What I should have done, before she’d gotten into my car, was tell Claire to call her own parents. Let them come get her.
But then she’d gone and mentioned Scott.
I got out my cell, checked to see whether I had any e-mails. I didn’t, but the effort helped kill ten seconds. I hit 88.7 on the radio presets, the NPR station out of Buffalo, but couldn’t concentrate on anything anyone was saying.
The girl had been in there five minutes. How long did it take to toss your cookies? You went in, you did your thing, splashed some water on your face, and came back out.
Maybe Claire was sicker than she’d realized. It was possible she’d made a mess of herself and needed extra time to clean up.
Great.
I rested my hand on the ignition key, wanting to turn it. You could just go. She had a cell phone. She could call someone else to come and get her. I could head home. This girl wasn’t my responsibility.
Except that wasn’t true. Once I’d agreed to give her a ride, to see that she got home safely, I’d made her my responsibility.
I took another look at the pickup. Just sitting there.
I scanned the inside of the restaurant again. The homeless guy, the woman with the two girls. Now, a boy and girl in their late teens sitting in a booth by the window, sharing a Coke and some chicken fingers. And a man with jet-black hair, in a brown leather jacket, was standing at the counter, his back to me, placing an order.
Seven minutes.
How would it look, I wondered, if this girl’s parents showed up now, trying to find her? And discovered me, local snoop-for-hire Cal Weaver, waiting here for her? Would they believe I was just driving her home? That I’d agreed to give her a ride because she knew my son? That my motives were pure?
If I were them, I wouldn’t have bought it. And my motives hadn’t been entirely pure. I had been wondering whether to try and get some information about Scott out of her, although I’d quickly abandoned that idea.
The hope of getting her to answer some questions wasn’t what kept me here now. I just couldn’t abandon a young girl out on this strip, at this time of night. Certainly not without telling her I was leaving.
I decided to go in and find her, make certain she was okay, then tell her to find her way home from here. Give her cab fare if she didn’t have anyone else she could call. I got out of the Honda, went into the restaurant, scanned the seats I hadn’t been able to see from my outdoor vantage point, just in case Claire was sitting down for a moment. When I didn’t find her at any of the tables, I approached the restroom doors at the back, which were steps away from another glass door that led outside.
I hesitated outside the door marked WOMEN, screwed up my nerve, then pushed the door open half an inch.
“Claire? Claire, you okay?”
There was no answer.
“It’s me. Mr. Weaver.”
Nothing. Not from Claire or anyone else. So I pushed the door open a good foot, cast my eye across the room. A couple of sinks, wall-mounted hand dryer, three stalls. The doors, all closed, were painted a dull tan and bubbling with rust at the hinges. They stopped a foot from the floor, and I didn’t notice any feet beneath any of them.
I took a couple of steps, extended an arm and gently touched the door of the first stall. The door, not locked, swung open lazily. I don’t know what the hell I was expecting to find. I could tell before I’d opened the door there was no one in there. And then the thought flashed across my mind: what if someone had been in there? Claire, or someone else?
This was not a smart place for me to be hanging around.
I exited the bathroom, strode quickly through the restaurant, looking for her. Homeless guy, woman with kids—
The man in the brown leather jacket, the one who’d been ordering food last time I saw him, was gone.
“Son of a bitch,” I said.
When I got outside, the first thing I noticed was an empty parking space where the black pickup used to be. Then I saw it. Turning back onto Danbury, flicker on, waiting for a break in the traffic. It wasn’t possible to tell, with those tinted windows, whether anyone was in the car besides the driver.
The truck found an opening and took off south, in the direction of Niagara Falls, the engine roaring, back tires spinning on wet pavement.
Could this have been the truck Claire’d been referring to when I allowed her to jump in at Patchett’s? If it was, had we been followed? Was the driver the man in the leather jacket? Had he grabbed Claire and taken her with him? Or had she decided he was less threatening than she’d originally thought, and now was going to favor him with the opportunity to drive her home?
Goddamn it.
My heart pounded. I’d lost Claire. I hadn’t wanted her in the first place, but I was panicked now that I didn’t know where she was. My mind raced while I worked out a plan. Follow the truck? Call the police? Forget the whole damn thing ever happened?
Follow the truck.
Yeah, that seemed the most logical thing. Catch up to it, come up alongside, see if I could catch a glimpse of the girl, make sure she was—
There she was.
Sitting in my car. In the passenger seat, shoulder strap already in place. Blond hair hanging over her eyes.
Waiting for me.
I took a couple of breaths, walked over, got in, slammed the door. “Where the hell were you?” I asked as I dropped into the seat, the interior lights on for three seconds tops. “You were in there so long I was starting to worry.”
She stared out the passenger window, her body leaning away from me. “Came out the side door I guess when you were going in.” Almost muttering, her voice rougher than before. Throwing up must have taken a toll on her throat.
“You gave me a hell of a start,” I said. But there didn’t seem much point in reprimanding her. She wasn’t my kid, and in a few minutes she’d be home.
