“This van on your street,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“You think it’s watching the house?”

“I don’t know. It seems pretty crazy to me.”

“Any reason why anyone would want to be watching you?”

“You mean us?”

“I mean you. If there really was someone watching your house, maybe they were watching you, maybe it’s got nothing to do with Suze, or Syd.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Did you sell somebody another Katrina?” I asked him. “They might be coming around looking for payback.”

“Oh, for crying out loud, Tim, you really never let anything go. I sell one car, a car I bought in good faith three years ago from a wholesaler who swore it was clean, and okay, it turned out to have been underwater for a while in New Orleans, and it made the news. I’m not happy it happened, but sometimes in this business you get jerked around. Maybe, if you’d hung in running a business instead of just working at one, you’d have a better understanding of that.”

My neck felt like it was on fire.

“I run an honest business, Tim,” he added.

I didn’t bother to mention the Honda S2000 sports car he’d tried to wholesale to me once, arguing it would sell faster off an authorized Honda lot than any of his. Said he wanted to do me a favor, that the car was pristine, low miles, still loads of warranty left. Almost got me, too. I checked the car out, top to bottom, and it wasn’t until I looked at the washers under the bolts that held the fenders to the frame that I noticed they weren’t original Honda parts. So then I took down the VIN number, made some calls, traced the car back to a dealership in Oregon that had reported it stolen ten months before. The car was finally recovered, at least what was left of it. It had been stripped of wheels and seats and airbags and enough other parts to make half a car. The insurance company paid off on the vehicle, acquired its remains, and auctioned them off. The buyer replaced the missing parts, sold the Honda to Bob, who then tried to fob it off on me as an original.

Bob hadn’t gotten to where he was today without cutting the occasional corner.

“Find another sucker,” I’d told him at the time.

Today, he said, “I’m clean, Tim. I’ve got nothing to hide. You want to come in and see my books, check the history of the cars on my lot, be my guest.”

Neck still prickling, I said, “A jealous husband, then.”

Bob was briefly speechless. Then, “How dare you even suggest I’d be seeing another woman.”

The thing was, I had no reason to suspect Bob of stepping out. The words were out of my mouth before I’d given much thought to them.

“Sorry,” I said.

“I love Susanne,” he said, and after a couple seconds added, “And I love Syd, too. I’m sick to death about this. She’s a great kid. I want to do anything I can to help.”

I didn’t want to hear him say he loved my daughter, no matter how much he meant it. I said, “What’s all this about her missing watch, and stolen cash?”

Bob shook his head sadly. “Like I said, I think it’s the stress. Susanne gets distracted. She could have lost the watch anywhere. And the cash… I don’t know. She could have spent it on something and it slipped her mind.”

I supposed it was possible.

“About Syd,” Bob said.

“Go ahead.”

“There’s a guy I know.”

“A guy?”

“I mean, the police, what are they really doing, right? She’s just another runaway to them. They’re not going to do anything unless, like, a body turns up, right?”

The comment cut like a knife. My eyes narrowed. For a second, the houses on Hill seemed to blur.

“Okay,” he said. “Bad choice of words. But if the cops aren’t going to put any effort into this, then maybe we have to bring in someone who will.”

“I’m working on this every day,” I told him. “I’ve got the website, I’m making calls, I’m driving around, going to the hotel, I’m-”

“All right, I know, I know. But this guy, he’s a good guy. The thing is, he owes me a favor, so I thought I could let him pay me back by asking around, check this and that, beat around the bushes a bit.”

My first inclination was to tell Bob to forget it. That would have been pride talking. At some level, I wanted to be the one who found Syd. But more than anything, I just wanted her back. If someone else got to take the credit, I could sure live with that.

“So, this guy,” I said. “What is he? Private detective? Ex-cop?”

“He’s in security,” Bob said. “Name’s Arnold Chilton.”

I thought about it for a moment. I didn’t like Bob, and I didn’t like accepting help from him, but if he knew someone professional with the skills to find Sydney, I wasn’t going to say no.

It took all I had in me to do it, but I reached my hand out to him. He took it, but I could tell the gesture caught him off guard, like he was expecting me to be palming a joy buzzer. “Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate it.” I dug a little deeper. “And thank you for looking after Susanne through all of this. She really needs your support, on several fronts.”

“Yeah, sure,” he said, still taken aback.

We walked back to our house. Evan was leaning up against the back of the Hummer, in a world of his own, singing a song quietly to himself, playing air guitar. He thought he was the next Kurt Cobain. Since Susanne wasn’t out front, I guessed she was still in the house.

“We going?” Evan asked Bob, taking a break from his music. “I need to get home. I got stuff to do on the computer.”

“I guess,” he said. To me, he said, “You want to tell Suze we’re ready to take off?”

I nodded and went into the house. I thought she might be resting in the living room, but she wasn’t there.

“Susanne?” I called.

I heard sniffing coming from Sydney’s bedroom. The door was partially closed, so I gently pushed it open and saw my ex-wife standing in front of our daughter’s dresser, the cane leaned up against the wall. She had her back to me. Her head was bowed, her shoulders trembling.

I closed the distance between us, put one arm around her and pulled her close to me. She was dabbing her eyes with one hand, touching various items on Syd’s dresser with the other. Syd didn’t have quite as much stuff here as I imagined she did in her room at Bob’s place in Stratford, but there was still plenty of clutter. Q-tips in a Happy Face coffee mug, various creams and moisturizers and cans of hairspray, bank statements with balances of less than a hundred dollars, various photos of herself with friends like Patty Swain and Jeff Bluestein, an iPod Shuffle music player, no bigger than a pack of matches, and the stringy earphone buds that went with it.

“She never went anywhere without this,” Susanne said, touching the player lightly with her index finger, as though it were a rare artifact.

“She didn’t usually take it to work,” I said. “But any other time, yeah.”

“So if she was going to go away somewhere, if she’d planned to go away, she would have taken it,” Susanne whispered.

“I don’t know,” I said quietly. But that made sense to me. Syd hadn’t packed anything. The bag she used to bring her things from Bob’s place was here. All of her clothes were either in her closet or, as was often the case with her, scattered across her bed and the floor.

The iPod was recharged by plugging it into Syd’s laptop, which sat a few feet away on her desk. We’d already been through it, with the police, checking out Syd’s emails, her Facebook page, the history of sites she’d visited in the days leading up to her disappearance. We hadn’t come up with anything useful.

Susanne turned to me. “Is she alive, Tim? Is our girl still alive?”

I took the player and placed it into the recharging unit that was already linked to the laptop. “I want it all ready to go for when she gets back,” I said.