Fear the Worst

by Linwood Barclay

  “He did.”

  “So when Patty said she had a friend named Sydney, didn’t that set off any bells?”

  “In the report I got, your daughter’s name was down as Francine,” Carol Swain said.

  Francine was Sydney’s first name, the name that showed up on her birth certificate. But when she was just a toddler, her second name, Sydney—and ultimately, Syd—just seemed to suit her better, and we stopped calling her Francine altogether.

  I explained this to Patty’s mother. “So there was never a time that I suspected,” she said. “Maybe, if Patty had ever brought your daughter around, I’d have noticed some similarities.”

  “This report you got from the detective,” I asked. “Do you still have it?” She nodded. “Is it here, in the house?” She nodded again. “So then maybe Patty found it.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “It’s hidden.”

  “Hidden where?”

  She set down her beer and went upstairs. I heard her moving around up there, then she came back downstairs clutching a thick manila business envelope with her name printed on the front. She tossed it onto the coffee table. “There it is. Everything anybody ever wanted to know about Timothy Justin Blake. It was in a zippered compartment in a travel bag I keep under the bed.”

  I slid the envelope’s contents out onto the table as Carol sat back down and resumed her relationship with the beer.

  There were quite a few pages. Photocopies of birth certificates, my father’s death certificate, a photo of me from a Bridgeport Business College graduation ceremony, a picture of the house I grew up in and the house I had been living in at the time. All that, and a copy of the bill for services rendered from Denton Abagnall.

  “Have you spoken to Mr. Abagnall lately?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “He got killed a couple of years ago. It was in all the papers. He’d been hired by that woman whose family disappeared when she was a kid.”

  I remembered reading something about that at the time. “So you never showed this to your daughter?”

  “I’m telling you, no,” she said.

  “Who else might have known?” I asked. “That you’d hired someone to find out I was Patty’s biological father?”

  Carol Swain shook her head. “No one,” she said. “Unless Abagnall told someone. And I don’t think he would have done that. He seemed like a real professional, you know?”

  “What about your husband, Ronald?” I asked.

  “I don’t see how…” she said, but then her voice drifted off. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Do you and he still keep in touch?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Off and on.” There was something in the way she said it. Her eyes did some kind of twinkle.

  “What do you mean, ‘off and on’?”

  She looked away, drank some beer. “It’s just… He’s a total asshole, okay? I know that. It’s just that, sometimes, we hook up. You know? No strings, just get together for old times’ sake.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s not like I’m going to get pregnant or anything with the guy shooting blanks.”

  “How often do you see him?”

  She shrugged. “Every few months. Maybe, if it’s been a long time for either one of us, someone gets an itch that needs scratching, we kind of send out a little email, you know, like, what’s doing?”

  “When was the last time?”

  “Maybe eight, ten months ago. It’s been a while. And the last time before that was way more than a year ago, for a few days.”

  “He came here?” I asked.

  “His wife wouldn’t exactly be crazy about it if I went and stayed with him at their place.”

  “Ronald stayed here for a while? More than a year ago?”

  “He had a blowout with his missus, needed a place to camp out for a while. So I shipped Patty off to stay with my sister in Hartford for a bit so I could have some peace and quiet. Seemed like a good time for a bit of a reunion with Ronald.”

  “He slept in your room?”

  She looked at me and said, “Duh.”

  “I’m just asking because he’d have been in the same room with this file.”

  She shook her head. “You’re wrong.”

  “I’m not accusing him of anything,” I said. “I’m just saying it’s possible. He might have gone looking through your things, looking for something else—”

  “What, a pair of my panties to try on?”

  “I was thinking more like money. And instead, he came across that envelope. Maybe he’d have thought there was money in it, looked inside, found something else.”

  “Anyway,” she said dismissively, “it’s not like it would be a huge shocker, even if he had looked inside. He already knew he wasn’t Patty’s father.”

  “But he’d never known the actual identity of Patty’s biological father. And that I had a daughter of my own, about Patty’s age.” My mind was racing, trying to see whether any of these pieces fit together. “If he did see the file, do you think he would have told Patty?”

  This time she was more definite. “No way,” she said. “Even though he was a piss-poor father to her, he still felt he was more her father than anyone else was. He wouldn’t have wanted to admit you existed.”

  That made sense to me. “But if he read the file, is there any way he might act on the information?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just thinking out loud here. Do you think he might have engineered a way for the girls to meet each other?”

  “Why?”

  “I’m telling you I don’t know. I mean, would he do it out of mischief? Because he liked the idea that he knew they were half sisters, even if they didn’t know?”

  And did it have anything to do with the fact that they were both, now, missing? I didn’t pose the question out loud. I felt I was already too far down a strange road without a map.

  “That sounds crazy to me,” Carol said.

  “Have you been in contact with Ronald since Patty went missing?”

  “Yeah, the first day, before I called the cops,” she said. “I felt like an idiot doing it, because I knew what the chances were. So I call him at work and say, you know, has Patty been by your place or anything, and he says, you’re kidding, that’d be a first.”

