When I got home, I found my mother curled up on the couch in her bathrobe, her hair wrapped in a towel. She had the TV on, which was startling enough. My mother doesn’t watch much TV. She especially doesn’t watch sitcom reruns. But that was exactly what she was doing when I walked in. She was also eating ice cream right from the container—something else she never does. Or, at least, something she hasn’t done since right after she and my father split up. She told me at the time that separating from my father was the right thing to do, but she cried a lot when she thought I couldn’t hear her and she’d scooped her way through enough ice cream to keep a small town cool for an entire summer. It had taken her a couple of months of serious gym work to lose all the inches it had added to her butt and thighs.

“Are you and Ted still taking a break?” I said.

“I really don’t want to talk about it, Robyn.” She shoveled another spoonful into her mouth.

The thing was, I wanted to talk about it. “Did Ted break up with you, Mom?” I couldn’t think of anything else that could make her this miserable.

She reached for the remote and turned off the TV. Then she snapped the lid back on the ice cream container and went into the kitchen. I followed her.

“Is that what happened, Mom? Did he dump you?”

She put the ice cream back into the freezer before turning to face me.

“I said I don’t want to talk about it, Robyn, and I mean it.” She sounded annoyed that I had interrupted her ice cream and TV extravaganza. She sounded like that more and more often lately. I didn’t like it, and I didn’t see why I should have to put up with it.

“I’m going to Dad’s,” I said.

“No, you’re not.”

“I can go to Dad’s whenever I want.”

“You were at your father’s all weekend and a couple of days after school this week so far. You should spend more time here with me.”

“Why? So I can watch you mope around and whenever I ask you what’s going on, you can tell me you don’t want to talk about it?”

She relented a little. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Look, why don’t I get dressed and we’ll go out to dinner, just the two of us? We haven’t done that in a while. What do you say?”

I said okay. I agreed because I thought it would make her happy, not because I thought there was a chance she would tell me what was going on. Good thing, too.

Nick called my cell phone while I was out with my mother, but I’d left it at home. I didn’t want anything to interrupt our time together, even though it turned out that any interruption (gale-force hurricane, house-sucking tornado) would have been welcome. My mother was not in the mood to talk about anything. Nick’s message said he had to make a stop downtown after school tomorrow, on his way back to Somerset. He told me where he was going to be and asked if I could meet him. He said if I couldn’t make it, it was no big deal. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

 

. . .

The next morning, I had a dentist appointment, which meant that I didn’t have to go to school first thing. By the time my teeth were gleaming, it was almost noon, so instead of going directly back to school, I stopped by my father’s place. I was pretty sure Mr. Jarvis had said something to him about Nick. I wanted to ask him what it was. I wanted to do it in person so that I could see his face if he started to get evasive.

When he didn’t answer the buzzer, I let myself in. He wasn’t there, so I made myself some lunch. He still hadn’t appeared by the time I finished eating, so I went back downstairs. As I stepped out onto the sidewalk, a man got out of a car parked at the curb. Carl Hanover. He forced a smile, but there were dark lines under his eyes and he sounded tired when he greeted me. I pictured him sitting beside the telephone with his sick wife, both of them waiting for it to ring.

“Hi, Robyn,” he said. “I talked to your father the other day. He told me you were going to ask around at school to see if anyone had heard anything from Trisha or had any idea where she might be. I can’t tell you how much Denise and I appreciate that.”

I said that I hadn’t been able to find out anything. I didn’t tell him about Kenny because I’d already struck out twice and I didn’t want to get his hopes up.

“Still, we appreciate your help,” he said. He pulled an envelope from his pocket. “I was just going to drop these off for your father. I gave him a picture of Trisha, but it wasn’t a very good one. She never gets her picture taken at school. These are some snapshots her mother took. I thought they could be useful.”

“He isn’t home,” I said. “But if you want, I can give them to him later.”

A genuine smile appeared on his sad, tired face. “Would you?” He handed the envelope to me. “Her mom can hardly sleep. She keeps hoping that Trisha will call, but so far nothing.” He shook his head. “I bet you never give your parents anything to worry about, do you, Robyn?”

I said I wasn’t so sure about that.

 

. . .

I looked for Morgan and Billy when I got to school. I had called Morgan a couple of times the night before, but she hadn’t called me back. I wondered if she was still mad at me. I had called Billy too, with the same result. I felt even worse about him. I was used to Morgan doing her drama queen thing. But I was not used to Billy looking so humiliated. I wanted to reassure myself that he was okay.

