SOMEWHERE AROUND BRATTLEBORO, Bob decided we needed to start looking for a gas station. It was the middle of the night and it was clear we weren’t going to make it all the way to Stowe without refilling. Holding the car at ninety was sucking up the fuel pretty quickly.
We found an all-night station, a run-down place that was light on the amenities, including a working restroom. Bob ran off into the bushes to take a whiz while I filled the tank at the self-serve. When he came back, I ran off into those same bushes.
Bob, pretty tired himself now, tossed me the keys. When I got into the car, he handed me a Mars bar and held up a coffee, which he then fit into the cup holder. “This, along with your nap, should keep you going.”
“You know how I take it?” I asked.
“Black, I know. Half the time Susanne makes me coffee, she serves it to me that way, leaves out the cream, thinks she’s still married to you.”
I tore off the end of the candy bar wrapper as I barreled up the ramp and back onto the highway. I took a huge bite and chewed contentedly while Bob sipped his own coffee. I could not remember when I’d last eaten. I set the bar down on my lap and carefully brought the coffee up to my lips. Bob had already pried back the plastic lid so I could get at it.
I took a sip.
“Wow,” I said. “That has to be the worst coffee I’ve ever had in my entire life.” I had to suppress a gag reflex as it went down my throat.
“Yeah,” said Bob, nodding. “If that won’t keep you awake, nothing will.”
I took my eyes off the road for a second, still holding the cup close to my mouth. “Thanks,” I said.
Another mile on, I said, “I know I’ve sometimes been, you know, where you’re concerned, a bit-”
“Of an asshole?” Bob said.
“I was going to say, a bit reluctant to show you much respect.”
“Sort of the same thing,” he said, leaning back in his seat, glancing into the passenger door mirror.
“Well, I don’t really think that’s going to change any,” I said. Bob found himself unable to stifle a laugh. “But I want to thank you for taking such good care of Susanne.”
“Shit,” he said.
“No, really,” I said. “I mean it.”
“And I mean shit, you’ve got a cop on your ass.”
I glanced into the rearview mirror. Flashing lights. Way back there, maybe as far as a mile, but unmistakably cruiser lights. I felt my heart hammer in my chest. After all I’d been through today, I was worried now about a speeding ticket?
Unless it was worse than that. Maybe Jennings had figured out where we were going, and what kind of car we were in, and put the word out.
“Shit,” I concurred. The thing was, we were lucky to have gotten this far along without getting pulled over.
There was nowhere to go, out here on the interstate, and no upcoming exits that might allow me to lose the police. I eased my foot off the gas, allowing the car to coast back down to something close to the legal speed limit, hoping that by the time the cop caught up with us, he’d think he’d made a mistake about how fast we were going.
And if he did pull us over for something as simple as speeding-and wasn’t after me for the mayhem I’d left behind-I’d take the damn ticket.
“What are you doing?” Bob asked as the car slowed. First to eighty, then seventy-five.
“I’m dropping down to the speed limit,” I said.
“No no, you’ve got to lose him,” Bob said.
“How am I supposed to lose him? Which side street would you like me to turn down?”
“Okay, here’s the thing,” he said, measuring his words. “I’m not sure, technically speaking, whether the registration for this car will hold up.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m just saying it would be better, all around, if we weren’t pulled over.”
“Bob, is this car stolen?”
“I’m not saying that,” he said. “I’m just saying the registration might not hold up to close scrutiny.”
I was still letting the car slow down. The flashing light behind me was getting closer. “Honest to God, Bob, you told me your days of Katrina cars were over. That you were on the up-and-up. I swear-”
“Calm down,” he said. “It might be okay, I don’t know.”
“This is a stolen car,” I said.
“I do not have personal knowledge that this car is stolen,” he said.
“Those are fucking weasel words if I ever heard them,” I said.
I felt sweat breaking out on my forehead. I didn’t see as we had any choice but to pull over and see how this played out.
We could hear the siren now.
