“Because… I gave her the tip to work for the hotel. I put her in touch with somebody.”
I thought about what Andy had told me, about finding Gary and Patty meeting over a milk shake.
“You knew Gary,” I said. “Andy saw you together.”
Now she looked at me. She was puzzled. “Knew?”
“Gary’s dead,” I said.
“Dead?” Patty said.
“How did you know Gary?”
“I did some work for him. Couple of places I worked.”
“Stealing data off credit cards?”
“It was no big thing.” She looked away. “But I knew, if Sydney came back, and told everybody everything, it’d come back on me. How Syd got the job, that I knew Gary, that I used to rip off numbers for him. I’d be in deep shit.”
“Patty, Patty, Patty,” I said softly, thinking of all the anguish she’d put me, and so many others, through the last few weeks. “Didn’t Gary, and the others at the hotel, didn’t they think you’d know where Sydney was? Because you were friends?”
“They didn’t know we were that close. I mean, they came to see me, right? I wasn’t going to tell them where Sydney was, but I had to give them something, so I told them they should watch your house and Sydney’s mom’s place, but so what? I knew Sydney wasn’t going to show up, because she was listening to me. She’d call me every few days and I’d tell her to keep laying low, right? And come on, let’s face it, she’s been safe all this time, right?”
I heard a car pull up, a door open and close.
“But you still could have told me,” I said. “It didn’t make any sense to trick Sydney into staying away.”
“The thing is…”
“What?”
She bit her lower lip. Then, “I liked it that she was gone.”
I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the night air. I thought of all the times Patty, since Syd’s disappearance, had dropped by to see me. Showed up with dinner. Popped into the dealership.
Patty wanted to take Sydney’s place. She could be my daughter if Sydney didn’t come back.
Then why had Patty finally decided, in the end, to come to Stowe to bring Sydney back?
Unless that hadn’t been the plan at all.
That’s when I realized that someone was standing on the covered walkway only a few steps away. I’d been so focused on Patty, trying to figure out what she’d done, that I’d failed to notice we were no longer alone.
I whirled around. There was a woman standing there. She was holding a gun, and it was pointed at me.
It was Veronica Harp.
FORTY-SIX
“YOU LITTLE BITCH,” VERONICA SAID TO PATTY. “You mean you knew where she was all along? You waited until yesterday to tell us? You couldn’t have mentioned this a couple of weeks ago?”
So, there it was.
Patty had led Veronica here. To get Sydney. I could guess when she’d decided to make her betrayal of Sydney complete. After I’d told her I had one daughter, and didn’t need another.
“He has a gun,” Patty told Veronica.
Great.
Veronica, keeping her weapon trained on me, said, “Take it out slowly and toss it over the railing.”
I reached behind me, pulled the Ruger from behind my belt, and did as I was told. A second later we heard it splash into the creek.
“Do your Yolanda Mills voice for me,” I said to Veronica. She held back a smile. “Emailing me that picture was what really clinched it.”
“That was a bit of luck,” Veronica said. “I really was trying to figure out how to take pictures with my phone. I’m not very technical, you know, but I want to be able to take lots of shots of my grandson, and I don’t want to have to carry a camera around if the phone will do the trick. So I was fiddling with it up in the hall when Sydney walked by. Who knew it would come in handy later?” To Patty she said, “You told me you hardly knew this Sydney kid. You’re friends?”
More than that, I thought.
“I didn’t want something to happen to her,” Patty said. “Then.”
Veronica sighed. “Working with children, I swear.”
I said, “I don’t get it.”
“You don’t get what?”
“How does someone like you, a goddamn grandmother, sleep at night doing what you do? Bringing people into the country, farming them out as slave labor. Taking all their rights away. Turning them into prostitutes and God knows what else.”
Veronica became indignant. “They get lots of good jobs. Nannies, hotel work, restaurants, construction. Let me tell you something. They’ve got it a lot better here than they did back in the countries they came from. You see any of them trying to go home?”
“Would you let them? What do they pay you to come here? What kind of horseshit stories do you tell them to convince them they’re going to have a better life when they get here?”
Veronica had nothing more to say. When it was clear she wasn’t interested in debating with me any longer, I said to Patty, “You know she’s going to have to kill Sydney. And me. And Bob.”
Patty said nothing.