I couldn’t find either of them.

I was thinking about Morgan and Billy while I stood on the corner where Nick had said he’d meet me after school. I had arrived a few minutes early and was scanning the crowded streets for a tall, good-looking guy with his arm in a sling. Instead I spotted Kenny Merchant sauntering down the street toward me. After talking to Alison, I was sure that if anyone had an idea where Trisha was, it would be Kenny. He was close enough to touch now, but he still didn’t notice me—until I stepped out in front of him.

“Hey,” he said, annoyed to find an obstacle in his path. Then he recognized me. He shook his head.

“I need to talk to Trisha and I think you know where she is,” I said.

He kept walking, as if he hadn’t heard me. I grabbed him by the arm.

“Come on, Kenny, it’s important. If you don’t—”

“If I don’t, you’ll do what?” he said. He wasn’t much taller than me, but he looked like the kind of guy who didn’t mind getting physical, who maybe even enjoyed it. “You’ll call the cops? Be my guest. I’ll tell them the same thing I already told you. I don’t know where she is. And you know what? They won’t care. They’re not even looking for her. She hasn’t done anything wrong.”

I’d been going to say,“If you don’t, her mother will be devastated.” I’d been going to tell him how sick Trisha’s mother was, in case he didn’t know. I’d been willing to assume, based on what Alison had told me, that he was capable of compassion. Now I wasn’t so sure.

“You know that for a fact, right, Kenny?” I said. “You know all that about somebody you say you don’t know anything about.”

His eyes looked sharp and cold. It reminded me of the way Nick used to look when he was angry. Then Kenny did something that Nick would never have done. He grabbed me, hard, and yanked me toward him, so close that I could feel his breath hot on my face.

“Stay away from me,” he said. “You got that?”

He shoved me away so hard that I lost my balance. My hands flew out, feeling for something to grab onto. As I pitched backward, I curled a little so that when I hit the cement, it would be my butt and maybe my back that made contact, not my head.

But I never hit the cement. Someone grabbed me around the waist and suddenly I wasn’t falling anymore. Whoever had caught me put me back on my feet and said, “What do you think you’re doing?” Nick. His question was directed at Kenny, not at me.

“What’s it to you?” Kenny said.

Nick kept his arm around me, but I felt it tense up. Kenny backed up, but only half a pace.

“She was bugging me, okay?” he said. “Not that it’s any of your business, D’Angelo, but she’s a real pain.”

Well, well. Nick had told me he didn’t know Kenny. But Kenny sure seemed to know Nick.

“When you push my girlfriend around, it’s my business,” Nick said.

Girlfriend! I pulled away a little so that I could look at Nick. He was still holding me tightly around the waist. Even with his left arm in a sling, he looked fierce. He was taller than Kenny and had a little more weight to him. He was staring at Kenny as if he were daring him to try something.

“I’m okay,” I murmured to Nick.

“See?” Kenny said, stepping forward, cocky again. “She’s fine. So there’s no problem.”

“If you ever touch her again, there’ll be a big problem,” Nick said. His eyes locked onto Kenny’s for a few seconds. Kenny was the first to look away. He glowered at me, maybe trying to scare me since it was obvious he didn’t scare Nick. “You hear me?” Nick said.

“Yeah. I hear you.”

They stared at each other a little longer before Kenny blinked, then turned and walked away. Nick watched him go before relaxing his grip on me and looking me over.

“You hurt?” he said.

I shook my head. I was thinking about what he had said. Girlfriend. He had described me as his girlfriend.

“Come on.” He slipped his good arm around my waist again and led me to a coffee shop. We went inside, ordered hot chocolate for me, regular coffee for him. I couldn’t stop thinking about what he had said, about that one glorious word that I wanted to hear him say again. He might have too, if I had been willing to let things be. Instead I said, “I thought you didn’t know Kenny Merchant.”

Nick didn’t look guilty or embarrassed at being caught in a lie. He didn’t avert his eyes this time, either. Instead, he looked directly at me and said, “I owe him. When you owe a guy and someone starts asking about him, you don’t talk about him, you don’t talk about his business.”

“What is that?” I said. “Some kind of guy code?”

He shook his head and sighed, as if we lived in completely different worlds. Which, I guess, we did.

