Linwood Barclay - Fear The Worst

“You see?” Bob said. “Everything’s okay.”

The rest of the way, I held the Mustang to just a few miles per hour over the limit. It seemed safer that way.

THERE WAS A LONG STRETCH AFTER THAT where neither of us said much of anything. I finished my Mars bar, even drank the bad-now cold-coffee Bob had bought. When there was nothing to do but stare at the road up ahead and fall into a trance watching the dotted lines zip past, I had time to think.

About Syd’s disappearance. Gary and Carter and Owen. Andy Hertz.

And while Syd was always there right in front, I also couldn’t stop thinking about Patty. The girl I now knew to be my biological daughter. And within minutes of learning the truth about my connection to her, came the news that I had lost her.

It was a lot to take in.

Bob would never have been my first choice of someone to open up to. But at that moment, he happened to be the only one available.

I said, “What would you do if you found out there was a child out there who was yours, a grown-up kid, and you’d never known about this person before?”

Bob glanced over nervously. “What have you heard?”

“I’m not talking about you,” I said. “I’m just saying. How would you handle that? Finding out there was this person and you were the father?”

“I don’t know. I guess that would kind of blow my mind,” he said.

“And then,” I said, slowly, “what if, right after you learned this, you found out that something had happened to this kid. And any kind of connection you might have wanted to make, you’d never be able to do that?”

“What happened?” Bob said. “To this supposed imaginary kid?”

“She died,” I said.

I could feel Bob looking at me. “What are we talking about here, Tim? You’re not talking about Evan and Sydney, and anything that might or might not have happened there, are you?”

“No,” I said.

“So what, then?”

I shook my head. I had to blink a few times to keep the road in focus. “Nothing,” I said. “Forget I said anything about it.”

WE HEADED NORTH at the Waterbury exit, past the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream factory on the left. There were hardly any cars on the road. It was, after all, coming up on three in the morning.

The road wound leisurely up and over graceful hills, through wooded areas and clearings. A couple of times, the headlamps caught the eyes of night creatures-raccoons, most likely-at the edge of the road, starry pinpoints of light.

About fifteen minutes after we got off the interstate the road curved down and to the right, taking us into the center of Stowe. Colonial-looking homes and businesses crowded up to the sides of the road. We came to a stop, a T intersection. There was an inn on the right, a church and what appeared to be a government building just up ahead and to the left. Turning left would take us over a short bridge, with a pedestrian walkway on the right side modeled after a covered bridge.

“Where the hell do we start?” Bob asked.

A cell phone went off. I grabbed mine out of my jacket, but it wasn’t the one ringing.

“Oh,” said Bob, and fished out his own phone. “Yeah?…We just got here, just pulled into town a few minutes ago… Yeah, we’re okay, although we nearly got pulled over, Jesus… Uh-huh… Okay. Okay. Did Evan know any more than that?… Okay, okay, great… Okay, yeah, of course we’ll be careful… Okay. Bye.”

“What?” I asked as he put the phone away. I noticed, at the gas station on the corner, a pay phone. I wondered whether any of the calls made to Patty’s cell had come from it.

“Susanne talked to Evan, and then he tried to find this kid he knew, name of Stewart. He just found him, woke him up. Stewart said yeah, he used to work up here at a motel or inn or something.”

“What was the name of it?” I asked.

“The Mountain Shade,” Bob said. “Stewart said it was a good job, because they paid in cash.”

This underground economy was everywhere.

“Did Stewart know Sydney?” I asked. “Did he ever tell her about the place?”

“Evan says yeah. A few months ago, they ran into each other at a Starbucks or something, and Sydney was asking about it. I guess this was before she found something else to do for the summer.”

I thought about that. If Syd was on the run and knew she’d have to support herself while things got themselves sorted out, it would be the perfect job for her. A place where she could make some money and stay below the radar.

“So where the hell is this place?” I asked.

There weren’t exactly a lot of tourist information places open this time of night. The gas station was closed as well. I went straight ahead, but in less than a mile we were driving out of Stowe, so I turned around and came back to the T intersection, turning right onto Mountain Road and across the bridge with the covered walkway.

This route was filled with places to stay. I scanned to the left as Bob read off the names of places on the right.

“Partridge Inn… Town and Country… Stoweflake…”

“Up there,” I said. “You see the sign, just past the pizza place?”

“Mountain Shade,” Bob said. “Son of a bitch.”

I pulled into the lot, the tires crunching on the gravel. As I reached for the handle to open the door, Bob said, “Hey, you want this?”

He had a Ruger in each hand and held one out to me. “Which one is this?” I asked. “The one with one bullet, or three?”

He glanced down at one, then the other. “Fuck.”

I took the gun from him. Once we were out of the car, I tried to figure out what to do with it.

“It won’t fit in my jacket pocket,” I said.

“Try this,” Bob said, turning to the side and demonstrating how he could tuck the barrel of the gun into the waistband of his pants at the back.

“You’ll shoot your ass off,” I said.

“That’s how it’s done,” he said. “Then you hang your jacket over it, no one knows it’s there. It’s better than tucking it in the front of your pants. If it shoots off by mistake there, you got a lot more to lose.”

So, nervously, I tucked the gun into the back of my pants. It felt, to say the least, intrusive.

The night air was so still that when we closed the doors the sound echoed. There was a light over the office door, but no light on inside.

“What are we going to do?” Bob asked.

“We’re going to have to wake some people up,” I said.

I banged on the office door. I was hoping that whoever ran the joint had quarters adjoining the office and would hear the ruckus. You ran a place like this, you had to be prepared for the unexpected. A burst pipe. A guest with a heart attack.

I waited a few seconds after the first round of knocking, then started up again. Somewhere down a hallway a light came on.

“Here we go,” I said. “Someone’s coming.”

A shadowy figure started trudging down the hall, flipped the office light on, and came to the door. It was a man in his sixties, gray hair tousled, still drawing together the sash on his striped bathrobe.

“We’re closed!” he shouted through the glass.

I banged again.

“Goddamn it,” he said. He unlocked the office door, swung it open a foot, and said, “Do you know what time it is?”

“We’re really sorry,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Bob.

“I’m Tim Blake, this is Bob Janigan, and we’re trying to find my daughter.”

“What?” said the manager.

“My daughter,” I said. “We think it’s possible she might be working here, and it’s very important we find her.”

“Family emergency,” Bob chimed in.

The manager shook his head. The gesture seemed designed to wake himself up as much as to display annoyance. “What the hell’s her name?”