Linwood Barclay - Fear The Worst

“You know that cartoon about the monsters?” I said. “How they all work for a big company and their job is to scare little kids?”

“Monsters, Inc.?”

“That’s the one,” I said. “I took Sydney to that when she was, what? Ten? The ending, I started tearing up myself. You know the part I’m talking about?”

Patty Swain nodded. “Oh yeah. My mom took me to that. She snuck in a can of Coke that actually had rye in it. She’s taught me everything I know.” She grinned, hoping she could shock me.

I leaned forward. “Patty, did Sydney have any friends up in Derby?”

She looked taken aback. “I don’t think so. Derby? Fuck, no. Nobody in Derby. Why?”

I weighed whether to tell her about Syd’s car, decided against it.

“So I’m still putting the word out,” she said. “Facebook, shit like that.” The leg she’d propped over the chair arm was swinging back and forth, plus she was doing some flicking thing with the fingers of her left hand.

“I appreciate that. You’re probably reaching more people that way than I am.” I watched the leg swing. “You okay, Patty? You seem a bit on edge.”

She stopped all the seemingly involuntary body movements. “I’m cool.”

“You’re not, you know, high or something, are you?”

She laughed. “Shit, Mr. B., you’re something.”

Laura Cantrell was doing a slow walkabout through the showroom, graceful as a gazelle despite the five-inch heels. She swept by my desk, not saying a word to either of us, wandered between the cars. It felt as though the thermostat had been turned down.

Laura Cantrell slipped back into her office. Patty had been aware of her the whole time.

She said, “Seriously, that chick needs to get banged.”

“I know I’ve asked you this a thousand times, Patty, but where could she have gone?” I asked. “If she wasn’t working at the hotel, where was she?”

“I don’t know. It’s totally fucked up.”

“I’ve been all up and down Route 1, going into every shop and business. No one knows anything about her.”

That made me think, just for a second, about Ian, from Shaw Flowers, how he could have looked at Syd’s picture a little longer before saying he hadn’t seen her.

“You were her best friend,” I said. “And yet she didn’t tell you what she was really doing.”

She nodded. “I swear, I thought she was working at that place. She never told me any different. The thing is, she’s not like me. She wouldn’t be looking for trouble. I was born for it.”

I flashed her a weary smile. “Thanks for dropping by. If you think of anything…”

She nodded, blinked furiously several times, like maybe she was warding off tears. “Sure,” she said, getting out of the chair. “The thing is, I was wondering…”

“What is it, Patty?”

“You know this new job I got at the mall?”

“At the jewelry place?”

She nodded, like this was no big deal. “Yeah. So you have to work for a month before you get your first paycheck, and my mom, well, you know, she’s kind of tapped out herself at the moment, and it’s not like my dad’s sending me a check every month.”

“You can’t be asking me for money, Patty,” I said.

“Sure,” she said, her face flushing. “I get that.”

I looked at her a moment, then took a twenty out of my wallet and handed it to her. She took the bill and stuffed it down the front pocket of her jeans. They were on so tight she had trouble getting her fingers in there.

“Thanks,” she said. “You want to grab something tonight or anything?”

Trying to fill the gap left by Sydney, Patty had dropped by half a dozen times in the last few weeks with surprise deliveries of McDonald’s or Burger King or Subway, which I always paid her back for.

“I don’t think so, not tonight,” I said.

I could see the disappointment in her eyes. “That’s okay,” she said. “Catch you later.”

As she walked past Andy Hertz’s desk, hips swaying, she said, “Hey there, Andy Panda,” and kept on walking.

Andy, who was working his way through the page from the phone book, making cold calls, mumbled a “Hey.”

Patty had been in here enough to know Andy, but that seemed a little familiar.

Jeff got out of the Civic and ran to catch up to Patty, dropping a set of keys on my desk as he went by. “Someone left these in the car,” he said.

I USED TO WONDER HOW PEOPLE DID IT.

You’d watch the news, and there’d be some couple who’d lost a child in a fire. The mother of that girl who went missing in Bermuda and was never found. A father whose son was killed in a bar fight. Once, there was a story about a girl whose class went on a skiing trip, and there was an avalanche and she was buried under several feet of snow and the rescue workers couldn’t find her. And there were her parents, weeping, holding out hope their daughter was still alive, and you knew there was simply no way.

How the hell do they do it? I’d say to the TV.

I figured, something like that happens to a loved one, everything just stops. How can it not?

But I was realizing that everyone does go on. You get up. You have breakfast. You go to work. You do your job. You come home, have some dinner, go to bed.

Just like everybody else.

But it’s always there. You go on, but you don’t go on. Because there’s this weight, and you can feel it all the time, like you’ve got a cinder block sitting on each shoulder, pushing you down, wearing you out, making you wonder whether you’ll be able to get up the next day.

And son of a bitch, you do get up. That day, and the day after, and the day after that. With those blocks on your shoulders.

Always there.

ON MY WAY OUT, I picked up, from reception, the photocopy of the driver’s license of Richard Fletcher, my manure delivery guy. I made a mental note of his address, on Coulter Drive. I folded the sheet and slid it down into my pocket.

Once in the car, I turned Syd’s iPod on again and listened to some Natasha Bedingfield (I’d heard Syd listening to her one night in her room and asked who it was), an Elton John number from my own youth, and, astonishingly, pianist Erroll Garner’s “Misty.” I’d mentioned him to Syd one weekend a few months back, and she’d gone and downloaded one of his songs.

“You’re something else, sweetheart,” I said, as though she were in the seat next to me.

I didn’t head home. Instead, I drove over to the original Bob’s Motors used-car dealership and pulled up by the office-a disguised forty-foot trailer with the wheels hidden behind decorative vinyl skirting.

As I went up the steps, the door opened and Evan came rushing out, his face red, his jaw set angrily. He looked ready to explode.

“Hey,” I said, but he brushed past without seeing me, charged off between the used cars, then stopped abruptly next to a red Jetta with a “One Owner!” banner in the windshield, and kicked the rear fender with everything he had.

“Fuck!” he shouted. “Fuck her! Fuck that bitch!”

And then he stormed off, heading down the sidewalk, away from the lot.

I went inside, where Susanne was posted at a desk just to the right of the door, the crutches she’d been managing without leaned up against the wall, the cane hanging from a coat hook. She was shaking her head, then looked up when she saw me.

“Jeez, perfect timing,” she said. She was obviously rattled. “Did he run into you?”

“He just beat up a Volkswagen,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“All I did was ask him about the petty cash,” she said.

“What petty cash?”

“In the desk here. I swear, there was two hundred dollars there yesterday, and today there’s forty. I asked him whether he’d had to go into it for something and he flies off the handle, says I’m calling him a thief. I never did any such thing. All I did was ask him whether he-”