He couldn’t take her home, though. He didn’t know how Sofi would react, and it was best for her not to be involved in this—whatever this was. He needed to get the girl somewhere safe, with someone he could trust, someone who could speak Russian. Harry was the only option, and it helped, too, that he was in the business.
Finn pointed and said, “This way,” and they started walking. Almost immediately, the girl put her hand in his. She was tall enough that from a distance she might have passed as his girlfriend, but there was no mistaking the nature of that hand in his—it was that of a child to an adult, a yielding of responsibility. She was entrusting herself to him, and he only wished he could be as confident as she was that he was worthy of that trust.
Chapter Three
Fate was a small, crammed place that specialized in a certain kind of student fashion—he could imagine plenty of young wannabe poets and indie folk-rock kids wearing the stripy Breton sweaters and disheveled blazers and other overpriced jumble.
A couple of them were working in the store, including a girl who wore a flowery summer dress over a T-shirt, the outfit finished off with a cardigan that looked on the verge of falling apart. She was pretty, but looked at Finn with a smile that was borderline patronizing.
He smiled back. He was too old to be shopping here, that was for sure, but he guessed he wasn’t quite old enough to have a daughter who’d shop here. A younger girlfriend, perhaps?
Adrienne was a few years younger than him but he looked at the rails of clothes and could imagine her turning her nose up, at the quality rather than the style. Adrienne had that French thing for quality, for wearing it well—even as he prepared to speak, his thoughts raced off like an outrider toward her.
He put the photograph of Hailey on the counter and said, “I wonder if you could help. Have you seen this girl shopping in here recently?”
The assistant looked suspicious, her smile falling away into unfriendliness as she said, “I couldn’t tell you if she had. It would be a breach of privacy for us to talk about our customers. And, anyway, you could be anyone.”
She hadn’t even looked at the photograph, but she glanced down at it now. It was subliminal, but he could tell she recognized Hailey—hardly surprising given that she’d been in here nearly every day for over a week.
“I’ll tell you who I am—I’m working for her parents. See, the girl in that picture is fifteen and she’s disappeared. So I understand what you’re saying about privacy, but we know she was shopping here—and if I don’t ask you, it’ll be the police calling in.”
“When you say she’s disappeared . . .” The assistant’s colleague, a tall, thin guy with the beginnings of a beard and a striped blazer that looked two sizes too small for him, had been hovering nearby but he stepped closer now. “I think we can tell him. She’s American, right?”
Finn nodded.
The guy picked up the photograph. “She looked a little older in person. She wasn’t a regular customer but the last . . . ten days, maybe, she’s been in here nearly every day, if not every day.”
“Okay.” Finn took the tags from his pocket and said, “These are some of the things she bought—could you show me what they are?”
The female assistant looked to her colleague for approval and then said, “Of course, let’s see what we have here.”
She showed him half a dozen items—a pair of jeans, a few long-sleeved T-shirts, a cardigan, a threadbare knitted sweater—and couldn’t resist saying how great or how popular the various pieces were. Even without the clothes Hailey had bought in other stores, he could see the beginnings of a look here, a kind of capsule wardrobe that was just a few vital notches more bohemian, more lived-in, than the way Finn remembered her.
Finally, the assistant said, “I’m not sure if that helps—I mean, you said she disappeared, right?”
“Yeah. She ran away, but the circumstances are odd, and trust me, this tells me a lot.” He looked at the girl, who seemed to have been won over somehow, as if the act of showing him the clothes had helped her understand the seriousness of what he was doing. “If she was here every day for a week or more, she must have talked.”
The girl nodded. “But only about the clothes—what she liked, what she didn’t, that kind of thing.”
The male assistant said, “How did the clothes tell you something?”
Finn looked around the shop. “They confirmed something I already suspected. She wanted to look older. I guess with these clothes she’d look like a student, not a schoolgirl.”
The guy said, “You know, now that you’ve told us, I can see she did look like a schoolkid, especially when she first came in. I didn’t see it at the time, but yeah, with these clothes and the haircut.”
“What haircut?”
“Oh, she’d cut her hair, man—like, the last time she was in here, maybe two days ago?”
Finn looked through the receipts and said, “Four days ago.”
“No, she came in after that. Friday. Three days ago. I can’t remember what she bought, but she bought something, and I mentioned her hair, how cool it looked. She said she’d just had it done.”