“There were a couple of guys at the place I was in before Somerset,” he said. “Tough guys, you know? Real bullies. When I first got there, they gave me a hard time. A really hard time, you know what I mean, Robyn?”

Based on his intensity, I had a pretty good idea.

“What about the staff?” I said.

Nick laughed, but there was nothing jolly about the sound.

“The staff were okay,” he said. “But they can’t be everywhere all the time. They can’t be in all the rooms all night. They can’t be in the bathroom all the time. They can’t be in the laundry room all the time. You know?”

I was getting the picture.

“Kenny helped me out,” Nick said. “He knows Joey, through his cousin.” Joey was Nick’s stepbrother. He was doing time after stealing a car and then doing a hit-and-run during the joyride. “Kenny didn’t have to help me, but he did. And when a guy puts himself out for you like that, you owe him.”

“I think he might know where Trisha is,” I said.

Nick shook his head.“You can’t keep messing around in other people’s lives,” he said.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Everybody doesn’t need you to get involved in their business,” he said. “Me, that was one thing, and I guess I appreciate that.” I’d helped him out of trouble—serious trouble —a couple of months back.

“You guess? And what do you mean, everybody? You make it sound as if all I do is meddle.” I had done as much for him as Kenny had—maybe more. But it was obvious that he didn’t feel he owed me the way he owed Kenny.

He reached for my hand. I yanked it off the table and put it in my lap. Nick shook his head again.

“You kept me from doing something stupid, and I’m grateful. I really am,” he said. “But you have this tendency to want to get involved in things that are none of your business, like with this girl who’s missing or the thing with Glen.”

“Glen, who twisted your arm or hit you or did whatever it took to put your arm in a sling? Glen, who probably put that bruise on your arm too? Is that the thing you mean?”

He stared at me for a moment.

“A girl is missing,” I said.

Not a flicker.

I reached in my bag for the envelope Carl Hanover had given me, pulled out a picture of Trisha, and slapped it down on the table in front of him. “Here,” I said. “She’s the girl I’m talking about, just so we’re one hundred percent clear. She’s a real girl with real parents who are worried sick about her.”

Nick looked down at the picture. “You mean parent,” he said without looking up. “Singular. Her mother. The guy, he’s not her real dad, right?”

“So what?” I said. “You think only biological fathers care?” Knowing Nick, based on his own experience, that was probably exactly what he thought. “Wait, how do you know that? Do you not know Trisha Carnegie the same way you didn’t know Kenny Merchant?”

Up came those purple eyes of his, away from the picture and back to me.

“Your dad’s a great guy,” he said. “And I don’t just mean because he’s successful and funny and fair, you know, the way he looks at people. I mean because of how he cares about you. He really loves you. And your mom? She’s smart, and she can be pretty tough, but she loves you too. I don’t think there’s anything she wouldn’t do for you. You know what that makes you?”

“What? You’re trying to tell me I’m spoiled?”

“I’m trying to tell you you’re lucky. You’re lucky that you have two parents who care more about what happens to you than they do about what happens to themselves. A lot of kids I know, kids at Somerset, for sure the kids at the youth center, they’re not nearly so lucky. A lot of them left home because one or both of their parents don’t care what happens to them, or just plain don’t want them around. Some of them don’t even have parents. Some of them have been bounced from foster home to foster home their whole lives. Nobody cares what happens to them.” He reached for my hand again, and again I refused to let him have it. “Robyn, you ever stop to think that maybe this girl you’re looking for had a good reason to leave home?”

“Do you know where she is?”

He looked me straight in the eye and said, flat out, “No. But to tell you the truth, if I did know, I don’t think I’d tell you. At least not unless she told me I could.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Have you ever run away, Robyn?”

“Of course not.”

“Well, I have. Plenty of times. I usually ran when I was too afraid to be at home, you know, on account of the guy my mother was living with.” Nick’s stepfather. The guy who had given Nick the scar that sliced diagonally across the right side of his face. The guy who had made him an orphan. “I ran away and stayed gone as long as I could. And, Robyn? If anyone I knew had ever told my stepfather where I was. . . .” He shook his head. “You don’t know what really goes on at Trisha’s house, just like you don’t know what really goes on at my aunt’s house. But you have to respect people and their privacy. You have to respect their reasons for doing what they do.”

“What about her mother? She’s really sick.”

