She nodded, then looked at the passport again and put it back in the desk drawer. Her faith looked as if it had faltered, as if she no longer believed the beautiful and haunting lie that she’d been telling herself, that her precious daughter wouldn’t do this to them of her own free will.
Slowly, fatigued by emotion, she stood and followed him. He lifted the shoebox out of the closet and placed it on the bed. He took the paper bags out, all from the same store, then emptied the plastic bags, which were mostly from just a couple of places.
Debbie’s bewildered expression answered his question in advance, but for the sake of form he said, “Are these the kind of places Hailey usually shops at?”
She shook her head and pointed at the paper bags. “I’ve never even heard of that place.”
The paper bags were from a store called Fate.
“What access does she have to money?”
“We trust her entirely . . .” She ground to a halt, perhaps realizing the redundancy of the statement. “She has a pre-paid credit card, but apart from some extra cash withdrawals there’s nothing suspicious on it. I guess she gets a lot of cash from us, too, but . . . you know how it is with kids nowadays.”
He took a few of the receipts and looked at them.
“It looks like she bought all this stuff over the last week or so. I suspect that’s why none of her clothes are missing.”
“But why? I mean, she chooses her own clothes anyway—she loves the things she has.”
If Debbie’s world had fallen apart with Hailey’s disappearance, it appeared to collapse in on itself further as each of these truths hit home—that her daughter had chosen to run away, that rather than being in so much of a hurry as to leave her clothes behind, she’d been planning her disappearance for a week or more. All of Debbie’s past certainties were as nothing now.
Perhaps this was the moment at which she expected Finn to make his excuses and leave. Yet the very things that had shaken Debbie’s faith had piqued Finn’s interest. For the first time, he saw how this might be something more interesting than a straightforward runaway.
“You checked her computer, of course?”
She nodded absentmindedly. “That’s how much she trusts us—we even know her password. But the computer’s clean: no browsing history, nothing.”
“Nothing at all?”
“No,” she said, apparently unable to see the implication, that Hailey had wiped it, presumably because she didn’t trust them as much as Debbie imagined.
He could also have told her that a computer was never clean, but as he no longer knew anyone who could look at it for him, there hardly seemed to be any point. Besides, even if he was here helping, he still hadn’t admitted anything about his past, and he knew that it was best to maintain that stance.
He crossed the room, saying, “Is this her only iPod?”
Debbie nodded, not sure what he was doing. He picked it up and scrolled through the songs. A lot of them were things he didn’t recognize, but there was a lot of middling pop on there, too—the kind of thing beloved by girls of a certain age.
He put it back in its dock, the pieces coming together. He picked up some of the bags, then turned and looked at a confused Debbie.
“I’ll need to take these. I’ll also need a good recent photograph.” He looked at the laptop, but taking it would only hint at a level of sophistication above and beyond what he was bringing to the table. “I’m not promising anything. Adrienne was wrong in what she told you. I don’t have any contacts, but I can help as a friend.”
She shook her head, and he wondered if it was because his description of himself as a friend was incongruous, but then she said, “I don’t understand—what’s changed your mind? I’m grateful, of course, but you seem more keen to help now that it looks . . .” She gestured at the bags on the bed.
“Debbie, I don’t know a great deal about the psychology of runaways, but I know what I see here. She created a new identity for herself, and she thought it through, even down to leaving her old music behind. She created a new identity.”
“But why would she do that?”
“I don’t know, but if we can find out, it might tell us where she’s gone.”
Even as he spoke, he thought of a dozen locations in Europe, hoping for Hailey’s and her family’s sakes that she hadn’t headed to any of them. But wherever she’d gone, a new identity was as likely to get a girl like her into trouble as it was to keep her out of it.
And another even more troubling thought was lurking at the back of his mind. Because he’d found himself in a similar situation to this once before—in those weeks before Kaliningrad, when he had done the right thing without thinking, and had lost everything in the process.
History
Tallinn—late February
Finn was done for the afternoon, and was making his way out of the office as Perry came in. Perry gave him a knowing, exasperated look, as if they were both working in the middle ranks of some ramshackle multinational, his expression meant to represent their collective response to the latest mess-up.