A Tap on the Window

  “I told you why I did it.”

  Her mouth opened slightly as something dawned on her. “I know why you did it. You thought she might know something. You think everyone may know something. You keep interrogating everyone under twenty in this town, you’re going to put your foot in it sooner or later. You’ll push someone too far, get yourself in trouble.”

  She didn’t know the half of it.

  “That wasn’t why I picked her up. But yeah, I’d probably have gotten around to asking her some things, but she cut me off before I had a chance. Said she didn’t know anything.”

  “They’re all wary of you.”

  “Maybe they should be,” I snapped.

  Donna didn’t flinch. “You’re obsessed.”

  “I’m obsessed? Do I have a sketchbook this thick?” I held my thumb and index finger an inch apart.

  This time a microscopic twitch. I’d wounded her. Trying to soften my voice, I said, “I’d have thought you wanted answers, too.”

  She lightly touched the closest wall, as though bracing herself. “Would that make everything better for you? Finding out where he got the stuff? Who gave it to him or sold it to him? Then you’d have your culprit. Then you’d be off the hook. Would I be, too? Would I be exonerated as well? Could you stop blaming me as much as you blame yourself?” She lowered her head and touched her fingers to her forehead, massaged it, then said, “Let’s say you find whoever it is. Let’s say you could even get him to confess. Then what’ll you do? Turn him in? Mete out some kind of frontier justice of your own?”

  “I can’t talk about this now,” I said.

  “And the thing is, whoever it is, if it hadn’t been that person, it would have been somebody else. What you don’t get is, who has never been the issue. The issue is why. Why’d he take the stuff in the first place? What was wrong with his life that he thought getting high could fix?”

  “I told you, I can’t do this now.”

  “Of course you can’t,” Donna said with mock acquiescence. “When would be a better time? Maybe I could make an appointment.”

  “I’m worried about this girl,” I said. “I don’t think she disappeared because of some stalker boyfriend. I don’t think she’d have gone to all that trouble, to have another girl dress up like her, just to ditch some guy.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Donna said. “Are you talking to me, or are you talking to yourself?”

  I gave my head a shake. “I guess to myself.”

  “There’s your problem,” she said, turned and walked away.

  * * *

  I wasn’t able to just let it go. I couldn’t go about my own business while the Griffon police looked for Claire Sanders. I’d meant what I said when I told the girl who’d pretended to be her that, even if the two of them never intended to, they had involved me.

  Now that I knew the girl was missing, nearly a day after I’d given her a lift, I was reevaluating everything I’d done the night before. I shouldn’t have let the second girl get away. I should, at the very least, have gotten her name. I should have followed her when she bolted from the car. I should have asked Claire more questions. Was there really a guy in some pickup watching her? If so, who did she think it was?

  Woulda coulda shoulda.

  I didn’t much care for Officer Brindle’s parting shot, that I’d better hope they found her soon. But there was some truth in it. If something had happened to Claire—I didn’t even want to think about what that might be—it was a safe bet they’d be coming back with more questions.

  But I was getting ahead of myself. Teenagers took off all the time, and it didn’t necessarily mean something bad had happened to them. But I knew, as well as anyone, the kind of agony parents went through when they hadn’t heard from their kids, when they had no idea where they were. Like you’re at the bottom of a well and can’t climb out. I had an inkling of what Claire’s parents had to be going through. What I didn’t know was whether getting the police to handle the matter quietly was the way to go.

  Like I was in any position to criticize how any other parents dealt with their kids.

  I didn’t want to wait to find out what progress Haines and Brindle made in their discreet search for Claire. I could find her as quickly as they could, if not quicker. I knew something they didn’t. I knew what Claire’s friend looked like. If I could learn who she was, and get to her, I could find Claire. This girl had to know where she’d gone. They’d cooked up this disappearing act together.

  I was betting I could get her name without even leaving the house.

  I went to the kitchen, past Donna, who was standing at the sink with her back to me, and grabbed the laptop sitting there. I dropped into the recliner where I’d passed time the night before, and logged on to Facebook.

  But not as myself. I didn’t have a Facebook profile.

  After Scott died and I began looking into where he might have gotten the ecstasy, I needed to know who his friends and acquaintances were. Ten or fifteen years ago, that would have involved a lot of legwork. Once I’d found one friend, I’d have leaned on him to get the names of more. And then when I’d gone to visit those people, I’d have repeated the process.

  These days, all I had to do was go to the number one social network. There wasn’t, in my experience, a kid today who wasn’t on it, although I suspected it wouldn’t be long before the younger generation found some other way to connect. All their parents were on Facebook now, ruining it for them, crowding them out, posting videos and pictures of dogs and cats and cute babies, and tarting up clichéd aphorisms—“This Is Your Life. Be Who You Want to Be!”—in colored boxes with fancy fonts.

  When I’d started snooping around Facebook, the first thing I’d had to figure out was Scott’s password.

