“No. Sarah—they told us she was dead. I mean, she has to be. She wasn’t the kind of person to just disappear and not tell anyone. Why are you asking if I’ve heard from her? I don’t understand.”
“Sorry, there are just certain things I’m supposed to ask.” I breezed past it. I certainly didn’t want to tell her that Brad’s sister was trying to get him out of jail, not when I was already here under false pretenses. “Did you ever hear Sarah talk about running away?”
Her eyes flicked down to my business card on the surface of the dining table. “No.”
“She get along with her parents?”
“Yeah, I guess,” she said. “Uncle Garrett was pretty strict. Not mean strict, but, like, she was supposed to get all A’s all the time in school. And there was a list of words Sarah wasn’t supposed to say, like heck and that sucks and shoot. And if she said one of the words on a list, her allowance got docked a quarter.”
“Shoot?” I said.
“I guess because it’s like shit?”
“That’s nuts,” I said, and we both laughed a little.
“And I remember this one time, she was showing us this boy collage she made—you know, like pictures from those dumb teen magazines, how girls used to put them up on the wall. But Sarah had hers on a poster board that she kept hidden behind the headboard of her bed—she said she had to hide it because she wasn’t allowed to put boy pictures up. But I always kind of felt like Sarah was lucky. Her parents loved each other, and she loved them, and their house was happy.”
Cass looked uneasy again, like she didn’t want that sentiment repeated in the television show. I smiled in what I hoped was a reassuring way. “What was she like as a person?”
Cass got a faraway look in her eyes. “She was really lively. A little bossy. She was always writing these stories and songs and scripts and trying to get us to perform them with her. But she was also really cool.” She stabbed out her cigarette against the side of a pumpkin-scented jar candle. Then she looked at the filter for a minute like she wasn’t sure where it had come from. “You’re asking these questions like you think she’s still out there and it’s really weird.”
I reached into my coat and pulled out Catherine’s sketch. “I’m going to show you a picture. A drawing. Tell me what you think.”
Cass looked down at the sketch. “What is this?” she said.
“Does it look like your cousin?”
She picked it up and studied it carefully, but there was no emotion or recognition in her face. “It just looks like a drawing,” she said.
SEVEN
I went back to the gas station, where I found the same pair of employees that I’d talked to yesterday peering into the open front of the soda machine. “Hi again,” I said. I held up my sketch. “This is the woman I’m hoping to find on your security tapes.”
The girl put her hands on her hips. “We talked about you at our staff meeting,” she said. She paused, so I nodded like I was flattered. “Dave said we only keep the video for seven days. Then it records over itself. Was it less than seven days ago?”
It was not. So much for that. “Forget the tapes,” I said. “Can you just look at this and tell me if you’ve seen her?”
The girl glanced at it briefly. The guy gave it a more thoughtful once-over, but he shrugged. “We see a lot of people,” he said. “I don’t know.”
There was no way I was going to find the maybe-Sarah like this, whoever she was.
I thanked them both and went across the street and stood outside the Greek restaurant where Danielle and Kenny had met that night. It was midafternoon and the sun was high, though hidden behind gauzy November clouds. I squinted at the faces of people pumping gas on the other side of the street, and I could barely make them out in broad daylight. Danielle’s encounter had taken place well after sundown. I made a mental note to check what the weather had been like. “It’s not looking good,” I said to myself.
In the lot beside the restaurant, there stood a small plaza offering a tanning salon, a title loan outfit, a pizza carryout, and a liquor store. I went into each shop with the drawing of the woman.
I got nowhere at the tanning salon and the pizza place. At the loan shop, the attendant offered, “Looks sort of like, what’s her name. From Iron Man.”
I looked at the drawing and thought. “Gwyneth Paltrow?” I said.
“Yeah!”
“Maybe a little,” I said. It didn’t look like Gwyneth Paltrow. “But have you seen her?”
“In my dreams.”
At the liquor store, I did somewhat better: a half pint of Crown and one nibble at the sketch. A partial nibble. The old guy who worked there squinted hard at it. “Yeah, she kinda looks familiar.” But then he added, “The lady with the dog?”
“The dog,” I said, raising an eyebrow. That made her sound like a regular in the area. I hadn’t considered the fact that Sarah might never have left Belmont. It wasn’t impossible, but it seemed like someone would have recognized her way before now if this was the case.
“One of those, what do you call ’em, doodles? Something-doodle? Kinda curly and brown?”
“But what about this woman?”
“Right,” he said. “I think I’ve seen her walking the dog before. Maybe. Labradoodle, is it?”
“Do you know her name? Or where she lives?”
“Sorry,” the old guy said.
“How about when you saw her last?”
He shook his head. “What did she do?”
“I just need to talk to her,” I said. I gave him a card and asked him to call me if he saw her.
I spent another hour knocking on doors on the residential streets next to and behind the gas station. I didn’t see any curly brown dogs. No one else recognized the sketch or did anything to encourage me except for the teenage punk girl who told me she liked my jacket. Then I got back into the car and squinted at the sketch. The more I stared at it the more it did look like Gwyneth Paltrow, if Gwyneth Paltrow lived in Ohio and had never been happy.
I took the sketch back into the gas station. The duo from earlier had been replaced by a middle-aged guy whose name tag pegged him as the famous Dave. He looked at me with suspicion. “I was wondering if maybe you’ve seen this woman in here,” I said, placing my sketch on the counter. “She might live in the area, might sometimes walk a, a”—I was not going to say Labradoodle—“brown, curly dog?”
Dave’s face brightened. “Sadie.”
“Sadie?” I said. “That’s her name?”
“The dog,” Dave said, and I sighed. He shrugged. “I have a goldendoodle, myself.”
I asked if he knew the woman’s name or where she lived, but he didn’t. “This does look a lot like her,” he said. “The lady I’m thinking of, she comes by a few times a week. But I wouldn’t put money on it. Too bad you don’t have a sketch of Sadie!”