“I’m just saying, while this is a legitimate car, its history is a bit clouded,” Bob continued.
“How many cars on your lot are like this?” I asked. “Have you got them grouped? These cars over here, they were in a flood, these ones over here were stolen, these ones over here come with a free fire extinguisher because they’re likely to burst into flames?”
“This is what I mean about you being an asshole,” Bob said.
The cruiser was nearly on top of us now, lights flashing, siren wailing.
“You know,” Bob said, “there’s also the matter of these two guns we’ve got.”
“Oh God,” I said. “Speeding, a car with a murky registration, and weapons we don’t have licenses for that can be traced back to actual murders.”
“Nice going,” Bob said.
And then a miracle happened. The cop car moved out into the passing lane and blasted past us.
“What the hell?” said Bob.
About another mile on, we came upon a pickup truck that had rolled over into the median. The cruiser was pulled over onto the left shoulder, the officer helping a couple of people standing about, apparently not seriously injured.
“You see?” Bob said. “Everything’s okay.”
The rest of the way, I held the Mustang to just a few miles per hour over the limit. It seemed safer that way.
THERE WAS A LONG STRETCH AFTER THAT where neither of us said much of anything. I finished my Mars bar, even drank the bad-now cold-coffee Bob had bought. When there was nothing to do but stare at the road up ahead and fall into a trance watching the dotted lines zip past, I had time to think.
About Syd’s disappearance. Gary and Carter and Owen. Andy Hertz.
And while Syd was always there right in front, I also couldn’t stop thinking about Patty. The girl I now knew to be my biological daughter. And within minutes of learning the truth about my connection to her, came the news that I had lost her.
It was a lot to take in.
Bob would never have been my first choice of someone to open up to. But at that moment, he happened to be the only one available.
I said, “What would you do if you found out there was a child out there who was yours, a grown-up kid, and you’d never known about this person before?”
Bob glanced over nervously. “What have you heard?”
“I’m not talking about you,” I said. “I’m just saying. How would you handle that? Finding out there was this person and you were the father?”
“I don’t know. I guess that would kind of blow my mind,” he said.
“And then,” I said, slowly, “what if, right after you learned this, you found out that something had happened to this kid. And any kind of connection you might have wanted to make, you’d never be able to do that?”
“What happened?” Bob said. “To this supposed imaginary kid?”
“She died,” I said.
I could feel Bob looking at me. “What are we talking about here, Tim? You’re not talking about Evan and Sydney, and anything that might or might not have happened there, are you?”
“No,” I said.
“So what, then?”
I shook my head. I had to blink a few times to keep the road in focus. “Nothing,” I said. “Forget I said anything about it.”
WE HEADED NORTH at the Waterbury exit, past the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream factory on the left. There were hardly any cars on the road. It was, after all, coming up on three in the morning.
The road wound leisurely up and over graceful hills, through wooded areas and clearings. A couple of times, the headlamps caught the eyes of night creatures-raccoons, most likely-at the edge of the road, starry pinpoints of light.
About fifteen minutes after we got off the interstate the road curved down and to the right, taking us into the center of Stowe. Colonial-looking homes and businesses crowded up to the sides of the road. We came to a stop, a T intersection. There was an inn on the right, a church and what appeared to be a government building just up ahead and to the left. Turning left would take us over a short bridge, with a pedestrian walkway on the right side modeled after a covered bridge.
“Where the hell do we start?” Bob asked.
A cell phone went off. I grabbed mine out of my jacket, but it wasn’t the one ringing.
“Oh,” said Bob, and fished out his own phone. “Yeah?…We just got here, just pulled into town a few minutes ago… Yeah, we’re okay, although we nearly got pulled over, Jesus… Uh-huh… Okay. Okay. Did Evan know any more than that?… Okay, okay, great… Okay, yeah, of course we’ll be careful… Okay. Bye.”
“What?” I asked as he put the phone away. I noticed, at the gas station on the corner, a pay phone. I wondered whether any of the calls made to Patty’s cell had come from it.
