Fear The Worst

ELEVEN

THE TAXI WAS HEADING INTO DOWNTOWN in the middle of the afternoon commute home. The regular traffic would have been bad enough, but we got bogged down where three lanes were being narrowed to one for an accident. Just before six, we were pulling up in front of the Second Chance shelter, a light rain coming down. I’d lost all sense of direction coming in, couldn’t guess north from south, east from west, especially with no sun visible.

I paid the cabby and grabbed my bag. I was in an older part of town. Used-record shops, discount clothing stores, pawnshops. This must have been the only block in Seattle where there wasn’t a Starbucks. Second Chance looked more like a diner than a refuge. There were tables pushed up to the windows, young people in scruffy clothes seated at them, drinking coffee out of cardboard cups. They had an aimless look about them, as though they’d already been sitting there a long time, that if I came back a couple of hours from now they’d still be there.

Already I was looking. Scanning the sidewalk in both directions, searching the faces. Satisfied that Syd wasn’t hanging around the street, just waiting for me to show up, I entered Second Chance.

Once inside, I started doing the same thing. I scanned. A couple of dozen teens-some actually looked older than that, late twenties maybe, even one who could have been in his early thirties-were milling about, but none of them was Syd. They seemed to sense that they were being studied, and several of them subtly turned their backs to me.

I was expecting something like a hotel front desk, I suppose, but what I found off in the corner of the room was a door resting on two sawhorses, and sitting behind it, peering through wire-rimmed glasses at a computer, was a man in his late thirties, prematurely balding but with enough hair at the back to make a short ponytail, dressed in a plaid shirt and jeans.

“Excuse me,” I said.

He held up one finger, resumed typing something, then hit, with some fanfare, one button. “Send,” he said. He turned in his chair and said, “Yeah?”

“My name is Tim Blake,” I said. “I just flew in from Connecticut.”

“Good for you,” he said.

I wasn’t in the mood for attitude, but pressed on. “Is Yolanda around?”

“Beats me,” he said. “Who’s Yolanda?”

“She works here,” I said.

“News to me.” He shrugged, as if to say, So what if I don’t know who works here? “Is there something I can do for you?”

“I’m trying to find my daughter,” I said. “Sydney Blake. She’s been in here a couple of times in the last week, I think. We’ve been going out of our minds, her mother and I, wondering what’s happened to her. Hang on, I’ve got a picture.”

I reached into my jacket pocket for reprints of the photos of Sydney that were on the website. I handed a sampling of them to the man, who glanced at them quickly and then put them on his desk.

“Never seen her,” he said.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Len,” he said.

“Len, would you mind just taking another look?”

He gave the shots another cursory glance and said, “We get a lot of kids through here, you know. It’s possible she’s been around, but I don’t recognize her.”

“You here all the time?” I asked.

“Nope. So maybe she was here when I was off. How did you hear that she’s been in here?”

I didn’t want to tell him that Yolanda had tipped me off. She might have violated privacy rules by getting in touch. I was betting one of the reasons runaways felt comfortable coming here was that it was understood the management wasn’t in the habit of ratting them out to their parents.

So instead of answering directly, I said, “There was a tip to the website I set up when my daughter went missing. That she might have been here. So then I was in touch with Yolanda Mills.”

“Okay,” Len said.

“Has Yolanda gone home for the day?”

“Like I said, I don’t know her.”

“Is this her day off? Does she work a different shift?”

“What’s the name again?”

“Yolanda Mills.”

Len had a blank look on his face. “And she works here? At this shelter?”

“That’s what she told me,” I said.

“You spoke to her?”

“Yes. By email, and over the phone,” I said. I was getting a strange tingling at the back of my neck.

“Can you give me a second?” Len got up from behind the desk and went through a door that led down a dark green hallway dotted with notices that had been taped directly to the wall. I saw him go into a room halfway down the hall. He was in there no more than twenty seconds, then came back.

“We got nobody working here by that name,” he said.

“That’s not possible,” I said, feeling my anxiety level go up a notch. “I spoke to her. Who were you talking to back there?”

“Lefty.” My look must have told him I thought he was jerking me around. “Morgan. She’s the boss. We just call her Lefty. You want to talk to her?”

“Yes.”

“Great. She loves interruptions.”

He led me down the hall, stuck his head in the doorway, and said, “Guy wants to talk to you, Lefty.”

She was nearly hidden behind a desk stacked with paper-stuffed folders. Forties, probably, although the thin gray streaks in her brown hair and the wire-rimmed John Lennon glasses suggested to me that she might be older. A blue long-sleeved sweater hung off her thin frame, and when she stood up I could see that she’d cinched her belt tight to keep her jeans, a couple of sizes too large, from falling off her.

“Yeah?” she said.

“I’m Tim Blake,” I said, extending my right hand. Instead of returning the gesture with her own right hand, she stuck out her left. She had no right arm. The right sweater sleeve, hanging empty, was tucked into a pocket. I was glad I hadn’t called her Lefty.

“Morgan Donovan,” she said. “This is my empire.” She waved her hand majestically at the chaos that was her desk. “You’re looking for somebody?”

“Two people, actually,” I said. “My daughter, Sydney Blake. And a woman who works here. Yolanda Mills.”

“Nope.”

“Excuse me?”

“No one by that name works here.”

“She told me she worked at Second Chance. Is there another drop-in place with this name?”

“Maybe in some parallel universe,” Morgan said. “But we’re the only one in Seattle.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Maybe you got the name wrong. She works for some other shelter. God knows the city is full of them.”

“No, I’m sure I have it right,” I said. I put the pictures of Syd on top of one of the folders. “This is my daughter, Sydney Blake. Yolanda Mills said she’d seen her here. Twice.”

Morgan gave the pictures a more thorough examination than Len had. “I’m good with faces,” she said. “But this girl, she’s not familiar. She’s a looker. If I’d seen her, I’d have remembered her. So would Len.” She rolled her eyes. “Especially Len.”

“But you’re back here in the office,” I said. “She could have come in and you wouldn’t have seen her.”

She nodded. “Yup,” she said. “But if there was a Yolanda Mills working for me, that I’d know. I sign the checks.”

“Maybe she’s a volunteer. Do you have volunteers here?”

“Some. But none by that name.”

I took out a slip of paper on which I’d written the shelter’s address, my flight info, and several phone numbers, including Yolanda’s. “I’ve got her number right here.”

Morgan asked me to read it out to her. “That’s not the shelter number,” she said.

“It’s her cell,” I said. “I called this number last night and talked to her. She said she helped with the food orders here, that she was out all the time picking up groceries.”

Morgan Donovan just looked at me.

“Hang on,” I said, got out my cell, flipped it open, and punched in the number. “I’ll get her on the phone and you can talk to her yourself.”

“Why the hell not,” she said tiredly. “It’s not like I have anything else to do.”

I let it ring a dozen times, thinking that eventually it would go to message, but it didn’t. I ended the call, then immediately tried the number again. I let it go another dozen rings, then snapped the phone shut.

Morgan said, “You don’t look so good.”