Linwood Barclay - Fear The Worst

“Did you ever tell your wife? That there might be other kids out there who are yours?”

“No,” I said. “I never have.”

“So,” she said, picking up her story, “there was no father on the scene, and I couldn’t stop thinking about finding out who Patty’s real father was. I had this fantasy that if I could find you, you’d fall in love with us. That you’d fall for me and Patty and come into our lives and everything would end up just like in the movies. A friend of mine knew someone who was a private detective, a man named Denton Abagnall, and it took me a couple of months to work up the nerve to call him. I asked him if it was even possible to find out, that the clinic was very strict about confidentiality, but when I showed him the form you’d filled out with the background information, he said he might be able to figure out who you were through the process of elimination. He started with the college, got the names of all the male students over a three-year period, checked all their names against death records, looking for any of them who were nineteen when they lost a father at the age of sixty-seven, and he started putting it all together. Once Mr. Abagnall was sure he had the right student, he had to move ahead six years or so, and he tracked someone down with your name working at a Toyota dealership. He went in, got one of your business cards with your picture on it, and the minute I saw your face, I knew.”

It had never occurred to me that Patty and I looked anything alike. But I was pretty sure there had been times when it had occurred to me-almost subconsciously-that she and Sydney shared certain characteristics. The way they arched their eyebrows, twitched their noses.

“Mr. Abagnall wrote up an entire report for me, and that’s when I found out that you were married, that you had a daughter of your own. That’s when the fantasy died for me. I knew I couldn’t turn your life upside down. I didn’t want to take away another little girl’s father to give my daughter one.”

“But still you came into the dealership.”

“I just had to see you. In person. Just once. Then I put it behind me. I moved on.”

I sat back in my chair, trying to take it all in.

And then it hit me. I didn’t have one daughter missing, and in danger.

I had two.

“SO YOU MUST HAVE TOLD PATTY ALL OF THIS,” I SAID.

“No, never,” Carol Swain said. “I didn’t want her to know.”

“But she must have found out,” I said. “How else could she have connected with Sydney?”

“I’ve been thinking about that from the moment you turned up in my driveway. You know how once in a while, you read some story in the paper, about a couple who meet and fall in love and then find out that they’re brother and sister? You think, what are the odds, but it happens. At least in this case, it wasn’t a brother-sister thing, thank God.”

“I don’t know,” I said. I wasn’t a big believer in coincidences, although I knew they could happen. “When the detective reported everything back to you, he must have included the names of my wife and daughter.”

“He did.”

“So when Patty said she had a friend named Sydney, didn’t that set off any bells?”

“In the report I got, your daughter’s name was down as Francine,” Carol Swain said.

Francine was Sydney’s first name, the name that showed up on her birth certificate. But when she was just a toddler, her second name, Sydney-and ultimately, Syd-just seemed to suit her better, and we stopped calling her Francine altogether.

I explained this to Patty’s mother. “So there was never a time that I suspected,” she said. “Maybe, if Patty had ever brought your daughter around, I’d have noticed some similarities.”

“This report you got from the detective,” I asked. “Do you still have it?” She nodded. “Is it here, in the house?” She nodded again. “So then maybe Patty found it.”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “It’s hidden.”

“Hidden where?”

She set down her beer and went upstairs. I heard her moving around up there, then she came back downstairs clutching a thick manila business envelope with her name printed on the front. She tossed it onto the coffee table. “There it is. Everything anybody ever wanted to know about Timothy Justin Blake. It was in a zippered compartment in a travel bag I keep under the bed.”

I slid the envelope’s contents out onto the table as Carol sat back down and resumed her relationship with the beer.

There were quite a few pages. Photocopies of birth certificates, my father’s death certificate, a photo of me from a Bridgeport Business College graduation ceremony, a picture of the house I grew up in and the house I had been living in at the time. All that, and a copy of the bill for services rendered from Denton Abagnall.

“Have you spoken to Mr. Abagnall lately?” I asked.

She shook her head. “He got killed a couple of years ago. It was in all the papers. He’d been hired by that woman whose family disappeared when she was a kid.”

I remembered reading something about that at the time. “So you never showed this to your daughter?”

“I’m telling you, no,” she said.

“Who else might have known?” I asked. “That you’d hired someone to find out I was Patty’s biological father?”

Carol Swain shook her head. “No one,” she said. “Unless Abagnall told someone. And I don’t think he would have done that. He seemed like a real professional, you know?”

“What about your husband, Ronald?” I asked.

“I don’t see how…” she said, but then her voice drifted off. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Do you and he still keep in touch?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Off and on.” There was something in the way she said it. Her eyes did some kind of twinkle.

“What do you mean, ‘off and on’?”

She looked away, drank some beer. “It’s just… He’s a total asshole, okay? I know that. It’s just that, sometimes, we hook up. You know? No strings, just get together for old times’ sake.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s not like I’m going to get pregnant or anything with the guy shooting blanks.”

“How often do you see him?”

She shrugged. “Every few months. Maybe, if it’s been a long time for either one of us, someone gets an itch that needs scratching, we kind of send out a little email, you know, like, what’s doing?”

“When was the last time?”

“Maybe eight, ten months ago. It’s been a while. And the last time before that was way more than a year ago, for a few days.”

“He came here?” I asked.

“His wife wouldn’t exactly be crazy about it if I went and stayed with him at their place.”

“Ronald stayed here for a while? More than a year ago?”

“He had a blowout with his missus, needed a place to camp out for a while. So I shipped Patty off to stay with my sister in Hartford for a bit so I could have some peace and quiet. Seemed like a good time for a bit of a reunion with Ronald.”

“He slept in your room?”

She looked at me and said, “Duh.”

“I’m just asking because he’d have been in the same room with this file.”

She shook her head. “You’re wrong.”

“I’m not accusing him of anything,” I said. “I’m just saying it’s possible. He might have gone looking through your things, looking for something else-”

“What, a pair of my panties to try on?”

“I was thinking more like money. And instead, he came across that envelope. Maybe he’d have thought there was money in it, looked inside, found something else.”

“Anyway,” she said dismissively, “it’s not like it would be a huge shocker, even if he had looked inside. He already knew he wasn’t Patty’s father.”