She’s passed all her driving tests and now wants to take out the car solo. She has more opportunities at her mother’s house than at mine. Susanne works conventional hours compared to me, so there’s a car available more often for Syd to practice with in the evenings. When Syd’s staying with me, and there actually happens to be an evening when I’m home and the car’s in the driveway, I’m more hesitant about letting her take it out. I attribute this to the fact that I haven’t had as much chance to get comfortable with the idea of her being out there on the road, alone.
This is before she gets her summer job at the dealership, where she shows herself to be quite adept at getting into a strange car and whipping it around the lot, driving it into the service bay, lining it up over the hoist.
I’m driving a Civic this particular week. Sydney says she wants to drive it to her mother’s house to pick up some homework she’s left there, and drive back. On her own.
“Come on,” she says.
I give in.
About an hour later, there’s a knock at the door. I find Patty standing there, smiling nervously. She and Syd have been friends a couple of months now.
I open the door.
“Can I come in?” she asks.
“Syd’s not home,” I tell her. “She drove over to her mom’s to pick something up.”
“Can I still come in?”
I let her in.
“Okay, the first thing you have to know,” Patty says, holding her hands in front of her as though she were patting down a cloud, “is that Sydney’s okay.”
I feel the trapdoor opening beneath me. “Go on.”
“She’s fine. But this thing happened, and you need to know that it wasn’t her fault at all.”
“What’s happened, Patty?”
“On the way back from her mom’s, Sydney picked me up and we decided to go to Carvel for some ice cream?” It’s just down the hill from us. Patty must have walked up here from there. “So, she’s parked, and she’s not even in the car, and this guy, this total asshole, he’s driving some beat-up old shitbox, and he’s backing up, and he goes right into the car door.”
“You weren’t in the car? You and Syd?”
“Like I said, we saw the whole thing happen while we were getting our ice cream. And then the guy, he just takes off before we can get down a license plate or anything. But it was totally not Sydney’s fault.”
I started going for my coat.
“You’re not going to be mad at her, are you?” Patty asked.
“I just want to be sure she’s okay.”
“She’s cool. Mostly, she’s worried about you. That you’re going to freak out.”
Later, I say to Syd, “Is that what you thought I was going to do? Freak out?”
“I don’t know,” she says.
“Why’d you send Patty?”
“Well, she offered, first of all. And I kind of thought, okay, because, ever since you and Mom got divorced, well, even before you got divorced, every time there’s anything about money, it’s like, watch out, it’s freak-out time.”
“Syd—”
“And a dented door, that’s going to be a fortune, right? And you’re not going to want to put it through insurance because they’ll put your rates up, and, like, I’d pay for it but I don’t have any money anyway, and you’ll ask Mom for half but she’ll say it’s your car, you let me drive it, you should pay for it all, and you’ll get all pissed, and it’ll be like when you had the dealership and everything was going wrong and every night you and Mom were fighting and she said this was all supposed to give me a better life and it was like if it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t be fighting all the time and—”
The next day I ask Susanne to meet me for lydney. Yalwayme qtionbnevnynews forme Onydneybocaof cedrivalacodashowydpictuundredsof peoplHy peoplhownpictuodamy gazomentarilnWmoinminuta>came,yd. T. Tgonstumoment latepocketphond likgoig. WnpickPattyup,nbouomei big dealmKip Jmbp:pagebreak/a><20centerfont sizeb>TWENTY-NINETfont size">HIS MUCH Kfont size">IP Jfont size">ENNINGS TOLD ME:
So around six o’clock, Patty’s mother called the police. Almost apologetic about it. Probably nothing, she said. You know what girls are like today. But had there been, you know, any teenage girls who looked like her daughter run down at an intersection or anything?
The police said no. They asked Carol Swain if she wanted to file a missing-persons report on her daughter.
She thought about that a moment, and said, “Hell, I don’t want to make a federal case out of this or anything.”
The police said, “We can’t do anything to help you find her if you’re not going to report her missing.”
So Carol Swain said, “Oh, why the hell not?”
Jennings told me all this, finishing up with “I just made a couple of calls in the last few minutes, and she hasn’t turned up.”
“I tried to call her a couple of times today,” I said. “She never answered.”
“At the moment,” Jennings said, “it seems that you’re the last person who’s seen her.”
That seemed to be more than just an observation. “What are you saying?”
“Mr. Blake, you seem like a decent enough guy, so I’m just trying to be straight with you. We’ve found bloody towels in your house that you say were used to help a girl who hasn’t been seen in nearly twenty-four hours.”
“I’ve been totally straight with you,” I said.
“I hope so,” she said. “Now we’ve got two missing-girl cases, and you’re at the center of both of them.”
IN THE MORNING, I PHONED SUSANNE AT WORK.