“I have other clients, Mr. Bysen, who’ve been waiting a lot longer than you have for help. If you think your son’s life is in imminent danger, then you need the FBI or the police. Otherwise, I’ll report when I know something.” I really, really hate working for the powerful: they think they’re the boss of the whole world, as we used to say in South Chicago, and that includes being the boss of you.
While I was on the phone with Bysen, Morrell had made me a cappuccino and a pita with hummus and olives. I sat at his desk, eating, while I talked to Bysen’s wife. In a quiet, almost little-girl voice, Annie Lisa Bysen told me nothing: oh, yes, Billy had friends, they were all in the church youth group together, they sometimes went camping together, but never without him talking to her first. No, he didn’t have a girlfriend; she repeated his participation in True Love Waits, and how proud they were of Billy after their experience with their daughter. No, she didn’t know why he hadn’t come home, he hadn’t talked to her, but “my husband” was sure he was with that preacher in South Chicago. They had asked their own pastor, Pastor Larch-mont, to call down to the South Side church, but Larch-mont hadn’t been able to reach anyone yet.
“It was probably a mistake, that exchange program with the inner-city churches, they have so many bad kids who can influence Billy. He’s so impressionable, so idealistic, but Daddy Bysen wanted Billy to go work in the warehouse. It was where he started his business, and all the men in the family have to go. I tried to tell William we should just let Billy go to college, like he wanted, but you might as well talk to Niagara Falls as get Daddy Bysen to change his mind, so William didn’t even try, just sent Billy down there, and ever since it’s been Pastor Andrés, Pastor Andrés, as if Billy was quoting the Bible itself.”
“What about your daughter, Billy’s sister—does she know where he is?”
A long pause at the other end. “Candace—Candace is in Korea. Even if it wasn’t so hard to get to her, Billy wouldn’t do that; he knows how much William—how much we—would hate it.”
I wished I did have time to drive up to South Barrington to the Bysen enclave. There’s so much that you get from body language that you can’t see over the phone. Did she really believe her son would avoid his sister on his parents’ say-so—especially if he was running away from home? Did Annie Lisa do everything Daddy Bysen said? Or did she resist passively?
I tried to get Candace’s e-mail address, or a phone number, but Annie Lisa refused even to acknowledge the question. “What about your sister-in-law, Jacqui Bysen. Did Billy talk to her at the warehouse yesterday?”
“Jacqui?” Annie Lisa repeated the name doubtfully, as if it were in a strange language, maybe Albanian, that she’d never heard of. “I guess it never occurred to me to ask her.”
“I’ll do that, Ms. Bysen.” I took the names of the two youths she thought her son might be closest to, but I expected the Bysens were right: Papa and Mama Bear had insulted a man Billy looked up to, and Baby Bear had probably fled to him for cover. If he hadn’t, I suppose I could begin the unenviable job of trying to find Candace Bysen. I would also check area hospitals, because you never know—accidents happen even to the children of America’s richest men. I scribbled all this down in a set of notes, since I’ve learned the hard way that I can’t keep track of so many details in my head.
I had business in the Loop for a couple of significant clients, but I finished before one and drove early to the South Side. I stopped by the warehouse to talk to Patrick Grobian first. He and Aunt Jacqui were deep in a discussion of linens; neither had seen Billy today.
“If he wasn’t a Bysen, he’d be out on his can, believe me,” Grobian snapped. “No one who wants a job with By-Smart comes and goes as they please.”
Aunt Jacqui stretched, catlike, with the same look of mischief around her mouth I’d seen yesterday during the uproar at the prayer meeting. “Billy is a saint. You’ll probably find him eating honey and locusts in a cave someplace, maybe even under the boxes in the basement—he’s always preaching to Pat and me about work conditions here.”
“Why?” I widened my eyes, innocence personified. “Is there something wrong with work conditions here?”
“It’s a warehouse,” Grobian said, “not a convent. Billy can’t tell the difference. Our work conditions comply with every OSHA standard ever written.”
I let that lay. “Would he go to his sister, do you think?”
“To Candace?” Jacqui’s carefully waxed brows rose to her hairline. “No one would go to Candace for anything except a trick or a nickel bag.”
I left while she and Grobian enjoyed a complicit laugh over that witticism. I had to be at the school for basketball practice at three, which is when Rose’s shift also ended. I couldn’t keep the girls waiting for me, so that meant if I wanted to talk to Rose I had to go back to the factory.
14