  “She doesn’t keep in touch with him,” I said.

  “No. And he couldn’t be happier. He’s not bad in the sack, but as a dad he’s a complete and total washout.”

  I tossed the various pages of the report onto the envelope and stood up, paced back and forth a few steps. “We need to talk to him,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “We need to go talk to Ronald.”

  “What’s the point of that?”

  “I want you to introduce me. Just tell him the truth. That I’m Tim Blake, my daughter Sydney is a friend of Patty’s, the two of them are missing. I want to see his face when you tell him who I am.”

  “You think that’ll prove something,” she said.

  “It might,” I said. “He still work for Sikorsky?”

  “In his dreams. He works at a liquor store.” Right, I thought. I did know that. “He’s probably still on. I’d shop there, but the son of a bitch doesn’t give me a discount. So I take my business elsewhere.”

  My cell phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “You said you were going to get back to me.” It was Detective Jennings.

  Hearing her voice made me feel as though a trapdoor had opened under me. “I’ve kind of had a lot on my plate,” I said. “When I get a minute, I’ll call you.”

  “Where are you, Mr. Blake?” she asked.

  “Out and about,” I said. Carol Swain looked at me curiously.

  “I want to talk to you right now,” Jennings said. “In person.”

  “Why’s that so important?”

  “I dropped by your house,” she said.

  I swallowed. “Oh,” I said. “Like I said, I’ve been
out, looking for Syd.”

  “I’m not asking you to come in,” Jennings said firmly. “I’m telling you. You’re coming in right now, or we’re going to find you and bring you in.”

  I decided to take a shot at playing dumb. “I don’t understand the urgency.”

  “Mr. Blake, one of your neighbors saw you come home less than an hour ago and leave again in a hurry. I know you were here.”

  “I really have to go.”

  “Mr. Blake, let me lay it out for you. Kate Wood is dead. Unless you can tell me something to persuade me otherwise, you’re the lead suspect in a homicide.”

  “I didn’t do it,” I said. Carol was still looking at me.

  “That’s not what I’d call persuasive,” Jennings said. “Call your lawyer, Edwin Chatsworth. He can arrange a surrender so no one has to get—”

  I closed the phone and said to Carol Swain, “Let’s go see your ex.”

  I PUT MILT IN THE BACK SEAT so Carol wouldn’t crush him when she got into the Beetle. She gave me directions to a store in Devon, not far from the dealership, that was sandwiched between a courier franchise and a distributor of appliance parts.

  At a four-way stop, we waited for a police car to go through ahead of us. I gripped the wheel a little tighter and held my breath, trying to will myself into a state of invisibility as the patrol car went past.

  Carol picked up on my anxiety. “Somebody looking for you?” she asked.

  “I’m fine,” I said. I figured it would take a few more minutes for Jennings to put the word out to every cop in Milford to be watching for me. It wouldn’t take her long—a call to Susanne or Bob would do it—to find out what I was driving now.

  It was getting to be dusk as I pulled into a spot in front of the liquor store. Carol Swain was out of the car before I’d turned the ignition off. She was making a beeline for the door and I told her to wait up.

  An elderly, unshaven man clutching a brown-bagged bottle shuffled out the door as we went in. The old guy had evidently been the sole customer. The only one left in the store was the man behind the counter.

  The guy who scratched Patty’s mother’s itch every eight to ten months might have been a good-looking man once. About five-ten, strong jaw, blue eyes. But he was thin to the point of emaciated, his hair was thinning, and he’d gone a day or two without shaving. He peered at me through a pair of cheap reading glasses.

  “Hey,” he said. He noticed his ex first, me second, and my nose third. He didn’t look puzzled, surprised, annoyed, intimidated, you name it. There was nothing there.

  “Hey, Ron,” she said.

  “Hey,” he said.

  I thought he might ask Carol if she’d heard from Patty, but he didn’t.

  “Ron, this here’s Tim Blake.” He just looked at me. “He’s been trying to find his daughter, Francine?”

  That had been my idea, to refer to Sydney by her first name, the one that the detective had used in his report.

  Ronald’s expression stayed blank.

  “She was a friend of Patty’s,” Carol Swain continued. “Now the two of them are missing.”

  “Kids,” he said dismissively, shaking his head. He asked me, “Did they run off together?” It seemed a genuine question.

  “We don’t know,” I said. “I came by to talk to Carol, see whether she had any idea about where either one of them might be.”

  “I don’t know what your daughter’s like,” he said, “but Patty’s the kind of girl, she’s probably just blowing off some steam, getting a little wild for a couple of days. I’m sure she’ll turn up. And if your Francine is with her, they’ll probably come back together.” He looked at his ex-wife and said, “Joyce is going to give me a lift home when I lock up so, you know, you might not want to be hanging around when…”

  “It’s okay,” Carol Swain said. “We just wanted to pop in, in case you’d heard from Patty, you know?”

  “Yeah, well, no,” he said, looking back and forth between us.

  I said, “Mr. Swain, do you know who I am?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you recognize my name?”

  He looked at me a moment and finally said, “Yup.”