  I worked at it, off and on, for three days. I entered everything I could think of, starting with the obvious ones many people use. Like . But I knew Scott was far too clever for that. So I moved on to his birthday, and tried every variation of it. Day, month, year. Year, month, day. And so on. No luck there.

  Then I tried the names of pets. We hadn’t had that many over the years. There was our white poodle, Mitzy, who got run over by a FedEx truck when Scott was seven. He’d accidentally let the dog out of the house when he was heading out to play with friends, and saw Mitzy chase after the truck and get caught under its rear wheels. He cried for a couple of days straight, and we swore off any more dogs at that point.

  There was a gerbil named Howard that came into our lives for three months when Scott was ten. He got out of his cage, and we found him, a week later, stuck behind a bookcase. It wasn’t pretty.

  No joy on or .

  So then I entered everything I’d ever known him to be interested in. Movie titles and characters. Celebrity names. Favorite songs and musicians. Names of cars.

  Nothing worked.

  Then, one day, I thought of two words he used all the time whenever he wanted to get our attention. He might shout them from any room in the house, or blurt them out when he came into a room. Two words that he ran together as one. From the time he was little, until the day he—

  You get the idea.

  “Momdad!” he’d yell. “Momdad!”

  I tried MOMDAD.

  I was in.

  Trouble was, I was too overcome, my eyes too misted, to be able to study his list of friends for several minutes.

  But once I did, I learned he had two hundred and seventeen of them. A respectable number, if not huge. While Scott was part of the network, he didn’t do all that much socializing on it. He posted rarely, and when he did—a clip, say, from a favorite movie or Family Guy episode, or a link to an article from one of his favorite sites—few people chimed in with comments. There were only a handful of people with whom he actually exchanged messages, but those were the people I’d first checked out. Some discree
tly, some not so discreetly.

  As I’d thought she might be, Claire Sanders was listed as one of Scott’s friends, but there was no interaction between them beyond that. No private messages back and forth.

  But right now, I wasn’t interested in who Scott’s friends were. I wanted to know who Claire’s friends were. So I clicked on her name, went to her Facebook page, and immediately saw that she had more than five hundred of them. This could take a while. But I was confident that anyone she could talk into posing as her was going to be a Facebook friend.

  First, I looked at photos she’d posted, but there were only a few, including the one that Haines had shown me on his phone. I found a couple of party shots featuring a girl who looked like the one from my car, but the photos hadn’t been tagged with identifying names.

  I clicked on Claire’s friends list and started scrolling through it, looking at all the postage stamp–sized faces, hunting for the girl who’d tried to pass herself off as Claire.

  If only it were that simple.

  Not only were the profile images small, but many of them were poorly shot, or featured the individual with others. Lots of Claire’s friends, like millions of others on Facebook, didn’t even use a picture of themselves for their profile. They used shots of famous people. For example, one boy, Bryson Davies, was passing himself off as George Clooney. Another, Desmond Flint, was Gort, the robot from The Day the Earth Stood Still. Several kids were animated cartoon characters, like Snoopy, or Cartman from South Park.

  The girls also embraced this practice. Elizabeth Pink, I was sure, was not a dead ringer for Lady Gaga. If Patrice Hengle looked like her profile image, then she needed help. She’d posted a photo of a pepperoni pizza slice.

  If none of Claire’s female friends whose profiles featured actual pictures of themselves looked like the girl I was searching for, I would come back to these, click on their personal pages and hunt for more representative photos. At least, I would search those whose profiles I could access. If Scott and Claire did not have these friends in common, there was a strong likelihood I wouldn’t be able to get into their personal pages, given that I was signed in as Scott.

  All these new opportunities for digging into people’s private lives presented an equal number of obstacles.

  Slowly, I scrolled through the list and studied female faces. Many were easy to dismiss immediately. They were too old, or had different hair or skin color. Every time I spotted a blond girl in her teens I stopped, clicked on the pic, and went to the individual’s personal page to view a larger image. When I found it was the wrong person, I went back and repeated the process.

  “You’re invading his privacy, you know. I still think those things matter.”

  I looked up from the laptop screen to see Donna standing in the doorway to the kitchen.

  “Right now, I’m invading someone else’s privacy,” I said. “It’s kind of how I’ve made my living for some time now in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “Let it go.”

  “I told you, this isn’t about Scott.”

  “It’s about this girl you picked up.”

  “Gave a ride to,” I said.

  “What did you say her name was?”

  “Claire.”

  “Claire what?”

  “Claire Sanders.”

  Donna’s eyebrows went up. “Bertram Sanders has a daughter named Claire. Is that who you picked up?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she’s missing? That’s who Brindle and his partner were asking you about?”

  “That’s right.”

  She folded her arms. Concern pushed anger from her face. “That must be so awful for him.”

  “Him?”

  “Well, his wife—his ex-wife—too, of course. He’s divorced.”

  “You seem to know a lot about him.”

  “He’s the mayor, and he’s in the station all the time, not that he’s particularly welcome there. He likes to come in and harangue Augie on a regular basis.”