“Susanne talked to Evan, and then he tried to find this kid he knew, name of Stewart. He just found him, woke him up. Stewart said yeah, he used to work up here at a motel or inn or something.”
“What was the name of it?” I asked.
“The Mountain Shade,” Bob said. “Stewart said it was a good job, because they paid in cash.”
This underground economy was everywhere.
“Did Stewart know Sydney?” I asked. “Did he ever tell her about the place?”
“Evan says yeah. A few months ago, they ran into each other at a Starbucks or something, and Sydney was asking about it. I guess this was before she found something else to do for the summer.”
I thought about that. If Syd was on the run and knew she’d have to support herself while things got themselves sorted out, it would be the perfect job for her. A place where she could make some money and stay below the radar.
“So where the hell is this place?” I asked.
There weren’t exactly a lot of tourist information places open this time of night. The gas station was closed as well. I went straight ahead, but in less than a mile we were driving out of Stowe, so I turned around and came back to the T intersection, turning right onto Mountain Road and across the bridge with the covered walkway.
This route was filled with places to stay. I scanned to the left as Bob read off the names of places on the right.
“Partridge Inn… Town and Country… Stoweflake…”
“Up there,” I said. “You see the sign, just past the pizza place?”
“Mountain Shade,” Bob said. “Son of a bitch.”
I pulled into the lot, the tires crunching on the gravel. As I reached for the handle to open the door, Bob said, “Hey, you want this?”
He had a Ruger in each hand and held one out to me. “Which one is this?” I asked. “The one with one bullet, or three?”
He glanced down at one, then the other. “Fuck.”
I took the gun from him. Once we were out of the car, I tried to figure out what to do with it.
“It won’t fit in my jacket pocket,” I said.
“Try this,” Bob said, turning to the side and demonstrating how he could tuck the barrel of the gun into the waistband of his pants at the back.
“You’ll shoot your ass off,” I said.
“That’s how it’s done,” he said. “Then you hang your jacket over it, no one knows it’s there. It’s better than tucking it in the front of your pants. If it shoots off by mistake there, you got a lot more to lose.”
So, nervously, I tucked the gun into the back of my pants. It felt, to say the least, intrusive.
The night air was so still that when we closed the doors the sound echoed. There was a light over the office door, but no light on inside.
“What are we going to do?” Bob asked.
“We’re going to have to wake some people up,” I said.
I banged on the office door. I was hoping that whoever ran the joint had quarters adjoining the office and would hear the ruckus. You ran a place like this, you had to be prepared for the unexpected. A burst pipe. A guest with a heart attack.
I waited a few seconds after the first round of knocking, then started up again. Somewhere down a hallway a light came on.
“Here we go,” I said. “Someone’s coming.”
A shadowy figure started trudging down the hall, flipped the office light on, and came to the door. It was a man in his sixties, gray hair tousled, still drawing together the sash on his striped bathrobe.
“We’re closed!” he shouted through the glass.
I banged again.
“Goddamn it,” he said. He unlocked the office door, swung it open a foot, and said, “Do you know what time it is?”
“We’re really sorry,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Bob.
“I’m Tim Blake, this is Bob Janigan, and we’re trying to find my daughter.”
“What?” said the manager.
“My daughter,” I said. “We think it’s possible she might be working here, and it’s very important we find her.”
“Family emergency,” Bob chimed in.
The manager shook his head. The gesture seemed designed to wake himself up as much as to display annoyance. “What the hell’s her name?”
“Sydney Blake,” I said.
“Never heard of her,” he said and began to close the door.
I got my foot in. “Please, just a minute. It’s possible you might know her by another name.”
“What?” he said. “What other name?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I was reaching into my jacket for one of the photos of Syd I carried around with me everywhere I went. I reached through the door and handed it to him.
Reluctantly, he took it between his fingers and squinted at it. “Hang on,” he said and went around to the office desk, where a pair of reading glasses lay. That allowed us to open the door wider and take a step inside.
