Finn nodded and followed him, but no sooner had he sat down on one of the small sofas than Debbie came into the room. Her eyes were a little reddened but she didn’t look as if she’d been sleeping.
Their earlier awkwardness seemed to be forgotten, and she looked at him now as if he was one of the family, rallying around in a crisis, and said, “Can I get you a drink?”
“I’m fine, thanks. Why don’t you both sit down?” Debbie sat down immediately, urgently, but Ethan hesitated, with the look of someone who wished he could put off what he was about to hear. Finn said, “It’s nothing bad, I just found out quite a bit.”
Debbie nodded, as if she felt this justified her decision to approach Finn in the first place. Yet he’d done no more than anyone else could have done. Ethan sat, too, not quite relaxing.
“Okay, I went to Fate, the store where the paper bags came from. As we knew, she’d been in there nearly every day for over a week. It’s clear from what she bought that she was creating a new wardrobe—what I could only describe as a kind of student look. I also learned that three days ago, presumably between the last time she saw you and disappearing, she had her hair lightened, and cut short like a boy’s.”
Ethan looked more shocked by the final revelation than Finn had anticipated, and sounded devastated as he said, “She cut her hair?” Finn wondered if it was a typical paternal response—the cutting of the hair symbolizing that he’d lost his little girl, no matter what happened now, that she was growing up and becoming her own person.
Debbie said, “Do you have any idea why?”
“Yeah. I’m pretty certain she did it to make herself look older, just by a few years—that’s backed up by what the people in the store said. Maybe she just thought it would be easier to travel that way, or maybe . . .” He looked at both faces, making sure they were still with him. “Was she very active online? I mean, did she generally talk about online friends?”
Finn hardly expected she would have mentioned the kind of online friend she might run away to meet, but he thought she might have spoken about other virtual friends, giving him an idea of how active she was when it came to social networks and forums.
Debbie looked horrified as she thought through the implications and said, “Oh my God, you don’t think she’s been . . .”
“I don’t think anything—not yet.”
Actually, what he thought was that Hailey might have been the instigator in whatever had happened. He had no reason for thinking that, and even her intricate planning might have been a response to someone with a very sophisticated grooming technique.
It was instinct alone that convinced him she hadn’t been the victim of some wily and predatory man, but his instincts had been wrong in the past—sometimes spectacularly wrong.
Ethan said, “I don’t think she really has many online friends. She uses the Internet, naturally, but if she contacts people it tends to be her friends here.”
“And you’ve spoken to all of them.”
He nodded. “Even Jonas didn’t know anything.”
Finn hadn’t even had time to respond when Debbie offered up an explanation, saying, “He’s not a boyfriend—they’re just the closest of friends, almost inseparable. You’ve probably seen him with her.”
“I’m not sure. Possibly.”
“They’re both very strong academically. They often work on projects together, that kind of thing, and they do a lot of the same classes.”
Ethan nodded in agreement and said, “He’s a lovely kid. He’s pretty cut up about it, too.”
For some reason, Finn latched on to the tone Ethan had used for the words “lovely kid”—it was the way someone might talk about a child if they were disabled in some way, fighting a battle against life.
“Jonas? Swiss . . . ?”
“Half-Austrian, half-Australian—he finds that pretty funny.”
“Is there something wrong with him?” They looked confused, as if they thought the question was a response to the statement about his nationality. “Just something in the way you spoke about him a moment ago. It suggested—I don’t know, that there’s something . . .”
Debbie looked like someone venturing into dangerous territory as she said, “Jonas is exceptionally intelligent.”
“Off the scale,” said Ethan.
“This is strictly between the three of us, of course, because he hasn’t been diagnosed and his parents don’t seem to think there’s any cause for concern, but Ethan and I . . . we suspect he might be mildly autistic.”
“Or more specifically Asperger’s. But Finn, we know him well enough to know that he’s in the dark on this. He looked seriously put out when he heard she was missing.”
“Maybe because he thought he was going with her.” He caught their expressions and added, “I’m not suggesting that—I’m just trying to make clear that things aren’t always as they seem.” He stood up. “Let me have a think about my next move, but in the meantime, let me know if you hear anything from the police or the embassy.”
Ethan stood, looking full of gratitude as he said, “Finn . . . both Debbie and I—”