full, she squeezed me with her outstretched arms.
“Oh, baby,” she said. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”
I didn’t say anything. I just held her.
“Has something happened?” she asked. I still had no words. “Come on, let’s go inside. Come on.”
I found my house key on the ring as she led me to my own door. Once inside, she said, “I’ll get some plates, we’ll get some food into you, we’ll talk. I swear, you look like you’ve lost ten pounds.”
I’d noticed my pants had seemed looser the last few days but hadn’t really given it much thought.
“You want to open the wine?” Kate asked.
“Let me check something first,” I said.
“When you get back, I’ll tell you what’s happened with Edith,” she said. “She totally fucked up an entire order.”
“In a minute,” I said.
“Good God!” she said as she entered the kitchen. “What happened here?”
My earlier outburst. “Don’t worry about it,” I said.
I went up the stairs, two at a time. I didn’t even bother to sit in front of the computer, just leaned over, moved the mouse around, hit the button to see whether there had been any responses to the website, other than offers for discounted Viagra.
There were two messages. One said there was a problem with my eBay account. I did not have an eBay account. I deleted it.
Then I opened the second email.
It began:
“Dear Mr. Blake: I’m pretty sure I’ve seen your daughter.”
EIGHT
I WAS TREMBLING EVEN BEFORE I SAT DOWN.
The email, from a Hotmail address that was preceded by the letters “ymills” and a series of numbers, read:
“Dear Mr. Blake: I’m pretty sure I’ve seen your daughter. I work at a drop-in shelter for teens in Seattle-”
Seattle? What the hell would Syd be doing in Seattle? No, wait. What mattered was:
Having just seen traces of blood on my daughter’s car, this email already had me fighting back tears.
I started reading again: “I work at a drop-in shelter for teens in Seattle, and because I’m in that line of work I’m often scanning websites about kids who are missing, and I came to your site and when I saw the pictures there of your daughter Sydney I recognized her because she’s very pretty. At least I am kinda sure that it was her but of course I could be wrong. I don’t think she said her name was Sydney, I think she might have said Susan or Suzie or something like that.”
She was using her mother’s name. I wondered, for a moment, whether there was something wrong with the computer, because the cursor was jiggling all over the place. I glanced down and saw that my hand on the mouse was shaking.
“Feel free to get in touch at this email address,” the note continued. “It must be very stressful not to know where your daughter is and I hope that maybe I can help.”
The note signed off with “Yours in Christ, Yolanda Mills.”
From downstairs, Kate shouted, “Come get this while it’s hot! This chow mein looks pretty decent.”
I hit the reply button and wrote: “Dear Ms. Mills: Thank you so much for getting in touch with me. Please tell me how to reach you other than email. What is the name of your drop-in shelter? What is the address in Seattle? Do you have a number where I can reach you?”
I was typing so quickly I was making numerous typos, then backspacing and fixing them.
“Tim? Everything okay up there?”
I typed, “Sydney went missing nearly a month ago and her mother and I are frantic to find her, to know that she is okay. When did you see her? How long ago? Has Syd been in there several times or just once? Here’s how you can get in touch with me.” I then typed my home phone number, my cell number, my number at the dealership. “Please get in touch the moment you receive this email. And call collect, please.”
I double-checked that I hadn’t entered in any of the phone numbers wrong, typed my name at the end, and hit Send.
“What’s going on?” Kate said. She was at the door, leaning into the frame.
I turned, and I know I must have had tears on my cheeks, because Kate suddenly looked horrified, as though I’d just gotten bad news.
“Oh my God, Tim, what’s happened?”
“Someone’s seen her,” I said, feeling overcome. “Someone’s seen Syd.”
Kate closed the distance between us, pulled my head to her breasts, and held me while I tried to pull it together.
“Where?” Kate asked. “Where is she?”
I pulled away and pointed to my screen. “This woman in Seattle. She works at a drop-in shelter. Some place, I guess, where runaways can go.”
“Seattle?” Kate asked. “What would Syd be doing in Seattle?”
“I don’t know and right now I don’t care,” I said. “Just so long as I know where she is, I can go get her and bring her home.”
“Have you got a number? Call this woman. It’s what, three hours earlier out there? She might even still be at work.”
“She didn’t send me a phone number,” I said. “I just wrote her back, asked her for one.”
“How about the shelter? Did she say what it was called?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t know why the hell she couldn’t have been a bit more specific.”
“What’s her name?”
I glanced back at the screen. “Yolanda Mills.”
“Shove a bum,” Kate said, motioning for me to get out of the computer chair. I stood while she sat down. “We go to the online white pages, find her, call her.”
Kate tapped away on the keyboard, went to a site with some empty fields where she entered the woman’s first and last name and the city where she lived. “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got… We got nothing yet. There are Y. Millses but none of them Yolanda.”
“So maybe she’s married and the phone number is listed under her husband’s name. Her last name might still be Mills.”
“Let me see how many Millses there are.” Kate whistled under her breath. “Okay, there’s like more than two hundred of them.”
I put a hand on the edge of the computer table to steady myself. Blood was pulsing in my ears.
“We could wait for this woman to get back to you, or we could just start calling all of them.”
“Maybe we can narrow it down another way,” I said. “Do a search on teenage drop-in shelters in Seattle.”
Kate’s fingers danced across the keyboard. “Holy shit,” she said. “There’s all kinds of them. Not as many shelters as there are Millses in the Seattle directory, but there’s quite a few. Hang on, I think I can
