reached down, grabbed it, and slid it into the front pocket of my slacks.
Everyone took a moment.
Bob, whose face was red and puffy, tried to straighten up, using the Kia’s hood for support. But it was still wet, and Bob’s hand slipped, throwing him off balance momentarily.
“You okay?” I asked him.
“Fuck off,” he said.
“Are you out of your mind?” Susanne asked me. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“That’s what you are,” Evan said, pointing at me. “You’re out of your mind.”
To Susanne, I said, “He wrote a song for Sydney.”
“What?”
“They recorded it, she put it on her iPod. He wrote this song and dedicated it to her.”
Susanne turned on Evan. “Is that true?”
He shrugged.
“I asked you a question,” she said. “Is that true?”
“It was just a song,” he said.
Bob slowly stood back up to his full height, but you could see he was still feeling the pain. There’s nothing like it. He looked at me. “I swear to God I’m going to kill you.”
“Shut up, Bob,” Susanne said. That caught both Bob and me off guard.
I said, “Your boy knew our daughter better than he’s been letting on,” I said.
“What are you talking about?” he said.
I took the iPod back out of my pocket. “Let’s have a listen.” I walked back to my car, turned the key ahead a notch, plugged the player back into the auxiliary jack.
When Syd’s voice came on, Susanne’s face crumpled like paper. I knew how she felt. I hadn’t heard my daughter’s voice for weeks, either, until now.
Sydney’s and Evan’s voices came out of the car speakers, then Evan went into his lyrics. Sydney followed up with the joke about him wanting to get into her pants.
When it got to the end, I asked, “Anyone want to hear it again?”
No one did. But Evan said, “See? It’s not even a whole song. It’s just a couple of lines, that’s all. We were just goofing around.”
“Christ almighty,” Bob said to me. “This is what’s got your shorts in a knot?”
But Susanne clearly saw it differently. To Evan, she said, “Why is Syd making a joke about you wanting to get into her pants?”
Evan’s cheeks reddened.
“I’m asking you a question!” Susanne shouted.
“Suze,” Bob said, “don’t get yourself worked up.”
“Fuck off,” she said to him.
“Susanne, for crying out loud, stop listening to this ex-boob of yours. Don’t you see what he’s doing? He’s using Evan to drive a wedge between us. He wants you back and he figures the best way to do it is to turn you against us.”
“You’re an ass,” I said to Bob.
He lunged at me and swung. He caught me in the jaw and I stumbled to the right, tripped over my own feet, and hit the ground.
Susanne screamed at us, “Stop it!”
She wasn’t using a car hood or any of us for support now. She was standing directly before Evan. Her right leg seemed wobbly.
“For the last time,” she said, her voice now not much more than a whisper, “I want to know what was going on between you and my daughter.”
“We talked some,” he conceded.
“And what else?” Susanne asked. “What else did you do?”
Evan glanced hopelessly at his father. “Look, really, nothing happened. We were just getting along okay, all right? We liked to talk. But not when you guys were around. We figured, if our parents knew that we actually liked each other, you’d start freaking out. You’d think it was like incest or something, but it’s not.”
I think all the adults exchanged glances at that one. Even Bob and I.
“It was no big deal,” Evan persisted.
“Did you sleep with my daughter?” Susanne asked, point-blank.
Ordinarily, that might have been something I’d have wanted to know myself, but I was worried about more than my seventeen-year-old daughter’s sex life.
“I don’t believe this,” Evan said. “What a fucking question.”
“How about answering it?” Susanne asked.
“We only, we just, you know, okay, we made out a bit.”
“Great,” Bob said.
“She’s not my
“You stupid idiot,” Bob said to him. He reached over and grabbed Evan by the scruff of the neck. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“You moved me into the house with her!” he shouted into his father’s face, like it was his fault. On this, we were more or less on the same page. “What, you think I wasn’t going to notice?”
I struggled to my feet and looked at Susanne, but she was avoiding me. Then, to Bob’s son, I said, struggling to make my voice as calm as possible, “Evan, I can’t pretend not to care about what you and Syd may have been up to. Any other time, I’d want to kick your ass across this lot.”
Bob, perhaps calmed by the even tone of my voice, if not the words, released his hold on Evan.
I continued, “But the only thing that interests me right now is finding Sydney. We now know you’ve been less than honest about how well you two were getting along. Okay. Now we want to know if you’ve been less than honest about where she may be.”
“I swear I-”
“Shut up,” I said. “If you’re not straight with me, right now, right here, I’m calling Detective Jennings and turning it over to her.”
“Honest, I don’t-”
“Tell him,” Bob said. “Tell him what you know.”
All eyes were on Evan. “She was just-first of all, she didn’t like her job.”
“What job?” I asked. “Where was she working? What was she doing?”
“She told me she was working at the hotel. Same as she told you,” Evan said, looking at me.
“What didn’t she like?”
“She said she wanted to quit, see if she could get her job back at the dealership.”
“What else?” I said. “What else did she say?”
Evan swallowed. “She was also kind of worried about another thing.”
Again, we waited for Evan to spit it out. Finally, he said, “She thought she might be late.”
“Late?” I said.
“Oh shit,” said Susanne.
And then she collapsed.
TWENTY-ONE
BOB AND I SHOUTED “SUZE!” at the same moment. But even after having been kicked in the