He peered through the glasses at the photo.
“Hang on,” he said again, and I felt my pulse quicken. “I’ve seen this girl.”
“Where?” I asked. “When?”
“She came in here, I don’t know, two weeks or more ago. Looking for some part-time work. I didn’t have anything.”
“Did she tell you her name?”
He shrugged. “Maybe, but I don’t remember it. I told her to try another place, one of their summer staff quit all of a sudden, they were looking for help.”
“What place?” I asked.
“Uh, hang on. Touch the Cloud.”
“What?” Bob asked.
“The inn. That’s the name of it, the Touch the Cloud Inn. It’s further up the road, on the way to Smugglers’ Notch, where the road starts climbing.”
“Do you know if she got a job there?”
“Beats me,” he said. “Now you can go wake them up.” He ushered us out of the office and killed the light.
Back in the car, the guns removed from the backs of our pants, we carried on up Mountain Road, driving slowly so as not to miss any of the signs.
“Whoa, go back!” Bob shouted. “I think it’s in there.”
I backed up the Mustang about thirty yards. Even at night, it was clear to see that the Touch the Cloud Inn had seen better days. The towering rustic sign out front needed paint, a mock split-rail fence around the garden below it appeared to have been used for bumper impact tests, and one of the bulbs over the office door was burned out.
We parked again, tucked the guns into our waistbands, and did the whole routine all over again.
A second after the first knock, a small dog started yapping. I heard nails skittering across the floor, saw the shadow of something small scurrying across it. “Yap yap! Yap yap yap!”
Even before the lights came on inside, a woman was shouting: “Mitzi! Mitzi! Stop it! Be quiet!”
She was in her forties, streaky blonde hair, good-looking-not easy to pull off this time of night in a frayed housecoat and no makeup. She was also very wary. She looked at us through the glass of the still-locked storm door and asked, “Who are you?” We introduced ourselves. “What do you want?” she shouted over Mitzi’s yapping.
I said, loud enough to be heard through glass and over Mitzi, “We’re trying to find my daughter. It’s an emergency.” I said I thought she might be working there, and gave her Sydney’s name.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’ve got no one here by that name. Mitzi, Jesus, shut up!”
The dog shut up.
I pressed Syd’s picture up against the glass. The woman leaned in, studied it, and said, “That’s Kerry.”
“Kerry?” I said.
“Kerry Morton.”
“She works here?” I asked.
The woman nodded. “Who’d you say you were again?”
“Tim Blake. I’m her father.”
“If you’re her father, how come her last name’s not the same as yours?”
“It’s a long story. Listen, it’s very important that I find her. Do you know where she’s staying?”
The woman kept studying me. Maybe she was looking for some sort of family resemblance. “Let me see some ID. Him too.”
I dug out my wallet, pulled out my driver’s license, and put it up against the glass. Bob did the same.
The woman was debating what to do. “Hang on,” she said. She left the office and could be heard in a nearby room saying, “Wake up, wake up, pull some pants on.” Some male grumbling. “There’s a couple chuckleheads here want me to walk off into the night with them, and there’s no way I’m going out there alone.”
A moment later she reappeared with a young shirtless and barefooted man who looked like he’d just walked out of an Abercrombie & Fitch ad. Washboard stomach, rippling arms, hair as black as the woods. The faded jeans he’d just pulled on were zipped but unbuttoned. Bob and I traded glances. A boy toy. But a boy toy who didn’t look like he should be messed with.
“This is Wyatt,” she said. He blinked sleepily at us. “He’s joining us.”
“Great,” I said.
“We got several out-of-town kids working here,” she said. “Wyatt’s one. We got a few mini-cabins out back for them.” Evidently Wyatt was favored with better accommodations, at least tonight. “Kerry’s staying in one of those.”