  Augustus Perry. The police chief. Someone whose unlisted home number was in my own phone’s contact list, for reasons that were more than professional. I thought back to the item I’d read in the paper the night before, about Mayor Bert Sanders’ fight with the Griffon police over allegations of brutality. Did it make sense that the mayor, who’d pissed off everyone in this town who wore a badge, could reasonably expect the cops to indulge him with a discreet search for his daughter?

  Yet that seemed to be what Brindle and Haines were doing.

  Maybe Augustus Perry was happy to do the mayor a favor. It could buy him leverage in the future. The chief was good at having people owe him one.

  “You think the mayor would go to him directly?” I said. “Ask for help finding his daughter, without making a big official thing of it?”

  “A lot of people are willing to swallow their pride when it comes to their kids’ safety,” Donna said. “You think maybe this is something you shouldn’t be sticking your nose into?”

  “It’s already there,” I said. I told her, briefly, about the events of the previous evening. How I might be one of the last people to see Claire before she went missing.

  “What do you know about Bertram Sanders?” I asked.

  “Former professor at Canisius College. Political science. Wrote a couple of books that did okay, I think. One of them was a flattering profile of Clinton. He’s left of center. He could have stayed and taught there a few more years but opted to take early retirement.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe he’d had enough. A woman I work with, she took a course with him ten, twelve years ago. He asked her out a few times.”

  “He hit on his students?”

  “So they say. Didn’t seem to trouble him that he had a wife, although I suspect it must have troubled her, given that she finally left him. And despite this failing, apparently he’s this big idealist. Believes in something called the Constitution. Doesn’t like Augie’s approach to streamlining the justice system.”

  A nice way to put it. Taking a felon behind a building and breaking his nose instead of laying charges was one way to keep the court system from getting too clogged.

  A ten-second silence followed as Donna stood there, staring at me.

  “What?” I asked.

  “This is how it used to be,” she said. “How we used to talk. I remember how, when you’d get home, you’d tell me all about the things you were working on.”

  “Donna.”

  “This is the most we’ve spoken in weeks.” Another pause. “You remember my friend Eileen Skyler?”

  “Who?’

  “She was married to Earl—he worked the border at Whirlpool Rapids before it went NEXUS only.”

  “Vaguely,” I said.

  “Things started to fall apart for them after their daughter, Sylvia, died in that crash at the top of the South Grand Island Bridge when she got cut off by the gas truck and there was a fire. She was thirty-two. Her husband had left her about a year earlier.”

  “I remember.”

  “It hit them pretty hard, which is no surprise. They were so sad, so heartbroken, that they didn’t know how to talk to each other anymore. The smallest pleasures made them feel guilty. And most of the pleasure they’d found in life had been being with each other. It got to the point where they lived on different floors of their house. Earl came in the back way, right by the stairs, and lived on the top floor, where he set up a hot plate and put in a small fridge. Eileen used the front door, and lived on the first floor. Set up a bedroom down there. They lived in the same house but could go weeks without ever having to see or talk to each other.”

  I said nothing.

  “So what I keep wondering is, are things going to get better around here, or should I put in a call to Gill?”

  Gill Strothers wa
s a carpenter and general handyman we’d used around the house for several small projects, although he had tackled larger ones for other people. Additions, new kitchens. All cash-under-the-table jobs. He did good work.

  “Do you want me to call him and ask him if he could put in a set of stairs by the back door there? Is that what you’d like me to do? I’m not saying it’s what I want. I just wanted to get an idea if that’s what you want.”

  “Donna,” I said, shaking my head tiredly and looking down, my eyes scanning past the multiple square facial images, “I don’t want you—”

  And I saw her. There on the screen. Her head cocked a bit to one side, blond hair cascading across her forehead, tucked behind her ear. It was her. I was sure of it.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said.

  I clicked on the name next to the picture. .

  I looked up to tell Donna I’d found her, but she’d left.

  EIGHT

  I got out of Facebook, called up the online phone directory, and found a C. Rodomski at 34 Arlington Street, which was on Griffon’s west side.

  I grabbed my keys. Heading out the front door, I called back into the house, “Be back in a bit.” I didn’t know where Donna was, or whether she’d even heard me.

  The Rodomskis’ house was a broad bungalow, set back from the street, with an expansive, well-manicured lawn. There was an operating fountain in the center that looked like an oversized birdbath and fit in, on this street, like a Rolls hood ornament on a Kia. The Rodomskis had what looked like the nicest house on an okay street, which I’d learned long ago, from a friend who sold real estate, is not nearly as desirable as having an okay house on a very nice street. Every other home on Arlington was pulling the value of the Rodomski place down.

  A white Ford Explorer and a dark blue Lexus were parked in the double driveway. I pulled in behind the Explorer, got out, crossed the flagstone walk to the front door, and rang the bell.

  I could hear muffled shouting inside. A man’s voice asking if someone was going to get it, a woman saying he was closer. I waited, figuring that sooner or later someone would get here.