Or worse.
The covers were pulled high enough to hide everything but a few locks of blonde hair. Despite all the ruckus, she still hadn’t moved.
Oh dear God…
“Syd,” I said. “Syd?”
I sat on the edge of the bed and was about to pull down the covers when I sensed Ian coming through the door. I turned and pointed and fixed my eyes on him with such fury that he stopped.
“You make one move and I swear I’ll fucking kill you,” I said, barely able to get the words out I was panting so hard. Sweat was dripping off my brow, my shirt was plastered to me.
I pulled the covers back down to the girl’s shoulders. Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong. Her skin looked rubbery, had an odd sheen to it.
“What the fuck?”
This girl was not Syd.
This girl was not a girl.
She was a doll.
EIGHTEEN
I TURNED AROUND AND LOOKED AT IAN, who stood in the doorway staring at me, his face flushed from our grappling and, I suspected, embarrassment.
“Just get out of here,” he said quietly. There was a bruise coming up on his cheek.
“I thought… I thought she… I thought it was my daughter.”
Ian just stared at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “When I saw you…”
“You were spying on me?”
“I saw you carry something in from your van.”
I put my hand around the doll’s arm, raised it up to get a sense of its weight. No wonder it was so easy for Ian to carry it in here. It couldn’t have weighed much more than ten or twenty pounds. The inside of the arm felt like pillow stuffing.
I got off the bed and moved past Ian into the main room.
“You bought that next door?” I said.
Ian nodded. His nearly naked body seemed to have caved in on itself. Instead of seeming menacing, he now bordered on pitiful. “Please don’t tell my aunt,” he said.
I lowered my head, shook it regretfully. “Yeah, sure. I’m sorry.” Then I remembered the command I’d shouted out to Carter as I’d run out of the Just Inn Time. We could probably expect to see the police here any moment.
I said to Ian, “You keep… it… here?”
Ian shook his head. “My aunt’s in here all the time, cleaning up, making me things to eat. I got a storage unit in Bridgeport where my family’s stuff is. I keep her there and bring her over sometimes, then take her back before my aunt gets here in the morning. Sometimes, we just go for a drive, maybe park down by the harbor for a while and listen to the radio and stuff.”
I didn’t want to think about the stuff.
I ran my hand through my hair. Now I understood why Ian had been so odd when I’d spoken to him before. It was because he was, well, odd.
“Listen, Ian,” I said. “The police are probably going to be here any minute.”
“Oh shit no. That can’t happen.”
I felt a bit the same way. Ian, once he recovered from the inevitable mortification, would have every right to charge me with breaking into his apartment. He could have me charged with assault. I was a regular home invader.
“I don’t want the police here,” he said. “It’s not just… her.”
“What?”
“I’ve got weed here, too.”
“Okay, look, I’m just going to go,” I said. “When the cops show up, I’ll tell them I thought I saw my daughter hitchhiking or something.”
Ian, despite all I’d done, managed to mutter, “Thanks.”
I left without saying anything else. I was expecting to see police cars screaming into the lot out front of the florist shop and XXX Delights, but there was nothing going on. I jogged back to the Just Inn Time, spotting along the way one police car driving up Route 1 at a regular rate of speed. It drove past the Howard Johnson’s and kept on going.
When I walked back into the lobby of my hotel, Carter came out from behind the desk and said, “What’s happened, Mr. Blake?”
“Did you call the police?”
“Not yet,” he said. “You ran out of here and didn’t say where you were going or what you’d seen. What was I supposed to tell the cops?”
Ordinarily, I’d have been pissed, but not this time. “No harm done. It was my mistake,” I said and went back up to my room.
ON MY WAY OUT IN THE MORNING, I grabbed a complimentary stale blueberry muffin and coffee from the lobby. There was no sign of Carter or Veronica, but Cantana, the young Thai-looking woman I’d met here the other morning, was working the breakfast nook. She handed me a takeout coffee cup.
“You can tell just by looking at me that I need coffee,” I said, trying for Mr. Amiable. Instead of returning the smile, she nodded politely, looked away, and went back to work.