33

I knew I ought to go home, the way a child lost in the woods knows he ought to stay put and wait for the search party. But what if the familiar path is right over the hill? What if the dark starts closing in and the rustling branches threaten?

What if Paolina was close at hand, somewhere I might find her?

Staying put is too damn hard.

I told myself she was okay. She’d taken care of herself last night, and she was smart enough to take care of herself tonight. I was less than convincing.

With the all-points, every cop in the metro area would be looking out for her. So what the hell did I think I could add? One more pair of searching eyes. A knowledge of her habits.

As I drove, my eyes peered into the shadows. Just because Paolina had been at Hunneman, I lectured myself, just because she had spoken to the woman who’d called herself Manuela, given her my business card, was no reason to believe she was mixed up in this mess any further. Her disappearance was her own idea, triggered by Marta’s angry words.

I drove through Harvard Square, where one more young runaway would hardly be noticed, staring in the doorways where the musicians played on summer weekends, searching the sheltered depths of Holyoke Center, stopping to get a good look at the clutches of leather-clad youngsters.

Bands of young kids roamed the Cambridge Common. I abandoned the car and trailed a pack of them on foot, showed them a photo of Paolina, managed not to hit any of them when they sneered. I drew a ragged girl aside. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen. She wore a thin suede jacket, fashionably fringed and frayed, scant protection against the coming winter. For five dollars she really looked at Paolina’s picture. I believed her when she said she’d never seen her in the Square.

Hours later I found myself visiting the last-gasp places and realized I ought to quit. Paolina surely knew enough not to run to the Combat Zone, Boston’s adult-entertainment district, Boston’s sewer. But then, as Marta had said, what did I know?

I cruised Park Square near the bus terminal, looking for the ladies of the night, the sidewalk hostesses who might have noticed a young girl waiting for a bus. I flashed my photo of Paolina. Some of the women would have told me anything for a few dollars, but others said they’d never seen her, and I was relieved.

Where do you run when you’re too young to have anywhere to run to?

Would she try to get back to Colombia? To learn more about this new father? The image of my own dad came back to me so strongly, I thought I could smell the cigar smoke. A cop, he’d smoked every day of his life, a three-pack-a-day man, plus those evening cigars. I quit right after he died of emphysema, his last days a hospital nightmare of tubes, shots, and pills. Oxygen masks. The painful struggle for breath.

How would I feel if I suddenly learned that he wasn’t my father? Me, the daughter who’d become a cop in his image? It would be like an earthquake, I thought. Something I’d always counted on would have moved, altered irrevocably. The very earth would seem treacherous.

Paolina’s brothers would have become her half brothers in a moment’s revelation.

I debated a trip to the airport, gave it up, drove home with my heart tight in my chest. I imagined her at my front door, sleepily greeting me when I arrived. She wasn’t there.

I fell asleep as the sun was starting to rise, a quarter to six. Two hours later I woke, filled with an urgency that seemed almost an extension of a dream.

I called Mooney and argued with him until he agreed to meet me in half an hour at a doughnut shop near the apartment on Westland Avenue.