“Where?” I asked. “Do they have numbers? Can you tell me where-”
“Hold your horses,” she said and, along with Wyatt, led us down a sidewalk, around the side of the building to a row of cabins dimly lit by some lamps attached to wooden poles. They all backed onto a wooded area. I hoped Wyatt was groggy enough not to notice the bulges under the backs of our jackets. It was dark out, so I figured we were okay.
“It’s this one over here,” she said. “This better be a real emergency, because she’s going to be pissed, getting woke up in the middle of the night. I know I am.”
I didn’t have anything to say. I was so excited about finally finding Sydney that my body was shaking.
The woman reached the door and rapped on it lightly with her knuckle. “Hey, Kerry, it’s Madeline. Kerry?”
The windows stayed dark. I didn’t hear any stirring inside. I came up to the door and called out, “Sydney! It’s Dad! Open the door! It’s okay!”
Still nothing. “Open the door,” I said to the woman I now knew to be Madeline.
“I’ll have to go back and get the-”
Bob had come around behind her and kicked the door in. “Hey!” she said.
“Whoa!” said Wyatt. It was the first word we’d heard from him. He grabbed hold of Bob’s arm, but Bob shook him off and reached around inside the door, found a light switch and flicked it on.
It was, at best, six by nine feet. A cot, two wooden chairs, an antique washstand. No running water, no bathroom. A quaint prison cell, in many ways. There were a few toiletry items on the washstand: a hairbrush, a set of keys, a pair of sunglasses. The cot didn’t look slept in.
“Where the hell is she?” Madeline asked. “She needs to be stripping beds first thing in the morning.”
I stepped over to the washstand, picked up the keys. There were three house keys-that made sense: my house, Susanne’s, and now Bob’s-plus a remote and a car key, both stamped with the Honda emblem. I touched the hairbrush, then picked up the sunglasses.
They had Versace written on the arms.
“This is Sydney’s stuff,” I said to Bob, trying to keep my voice from breaking.
I began looking about the cabin for any other clues, anything that might give me a hint as to where she was now.
“When did you last see her?” I asked Madeline, who was huddling up close to Wyatt.
“Sometime today,” she said vaguely. “I don’t really keep track. Kerry usually works an early shift, finishes up midafternoon. After that she can do what she wants.”
“So she did work today?” I asked. “You actually saw her?”
“Yeah, I saw her.”
“What was she like? How was she?”
“You mean today, or since she got here?”
“Both, everything.”
“She’s just about the unhappiest girl I ever did see. Mopey and down, skittish, always looking over her shoulder; you come up behind her and say something and she jumps out of her skin. Cries all the time. Something’s wrong with that girl, you don’t mind my saying.”
I’d felt so hopeful moments earlier, now very uneasy. We’d come so close to finding her. Where would she have gone in the middle of the night?
What if someone else had already found her?
I looked in the corners of the cabin, in the washstand, under the cot. I found some shorts, underwear, a couple of tops. What few items there were looked brand new. Syd had left Milford without packing, after all. There were a couple of prepaid phone cards she must have used to make long-distance calls, and some sheets of paper with material that had been printed off the Internet. Some of it was from the website I’d set up to find her. There was an online version of a New Haven Register story on her disappearance.
“You have a computer here people can use?” I asked.
“There’s one in the office I let the kids working for me borrow. Send emails home, that kind of thing.”
“Has Sydney-Kerry-used it?”
“Yeah, she sneaks some time on it every day. And yeah,” she said, nodding at the papers in my hand, “she’s printed some stuff off it, but I don’t know what it’s about. She was always clearing the history every time she was done.”
I asked Madeline, “Did you hear anything unusual tonight, see any people around you didn’t recognize?”
“I run a tourist business,” Madeline said. “I see different people around here every day.”
“How about you?” I asked Wyatt.
The boy shrugged. “I never talked to her,” he said.
I turned to Bob. “I don’t know what to do,” I said.
He stood there in the dim light of the cabin, shaking his head. He didn’t seem to have any ideas either.
“Maybe it’s time to let Detective Jennings in on things,” he said. “Tell her where we are, see if she can get the locals involved.”