I backed the car out, then continued heading south on Danbury.
She kept leaning up against her door, like she was trying to stay as far away from me as possible. If she was wary of me now, why hadn’t she been before she’d gone into Iggy’s? I couldn’t think of anything I’d done to make her fearful. Was it because I’d run into the restaurant looking for her? Had I crossed some kind of line?
There was something else niggling at me, something other than what I might have done. It was something I’d seen, when the light came on inside the car for those five seconds while my door was open.
Things that were only now registering.
First, her clothes.
They were dry. Her jeans weren’t darkened with dampness. It wasn’t like I could reach over now and touch her knee to see whether it was wet, but I was pretty sure. She couldn’t have stripped down in the bathroom and held her jeans up to the hot-air hand dryer, could she? I could barely get those things to blow the water off my hands. Surely they couldn’t dry out denim.
But there was more. More disconcerting than the dry clothes. Maybe what I’d thought I’d seen I hadn’t seen at all. After all, the light was on for only those few seconds.
I needed to turn it back on to be certain.
I fingered the dial by the steering column that flicked on the dome light. “Sorry,” I said. “Just had this thought I left my sunglasses at the Home Depot.” I fumbled with my right hand in the small storage area at the head of the console. “Oh yeah, there they are.”
And I turned the light back off. It was on long enough for me to be sure.
Her left hand. It was uninjured.
There was no cut.
TWO
I’d seen that wound on Claire’s hand, the ragged bits of skin, the tiny bubbles of blood just below the surface, waiting to come out. She’d suffered that injury—small as it was—only a few minutes before she’d gotten into my car at Patchett’s.
Unless Claire was
one of the X-Men team, and had super healing powers, the girl sitting next to me now was not the same girl who had been sitting next to me when we pulled into Iggy’s.
I had a surreal feeling as we continued along Danbury, like I’d stumbled into a Twilight Zone episode. But this was real, and there had to be some kind of rational explanation.
I tried to think it through.
This girl was dressed pretty much identically to Claire. Blue jeans and a short dark blue jacket. The same long blond hair. But, glancing over, I noticed that this girl’s hair, like her jeans, was not nearly as wet as Claire’s had been. And there was something slightly off about it, like her entire head was askew. I was pretty sure I was looking at a wig.
I broke the silence. “Do I make a turn soon or anything?”
The girl nodded, pointed. “Two lights up. Go left.”
“Okay.” I paused. “You feeling better now?”
A nod.
“When you were gone so long, I wondered if you were even sicker than you’d first thought.”
“I’m okay now,” she said quietly.
There was a sudden glare coming from my rearview mirror, even with the night setting. Raised headlights again.
“You were telling me before,” I said, “about how you met my son.”
“Hmm?” the girl said.
“I was just wondering where it was that thing happened, where he spilled an ice cream cone on you.”
“Oh,” she said, not staring out her window, but still down and to the right, so that the side of her face was still shrouded by the wig. “Yeah, that was pretty funny. It was at the Galleria Mall. I ran into him at the food court. Like, literally. He was eating this cone and the ice cream fell off the top and landed on my top.”
“Really,” I said. We were sitting at the light where I was supposed to turn left. The truck that had been behind us was to our right, waiting to go straight. It was an SUV, not a pickup, like the vehicle I’d seen at Iggy’s.
Before the light turned green, I said calmly, “How long do you want to do this?”
“Huh?” She almost turned her head to look at me, but resisted.
“This act. How long do you want to go on like I don’t know you’re not Claire?”
Now she looked at me, and her fear was instantly palpable. She didn’t say anything.
“It was a nice try,” I said. “The hair, the clothes, it’s all pretty convincing. But Claire had a cut on her left hand. She’d just got it, at Patchett’s.”
“The cut doesn’t matter,” the girl said quietly. “It just has to work from a distance. It wasn’t meant to work close up.”
“What are you talking about?”
She bit her lower lip. “Just make like you think I’m Claire, okay? Don’t do anything weird.”
“Why? You think someone’s watching us?” I raised one hand, a gesture to the world around us. “Someone tracking us on satellite?”
“There was that truck a while ago. Maybe him. I don’t know. Could be a different guy.”
I could see why they thought they could pull it off. Judging from the oversized purse she had down by her feet, she’d come out to the car with a similar red bag. It might have been the same one.
This girl’s skin tone was about the same as Claire’s, almost porcelain. Her facial features were only slightly different. Maybe slightly more oval, but Claire’s nose was a little shorter, I thought, even though I’d never gotten a really good look at her. But they were about the same height and build. Skinny, about five six. It would be easy enough for them to pass themselves off as each other on a dark, rainy night, from a distance, especially with the wig, similar clothes, a nearly identical bag. If they’d said they were sisters, I’d have believed it. So I asked.
“You two sisters?”
“What? No.”
“You look it,” I said. “Although you need to work on the hair. It’s a bit crooked.”
