Linwood Barclay - Fear The Worst

Something Jennings had told me shortly after Bob and I started heading up from Milford came into my head.

“Patty,” I said. “This call you got from Sydney. Telling you she was up here. You got that when?”

“Yesterday,” she said.

“Was that the first call?”

“Huh?”

“Was that the first time she called you? Yesterday?”

“Yeah, of course,” she said.

“Because the police, they’ve been looking for you for the last couple of days, and they were checking your cell records.”

“Yeah…”

“And they said there were other calls from Stowe. Much earlier ones.”

“That’s crazy,” she said. “They must have that wrong.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” she insisted.

“Did Sydney call you before? Has she been keeping in touch with you? You haven’t known all along where she’s been, have you?”

She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Not for a second, anyway. “What?” she said. “Are you crazy?”

“I’m just trying to figure it all out,” I said. “And I can’t figure out why Sydney would call you to come and get her. Why wouldn’t she have called me, or her mother?”

“I don’t know!” she shouted. “I don’t know! Shit!”

“Patty, what’s going on? I need you to be honest with me. I need you to tell me what’s going on.”

“Honest?” she said. “You want honest? I’ll give you honest. My whole life has been one long fucking joke. It’s been shit, that’s what it’s been.”

“Patty.”

“And you know why? You know whose fault it is?”

“Patty, this isn’t the time. We have to find out where-”

“It’s my fucking parents’ fault, for sure, but you know who else? Huh? You know who else? You . That’s who. That’s who’s fucked up my entire life. You.”

“Patty,” I said again.

“Because you’re the reason I’m here,” she said. “You’re the reason I exist .”

I let that one hang out there a minute before I said, “I know.”

“What?”

“I know. I saw your mother. I know about the file. You found the file, didn’t you? The detective’s report.”

She stared at me, stone-faced. “Yeah. I saw it.”

“You’re my daughter,” I said.

“Yeah,” she repeated. “Big whoop.”

“You should have told me. When you met Sydney, when you came to our house, you must have figured it out.”

“I knew before,” she whispered. “That’s why I got to know her, kind of snuck into that math class. Because I wanted to get to know you . I wanted to know who my real father was. And now I know. I found out the other night. I saw the real you. When you told me you had one daughter and that was enough.”

“Patty, I didn’t know. If I’d known-”

“If you’d known, what? What would you have done? You’d have freaked out, that’s what you would have done. And listen, don’t even worry yourself about it. Because I really don’t have any father, okay? All you are is just some guy who had it off with a cup.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You make decisions when you’re young, you never think about the ramifications of-”

“Oh, fuck off,” she said. But while she sounded angry, I could see, in the limited light, that she was crying.

“Patty,” I said, “when did Sydney first call you?”

She wouldn’t look at me.

“How long have you known she was up here? What did you tell her? Why have you been keeping-”

My cell phone rang.

“Yeah?”

“Tim? It’s Bob. I’ve got her. I’ve got Syd.”

I HEARD THE PHONE BEING RUSTLED. “Daddy?” Sydney said. “Daddy?”

“Syd!” I said while Patty watched me. “Oh my God, Syd, I can’t believe it’s you! Are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m okay!”

“How did Bob find you?”

“I found him!”

“What?”

“I’ve been hiding out all over town for hours after I got spotted at the inn. So I saw this car drive by, and the window was down, and I was sure it was Bob, so I phoned him!”

“That’s great, honey! That’s fantastic!” I brought my voice down a touch. “They’re still around. There’s some car prowling around with its headlights off.”

“I know, I know,” she said. “Did you find Patty? Bob said Patty left me a note?”

“I’m with her right now.”

“Oh thank God,” Sydney said. “Is she okay?”

I smiled at Patty, who seemed to be studying my facial reactions. “She’s good. She’s okay.”

“Patty’s been so great,” Sydney said. “Right from the beginning. I mean, it’s been awful, hiding out like this, but at least you knew I was okay.”

I looked at Patty. I wasn’t sure whether she could hear Sydney’s voice coming out of the cell. I turned slightly away. “What’s that, hon?”

“Whenever I called Patty, she kept me posted on everything. How the people from the hotel were watching you and Mom, about the fake website you got Jeff to set up to make them think you really didn’t know where I was. How the hotel people had our phones all tapped and were listening in on everything. Patty said as soon as it was safe to call you, and come back, she’d let me know. I can’t believe it’s finally over.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I can’t believe it, either.” Patty tried to inch closer to me, wanting to hear what Sydney was saying. I said, “You’ve been up here the whole time?”

“Pretty much,” she said. She was trying to hold off crying, but she was unable to stop her voice from shaking. “The first day, after it happened… Oh God, Dad, I swear I didn’t mean to shoot that man. I was walking down the hall and this girl was screaming, and when I used the passkey to go into the room, this man, he was doing these awful things to one of the Chinese women who worked there, he had her tied down and-”

“It’s okay, honey.”

“And I started to scream, and then this guy got off the bed and started coming after me. That’s when I saw the gun sitting on the dresser, so I grabbed it, and-”

“It’s okay. You can tell me all this later.”

Full-out crying now. “I shot him. I couldn’t believe I’d done it. Then Carter and some of the others came in, and I was freaking out, you know?”

“I know, I know.”

“I told them we had to call the police. I knew I had to call them. But then they all started freaking out, too. Said we couldn’t call the police. Said they couldn’t find out what was happening.”

“Okay,” I said. “And then what?”

“So they took my cell, and they left me in the room with the dead man and Owen was standing outside the door so I couldn’t get away, and they ripped out the wall phone so I couldn’t call anybody. I was so scared, and I couldn’t think what to do, and I knew Patty was coming over, because we were going to hit the mall real quick when I finished work. So I thought, maybe that dead man had a phone on him, and I reached into his jacket, and oh, Daddy, I got his blood all over my hands-”

“It’s okay,” I said softly.

“And I called Patty with his phone and told her I was in trouble.”

I looked at Patty. She wasn’t making eye contact.

“So Patty, she had this idea. She snuck into the hotel, pulled the fire alarm, snuck back out, and then I guess everybody was running around, and then she ran around to the window of the room I was in-it was on the first floor. I slid it open, it only went about a foot, and there was a screen, and Patty kicked out the screen, but I couldn’t squeeze through, so Patty grabbed my arm and pulled and pulled and it just about killed me but she got me out.” Syd took a moment to catch her breath. “But she told you all this, right?”