Linwood Barclay - Fear The Worst

I said nothing.

“So we’re not exactly going to put a call into mommies and daddies like that and say hey, guess what, we found your little angel, why don’t you come on down and take them home.”

“I get it.”

“These kids trust us. They have to be able to trust us or we can’t help them.”

I was thinking. “So then, if you did have someone on staff who was doing this, who was trying to reunite kids with their parents, and you found out, they’d be fired.”

“Very likely.”

“So maybe whoever called me works here but didn’t use her real name.”

Morgan Donovan considered that a moment. “Why would someone have to give you a name at all? She could have gotten in touch with you anonymously.”

“I have an email address for her,” I said.

Morgan asked for it and wrote it down on the back of an envelope.

“There’s no one here with that address that I know of. A Hotmail address ain’t exactly that hard to get.”

“I know,” I said.

“So like I said, maybe someone’s yanking your chain,” she said. When I couldn’t think of anything to say to that, she said, “Wanna coffee or something? I’d offer you something stronger, but it’s a church foundation that tops up our budget and they take a dim view of my keeping scotch in my bottom drawer. Not that there isn’t a bottle in there right now. We’ve got a pot of coffee that’s been going continuously since 1992. Want some of that?” My face must have given away my reluctance. “A Diet Coke, then?”

I said sure.

“Hey, Len!” Footsteps scurrying down the hall, then Len poked his head in. “Can you grab us a couple cans of DC?”

Len continued farther on down the hall, where I could hear an old-fashioned fridge open and then latch shut, and then he was back with one can and a paper cup. “We’re running a bit low,” he said, putting both items on her desk and leaving.

Morgan got up and started clearing some papers off a wooden chair so that I could sit down.

“Let me get that,” I offered, but she held up her arm to deflect me, then used it to scoop up the files.

“I’m pretty good at this,” she said. “Although you know what pisses me off? Those taps in public washrooms, where you only get water so long as you’re pressing down? So as soon as you let go of the tap to get your hand under it, there’s no fucking water. I’ve just got the one fist, but if I could find the guy who invented that goddamn tap I could knock his teeth out.”

I smiled awkwardly.

“You can ask,” she said.

“Sorry?”

“How I lost it.”

“It’s none of my business,” I said.

“You ever hang your arm down the outside of the door when you’re in a car?”

Slowly, I nodded.

She smiled. “My husband’s driving, I’m chilling out in the passenger seat, my arm dangling out the window, the asshole runs a red and we get broadsided. I lost my arm in the front grille of a Ford Explorer. Maybe if the two of us hadn’t been three sheets to the wind, it wouldn’t have happened. Getting your wife’s arm cut off tends to put a strain on a marriage, so rather than look at me every day and be reminded of what he’d done, he hit the road. At least I had the one arm left to wave goodbye, the son of a bitch.”

She popped the Diet Coke can, filled the paper cup to the rim, and handed it to me. She sipped what was left in the can and returned to her spot behind the desk.

I sat in the chair she’d cleared for me.

“I don’t think you answered my question,” she said. There had been a question? I was still processing the lost-arm story. Morgan refreshed my memory. “Why couldn’t this person have just sent an anonymous tip? Why give you a fake name?”

“I guess she wanted me to know she was legit,” I said. “And she was. I’m sure of it. She even sent me a picture of my daughter.”

“A picture?”

“Sydney was caught in the frame of a shot she took with her cell phone.” I sipped Diet Coke from the paper cup. I hadn’t realized, until that moment, how parched I was. “It was her. In the picture. I’m positive.”

Morgan shook her head slowly back and forth. “Maybe she wanted you to know your daughter’s out here, she wants you to believe her, so she gave you a name. But maybe there was some reason why she couldn’t reveal her true identity to you.” Morgan laughed. “Makes her sound like Wonder Woman or something.”

“It wasn’t you, was it?” I asked. The idea had just popped into my head.

Morgan Donovan was too worn down by her job to register any surprise at my question. She said tiredly, “It’s all I can do to get these kids to have some breakfast, let alone reunite them all with their families.”

“I’m taking a lot of shots in the dark these days,” I said.

“Where are you staying?” Morgan asked me.

“I don’t know. I didn’t book anything before I left. I thought, maybe, if I found Syd right away, we’d catch a red-eye back home tonight.”

She smiled pitifully at me. “An optimist. It’s been so long since I ran into one of those I almost forgot they existed. Give me your cell number. I’ll put some of your snaps up on the bulletin board, tell everybody to see me if they know anything. Then I’ll call you. That a deal?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’d really appreciate that.” A couple more swallows and I had finished my cup of Diet Coke. “Would you mind if I asked the other people who work here if they’ve seen Syd, or heard of Yolanda Mills?”

“Actually, yes, I would,” Morgan said. “I’ll do what I can for you, but I don’t want you stirring things up around here.”

I didn’t like her answer much. I got up from the chair, nodded, and said thanks. She went back to the mounds of paper on her desk. When she noticed I hadn’t left yet, she said, “Was there something else?”

“You were going to put my daughter’s picture on the bulletin board,” I said.

“So I was.” She brushed past me on her way out of the room, went down the hall and into the main reception area, where kids were still milling around. There seemed to be more here than before I’d gone into Morgan Donovan’s office. She crossed the room and stuck Syd’s face to a bulletin board and wrote under it, If you’ve seen this girl, see Lefty.

The board was a collage version of a graduating class photo. Hundreds of photos. Boys and girls. White, black, Hispanic, Asian. Some as young as ten or twelve, others who looked to be in their thirties. The moment Morgan stepped back from the board, Sydney’s face blended into all the others. Not one lost daughter, but the latest addition to a lost generation.

I stared hopelessly at the wall.

“I know,” Morgan said. “It’s a bitch, isn’t it?”

I ASKED LEN FOR A SHEET OF PAPER from his printer before I left. I leaned over the door that was his desk, positioned a photo of Syd in the middle, and wrote above it, HAVE YOU SEEN SYDNEY BLAKE? Below the shot I printed my own name and cell phone number, adding, PLEASE CALL.

I left and found a drugstore with a photocopying machine, positioned the picture in the center of the sheet, and placed the two items on the glass. I set the counter to one hundred and pressed Print. Once I had the copies, I went up and down the street. I figured if Syd had been in this area at least a couple of times, she might have frequented other businesses. Maybe she’d even have gone into some of them looking for work. She’d always been a pretty resourceful kid, and I could see her looking for odd jobs so that she could afford to feed herself.

Most of the shopkeepers politely took the flyers, glanced at them, put them aside. Some just said, “Sorry.” Others glanced at the sheet and crumpled it up.