“What?”
“The wig. It’s off-kilter.” She fiddled around with it. “That’s better. Pretty darn close to Claire’s. Not bad.”
“She got this at a Halloween place in Buffalo,” she said. “Please, just drive me to Claire’s house, like you were going to do. It’s not far.”
“I’m trying to figure it out. You must have been waiting for her in the bathroom. She goes in, you come out, wearing pretty much the same clothes. You went out the side door as I was going in. I popped into the ladies’ washroom.” The girl gave me a startled look. “Was Claire hiding in there until the two of us drove off?” I could picture her perched on the toilet in the second or third stall, so her legs wouldn’t show. I should have kept going after I’d pushed open that first door.
“I guess,” she said sullenly.
“So the idea was, whoever’s following her will start following you? And now Claire’s free to run off and do whatever it is she wants to do without whoever’s following her knowing about it.”
“Wow,” she said. “You’re like a genius.”
“Boyfriend stuff?” I asked.
“Huh?”
“Is some boy stalking Claire? She wants to ditch him and meet up with a new guy?”
The girl made a soft snorting noise. “Yeah, sure, that’s what it’s all about.”
“But you said it could be a different guy. Has she got more than one guy stalking her?”
“I said that? I don’t remember.”
“What’s your name?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Okay, forget your name. If it’s not a boyfriend thing, what the hell is it?”
“Look, don’t worry about it. It’s got nothing to do with me, and it’s sure got nothing to do with you.”
“Is Claire in some kind of trouble?”
“Listen, mister—it’s Mr. Weaver, right? Claire said you’re Scott’s dad.”
I nodded. “You knew Scott, too?”
“Yeah, sure. Everyone kinda knew who he was.”
“Did you know him well?”
“A little. Look, like, I don’t know anything. Okay? Just let me out. Anywhere. Right here. Forget any of this ever happened. It’s none of your business.”
I watched the wipers repeat their rhythmic swipes across the glass. “It is my business. You and Claire’ve involved me.”
“We didn’t mean to, okay?”
“Was someone else supposed to pick Claire up at Patchett’s? They didn’t show so she grabbed a ride with me? Who picked her up at Iggy’s?”
“Stop the car.”
“Come on. I can’t let you out here. This is the middle of nowhere.”
She unbuckled her seat belt and grabbed for the door handle. The car was doing about thirty. I didn’t think she’d actually open it, but she did. Just an inch or so, enough to cause a huge rush of air.
“Jesus!” I shouted, reaching across her and scrambling for the handle. I couldn’t reach it and shouted, “Close it!” She did. “You out of your goddamn mind?”
“I want to get out!” she screamed, loud enough to make my ears ring. “It doesn’t matter now, anyway! Claire’s gotten away.”
“Gotten away from what?”
“Stop the car and let me out! This is kidnapping!”
I hit the brakes and swung the car over to the curb. We were in an area where residential met commercial, where old homes sat cheek by jowl with furniture-stripping and electrical-supply stores. There was a cross street just ahead where a suspended traffic light lazily turned from yellow to red to green and then did it all over again.
“Look, I can take you wherever you want,” I said. “You don’t have to get out. It’s pouring. Just—”
She threw open the door, swung her legs out, and bolted from the car, snatching her purse at the last second. She stumbled, went down onto one knee on the grass, yanked the
wig from her head, and threw it by some bushes. Her own hair was blond, too, but it only fell to her shoulders, about half the length of Claire’s.
I couldn’t reach the passenger door from where I sat, so I got out, engine running, went around the vehicle, and slammed it shut.
“Stop!” I shouted. “Come on! No more questions! Let me drive you home!”
She looked back, just for a second, and waved her hand in the air. It looked like she was holding a cell phone. Telling me not to worry, she’d get someone to pick her up.
Her feet splashed through the puddles, and as she got to the corner, she turned right, disappearing down the far side of a television repair shop that looked as though it had gone out of business years ago.
I felt a sense of unease as she vanished from view. Rainwater filled my eyes, dripped into my ears.
I tried to convince myself she was right. This wasn’t about me. This wasn’t my problem.
I got back in my car, did a U-turn.
Drove past a black pickup parked on the other side, lights out. I hadn’t remembered seeing it there before hitting the brakes to keep the girl from jumping out of the car.
I drove on another half a mile, that damn truck niggling at me. Finally, I pulled over to the shoulder, checked my mirrors, and swung the car around. In a minute I was back to the spot where I’d seen the truck.
It was gone.
I let the car roll to a stop at the light, looked ahead, to the left and then the right. I didn’t see any sign of the truck, or the girl.
So I turned around again and headed for home.
THREE
Used to be, when I’d get home after something crazy like that, the first thing I’d have said would have been “You’re not going to believe what just happened.”
But that was then, and this was now.
It was nearly half past ten when I came in, and even though Donna would almost always be upstairs in bed by now, there was a time when she’d have come down to meet me the moment she heard the front door open and close.