“Her mother,” he said, “not yours. That makes it her decision.”

“Come on, Nick. You know Kenny. And I’m pretty sure Kenny knows something. You could help me find out.”

He shook his head.

“There’s another reason I need to find her, Nick. A personal reason.”

That’s when I saw Beej. She entered the restaurant just as Nick turned his head to look out the window. She adjusted the ratty backpack on her shoulder and started toward our table, her eyes jumping from me to Nick and back to me again. As she reached out to touch Nick on the shoulder and get his attention, her eyes went to the photograph of Trisha lying on the table between us. Her hand froze in midair. She stared at the photo, her mouth hanging open a little in surprise. She knows her, I thought. Beej knows Trisha Carnegie. But how?

I remembered the first time I’d met Beej. She had been sitting outside the youth center and someone had whistled. When I’d looked around, I’d seen someone I recognized—Kenny—on the other side of the street. He’d stood there for a moment, munching on a hot dog, and then he’d walked away. At the time, I hadn’t made a connection. It hadn’t even occurred to me that he had been the person who whistled. But right after Kenny had moved on, Beej had said that she had to go.

Trisha knew Kenny.

Kenny had spent some time on the street.

Beej spent a lot of time on the street.

Did Beej know Kenny too? Had she been dashing off to meet him? Had his whistle been a signal?

Nick had just become aware that someone was standing behind him but hadn’t yet seen who it was. He started to turn in his chair, but by then Beej was staring at Nick and shaking her head slowly, as if she didn’t want to believe whatever she was thinking. The look she gave me made it clear that she held me responsible. She started to back away as Nick slid out of his chair.

“Beej?” he said. He looked confused when she continued to back away. He followed her gaze to the pictures on the table and his eyes went wide. “Hey, Beej!”

She turned and ran out of the restaurant. Nick got up and raced after her. They had both vanished by the time I got outside. I stood there and waited for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, sure that Nick would come back. He didn’t.

 

. . .

I was sitting in the living room area of my father’s place when he got home. He looked mildly surprised to see me.

“Did you have a fight with your mother?” he said.

“No. Why?”

“I know that face, Robbie. Something’s wrong.”

I gave him the envelope of photographs that Carl Hanover had left with me. Delivering them was one of the reasons I had come to my father’s place.

He glanced at the photos. “You sure everything is okay between you and your mother?”

“Dad, I already told you. We didn’t have a fight.”

“So she’s okay then, right? Because it sure looked like something was bothering her the other night.”

“She’s fine,” I said. And then I couldn’t help it: I looked away from him, just for a split second. He caught it—he always catches it—and he knew what it meant. But he didn’t say anything, I think because he understood that I had promised to respect my mother’s privacy.

“So if it’s not about your mother,” he said, “what is bothering you, Robbie?” He looked genuinely concerned. When I still didn’t say anything, he didn’t push me. Instead, he said, “It’s getting late. Are you hungry? I’m going to start dinner.”

He went into the kitchen. I trailed after him and watched him stare into the fridge. “How about an omelet?” he said. “Salad on the side? Toast, lightly browned, just the way you like it?” He pulled out eggs, mushrooms, and cheese.

“It’s Nick,” I said finally.

“Oh.” He didn’t sound surprised.

“You’ve heard something about him, haven’t you, Dad? I can tell by the way you act every time I mention him.”

My father set everything down on the counter and turned to look at me. He seemed so serious all of a sudden that it scared me. “I don’t know much, Robbie,” he said. “I just heard it hasn’t been smooth sailing for him lately.”

“What do you mean? What did you hear?”

“You know I like Nick, don’t you, Robbie? He’s done some pretty stupid things, but I think that he’s a decent kid. You know that, right?”

I said I did, but I was getting a queasy feeling in my stomach.

“And I know you like him. Maybe a lot. But you also know enough about his background, and about his”— he hesitated—“his problems to know that sometimes Nick makes things harder on himself than they need to be.”

I couldn’t stand it anymore. “What did you hear, Dad? Does it have anything to do with a guy named Glen?”

“Nick told you about him?”

“I met him,” I said. “I told Nick if I were him, I’d call the cops on Glen.”

A strange expression appeared on my father’s face. “Robbie,” he said, “Glen is the cops. That’s how I heard.”

“I met him, Dad. Well, sort of. That guy’s a cop?”

“Patrol officer,” my father said. “A good one too.”