“Locals?” Madeline said.
“How about some of the other people you have working here?” I asked. “You have other kids working for you for the summer? Kids Sydney might have talked to?”
Madeline said, “Two cabins down, there’s a girl here for the summer from Buffalo. I’ve seen the two of them talking a few times.”
“We need to talk to her right now,” I said.
Madeline looked as though she was preparing to argue, then said, “What the hell.” With her housecoat flapping in the light breeze, she led us to the door of the other cabin and knocked on the door.
“Alicia? Alicia, it’s Madeline!”
A light flicked on inside, and a few seconds later a sleepy-eyed girl, black, nineteen or twenty years old, opened the door. She was in a T-shirt and panties. When she saw that it wasn’t just Madeline at the door, but three men, she narrowed the opening to about six inches, showing nothing but her face.
“What’s wrong? What’s going on?” Her eyes shifted from Madeline and Wyatt to Bob and me and back again.
“These men need to talk to you about Kerry,” Madeline said.
“Why?”
“I’m her father,” I said. “We need to find her. It’s very important.”
“She’s in the cabin two doors down,” Alicia said, like we were all idiots.
“No,” Madeline said. “She’s not. She’s gone.”
Then Alicia began to nod slowly, like maybe that made sense to her. “Okay,” she said, drawing the word out.
“What?” I asked.
“Well, okay, Kerry’s already pretty jumpy, right?” She looked for confirmation from Madeline, who nodded. “But today, she was totally freaked out. I was just sitting out front, reading Stephen King, and Kerry comes running up from the main building, she looks like she’s seen a ghost, you know? She was totally freaked out about something. She goes into her cabin and I went in to see her and she was putting on her backpack and I asked her what’s going on and she wouldn’t say anything. She just said she had stuff to do and she had to go right away.”
“She didn’t say why?” I asked. “She didn’t say what had freaked her out?”
“No, but it was something, that’s for sure.”
“When was this?” I asked.
“Like, late this afternoon?”
“Where did she go?”
“I don’t know. She started walking one way, then she looked over toward the parking lot, stopped all of a sudden, turned around and started going the other way. And she was walking along the trees there, you know? Instead of going down the pathway. Like she didn’t want people to see her.” She looked directly at Madeline. “Is she gone? Am I going to have to do all her chores in the morning?”
“We’ll talk about that later,” Madeline said.
I asked, “Did you talk to Syd? I mean, Kerry? Before this thing today? Did you talk to her much?”
“Some. A bit. I guess.”
“What did she tell you about herself? Did she tell you why she was here? Did she talk about anything? Why she was on edge?”
“Not really. But she’s majorly screwed up, honestly. She doesn’t want to do any jobs where she has to go into the dining room or work the front desk. She only wants to do stuff where she won’t run into people. I don’t think she really likes people. I mean, she’s the first person I ever met didn’t have a cell phone. She said she didn’t use them anymore, that they weren’t safe. I know they say if you talk on them too much they make your brain get cancer or something, but I think they’re safe.”
To Madeline, I said, “You have a pay phone here?”
“No. There are a few around town, but we don’t have one.”
“If you wanted to use a pay phone, where would you go? I saw one at the main intersection downtown.”
“You wouldn’t have to go that far. Just down the road, where the pizza place is, they’ve got one there.”
I looked at the sliver of Alicia in the open doorway. “Thank you for your help. I’m sorry we troubled you.”
She said, “Did you say ‘Syd’? A second ago?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s my daughter’s name. Not Kerry, Sydney.”
She vanished for a moment, then, when her face reappeared, she extended her hand to me. There was a piece of folded paper in it.
“This got slipped under my door earlier tonight,” she said. “Someone got the wrong cabin, but I didn’t know anyone named Sydney so I didn’t know who to give it to.”
I took the paper and unfolded it. It read:
Syd: I’m here to bring you home! Meet me by that little covered bridge in the center of town! Love, Patty.