“Someone’s seen her,” I said, feeling overcome. “Someone’s seen Syd.”
Kate closed the distance between us, pulled my head to her breasts, and held me while I tried to pull it together.
“Where?” Kate asked. “Where is she?”
I pulled away and pointed to my screen. “This woman in Seattle. She works at a drop-in shelter. Some place, I guess, where runaways can go.”
“Seattle?” Kate asked. “What would Syd be doing in Seattle?”
“I don’t know and right now I don’t care,” I said. “Just so long as I know where she is, I can go get her and bring her home.”
“Have you got a number? Call this woman. It’s what, three hours earlier out there? She might even still be at work.”
“She didn’t send me a phone number,” I said. “I just wrote her back, asked her for one.”
“How about the shelter? Did she say what it was called?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t know why the hell she couldn’t have been a bit more specific.”
“What’s her name?”
I glanced back at the screen. “Yolanda Mills.”
“Shove a bum,” Kate said, motioning for me to get out of the computer chair. I stood while she sat down. “We go to the online white pages, find her, call her.”
Kate tapped away on the keyboard, went to a site with some empty fields where she entered the woman’s first and last name and the city where she lived. “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got…. We got nothing yet. There are Y. Millses but none of them Yolanda.”
“So maybe she’s married and the phone number is listed under her husband’s name. Her last name might still be Mills.”
“Let me see how many Millses there are.” Kate whistled under her breath. “Okay, there’s like more than two hundred of them.”
I put a hand on the edge of the computer table to steady myself. Blood was pulsing in my ears.
“We could wait for this woman to get back to you, or we could just start calling all of them.”
“Maybe we can narrow it down another way,” I said. “Do a search on teenage drop-in shelters in Seattle.”
Kate’s fingers danced across the keyboard. “Holy shit,” she said. “There’s all kinds of them. Not as many shelters as there are Millses in the Seattle directory, but there’s quite a few. Hang on, I think I can narrow it down. Some are men’s shelters, so we can skip those…. Let me see. Okay, look here.” She pointed to the screen. There were half a dozen listings for Seattle-area shelters aimed at youths.
I grabbed a pen and a pad and scribbled down web addresses. “I’ll grab Syd’s laptop and work on these downstairs. I’ll use my cell, and you can use the landline for some of the women’s shelters. She might be attached to one of those, for all we know.”
“I’m on it,” Kate said. She snatched the receiver off the cradle and punched in a number as I ran downstairs, grabbing my daughter’s laptop on the way. The house was equipped for wireless, so I could use Syd’s computer anywhere. I found my cell in the pocket of my jacket, which was hanging over a kitchen chair, and dialed the first of the five numbers that came up on the screen once I had the laptop up and running.
“Refuge Place,” a woman answered.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m trying to get hold of Yolanda Mills. I think she might work at your shelter.”
“Sorry,” she said. “No one here by that name.”
“Okay, thanks,” I said, ended the call, waited a beat, and then dialed the second number. Upstairs, I could hear Kate murmuring on the phone.
“Hope,” a man said.
“Is this the shelter?” I asked.
“Yeah, Hope Shelter.”
“I’m calling for Yolanda Mills.”
“What’s that name again?” he asked.
I repeated it. “I think she may be an employee there.”
“I know everyone here,” he said. “We got no one by that name.”
I thanked him and hit End.
“How’s it going?” Kate shouted from upstairs.
“Nothing yet,” I said. “You?”
“Ditto.”
There were two plates of shrimp fried rice, chow mein, sweet and sour chicken, and egg rolls on the counter, but I wasn’t hungry. I had next to nothing in my stomach and already felt like I was going to lose what was there.
I tried the next two numbers, struck out with both. I was just entering the last of the five I’d jotted down when Kate shrieked, “Tim!”
I flipped my phone shut and bolted up the stairs two steps at a time. “You got somebody?” I said breathlessly as I came into the computer room.
“You have mail,” she said, hopping out of the chair and letting me sit down.
It was Yolanda Mills. Her reply read: