“Yeah, she sneaks some time on it every day. And yeah,” she said, nodding at the papers in my hand, “she’s printed some stuff off it, but I don’t know what it’s about. She was always clearing the history every time she was done.”
I asked Madeline, “Did you hear anything unusual tonight, see any people around you didn’t recognize?”
“I run a tourist business,” Madeline said. “I see different people around here every day.”
“How about you?” I asked Wyatt.
The boy shrugged. “I never talked to her,” he said.
I turned to Bob. “I don’t know what to do,” I said.
He stood there in the dim light of the cabin, shaking his head. He didn’t seem to have any ideas either.
“Maybe it’s time to let Detective Jennings in on things,” he said. “Tell her where we are, see if she can get the locals involved.”
“Locals?” Madeline said.
“How about some of the other people you have working here?” I asked. “You have other kids working for you for the summer? Kids Sydney might have talked to?”
Madeline said, “Two cabins down, there’s a girl here for the summer from Buffalo. I’ve seen the two of them talking a few times.”
“We need to talk to her right now,” I said.
Madeline looked as though she was preparing to argue, then said, “What the hell.” With her housecoat flapping in the light breeze, she led us to the door of the other cabin and knocked on the door.
“Alicia? Alicia, it’s Madeline!”
A light flicked on inside, and a few seconds later a sleepy-eyed girl, black, nineteen or twenty years old, opened the door. She was in a T-shirt and panties. When she saw that it wasn’t just Madeline at the door, but three men, she narrowed the opening to about six inches, showing nothing but her face.
“What’s wrong? What’s going on?” Her eyes shifted from Madeline and Wyatt to Bob and me and back again.
“These men need to talk to you about Kerry,” Madeline said.
“Why?”
“I’m her father,” I said. “We need to find her. It’s very important.”
“She’s in the cabin two doors down,” Alicia said, like we were all idiots.
“No,” Madeline said. “She’s not. She’s gone.”
Then Alicia began to nod slowly, like maybe that made sense to her. “Okay,” she said, drawing the word out.
“What?” I asked.
“Well, okay, Kerry’s already pretty jumpy, right?” She looked for confirmation from Madeline, who nodded. “But today, she was totally freaked out. I was just sitting out front, reading Stephen King, and Kerry comes running up from the main building, she looks like she’s seen a ghost, you know? She was totally freaked out about something. She goes into her cabin and I went in to see her and she was putting on her backpack and I asked her what’s going on and she wouldn’t say anything. She just said she had stuff to do and she had to go right away.”
“She didn’t say why?” I asked. “She didn’t say what had freaked her out?”
“No, but it was something, that’s for sure.”
“When was this?” I asked.
“Like, late this afternoon?”
“Where did she go?”
“I don’t know. She started walking one way, then she looked over toward the parking lot, stopped all of a sudden, turned around and started going the other way. And she was walking along the trees there, you know? Instead of going down the pathway. Like she didn’t want people to see her.” She looked directly at Madeline. “Is she gone? Am I going to have to do all her chores in the morning?”
“We’ll talk about that later,” Madeline said.
I asked, “Did you talk to Syd? I mean, Kerry? Before this thing today? Did you talk to her much?”
“Some. A bit. I guess.”
“What did she tell you about herself? Did she tell you why she was here? Did she talk about anything? Why she was on edge?”
“Not really. But she’s majorly screwed up, honestly. She doesn’t want to do any jobs where she has to go into the dining room or work the front desk. She only wants to do stuff where she won’t run into people. I don’t think she really likes people. I mean, she’s the first person I ever met didn’t have a cell phone. She said she didn’t use them anymore, that they weren’t safe. I know they say if you talk on them too much they make your brain get cancer or something, but I think they’re safe.”
To Madeline, I said, “You have a pay phone here?”
“No. There are a few around town, but we don’t have one.”
“If you wanted to use a pay phone, where would you go? I saw one at the main intersection downtown.”
“You wouldn’t have to go that far. Just down the road, where the pizza place is, they’ve got one there.”
I looked at the sliver of Alicia in the open doorway. “Thank you for your help. I’m sorry we troubled you.”
She said, “Did you say ‘Syd’? A second ago?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s my daughter’s name. Not Kerry, Sydney.”
She vanished for a moment, then, when her face reappeared, she extended her hand to me. There was a piece of folded paper in it.
“This got slipped under my door earlier tonight,” she said. “Someone got the wrong cabin, but I didn’t know anyone named Sydney so I didn’t know who to give it to.”
I took the paper and unfolded it. It read:
Syd: I’m here to bring you home! Meet me by that little covered bridge in the center of town! Love, Patty.
FORTY-FOUR
“WHAT?” BOB SAID. “What does it say?”
I handed the note to him. It had filled me with a mixed sense of hope and puzzlement. He read it a couple of times and said, “Didn’t you say Patty was dead?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But maybe I was wrong. I hope I’m wrong. But this note could be some kind of trick. It might be from someone else, meant to lure Sydney out into the open.”
I asked Alicia, “You didn’t see who left this? You haven’t seen anyone around? A girl with streaks in her hair?”
Alicia shook her head.
So I thanked her again, and walked back to the office with Madeline and Wyatt. I had Madeline take down my cell number in case Syd reappeared, or anything else happened. Then Bob and I returned to the Mustang, fishing the guns out of the back of our britches before we settled into the seats. I wanted to study the note, so I gave him the keys.
“We’ll check out the covered bridge,” I said, once we were in the car.
“Yeah,” said Bob.
The note was handwritten. I was trying to recall whether I’d ever seen a sample of Patty’s handwriting. If I had, I couldn’t remember. It was hard to tell from the note whether it bore any of the trademarks