“What did he tell you?”

“That things aren’t going so well between Nick and his aunt. And that Nick may not be able to live with her when he finishes at Somerset. He may have to live in a group home. Nick hasn’t had a lot of stability in his life in the past few years, Robbie. Maybe he doesn’t know how to handle it.”

“According to Glen,” I said.

“Robbie—”

“Did he tell you he hurt Nick?”

My father frowned. “Hurt him? How?”

“They got into some kind of fight. Nick’s arm is badly sprained.” I caught a look on my father’s face. “What?”

“Nick and Glen got into a fight?” he said. I nodded. “Who started it?”

“I don’t know.”

“For all you know, it could have been Nick.”

“Dad!” I couldn’t believe he was blaming Nick.

“All I’m saying, Robbie, is that there are two sides to every story, and we don’t know what those two sides are. But I do know that Glen Ross is a well-respected police officer and that Nick is a kid who has trouble keeping a grip on his temper. Robbie.” His voice became softer now. “When I said I like Nick, I meant it. I think he’s got a lot of potential.”

“Potential?”

“But I also think you should be careful.”

“Careful? Of what? You think Nick would ever hurt me?”

“Physically?” My father looked surprised. “No. But I think he could break your heart.”

Why was he telling me that? Did he feel the same way as my mother did? Did he wish I’d go out with someone more. . . normal? And why was he so quick to believe that Nick was the problem instead of this cop?

“I’m not telling you not to see Nick,” my father said. “I’m not saying he will hurt you. And I’m not lying when I say I like him. If I could think of some way to help him, I’d do it. I’m just saying that I think you should be careful. You’re my daughter. I love you. I don’t want to see you hurt. Okay?”

I said okay even though I didn’t feel okay about it. I let him cajole me into helping him make dinner. While he cooked the omelet, I made the salad. But the whole time, I was thinking about Nick—about what kind of problems he was having with his aunt, about how much those problems had to do with Glen. I was worried about him. He’d been trying so hard to turn things around, and he really deserved to have something good happen to him. I wanted him to be happy for a change.

I put my thoughts aside when my father and I sat down to eat. I felt I’d heard enough of my father’s feelings on the subject of Nick. Instead I asked him about Carmine Doig.

“Did you find out anything?” I said.

“You mean, was it really an accident?” He shrugged and took a bite of toast. “The police are going by the fire investigation report, which says it was accidental. So as far as the police are concerned, it’s case closed. I can’t press the lead investigator for any details because he’s dead. I’ve been trying to get the insurance company to take another look at it. They paid out a lot of money. But they won’t even talk to me. They’re stonewalling me.”

I was surprised to hear that. “Mom always says you could get a confession out of a priest,” I said.

“I could if he didn’t have a grudge against me,” my father said. “I’ve had some dealings with the guy who’s in charge. Let’s just say that the only thing he’d be willing to do for me is send flowers to my funeral.”

“It sounds to me like you’re not satisfied with either the report or the way the insurance company handled the claim,” I said.

“Something’s not right about the way it happened,” my father said.

“What do you mean?”

“A lot of owners board their horses at Doig’s stables. Five horses died in the fire. Fifteen were rescued.” He took another bite of toast. “Fourteen of the fifteen that were rescued belonged to other owners. Four of the five that died belonged to Carmine Doig.”

“So?”

“So, there’s stable hand who lives in a cabin at the end of the property. He said he was asleep when the fire started. He said by the time he reached the stable, the fire was blazing and there was smoke everywhere.”

“With all those horses, didn’t they have a sprinkler system or something?”

“They did,” my father said. “But it was undergoing routine maintenance. In fact, the fire investigator’s report says that the fire started because of a short in some of the equipment that the repair guys had left in the stables.”

“What about the fire alarm?”

“The alarm went off. Besides the stables and the stable hand’s cabin, there’s a house on the property—a sort of country manor. The Doig family uses it sometimes. Sometimes the horses’ owners stay there too. There’s a permanent housekeeper. He was there that night. He’s the one who called the fire department. But the place is way out in the country. The closest fire department is twelve miles away and it’s volunteer-run. They know what they’re doing, but it takes time. While they were waiting for the fire truck to show up, the stable hand said he started to get the horses out.”

“Don’t you believe him?”

“I asked him why he didn’t start by evacuating Doig’s horses. After all, Doig’s his employer. He said they were kept at the far end of the stable and that he assumed the trainer was taking care of them.”

