Linwood Barclay - Fear The Worst

But she wasn’t raising a hand to me. She had both arms extended, cane dangling, and there were tears running down her cheeks. She fell into me, slipped her arms around me as Bob watched.

“What is it, Suze?” I asked. “What’s going on?”

“Something’s happened,” she said.

“WHAT?” I ASKED HER. “What’s happened?”

Bob Janigan stepped forward, caught my eye, and said, “It’s nothing really. I told her not to-”

I held up a hand. I wasn’t interested in what Bob had to say, at least not yet. “What’s happened?” I asked Susanne again. “You’ve heard from Syd? Has she gotten in touch? Is she okay?”

Susanne pulled away from me and shook her head. This is it , I told myself. Susanne’s heard something. She’s heard something bad.

“No,” she said. “I haven’t heard anything.”

“What is it, then?”

“We’re being watched,” she said. I glanced at Bob, who shook his head back and forth in small increments.

“Who’s watching you? Where? When did this happen?”

“A few times,” she said. “They’re in a van. Watching the house.”

I looked at Bob again. “Your house or Susanne’s house?”

“Mine,” he said, clearing his throat. Susanne’s house was sitting empty, and I knew she was on the verge of putting it on the market, waiting to see how things worked out with Bob. The three of us checked the house regularly, on the chance Syd might be hiding out there, but there was no evidence she’d as much as popped in.

Bob said, “Suze thinks some guy’s been keeping an eye on the place.”

Even in the midst of all that we were dealing with, it rankled that Bob used the same diminutive for Susanne I always had. Would it kill him to call her Sue, or Susie? But I tried to stay focused.

“What guy?” I asked. “Who is it?”

“I don’t know,” Susanne said. “I couldn’t get a look at him. It was night, and the windows were tinted. Why would someone be watching us?”

“Have you seen him?” I asked Bob.

He let out a long sigh. He’s a tall guy, better-looking in person than in his commercials, where he goes for an “everyman” kind of look in khakis and short sleeves and slicked-back hair. But in person, he’s all designer. Little polo players stitched to his shirts, perfectly creased slacks, expensive loafers without socks. If it were a little cooler, he’d have a sweater tied around his neck, yuppie-style.

“I’ve seen a van,” he admitted. “But it was halfway down the block. It’s been there two, maybe three times over the last couple of weeks. I think there’s usually been someone in it, but it’s kind of hard to tell.”

“What kind of van?” I asked.

“Chrysler, probably,” he said. “An older one.”

I wondered if it could be cops. You normally expected to see them in a Crown Vic or an Impala, but cops working undercover could easily be in a van.

“You think it was watching the house?” I asked him. A van parked halfway down the block didn’t have to mean anything.

“You have to understand,” Bob said, “we’ve all been under a lot of stress lately. This thing with Sydney, it’s taking its toll.”

This thing with Sydney. He made it sound like we were having a stretch of bad weather. Hope this thing with Sydney passes soon so we can put the top down on the car.

“I’m sure it’s been very hard on you,” I said to him.

He gave me a look. “Don’t start, Tim. I’m trying to help here. And all I’m saying is, everybody’s radar’s on high alert. Every time a girl goes by, we’re looking to see if it’s Sydney. We hear a car pull into the driveway, we rush to see if it’s her being brought home by the police. So Suze-both of us-we’re looking at the world different, you know what I’m saying? So we see a car parked on the street, we just wonder what’s going on.”

“He was smoking,” Susanne said, her voice sounding very tired. “It was like a little orange dot behind the steering wheel every time he took a drag on the cigarette.”

“Did you call the police?” I asked.

“And say what?” said Bob, even though he wasn’t the one I was asking. “ ‘Officer, there’s a van parked perfectly legally down the street. Could you check it out?’”

“I wonder if it has to do with Sydney,” Susanne said, taking a tissue out of the sleeve of her pullover top and dabbing at her eyes.

“First of all,” I said, “you don’t know that it has anything to do with Sydney or you or anyone at all. Bob might actually be right about this. We’re all under a terrible strain. You look like you haven’t slept for weeks-”

“Thanks a lot,” she said.

I tried to backtrack. “Neither of us has been getting the sleep we need. You get so tired you lose perspective, you start misinterpreting things people say to you, misconstruing their meaning.”

“That’s right,” Bob said to Susanne.

“I just want you to take me seriously about this,” Susanne said to me.

“I am,” I said.

“I didn’t belittle your concerns, years ago,” she said.

“What?”

“You remember,” she said. “When you thought someone was going around asking questions about you?”

I hadn’t thought about that in a very long time. It had to have been ten, twelve years ago. The feeling that someone was looking into my background. A couple of people I knew said they’d had a call from someone, said I’d given them as a reference. What did they know about me? Was I reliable? As though I’d been applying for an apartment or a new job, except I wasn’t applying for either of those things.

And then it stopped, and I never heard another thing.

“I remember,” I said. “And I’m not belittling your concerns. If you think someone’s watching the house, I believe you.”

“That’s not all,” she said. “Things have been disappearing. Bob bought me a Longines watch, and I don’t know what happened to it. I’m sure-”

Bob said, “Honey, you just misplaced it, I’m sure.”

“And what about the money?” she asked him. “That cash? It was nearly a hundred dollars.” She looked at me. “In my purse.”

“Has there been a break-in?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But something’s going on.”

The back door on the Hummer’s driver’s side opened. I hadn’t realized anyone else was in the car. Evan-Bob had been married twice before, and if I’d ever known which wife he made this kid with I’d since forgotten-slithered out of the back seat like a piece of boneless chicken.

“Could you like turn on the car so I could put the AC on?” he asked. He had a handful of scratch-and-win lottery tickets-what Sydney and I call “scratch-and-lose” tickets-with panels already rubbed off. He had a penny pinched between the thumb and index finger of his other hand. “It’s roasting in there.”

“In a sec, Evan,” his father said. I’d only met Evan three or four times-just once since Syd had disappeared-and I don’t think he’d said more than ten words to me on all those occasions put together. Nineteen, out of high school-I didn’t know whether he’d left with a diploma or not-and not planning to go anywhere in the fall, so far as I knew. Since Bob had brought him into Susanne’s house, he’d been doing little more than hanging around there and a few odd jobs on one of Bob’s lots. He was tall like his father, with dark locks of hair hanging sheepdog-like over his eyes.

“Are we getting some food on the way back?” he asked. He hadn’t even looked at me.

“Hold on, for Christ’s sake,” Bob said, rolling his eyes, and for a moment there, you had to wonder whether he was thinking the wrong kid went missing.