Linwood Barclay - Fear The Worst

“Have you got a number? Call this woman. It’s what, three hours earlier out there? She might even still be at work.”

“She didn’t send me a phone number,” I said. “I just wrote her back, asked her for one.”

“How about the shelter? Did she say what it was called?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t know why the hell she couldn’t have been a bit more specific.”

“What’s her name?”

I glanced back at the screen. “Yolanda Mills.”

“Shove a bum,” Kate said, motioning for me to get out of the computer chair. I stood while she sat down. “We go to the online white pages, find her, call her.”

Kate tapped away on the keyboard, went to a site with some empty fields where she entered the woman’s first and last name and the city where she lived. “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got… We got nothing yet. There are Y. Millses but none of them Yolanda.”

“So maybe she’s married and the phone number is listed under her husband’s name. Her last name might still be Mills.”

“Let me see how many Millses there are.” Kate whistled under her breath. “Okay, there’s like more than two hundred of them.”

I put a hand on the edge of the computer table to steady myself. Blood was pulsing in my ears.

“We could wait for this woman to get back to you, or we could just start calling all of them.”

“Maybe we can narrow it down another way,” I said. “Do a search on teenage drop-in shelters in Seattle.”

Kate’s fingers danced across the keyboard. “Holy shit,” she said. “There’s all kinds of them. Not as many shelters as there are Millses in the Seattle directory, but there’s quite a few. Hang on, I think I can narrow it down. Some are men’s shelters, so we can skip those… Let me see. Okay, look here.” She pointed to the screen. There were half a dozen listings for Seattle-area shelters aimed at youths.

I grabbed a pen and a pad and scribbled down web addresses. “I’ll grab Syd’s laptop and work on these downstairs. I’ll use my cell, and you can use the landline for some of the women’s shelters. She might be attached to one of those, for all we know.”

“I’m on it,” Kate said. She snatched the receiver off the cradle and punched in a number as I ran downstairs, grabbing my daughter’s laptop on the way. The house was equipped for wireless, so I could use Syd’s computer anywhere. I found my cell in the pocket of my jacket, which was hanging over a kitchen chair, and dialed the first of the five numbers that came up on the screen once I had the laptop up and running.

“Refuge Place,” a woman answered.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m trying to get hold of Yolanda Mills. I think she might work at your shelter.”

“Sorry,” she said. “No one here by that name.”

“Okay, thanks,” I said, ended the call, waited a beat, and then dialed the second number. Upstairs, I could hear Kate murmuring on the phone.

“Hope,” a man said.

“Is this the shelter?” I asked.

“Yeah, Hope Shelter.”

“I’m calling for Yolanda Mills.”

“What’s that name again?” he asked.

I repeated it. “I think she may be an employee there.”

“I know everyone here,” he said. “We got no one by that name.”

I thanked him and hit End.

“How’s it going?” Kate shouted from upstairs.

“Nothing yet,” I said. “You?”

“Ditto.”

There were two plates of shrimp fried rice, chow mein, sweet and sour chicken, and egg rolls on the counter, but I wasn’t hungry. I had next to nothing in my stomach and already felt like I was going to lose what was there.

I tried the next two numbers, struck out with both. I was just entering the last of the five I’d jotted down when Kate shrieked, “Tim!”

I flipped my phone shut and bolted up the stairs two steps at a time. “You got somebody?” I said breathlessly as I came into the computer room.

“You have mail,” she said, hopping out of the chair and letting me sit down.

It was Yolanda Mills. Her reply read:

“Dear Mr. Blake: Thank you for getting back to me. That was foolish of me not to give you more information. I work at a Christian youth center called Second Chance in the west part of the downtown area. There’s a number there but I’m in and out all the time (one of the things I do is arrange for the meals there, so I’m out a lot getting groceries and things) but I always have my cell with me, so you can usually get me on that. Here it is.” The number followed.

I had the receiver in my hand and was dialing, looking back and forth between the screen and the phone.

“What if she’s a nut?” Kate asked as I hit the last digit. “What if it’s someone just running a scam or something? A lot of people, they’re always thinking up ways to get innocent people to fall for things.”

I knew that, in a nutshell, was Kate’s worldview, but realized it was something I had to consider. As the phone began to ring at the other end, thousands of miles away, Kate said, “If she starts asking about money, about whether there’s a reward, that’ll be your tip-off that she’s-”

I held up my hand for her to stop talking, expecting the cell to be answered at any second.

And then it was.

“Hello?”

A woman. It was only one word, but she sounded on the young side.

“Is this Yolanda Mills?”

“Is this Mr. Blake?” she asked.

“Oh God,” I said, breathing a huge sigh of relief. “We were trying to track you down using the online phone directories and Google and everything, and then you got back to me. Thank you so much. You don’t know what this means to me.”

“I just don’t know how much help I can be.” I wasn’t picking up any noticeable accent. And trying to pick up someone’s age from their voice is tricky, unless the person is very young or very old. Yolanda Mills sounded right in the middle.

“When did you see Syd?” I asked.

“Who?”

“Sydney,” I said. “I call her Syd.”

“It was two or three days ago, I think.”

“How was she? Was she okay? Did she look hurt? Was she sick?”

“She looked fine. I mean, assuming it was her. She came in a couple of times to get something to eat.”

Jesus Christ, my daughter eating in a shelter for runaways. What had brought her to this? Why was she on the other side of the country?

“Did you speak to her at all?”

“Nothing much. Just, you know, ‘How ya doin’, darlin’?’ That was about it.”

“Did she say anything?”

“She just kind of smiled.”

“Was she with anyone? Was she traveling alone?”

“As far as I could tell, she was by herself. I have to say, she looked sad.”

It was as if someone had reached into my chest and given my heart a twist.

“And you said you last saw her a couple of days ago?”

“Okay, let me think a minute,” Yolanda Mills said. “I think the first time I saw her was about four days ago, then she came in two days after that when we were serving lunch. And that was day before yesterday.”

Which meant that Syd had been in Seattle for a while. Maybe she was popping into Yolanda’s drop-in every couple of days. So if I got out there, hung around the shelter long enough, she might show up.

“Do teens, runaways, do they come to your place to eat even if they aren’t staying there?”

“Oh, sure. We only have so much space. And this isn’t meant to be someplace where you come to live permanently. It’s a stopgap measure, you know? So kids, sometimes they find a place to bunk in with a friend, or they sleep in a car, and sometimes, I hate to say it, sometimes they just find a place in the park or something for the night.”

Syd, sleeping on a bench. I tried to push the image out of my head.