“No one’s heard of her.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I know.”
I could sense Susanne’s frustration thousands of miles away. “I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
I propped my elbow on the table and rested my head in the hand that wasn’t holding the phone, still watching the Second Chance shelter across the street.
A girl stood in the doorway of the shelter. Blonde.
“It’s just, you get some hint that maybe this is it, you grab on and hold on with everything you’ve got,” she said. “If you hear anything, you’ll call?”
“I will,” I said. Switching gears, I said, “Susanne, how close are Evan and Sydney? I mean, before she disappeared.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Not that close, as far as I could tell. I mean, they’d be civil with each other at the dinner table, but it’s not like they hung out together or anything.”
“What do you think he’s into?”
“What do you mean ‘into’?”
“You think he’s stealing from you; he’s always on the computer with the door closed. You don’t think it’s porn. What’s your best guess?”
“I don’t know. I mean, it may be nothing. He’s really into music. You know, they’ve got all these programs where you can create music on the computer. Maybe he’s doing that, with the headphones on so we don’t hear it.”
But she didn’t sound convinced.
I kept watching the girl across the street.
“Do you think Evan might have dragged Syd into whatever he’s up to?” I asked.
“I never saw anything to suggest-”
“Susanne? Hello?”
“Sorry. I just closed the study door. I don’t want to wake Bob. Anyway, no, I don’t think Syd was mixed up in anything Evan’s up to. But there’s something I have to tell you.”
The girl kept moving in and out of the shadows. She’d move in close to the shelter entrance where I could barely see her, then poke her head out to watch the cars go by, the streetlights catching her blonde hair.
Come on, come on, step out, step out all the way.
“I saw that van again tonight,” Susanne said.
“What van?” I said. The girl took a step forward, the light hitting her face for less than a second. She glanced down the street, then retreated into the shadows.
“The one on our street? The one Bob doesn’t think is a big deal?”
I knew what van she meant the first time, but I was having a hard time keeping track of the conversation while I watched the girl.
“When did you see it?” I managed to ask.
“Tonight. A couple of hours ago. After it got dark, I happened to look outside and saw a van parked a few houses down, and when I went out and walked down to the end of the driveway it started up and backed up to the corner and took off.”
A boy-a young man-was approaching the shelter from the right. He came up to the door, and the girl threw her arms around him, kissed him. He had his back to me, and all I could really see of the girl was the top of her head and her arms.
“Susanne…”
“It’s freaking me out. Bob says I’m getting paranoid about everything because of Syd. Why the fuck wouldn’t I be?”
The girl stepped out from the entrance, into the streetlight, but the way she had her arms wrapped around the boy, her head tucked down onto his chest, I couldn’t see her face. But my gut said it wasn’t her. There was something not quite Syd about her. This girl’s legs, they seemed a little shorter.
They started walking up the street. In another moment, they’d be gone.
“So I’m thinking, is someone watching our house? Or one of the other houses on the street? If it’s our house, are they watching me, or are they watching Bob? Or has this got something to do with Evan?”
Then the girl leaned her head back, tossed her hair back over her shoulder.
I’d seen Syd do that a thousand times.
“Susanne, I have to go for a second. Hang on.”
“What? Why-”
I bolted from the diner, leaving my bag behind, my phone on the table. I threw open the door and ran into the street, forcing drivers coming from both directions to hit the brakes. Horns blew, someone shouted, “Asshole!”
They were forty yards ahead, thirty, twenty. Arm in arm. She had an arm around his waist, her thumb in a belt loop.
“Syd!” I shouted. “Syd!”
Before the girl had a chance to turn around, I was on them, grabbing her by her free arm, using it to swing myself around in front of her.
“Syd!” I said.
It wasn’t Syd.
The girl jerked her arm back as her boyfriend shoved me away forcefully with both hands. I stumbled back, tripped over my own feet, landed on my ass on the sidewalk, my head narrowly missing a brick wall behind me.
“Fuck’s your problem?” he said, grabbing the girl and taking her across the street.
THIRTEEN
THE NEXT MORNING, I DEBATED RENTING A CAR, but Seattle isn’t exactly laid out like New York. I wanted to hit as many teen shelters as possible, and didn’t want to waste time attempting to navigate the city’s winding streets, so I talked to a cabby out front of the hotel and cut a deal to have him take me from shelter to shelter, and wait while I was at each one, for $200.
“That’ll take you to noon,” he said.
“We’ll see where we are then,” I said. “Let me go find a cash machine.”
The hotel-not a Holiday Inn, not even close-at least had a computer in the lobby I could use, and I went online to get a list of local shelters. The desk clerk said the printer was busted, so I had to write down names, addresses, and phone numbers on a pad I’d found next to the phone in my room.
I handed the sheet, and the cash, to the cabby and said, “Let’s hit the closest first and work our way out to the others.”
“You don’t have to worry about me running you all over the place. You’ve already paid me, the meter’s off, and with gas costing what it is, we’re doing the shortest route possible.”
“Great.”
He delivered me to all the shelters on my list by half past eleven. It was the same story everywhere. I showed them Syd’s picture, left them some flyers with my cell phone number on them. I stopped kids at random, pushed the photo under their noses.
No one recognized Syd.
Nor had anyone heard of Yolanda Mills. Every place I stopped I asked for her, too.
After the last shelter, I dropped into the back seat of the taxi. “You know of any other places
