“The one on our street? The one Bob doesn’t think is a big deal?”
I knew what van she meant the first time, but I was having a hard time keeping track of the conversation while I watched the girl.
“When did you see it?” I managed to ask.
“Tonight. A couple of hours ago. After it got dark, I happened to look outside and saw a van parked a few houses down, and when I went out and walked down to the end of the driveway it started up and backed up to the corner and took off.”
A boy—a young man—was approaching the shelter from the right. He came up to the door, and the girl threw her arms around him, kissed him. He had his back to me, and all I could really see of the girl was the top of her head and her arms.
“Susanne…”
“It’s freaking me out. Bob says I’m getting paranoid about everything because of Syd. Why the fuck wouldn’t I be?”
The girl stepped out from the entrance, into the streetlight, but the way she had her arms wrapped around the boy, her head tucked down onto his chest, I couldn’t see her face. But my gut said it wasn’t her. There was something not quite Syd about her. This girl’s legs, they seemed a little shorter.
They started walking up the street. In another moment, they’d be gone.
“So I’m thinking, is someone watching our house? Or one of the other houses on the street? If it’s our house, are they watching me, or are they watching Bob? Or has this got something to do with Evan?”
Then the girl leaned her head back, tossed her hair back over her shoulder.
I’d seen Syd do that a thousand times.
“Susanne, I have to go for a second. Hang on.”
“What? Why—”
I bolted from the diner, leaving my bag behind, my phone on the table. I threw open the door and ran into the street, forcing drivers coming from both directions to hit the brakes. Horns blew, someone shouted, “Asshole!”
They were forty yards ahead, thirty, twenty. Arm in arm. She had an arm around his waist, her thumb in a belt loop.
“Syd!” I shouted. “Syd!”
Before the girl had a chance to turn around, I was on them, grabbing her by her free arm, using it to swing myself around in front of her.
“Syd!” I said.
It wasn’t Syd.
The girl jerked her arm back as her boyfriend shoved me away forcefully with both hands. I stumbled back, tripped over my own feet, landed on my ass on the sidewalk, my head narrowly missing a brick wall behind me.
“Fuck’s your problem?” he said, grabbing the girl and taking her across the street.
THIRTEEN
THE NEXT MORNING, I DEBATED RENTING A CAR, but Seattle isn’t exactly laid out like New York. I wanted to hit as many teen shelters as possible, and didn’t want to waste time attempting to navigate the city’s winding streets, so I talked to a cabby out front of the hotel and cut a deal to have him take me from shelter to shelter, and wait while I was at each one, for $200.
“That’ll take you to noon,” he said.
“We’ll see where we are then,” I said. “Let me go find a cash machine.”
The hotel—not a Holiday Inn, not even close—at least had a computer in the lobby I could use, and I went online to get a list of local shelters. The desk clerk said the printer was busted, so I had to write down names, addresses, and phone numbers on a pad I’d found next to the phone in my room.
I handed the sheet, and the cash, to the cabby and said, “Let’s hit the closest first and work our way out to the others.”
“You don’t have to worry about me running you all over the place. You’ve already paid me, the meter’s off, and with gas costing what it is, we’re doing the shortest route possible.”
“Great.”
He delivered me to all the shelters on my list by half past eleven. It was the same story everywhere. I showed them Syd’s picture, left them some flyers with my cell phone number on them. I stopped kids at random, pushed the photo under their noses.
No one recognized Syd.
Nor had anyone heard of Yolanda Mills. Every place I stopped I asked for her, too.
After the last shelter, I dropped into the back seat of the taxi. “You know of any other places that aren’t on this list?” I asked.
“I didn’t even know there were this many,” the cabby said, turning in his seat to look at me. The Jesus bobblehead stuck to his dash, which had been bouncing madly during our drive around Seattle, had had a chance to calm down. My driver was heavyset, hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, and spent most of the time as we wandered the city talking on his cell phone to his wife about what they could do to find somebody to marry his sister. She was, from what I could tell, unlikely to be named Miss Washington in the near future, and this was a major stumbling block.
“All right,” I said, dejected. “Is there a main police headquarters?”
“Sure.”
“Drop me off there and that’ll be it,” I said.