I repeated my question.

“I asked him if he actually saw the trainer. He said it was dark and confusing. There were skittish horses everywhere. And a lot of smoke. And people who weren’t doing much good—a horse owner and his wife who were visiting from Florida, the manager of one of Doig’s construction companies. They had no idea how to handle panicky horses. The stable hand said all he could think about was getting as many animals out as possible, and that’s what he did. The police talked to the guy. So did the fire investigator. So did the insurance adjuster.”

“Insurance adjuster?”

“The person who has final say on an insurance claim, who decides whether the insurance company will pay the claim and how much they’ll pay.”

“And? Did the stable hand tell different stories to different people?”

“I know what he said to the police and to the fire investigator. I’ve seen the reports. I’m not so sure what he said to the insurance adjuster, but I don’t see why it would be any different.”

I didn’t get it. “So that’s good, right?”

“It is if it’s the truth.” He took a bite of omelet.

“What part don’t you believe?” I said.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “To be honest, I’m not even sure he’s lying. It’s not so much what he said that bothers me. It’s how he told it. He seemed awfully nervous for a guy who was telling the same story for the fifth time.”

The buzzer for the downstairs door sounded. My father got up to answer it. This time I recognized the voice when I heard it: Carl Hanover. My father gave me a look that told me he was sorry for the interruption. Then he pushed the button and told Mr. Hanover to come up.

I don’t think it would be possible for a person to look more upset than Carl Hanover did when he came through the door.

“I’m sorry, Mac,” he said. “I should have called first. But I was in the neighborhood and, well, I just can’t seem to concentrate on anything.”

My father told him not to worry and offered him a cup of coffee. Mr. Hanover sat at the table while my dad went to get him a mug. He looked at me with red, watery eyes that made me think the poor guy hadn’t slept in days.

My father put some coffee in front of him and said, “I wish I could tell you I’ve made progress, Carl, but the truth is, I haven’t. I checked with her bank to see if Trisha has used her credit card. She hasn’t. I went around to all the places you said she frequents—the mall, the library, the park down by the lake. No one remembers anyone who fits her description. I’ve also talked to taxi drivers, mail carriers, bus drivers. Nobody’s seen her. So either she’s not in the downtown area or she’s really lying low.”

The longer my father talked, the more Mr. Hanover shrank in his chair. He wrapped both hands around the mug of steaming coffee. I wondered how my father might look if I vanished. I decided he’d look a lot like Mr. Hanover. I also wondered what it must be like to be Mr. Hanover—to have a stepdaughter who had never accepted him and a wife who was sick, and to know that it was physically hurting his wife that her daughter had run away.

“Robyn has been asking around school, but she’s drawn a blank too, haven’t you, Robbie?” my father said.

I hadn’t told my father yet about Kenny Merchant. I hadn’t told him about Beej’s reaction when she saw Trisha’s picture either. I told myself that it was because there was really nothing to tell. But that wasn’t quite true. Mostly I’d been thinking about what Nick had said to me: You have to respect people’s reasons for doing what they do. It was up to Trisha to decide if and when she went home. I thought about what Nick had said about me and my parents, how my home life was so different from his own, from Kenny’s, from Beej’s. And, maybe, from Trisha’s.

I also thought about Nick telling Kenny, You push around my girlfriend, it’s my business. Then I thought about Nick telling me that even if he knew where Trisha was, he probably wouldn’t tell me. In other words, Nick didn’t completely trust me. Not yet. Maybe never, if I said anything to my father or Mr. Hanover.

“Robbie?” my father said. “I said you didn’t come up with anything at school. That right?”

“That’s right,” I said. But I made the same mistake I had made earlier. I forgot who I was talking to. Instead of looking my father straight in the eye, I looked down at my plate. When I looked up again, my father was staring at me. Mr. Hanover caught the look.

“If you know anything, Robyn,” Carl Hanover said, “or if you know anyone who might know anything, if you even suspect that someone knows where she might be, I’d appreciate knowing.” He looked at my father, who, in turn, looked at me.

“Robbie?”

“If anyone knows anything, they’re not telling me,” I said. And because that was true, I could meet my father’s eyes. He sat back in his chair, and Carl Hanover looked disappointed. My father kept his eyes steady on me. He didn’t argue with me, he didn’t push me anymore, but I knew that he wasn’t one hundred percent satisfied with my answer.