  “Where from?”

  He glanced at Carol, then back at me. “You’re the one supplied the juice to make Patty.”

  From Carol Swain, a sharp intake of breath.

  “How would you know that?” I asked.

  Ronald Swain offered up half a shrug. “It was all in the report. The one the detective did. It was hidden in a suitcase under Carol’s bed.”

  “You son of a bitch,” Carol said. If Ronald was hurt by the name-calling, he didn’t show it.

  “When did you see that report?” I asked.

  Another shrug. “A year ago? Something like that.”

  I tried to probe a bit. “What did you think when you read it? Were you angry?”

  “Not really. I mean, I knew I wasn’t Patty’s father. Somebody had to be.”

  “You were never curious?”

  He shook his head. “I mean, when I found the report, I was interested enough to read it. But that was about it.”

  “What about my daughter? Were you curious about her? Were you interested in Patty’s half sister? Did you think about trying to get the two of them together?”

  There was almost nothing in his dull eyes. “Why would I want to do that?”

  “Did you ever show that report to Patty?” Carol asked. “Did you ever tell her about it?”

  Ronald Swain sighed tiredly. “Both of you have evidently mistaken me for someone who gives a damn. Why would I tell Patty? The only thing I might have done, if this had been ten years ago, is go knocking on your door”—he looked at me—“with Patty in tow and seen if you wanted to take her off our hands. Might have kept the two of us together. But now, with her grown up and all, what would be the point of that?”

  Carol Swain looked from Ronald to me and offered up half a shrug, as if to say, “There you go.”

  Ronald, looking at Carol, said, “You should give me a call. But here, not at home.”

  “When this whole thing with Patty blows over,” she said, giving him a wink as she turned away.

  It didn’t feel as though we’d been in the store all that long, but it was noticeably darker out when we got back into the car.

  “Well, fuck me,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “He read the file.” She shook her head. “He’s never been much of a reader.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THERE WAS A POLICE CAR SITTING IN CAROL SWAIN’S DRIVEWAY when we turned the corner. I hit the Beetle’s brakes.

  “Whaddya suppose they’re doing there?” she said. “Maybe they brought home Patty.”

  She had her hand on the door handle, getting ready to bolt. I reached for her arm and held her.

  “They’re probably looking for me,” I said. “Checking all the possible places I might turn up.”

  Carol settled back into the car. “What do they want with you?”

  “It’s a long story,” I said.

  “I can hoof it from here if you want,” she said.

  “I’d appreciate that,” I said. “And if they ask if you’ve seen me—”

  “Seen who?” she said, and smiled. “I couldn’t turn in my daughter’s real-life father. What kind of mother would I be if I did that?”

  “If the police find me right now,” I said, “they’re going to slow me down trying to find Syd.” I paused. “And Patty.”

  “You think Patty’s mixed up with what happened to your girl?”

  “I don’t know. I hope not.” I didn’t want to tell Carol I had a bad feeling about Patty. “Thanks for your help,” I said.

  “No problem,” she said. She had her hand on the door again but didn’t push it open. “It was good to finally meet you. I mean, I know the circumstances are kind of shitty and all, but I’m glad to be able to talk to you, to tell you what you did for me, after all t
his time.”

  I smiled awkwardly.

  “I don’t blame you for not saying anything,” she said. “I wouldn’t know what to say, either.”

  “I had to know I might be the biological father of some child out there somewhere,” I said. “So that part’s not a surprise. I guess I never expected to actually know the identity of one of them.”

  She smiled ruefully. “There might be more. Maybe there’s hundreds of them running around out there. Little Tims and Timettes all over southern Connecticut.”

  “I doubt that,” I said. “I think they limit just how much of the stuff they spread around.” I winced. “That didn’t sound right.”

  Carol smiled. “That’s okay. But I can’t help wondering, if you’d been her father in every way, not just the biological, if she’d have turned out different. Whether she would have been such a screwup. So ungrateful, always getting into trouble.”

  I felt maybe I was being blamed here. I wanted to ask whether Patty might have turned out differently if Carol’s husband had hung in, if Carol hadn’t turned into an alcoholic over the years.

  That was what I wanted to say to her. But I didn’t because I did feel the blame.

  I felt responsible.

  Patty existed because of me. But I’d done nothing to help her since she came into the world.

  I rested my hands on the steering wheel, looked at the Swain house shrouded in darkness, the cop car out front. “You make decisions years ago, not thinking they mean a great deal, and then years later…”

  “It’s a bitch, isn’t it?” she said. Then, impulsively, she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. Tentatively, so as not to put any pressure on my injury. “If you find my girl, tell her to get in touch with her goddamn mother, would you do that for me?”

  “Sure,” I said, my cheek cool where her lips had been.

  As she slipped out of the car, my cell phone went off again. This time, I looked at the ID. I didn’t want to talk to Jennings again.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Tim?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s Andy.”

  “Yeah, Andy.”

  I’d almost forgotten Andy was out there trying to find this elusive Gary. There’d been a lot of events in the last couple of hours that seemed to have overtaken his errand.