“Hey, did I ask you that?”
THE BAG I’D PACKED FOR THE TRIP TO SEATTLE was back in my car. I’d walked into the house with it but, after discovering the state my place was in, never unpacked. And now that Kip Jennings wasn’t going to let me sleep in my own house that night, I’d hung on to the bag.
I went into the mall and had a slice of pepperoni pizza in the food court. I watched all the young people walking by. Tried to catch the faces of all the teenage girls.
You never stopped looking.
Then I got back in the car and drove over to the Just Inn Time. Carter and Owen, the two men who’d been on the front desk the night I’d come in trying to find Syd, were on once again.
I walked up to the counter and said, “I’d like a room.”
SIXTEEN
AND THAT’S JUST WHAT IT WAS.
A room. A generic, nondescript, plain room. A patternless blue spread covered the double bed in the center. Dull white shades covered the lamps flanking the bed. The bedroom walls were beige, much like the bathroom and the towels and the halls and everything else in this budget-minded hotel.
But that said, it was also clean and well kept. The bathroom came equipped with soap and shampoo and a hair dryer. The closet had one of those mini-safes you can program with a four-digit code, suitable for holding a passport, a video camera, and a few thousand in unmarked bills.
The hotel hadn’t yet moved to fancy flat-screen, wall-mounted TVs. And while the bulky set sitting atop the dresser seemed to be from a couple of decades ago, you could still order up movies—including ones with titles like She’ll Be Cummin’ Round the Mountain When She Cums—if you were so inclined.
I flipped through the channels, left Dr. Phil on in the background to exploit some miserable family stupid enough to air their dirty laundry for the entertainment pleasure of millions, and looked out the second-floor window. I don’t know what I was expecting, exactly. Maybe I thought staring at the Howard Johnson restaurant and hotel off in the distance, the cars and trucks whizzing past on I-95, would somehow provide a clue as to where Syd had gone after I’d dropped her off out front of the Just Inn Time.
It didn’t.
Watching those hundreds of cars and trucks and SUVs racing by, I couldn’t help thinking that if you were in one of those vehicles, in a few short hours you could be anywhere in New England. Boston or Providence, up to Maine. Maybe Vermont or New Hampshire. You could head west and north, be up in Albany in under three hours. Or closer to home, but harder to find, in Manhattan.
And that would just be the same day you got in one of those cars. By now, weeks later, a person could be almost anywhere.
If that person was alive.
I’d been trying very hard, since the moment she’d gone missing, not to let my mind go there. As long as there was no definitive evidence that harm had come to her, I had to believe she was fine. Lost—at least to Susanne and me—but okay.
The image of that blood on Syd’s Civic, though, was a hard thing to get out of my head.
And there was an audio loop running through my head. It had been playing for weeks, always below the surface, like a hum, like background noise.
The loop was made up of questions that I kept asking over and over again.
Where are you?
Are you okay?
What happened?
Why did you run?
What scared you?
Why won’t you get in touch?
Did you leave because I asked about the sunglasses, and then something happened that kept you from coming back?
Why can’t you just let me know you’re okay?
So around nine o’clock, a time of day when, as I’ve gotten older, I’m often ready to nod off, I wasn’t the slightest bit tired.
I went through the motions anyway. I unzipped the bag I’d taken to Seattle, and there was Milt the stuffed moose looking up at me.
“Oh shit,” I said, feeling slightly overwhelmed. I took him out and set him on one of the pillows.
I took my cell phone from my jacket and set it by the bed. I brushed my teeth, stripped down to my boxers, threw back the covers, and got into the bed. I channel-surfed for another ten minutes, then hit the light.
Stared at the ceiling for half an hour or so.
Light from Route 1—passing cars and trucks, the neon glow of the commercial strip—was flooding into the room. I thought maybe pulling together the drapes more tightly would block out the light and help me get to sleep.
I got out of the bed, padded across the industrial carpet, and grabbed one of the drapery wands. But before giving them a pull, I gazed out over this part of Milford. Traffic was thinning, except on the interstate, where it always seemed to be busy. Cars always appeared to be moving so slowly when viewed from some height.