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There’s no escaping the inevitable. I met the kid’s gaze.
“Okay. Here’s what I know. Your dad’s been missing all week. Mr. Collingswood hired me to find him.”
Eve and Nan caught each other’s hands.
“Missing? What do you mean?” Nan asked.
Briefly, I related when he’d last come to work, Daisy’s tale, and how thugs had been waiting for her at the end of her shift.
“The woman who makes the cinnamon rolls? Is that who you mean?” Eve’s voice squeezed out, higher pitched than before.
“Daisy. Yes.” Her question startled me. “You know her?”
“I met her once when Dad stopped at his office after a movie to get one of his engineering journals. She was nice. She was always leaving him treats, sometimes brownies but usually cinnamon rolls. If I was coming over, he’d save them to share.”
Tremain’s former wife sat with one hand pressed to her throat. She was staring at me.
“Are you saying Gil was... abducted? Like they tried to do Eve?”
“I think that’s the likeliest explanation.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know. Did he have any enemies?”
“No! At least none I’m aware of. He’s not the sort to make them. He doesn’t argue, he doesn’t spend time in bars—”
I held up my hand to halt her flow of words.
“Is there any chance he’d go off on his own and not tell anyone? Maybe if he was upset?”
“No!”
“Was he having any kind of financial problems?”
“Goodness no. He gave me a generous support check every month, spoiled Eve terribly. Two weeks ago he even gave me fifty dollars extra for Christmas. He said...” A hint of pink found its way through the strained whiteness of her cheeks. “He said I was to spend it mostly on myself, because I didn’t have anyone buying me presents.”
Two weeks ago. That meant the money hadn’t come from what he’d withdrawn Saturday.
“That was the last time you saw him then? Two weeks ago?”
“Oh no. He and Eve had an outing Saturday. He sees her one day a weekend.”
Gil Tremain had seen his daughter on Saturday. He’d gone out with Lucille Collingswood the following evening. Then he’d disappeared off the face of the earth.
Nan leaned toward me earnestly.
“Even if Gil did get in some kind of trouble, he’d never involve Eve. He’d never send strangers to scare her and hurt her like that.”
I nodded, piecing thoughts together. If someone wanted to incapacitate Collingswood, or put him in an early grave, abducting Eve made no sense at all.
“I think someone’s holding Gil prisoner. They planned to use Eve as a weapon.” I sorted it out for myself at the same time I told them. “They knew if they had her and threatened to hurt her, they could force him to tell them something or do something he didn’t want to. Data from an important project he’d been working on disappeared the same time he did.”
Eve whimpered. Her eyes had grown huge.
“Miss Sullivan’s going to help Dad, honey.” Nan’s voice was calm but her eyes as they met mine were hollow with fear.
“I doubt those men would come back, but it might be smart to get out of town for a few days. Just until this is sorted out.”
“But surely the police...”
“They’ll do what they can. I expect a patrol car will swing past every now and then, but they’re stretched pretty thin.”
Police resources had to be carefully allocated. The department needed more men, but the city fathers kept their purse strings tight.
“My sister lives outside Chicago,” Nan said faintly. “We were going there for Christmas but—”
“Whoever has Gil knows plenty about him, including where you live and that Eve’s alone after school, it appears. What about someone even Gil himself wouldn’t know about?”
“Oh!” She bit her lip. “There is a woman whose daughter was in Eve’s class. She was single like me, and we became friends. They moved to Terre Haute and they’ve asked us to visit...”
“Sophie’s mom? Oh, yes! Can we?”
We unfolded the paper and found the railroad timetable. A train that went through Terre Haute departed in a couple of hours.
“If you jot down anything on your telephone pad, take the top few sheets and stick them in your purse. Write the number and time of some other train on the pad, maybe one leaving about the time yours does, and leave that. Take your address book with you,” I added.
Such precautions might be unnecessary, but one woman already was dead and armed men had attempted to make off with the girl across from me. Nan’s eyes told me she grasped the gravity of the situation. She nodded once before disappearing into the hall.
“Tell me about your friend.” I didn’t want Eve to put two and two together the way her mother had. She’d had enough scares for one day.
She did, shyly at first, then with eagerness growing. Out in the hall I heard Nan get her connection to Terre Haute.
“Miss Collingswood says you’re smart, like your dad.” I smiled at the girl now fidgeting on the couch.
She shrugged.
“I get good grades in school. I wish I had a talent like she does, though. She plays violin, up on a stage with other people. It’s beautiful! She played for me at her house, just showing me how it’s done. She let me try notes on a littler violin she used when she was my age, but all I managed to make was squawks — well, more like scratches.” Eve wrinkled her nose.
“I want to play flute.” She pantomimed. “Once when we went to hear Miss Collingswood’s ensemble play, they had a man playing flute with them. Dad said if I was still interested after Christmas, he’d get me one and I could take lessons.”
No doubt about it, the girl was a fan of Lucille Collingswood. By the sound of it, things between her father and Lucille were pretty serious.
I hurried to get in a question while we were alone.
“Those men who broke in today, did they hunt for anything? Ask you where anything was?”
She shook her head vigorously.
“Did your dad say anything about needing a lamp? Or getting one fixed?”
“A lamp? No. Why?”
Before I could ask my other question, Nan returned.
“It’s all set,” she said with false cheer. “Now run get your suitcase out and pack as best you can, Evie. I have to call work and do a dozen other things besides mine.”
“Before you go,” I said as Eve jumped up. “I’m talking to people who might have seen your dad. Can either of you think of anything about him people might notice?”
They looked at each other a moment, then giggled and spoke as one. “His walk.”
Eve mimicked it, leaning one shoulder forward as she left the room. Getting up, I watched from the doorway until she disappeared into her room.
“I hope what you said earlier, about not keeping anything from her, was mostly for her sake. I need to ask about some trouble her father got in a long time ago.”
Nan’s whole manner went from soft to hard. She sank onto a chair.
“You mean the fact that he was a dope fiend?” The words were flat. “He went to a sanitarium. They helped him quit. He’s been rock solid ever since.”
“What’s the chance pressure from this project he’s been on, or something else, could make him—?”
“None.”
Of all the nightmares she’d been exposed to today, she seemed to find this the most heinous.
“It was different when he - when he had his problems,” she said angrily. “Two months after he got his first engineering job, the stock market crashed. The place he worked closed. He took the only work he could find and it bored him to death. He started... He hated himself. He tried to quit. It was awful.”
“But he succeeded.”
“Not until Eve was born. He was terrified he might accidentally hurt her. He tried to kill himself so we’d get his insurance. My father tied him up and locked him in a closet while he found a clinic and made arrangements. He went with him on the train to Colorado and Gil check himself in.”
Her hands were balled into fists. She leaned toward me.
“He would never take a step back toward that kind of nightmare. Never! He’d die before he’d make Eve ashamed of him. Or Loren Collingswood, who gave him a chance. Or me, I think.”
She stood up.
“I appreciate all you’ve done. Helping me about leaving. Especially saving Eve. But I have things to do.”