“Hey, Ron,” she said.
“Hey,” he said.
I thought he might ask Carol if she’d heard from Patty, but he didn’t.
“Ron, this here’s Tim Blake.” He just looked at me. “He’s been trying to find his daughter, Francine?”
That had been my idea, to refer to Sydney by her first name, the one that the detective had used in his report.
Ronald’s expression stayed blank.
“She was a friend of Patty’s,” Carol Swain continued. “Now the two of them are missing.”
“Kids,” he said dismissively, shaking his head. He asked me, “Did they run off together?” It seemed a genuine question.
“We don’t know,” I said. “I came by to talk to Carol, see whether she had any idea about where either one of them might be.”
“I don’t know what your daughter’s like,” he said, “but Patty’s the kind of girl, she’s probably just blowing off some steam, getting a little wild for a couple of days. I’m sure she’ll turn up. And if your Francine is with her, they’ll probably come back together.” He looked at his ex-wife and said, “Joyce is going to give me a lift home when I lock up so, you know, you might not want to be hanging around when…”
“It’s okay,” Carol Swain said. “We just wanted to pop in, in case you’d heard from Patty, you know?”
“Yeah, well, no,” he said, looking back and forth between us.
I said, “Mr. Swain, do you know who I am?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you recognize my name?”
He looked at me a moment and finally said, “Yup.”
“Where from?”
He glanced at Carol, then back at me. “You’re the one supplied the juice to make Patty.”
From Carol Swain, a sharp intake of breath.
“How would you know that?” I asked.
Ronald Swain offered up half a shrug. “It was all in the report. The one the detective did. It was hidden in a suitcase under Carol’s bed.”
“You son of a bitch,” Carol said. If Ronald was hurt by the name-calling, he didn’t show it.
“When did you see that report?” I asked.
Another shrug. “A year ago? Something like that.”
I tried to probe a bit. “What did you think when you read it? Were you angry?”
“Not really. I mean, I knew I wasn’t Patty’s father. Somebody had to be.”
“You were never curious?”
He shook his head. “I mean, when I found the report, I was interested enough to read it. But that was about it.”
“What about my daughter? Were you curious about her? Were you interested in Patty’s half sister? Did you think about trying to get the two of them together?”
There was almost nothing in his dull eyes. “Why would I want to do that?”
“Did you ever show that report to Patty?” Carol asked. “Did you ever tell her about it?”
Ronald Swain sighed tiredly. “Both of you have evidently mistaken me for someone who gives a damn. Why would I tell Patty? The only thing I might have done, if this had been ten years ago, is go knocking on your door”-he looked at me-“with Patty in tow and seen if you wanted to take her off our hands. Might have kept the two of us together. But now, with her grown up and all, what would be the point of that?”
Carol Swain looked from Ronald to me and offered up half a shrug, as if to say, “There you go.”
Ronald, looking at Carol, said, “You should give me a call. But here, not at home.”
“When this whole thing with Patty blows over,” she said, giving him a wink as she turned away.
It didn’t feel as though we’d been in the store all that long, but it was noticeably darker out when we got back into the car.
“Well, fuck me,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“He read the file.” She shook her head. “He’s never been much of a reader.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
THERE WAS A POLICE CAR SITTING IN CAROL SWAIN’S DRIVEWAY when we turned the corner. I hit the Beetle’s brakes.
“Whaddya suppose they’re doing there?” she said. “Maybe they brought home Patty.”
She had her hand on the door handle, getting ready to bolt. I reached for her arm and held her.
“They’re probably looking for me,” I said. “Checking all the possible places I might turn up.”
Carol settled back into the car. “What do they want with you?”
“It’s a long story,” I said.
“I can hoof it from here if you want,” she said.
“I’d appreciate that,” I said. “And if they ask if you’ve seen me-”
“Seen who?” she said, and smiled. “I couldn’t turn in my daughter’s real-life father. What kind of mother would I be if I did that?”
“If the police find me right now,” I said, “they’re going to slow me down trying to find Syd.” I paused. “And Patty.”
“You think Patty’s mixed up with what happened to your girl?”
“I don’t know. I hope not.” I didn’t want to tell Carol I had a bad feeling about Patty. “Thanks for your help,” I said.
“No problem,” she said. She had her hand on the door again but didn’t push it open. “It was good to finally meet you. I mean, I know the circumstances are kind of shitty and all, but I’m glad to be able to talk to you, to tell you what you did for me, after all this time.”
I smiled awkwardly.
“I don’t blame you for not saying anything,” she said. “I wouldn’t know what to say, either.”
“I had to know I might be the biological father of some child out there somewhere,” I said. “So that part’s not a surprise. I guess I never expected to actually know the identity of one of them.”
She smiled ruefully. “There might be more. Maybe there’s hundreds of them running around out there. Little Tims and Timettes all over southern Connecticut.”
“I doubt that,” I said. “I think they limit just how much of the stuff they spread around.” I winced. “That didn’t sound right.”
Carol smiled. “That’s okay. But I can’t help wondering, if you’d been her father in every way, not just the biological, if she’d have turned out different. Whether she would have been such a screwup. So ungrateful, always getting into trouble.”
I felt maybe I was being blamed here. I wanted to ask whether Patty might have turned out differently if Carol’s husband had hung in, if Carol hadn’t turned into an alcoholic over the years.
That was what I wanted to say to her. But I didn’t because I did feel the blame.
