But Lorna believed they must be responsible shoppers, and that meant checking out every car in the class they were looking at, comparing specs, studying warranties. All of which was a good thing, to a point, but now Lorna had so much information that she didn’t know what to do with it. Lorna thought all this research would help them make an informed decision, but instead it had made it impossible for her to make one at all.
They were in their mid-forties. He was a shoe salesman in the Connecticut Post Mall, and she was a fourth-grade teacher. This was standard teacher behavior. Research your topic, consider all the options, go home and make a chart, car names across the top, features down the side, make check marks in the little boxes.
Lorna asked about the Accord’s rear legroom compared to the Malibu, which might have been an issue if they had kids, or if she’d given any indication they had any friends. By the time she was on to the Accord’s trunk space versus the Mazda 6, I really wasn’t listening. Finally, I held up a hand.
“What car do you
“Like?” she said.
My computer monitor was positioned between us, and the whole time Lorna was talking I was moving the mouse around, tapping the keyboard. Lorna assumed I was on the Honda website, calling up data so I could answer her questions.
I wasn’t. I was on findsydneyblake.com. I was looking to see whether there’d been any recent hits on the site, whether anyone had emailed me. One of Sydney’s friends, a computer whiz-actually, any of Syd’s friends was a computer whiz compared to me-by the name of Jeff Bluestein had helped me put together the website, which had all the basic information.
There was a full description of Syd. Age: 17. Date of birth: April 15, 1992. Weight: approximately 115 pounds. Eye color: Blue. Hair: Blonde. Height: 5 feet 3 inches.
Date of disappearance: June 29, 2009.
Last seen: Leaving for work from our address on Hill Street. Might have been spotted in the vicinity of the Just Inn Time hotel, in Milford, Connecticut.
There was also a description of Syd’s silver Civic, complete with license plate number.
Visitors to the website, which Jeff had linked to other sites about runaways and missing teens, were encouraged to call police, or get in touch with me, Tim Blake, directly. I’d gone through as many photos as I could find of Syd, hit up her friends for pictures they had as well, including ones they’d posted on their various Internet sites like Facebook, and plastered them all over findsydneyblake.com. I had hundreds of pictures of Syd, going back through all her seventeen years, but I’d only posted ones from the last six months or so.
Wherever Syd might be, it wasn’t with extended family. Susanne’s and my parents were dead, neither of us had siblings, and what few relatives we had-an aunt here, an uncle there-we’d put on alert.
“Of course,” said Lorna, “we’re well aware of the excellent repair records that the Hondas have, and good resale value.”
I’d had two emails the day before, but not about Sydney. They were from other parents. One was from a father in Providence, telling me that his son Kenneth had been missing for a year now, and there wasn’t a moment when he didn’t think about him, wonder where he was, whether he was dead or alive, whether it was something he’d done, as a father, that had driven Kenneth away, or whether his son had met up with the wrong kind of people, that maybe they had-
It wasn’t helpful.
The second was from a woman outside Albany who’d stumbled onto the site and told me she was praying for my daughter and for me, that I should put my faith in God if I wanted Sydney to come home safely, that it would be through God that I’d find the strength to get through this.
I deleted both emails without replying.
“But the Toyotas have good resale value as well,” Lorna said. “I was looking in
I checked to see whether there were any messages now. The thing was, I had already checked for messages three times since Lorna and Dell had sat down across from me. When I was at my desk, I checked about every three minutes. At least twice a day I phoned Milford police detective Kip Jennings-I’d never met a Kip before, and hadn’t expected that when I finally did it would be a woman-to see what progress she was making. She’d been assigned Sydney ’s case, although I was starting to think “assigned” was defined as “the detective who has the case in the back of his or her desk drawer.”
In the time that Lorna had been going on about Consumer Reports recommendations, a message had dropped into my inbox. I clicked on it and learned that there was a problem with my Citibank account and if I didn’t immediately confirm all my personal financial details it would be suspended, which was kind of curious considering that I did not have a Citibank account and never had.
“Jesus Christ,” I said aloud. The site had only been up for nearly three weeks-Jeff got it up and running within days of Syd’s disappearance-and already the spammers had found it.
“Excuse me?” Lorna said.
I glanced at her. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Just something on my screen there. You were saying, about the red dots.”
“Were you even listening to me?” she asked.
“Absolutely,” I said.
“Have you been looking at some dirty website all this time?” she said, and her husband’s eyebrows went up. If there was porn on my screen, he wanted a peek.
“They don’t allow that when we’re with customers,” I said earnestly.
“I just don’t want us to make a mistake,” Lorna said. “We usually keep our cars for seven to ten years, and that’s a long time to have a car if it turns out to be a lemon.”
“Honda doesn’t make lemons,” I assured her.
I needed to sell a car. I hadn’t made a sale since Syd went missing. The first week, I didn’t come into work. It wasn’t like I was home, sick with worry. I was out eighteen hours a day, driving the streets, hitting every mall and plaza and drop-in shelter in Milford and Stratford. Before long, I’d broadened the search to include Bridgeport and New Haven. I showed Syd’s picture to anyone who’d look at it. I called every friend I could ever recall her mentioning.
I went back to the Just Inn Time, trying to figure out where the hell Syd was actually going every day when I’d believed she was heading into the hotel.
I’d had very little sleep in the twenty-four days since I’d last seen her.
“You know what I think we’re going to do?” Lorna said, scooping the pamphlets off the desk and shoving them into her oversized purse. “I think we should take one more look at the Nissan.”
“Why don’t you do that?” I said. “They make a very good car.”
I got to my feet as Lorna and Dell stood. Just then, my phone rang. I glanced at it, recognized the number on the call display, let it go to message, although this particular caller might not choose to leave yet another one.
“Oh,” said Lorna, putting something she’d been holding in her hand onto my desk. It was a set of car keys. “When we were sitting in that Civic over there”-she pointed across the showroom-“I noticed someone had left these in the cup holder.”
She did this every time she came. She’d get in a car, discover the keys, scoop them up and deliver them to me. I’d given up explaining to her it was a fire safety thing, that we left the keys in the showroom cars so that if there was a fire, we could get them out in a hurry, time permitting.
“How thoughtful,” I said. “I’ll put these away someplace safe.”
“You wouldn’t want anyone driving a car right out of the showroom, now would you?” She laughed.
Dell looked as though he’d be happy if the huge Odyssey minivan in the center of the floor ran him over.
