearms across his legs and stared down at the cement between his feet, wondering if he should begin at the beginning. He decided he’d better.
When he was finished, the man said, “That’s a hell of a thing.”
“Yeah.”
“You tried calling her?”
“She wouldn’t be home yet. And the phone’s in the office.”
The man scratched the side of his jaw thoughtfully, as if debating with himself about something. “You know,” he said at last, “I think I know where your dad was calling from.”
“You do?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Maybe.”
“Where?”
“Well, there’s this place,” he said vaguely. “A bar, cocktail lounge called the Yacht Club.… You’re too young to remember, but the Edgewater Beach Hotel was pretty hot stuff back in the thirties and forties. I mean real fancy. There was this one restaurant that was decked out like the lounge of a luxury liner—all teak and brass, lifesavers, portholes, that kind of stuff. It had surf sound effects, bells, foghorns, everything. You had to cross a sort of bridge to get to it, like you were boarding a ship, see? It was called the Yacht Club. Anyway, when they were going to tear the place down, some guys got together and bought the fittings and set it all up in a spot on Bryn Mawr, just like it was in the hotel.”
“You mean on Bryn Mawr?”
“That’s right.”
“They told Dad it was a few blocks north of Bryn Mawr.”
He nodded. “Yeah, that’s the whole idea. See? The Edgewater Beach Hotel was a few blocks north of Bryn Mawr.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Well, look. The idea is, this is still the Edgewater Beach Hotel. See? When they answer the phone, they say, ‘Yacht Club, Edgewater Beach Hotel.’ They use the same matchbook covers, the same ashtrays, everything. Everybody’s supposed to pretend it’s still part of the hotel, see?”
“That’s really weird.”
“Well, it’s a sort of joke. A nostalgia thing.”
Tim shrugged bleakly.
“Anyhow, I have to go practically right by it to get home if you want to check it out.”
“You mean you’d take me there?”
“Sure, why not? It just means getting off at Bryn Mawr instead of Hollywood. No big deal.” Seeing the boy’s hesitation, he added, “We could leave a note for your mom in case she comes back.”
Tim looked around uncertainly. “Where would we put it?”
The man snorted. “You want to be a success in life, kid? Remember this: for every problem there’s a solution.”
Three minutes later they were on their way.
The man introduced himself as Frank Orsini and said he was a printing salesman. But, as Tim found out, he was a missionary as well. As he warmed to his subject, he outlined the fabulous future Tim could expect to have in sales, detailed th
e course of studies he should pursue, described the sort of companies to ally himself with, laid down some basic principles he’d discovered for himself, and advised him about commission plans and stock option deals. Staring numbly out at the black flatlands sweeping by the window, Tim let the talk wash over him, grateful that he didn’t have to listen to his own thoughts and that Frank Orsini was content with his role as monologist.
It was nearly midnight when they parked a few doors away from the entrance to the Yacht Club, marked by a red neon sign so discreet it was almost invisible. Inside, after passing an unattended cloakroom, they crossed a gangway over a simulated beach to two dark, portholed doors that opened onto a deck three or four steps above the main room. Along the left wall stood a long, dimly-lit bar, now nearly deserted. Portholes in the right wall overlooked a romantically moonlit Lake Michigan, whose sighs could be heard behind the Andrews Sisters and “The Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy.”
As they crossed the room, the balding, red-jacketed bartender watched with stony disapproval and greeted them with an unfriendly “Can I help you?”
“Yeah, maybe,” Orsini said. “This boy’s father’s turned up a little missing, and he may have been here earlier tonight.” He turned to Tim. “Tell him what he looks like, kid.”
The bartender listened to Tim’s description and shrugged indifferently.
“He made a call from here around seven thirty,” Tim said.
“Not from here he didn’t.”
Orsini asked if there was a pay phone.
“By the front door, but it’s out of order.”
“There’s gotta be another phone, right?”
“Behind the bar, yeah. But nobody’s used it tonight, I can tell you that.”
Orsini frowned and drummed his fingers on the bar impatiently. “No others?”
“One in the office out front, but that’s been locked up since six.”
He gave the bartender a baleful glare and then transferred it intact to Tim, as if the two of them had conspired to make a fool of him.
“Well, I guess that’s it then,” he said bitterly and turned to leave.
As they walked out of the bar, a slowly cruising police car came to a stop across the street. When its door opened, Orsini said, “Oh, shit! Get in the car.”
“What?”
“Get in the goddamned car. And look—if he asks you, tell him I’m your father.”
Tim started to ask him what was going on, but Orsini had already turned to meet the patrolman in the middle of the street. They talked for a minute, then walked over to the passenger side of the Volvo.
The policeman bent down to scan the interior of the car, then turned solemnly to the boy. “This man is your father?”
“Yes, sir.”
He looked unconvinced. “How long were you in that bar?”
“A couple minutes.”
“You sure of that?”
“Yes, sir. Absolutely.”
He studied Tim’s face skeptically. “This man is your father?”
“Yes, sir.” He decided it was time to move a bit off the defensive. “What’s wrong, anyway?”
Ignoring the question, the policeman straightened up, had a few more words with Orsini, and then went back to his cruiser.
“What was that all about?” Tim asked when Orsini slid into the seat beside him and started the engine.