“Maybe you should try the police again, Carl.”

Mr. Hanover shook his head. “I thought about stopping by to see them on my way over here. But they just keep telling us the same thing—she’s old enough to leave home, if that’s what she wants.”

“I still know a few people,” my father said. He was being modest. He knows a lot of people. Cop people. “I’ll get in touch, see if I can give them a nudge.”

“I’d rather have you handle it, Mac,” Mr. Hanover said. “So would Denise. She doesn’t think the police are even interested. And after all the wild stories Trisha told them last time. . . .” He sighed. “All I need to know is where I can find her. So that I can at least try to talk to her.”

“Of course,” my father said. “If that’s what you want.” Then he said, “There’s something I need your help with, Carl. I’ve been trying to get a meeting with Trevor Bailey.”

Carl Hanover blinked. “Trevor? What do you want with Trevor?”

“I’ve been looking into the fire at the Doig place. I understand that he was the adjuster on that. You work with him, right?”

This was news. Carl Hanover had some connection to the job my father was working on. Is that why Vern had given my father that look down in La Folie the first time my father had mentioned his name?

Carl Hanover nodded.

“I’m looking into it for a client,” my father said. “But I’ve hit a road block. Apparently your boss put the word out not to talk to me.”

“I don’t understand,” said Carl Hanover. “What is there to look into?”

“Trevor hasn’t said anything to you about it, Carl, has he?”

“No,” he said. “I haven’t been at work much since Denise got sick again. What’s going on, Mac? Are you saying that you don’t think the fire was accidental? Because it was my understanding that the fire investigator said—”

“I need to talk to Trevor Bailey,” said my father. “I need to ask him a few questions. I’d also like to know if he talked to Howie Maritz, what Maritz said to him.”

Carl Hanover said he would see what he could do. Then he said he’d better get going. My father said “Just a minute,” and got up and walked him to the door while I started clearing the dishes off the table. He stepped out into the hall with Carl Hanover and stayed out there for a few minutes. I could hear them talking, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. When my father came back inside, he didn’t ask me any more questions about Trisha. Instead we cleaned up the kitchen together. He put some music on for us while we worked. When we finished, I glanced at my watch.

“I have to go, Dad,” I said.

“I’d love to offer you a ride home, Robbie, but I kind of have plans. . . .”

“It’s okay, Dad,” I said. I hadn’t come to my father’s place just to deliver the photos of Trisha. I had another reason for wanting to be in his neighborhood. For that same reason, I didn’t want the ride home. Nor did I want to tell him where I was really going. “I’ll take the bus,” I said. “And anyway, I have to stop at Morgan’s. I need to borrow some notes.”

“You sure you’ll be okay?” he said.

I rolled my eyes. “You act like I’ve never gone home on my own before,” I said. “Of course I’ll be okay.”

He kissed me on the top of my head and told me to be careful.

 

. . .

It was a fifteen-minute walk from my father’s loft in the trendy part of what used to be a downscale neighborhood to the high school in a part of the same neighborhood that was still run-down. The lights were on in the school gymnasium. I headed across the parking lot toward it, thinking about what I was going to say when I got there. I’d been thinking about it all the way from my father’s house. Not just what I was going to say, but whether I should say anything at all. I guess that’s why I didn’t do the standard safety check that my father had taught me: Always be aware of who’s on the street with you—front, back, and both sides. Always be aware if anyone is taking an interest in you. Always be aware of stores that are open and lights that are on in case you need help. Never go into isolated areas, like empty parking lots, at night.

I didn’t even think about the safety check until I heard something behind me. I turned and saw a car swing into the parking lot and advance toward me. I picked up my pace, walking quickly toward the gym door. The car sped up. I doubled my pace. There were lights on in the gym, but they were shining through narrow windows at the very top of a solid brick wall. I couldn’t see what was happening inside and, for sure, no one inside could’ve seen what was happening out in the lot. There were houses in the vicinity, but none of them overlooked the lot. My heart was racing, but it slammed to a stop when the car circled around me and pulled up before the gym door, blocking my path and almost blinding me with its headlights. The driver’s door opened, but I didn’t have a clear view of the driver’s face. When he stepped in front of the headlights, all I saw was an enormous, shadowy shape.

I should have listened to my father.At the very least, I should have told him the truth about where I was going.