Linwood Barclay - Fear The Worst

She stopped herself, looked at me. “What’s happened?”

“They found Sydney’s car,” I said.

Her face didn’t move. She waited.

“In Derby. Left in a Wal-Mart lot. It may have been there since she vanished. There are traces of blood on the door handle and steering wheel.”

Her face still didn’t move. She took it in, waited a moment, and said, “She’s not dead. I refuse to believe she’s dead.”

“She’s not,” I said, because that’s what I had to believe, too. “They’ll have to do DNA tests to know whether it’s Syd’s blood.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Susanne said. “She’s not dead.” She raised her chin, as though defying unseen forces.

The door flung open and Bob walked in. Before he’d set eyes on either of us, he barked, “What the hell did you say to Evan?” Then, seeing me, he said, “Oh.”

To Susanne, I said, “I’ll go. I’ll keep in touch.” To Bob, I said, “Take care of her. And if I ever hear Evan call Susanne a bitch again, I’ll put his head through a windshield.”

I’M NOT SURE HOW I GOT HOME. I had no memory of driving there. Hot blood was clouding my vision.

There was a police vehicle parked out front when I got there. A van instead of a cruiser. A nattily dressed black man identified himself as a member of the city’s forensic investigations unit. He’d been sent by Detective Kip Jennings to retrieve a DNA sample of Sydney’s. I let him in, showed him Syd’s room and the bathroom she used to get ready for work in the morning. He zeroed in on the hairbrush.

While he was doing that, I went down to the kitchen. The light was flashing on the phone. I hit the button to hear the message.

“Hey.”

Kate Wood.

“I just wondered how you were doing. I don’t know whether you got my message at work. My offer still stands. I could bring something over. I know you probably don’t feel like cooking. You could even come over here if you want. Anyway, get back to me? Okay?” And then she rattled off her cell number, which I knew better than my own, she’d reminded me of it so many times.

I deleted the message.

I went upstairs to the spare bedroom where I keep my computer and pay the bills and went online to see if there’d been any action on the website.

Nothing.

I sat there for a while, stared at the screen.

The guy from the forensics department popped his head in, said he’d find his own way out.

“Sure,” I said. “Thanks.”

Finally, I went back down to the kitchen. I opened the fridge and stared into it for a good twenty seconds, thinking if I looked long enough something edible would magically appear. I hadn’t bought groceries in a couple of weeks, and-on the nights when Patty didn’t show up with fast food-was surviving mostly on a cache of microwavable dinners that had been collecting in the freezer over the last year or two.

I closed the door and put my palms on the kitchen counter, leaning into it. I took several deep breaths, letting each one out slowly.

If this was supposed to relax me, it wasn’t working, because suddenly I took the back of my arm and swept everything off the counter in front of me: toaster, salt and pepper shakers, a day-by-day New Yorker cartoon calendar I hadn’t turned the page on in three weeks, an electric can opener-all were sent crashing to the floor.

I was filled with all this pent-up rage and frustration. Where was Syd? What had happened to her? Why did she leave?

Why the hell couldn’t I find her?

I wanted to explode. I had so much anger and no place to direct it.

I’d only been home a few minutes, but I needed to go out again. Every moment I spent here, alone, reminded me that Syd was not here. I couldn’t sit around. I had to burn off some steam. Drive around. Keep looking.

The phone rang. I snatched the receiver off the cradle before the first ring was finished.

“What?” I shouted.

“Whoa.”

“I’m sorry,” bringing my voice down, not knowing who it was. “Hello.”

“I called earlier. Did you get my message?”

Then I knew. “I just got home, Kate.”

It had started about six months ago. I’d met her in a rather unconventional way. She was backing her Ford Focus out of a spot at Walgreens and hit my bumper on the other side of the aisle. I was behind the wheel, engine off, listening to the end of a newscast before I went into the store, and jumped out when I felt the jolt.

I had a number of lines set to go. Are you blind? Where the hell were you looking? Did you get your driver’s license off the Net?

But when she got out of the car, the first thing out of my mouth was, “Are you okay?”

I think that had a lot to do with the fact that she was such a striking woman. Maybe not beautiful, not in some supermodel sense (and here, I would defer to Bob anyway, of course), but arresting, with short brown hair, brown eyes, a slightly Monroe-esque figure. But instead of a squeaky Betty Boop kind of voice, her words came out soft and low and throaty.

“Oh my God,” she said. “That was totally my fault. Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” I insisted. “Let’s see if your car’s okay.”

It was fine, and there was only a minor scratch on my bumper. Even though it was not something worth repairing, I offered no objection when Kate wanted to give me her name and phone number.

“You know, later, you might have whiplash or something,” she said. Like she was hoping.

The next day, I called her.

“Oh my God, don’t tell me you have a concussion or something.”

“I wondered if you wanted to get a drink.”

She told me, over a beer, that when I called she figured I’d be faking a spinal injury and suing her for a million dollars’ worth of hospital bills because that’s the kind of thing people do, that’s the kind of world we’re living in.

That should have been a clue.

But I didn’t pick up on it, because things between us seemed to be clicking pretty good. They ended up clicking pretty fast.

We moved on from drinks to dinner, and from dinner to my house. Five minutes after we’d come through the front door, we were in bed. I hadn’t had sex in several months, and it’s possible I made that apparent more quickly than I would have liked. But it was a long evening, and I was able to redeem myself.

Kate seemed, at first, almost perfect.

She was warm. Attentive. Sexually uninhibited. She was addicted to DVD sets of television series. I worked so many evenings I’d never much gotten into TV, so she introduced me to shows I’d only heard of, including one about these people whose commercial jet crashes on an island, and somehow this is their destiny, they’ve all been brought to this island for a reason, it’s all part of some big plan-I could hardly make any sense of it. But Kate was obsessed with it, how everyone’s lives were being manipulated by unseen forces. “That’s so what happens,” she said. “Other people are always pulling the strings behind the scenes.”

That should have been another clue.

The thing was, she was fun to be with. And I hadn’t been with anyone fun in quite some time. But it was when she started opening up about herself that things started to go off the rails.

She’d been divorced three years. Her husband was a commercial pilot. He fooled around. She got totally screwed over in the divorce. Her lawyer, she believed, was a friend of her husband’s, although she couldn’t actually prove it. Some kind of deal got cooked up behind closed doors, she said, otherwise she would have ended up with the son of a bitch’s house. But guess what? He was still living there, and she was stuck in some shithole apartment in Devon half a block from a bar, and Friday nights you were likely to find some guy taking a leak on your front tire.