“Asshole thought I was contributing to the delinquency of a minor.” He pulled away from the curb, turned right on Sheridan Road, drove north a few blocks, and was stopped by a red light. He sat drumming thoughtfully on the steering wheel with his fists until the light changed, then turned left and went around the block. Coming back to Sheridan, he turned right and headed back the way they’d come.
Tim gave him a curious glance but said nothing.
A few minutes later the man said, “I got another idea, kid.”
“Okay.”
He pulled up at a bus stop. “I want you to wait for me here. I can’t take you with me this time, where I got to go, see?”
Tim looked out blankly at the bench. “You want me to wait here?”
“Right.”
“How long will it take?”
He shrugged. “Fifteen, twenty minutes.”
“Okay.”
Tim got out of the car, sat down on the bench, and watched the Volvo make a U-turn and disappear northward.
He was still there more than an hour later when a bus stopped in front of him and a huge man with a battered face stepped out, peered down at him with a puzzled look, and said, “Are you waiting for this bus?”
As Howard was putting this query to Tim, Tim’s mother was walking into a police station less than two miles away. She was faintly surprised to find herself doing this; it was as if the decision had been made by her legs, and she was simply being carried along as an unwilling, semi-conscious passenger.
A man at a desk—she noticed nothing about him except that he was a man—spoke to her, and evidently some part of her understood what he said, because she answered him.
She sat down in a hard chair. Words flowed out of her, and evidently they made some sort of sense, because the man nodded and wrote things down on a pad in front of him. Finally she handed him the stiff, pale-green sheet of cover stock that she’d found wedged in the door of the gas station. The message written on it with a heavy red marker read:
Mom—
I’ve found someone who knows where Dad was calling from.
I’ll call you from Chicago.
Tim
The man at the police station asked many questions about Tim and about David, and, though she couldn’t remember what they were afterward, she answered them. Then he gave her some soothing half-truths to see her through the next few hours and told her to go home.
She shook her head.
He asked if she had a cell phone or if there was an answering machine at home. When she shook her head again, he explained to her that she really had to go back, in case Tim tried to reach her. She nodded but went on sitting in the hard chair, her eyes vacant, her body slack with fatigue, and he realized she was virtually unconscious. He called a nearby motel to tell them to expect another guest for the night, gave her detailed directions, made her repeat them, and handed her a card with two names written on it, one of them his.
When she didn’t move, he told her to put the card in her purse, and she did.
With a sigh, he helped her to her feet and took her to her car.
Sitting on the bench at the bus stop, Howard listened to the boy’s story and told him it was pointless to go on waiting for Frank Orsini. “It looks like you’ve been ditched three times in one week—twice in one day,” he said. “That’s got to be a world record.”
Tim smiled wearily.
“My place is just a couple blocks away. We’ll make some phone calls and bed you down for the night. Okay?”
“Yeah. Okay.”
Howard’s first call was to Tim’s home; naturally that went unanswered. His second was to the Indiana State Police.
“Within the past two or three, four hours,” Howard said, “you’ve probably gotten a call from Ellen Kennesey of Runnell, Indiana, about a missing son. They got separated by accident at a gas station outside Valparaiso.”
“Hold on.”
Tim, sitting with a Coke in his hands, watched expectantly as Howard waited through five minutes.
“Sorry. We’ve had no such call.”
“Huh. She must be out there looking for him herself, since she’s not home answering her phone.”
“I see. May I have your name, please?” He gave her his name and phone number and told her he was a private investigator in Chicago. “Did Mrs. Kennesey hire you to find her son?”
“No, no. The boy hitched into Chicago, and I just happened to find him stranded here. The point is, if she calls, give her my number and tell her Tim’s fine.”
She chewed this over for half a minute. “You really need to turn the boy over to the authoriti
es there.”
“Yeah, I know, but it’d be no kindness, believe me. The kid’s exhausted. He’s already asleep on the sofa.” He tipped Tim a wink.
“Well, I guess it’s your lookout.”
“Everything’ll work out fine, officer. We’ll have it all straightened out as soon as we get in touch with each other.”
It was an appropriate ending for the day. Howard had called the Indiana police (instead of the Chicago police) because Tim had forgotten to mention the note he’d left behind for Ellen at the gas station. And Tim, taking it for granted that Howard was talking to the Chicago police, didn’t think to mention it now.
CHAPTER 19
At ten Ellen fought her way up out of a drowning dream and spent a panic-stricken moment trying to remember where she was and what she was doing there. She went into the bathroom and faced herself in the mirror. She looked a wreck, her hair an unruly tangle, but there was little she could do about it. She washed her face and, while delving in her purse for makeup, found the card she’d been given at the police station the night before.
She dialed the number and asked for either Sergeant Wiley or Sergeant Horlach. After a couple of minutes she was connected with Sergeant Wiley, who told her there had been a development of sorts. A patrolman coming off night duty had seen a notice about her missing son and reported that he’d spotted such a boy coming out of a bar with a man he identified as his father.
“His description of the man tallies with your description of your husband,” Wiley said. “And he was driving a green Volvo, 1988 or thereabouts. According to the report Sergeant Horlach left me, your husband told you he was calling from the Edgewater Beach Hotel. Is that right?”
“Yes. That’s what he was told, anyway.”
“That’s very interesting,” Wiley said and went on to explain the Yacht Club’s association with the hotel. “It seems pretty well connected up, Mrs. Kennesey. It looks like whoever picked up Tim knew about the Yacht Club and got him together with his father there.”