As I sat down in my chair she said, “Hey, Mr. B. You look like shit. You okay?”

I nodded. “Hi, Patty.”

“What’s going on? You look kind of pasty.”

“Just… nothing.”

“That sucks.”

“Yeah, it does.”

She wrinkled her nose. “What’s that smell?”

“Manure,” I said.

Then, another greeting: “Hey, Mr. Blake.” I looked around, didn’t immediately see anyone.

“Jeff tagged along,” Patty said. “He’s over there.”

She pointed to an Accord. Patty’s friend Jeff Bluestein was sitting behind the wheel, touching the buttons on the dash, fiddling with knobs. Whenever he came by, he found a car to sit in and stayed there.

“Hey, Jeff,” I said, offering half a wave.

He smiled and waved back. Through the windshield he said, “Website still working okay?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Lots of hits?”

“A few.”

Jeff went back to looking at the dash. In the meantime, Patty had been taking in the showroom, looking at the posters for various models. “You think I could get a job here?” she asked.

“Doing?”

“Selling cars,” she said, the “duh” left unsaid. “I don’t know how to fix them or anything, so about the only thing I could do is sell them.”

I didn’t think it was her intention to suggest that if you were without any skills, this was about the only job left for you.

I said, “So you’re into cars now.”

Patty shrugged. “I guess not. And I guess I’d have to get a bit of a makeover. The whole crack-whore thing I’ve got going on might put off Mr. and Mrs. Upstanding when they come in for a minivan to take their tiny Republicans to the mall.”

“It might,” I said. Patty usually had a job, but it was rarely the same one she’d had a couple of months ago. She’d worked a lot of retail, usually in trendy clothing outlets frequented by similarly dressed clientele. Only six months ago, she’d been working at a sports footwear store in Stratford. Now she had something in an accessories shop where she sold cheap jewelry, hair bands, and scarves.

“Can I tell you something, honestly?” She was moving her jaw around, like she was chewing gum, but there was no gum.

“I’d expect nothing less, Patty.”

“This whole thing about putting DVD players in vans, is that, like, evidence of the fucking collapse of civilization or what? Are they thinking, like, little kids aren’t getting enough of a chance to watch TV, that they’ve got to put them in their cars, too?”

You see what I mean? She had her moments.

“I get what you’re saying,” I said. “When Syd was little, and we were driving around together, she’d always be asking what everything was. She liked to ask what all the different kinds of cars were. By the time she was six, she could tell a Honda from a Toyota from a Ford. That wouldn’t have happened if she was watching The Little Mermaid instead of looking out the window.”

I felt a lump in my throat and tried to swallow it away.

“My point exactly,” Patty said. A few more seconds went by where she didn’t say anything. Maybe she was thinking about the fact that she never spent a lot of time riding around in a car with her father.

Jeff got his awkward, lumbering frame out of the Accord and got behind the wheel of a Civic. You could almost hear him making “vroom” noises under his breath as he gripped the wheel.

Patty said, “Syd and I actually watched The Little Mermaid together a few months ago and we cried like we were in fucking second grade.” It was difficult to picture the girl sitting before me now being entranced by anything remotely Disney.

“You know that cartoon about the monsters?” I said. “How they all work for a big company and their job is to scare little kids?”

“Monsters, Inc.?”

“That’s the one,” I said. “I took Sydney to that when she was, what? Ten? The ending, I started tearing up myself. You know the part I’m talking about?”

Patty Swain nodded. “Oh yeah. My mom took me to that. She snuck in a can of Coke that actually had rye in it. She’s taught me everything I know.” She grinned, hoping she could shock me.

I leaned forward. “Patty, did Sydney have any friends up in Derby?”

She looked taken aback. “I don’t think so. Derby? Fuck, no. Nobody in Derby. Why?”

I weighed whether to tell her about Syd’s car, decided against it.

“So I’m still putting the word out,” she said. “Facebook, shit like that.” The leg she’d propped over the chair arm was swinging back and forth, plus she was doing some flicking thing with the fingers of her left hand.

“I appreciate that. You’re probably reaching more people that way than I am.” I watched the leg swing. “You okay, Patty? You seem a bit on edge.”

She stopped all the seemingly involuntary body movements. “I’m cool.”

“You’re not, you know, high or something, are you?”

She laughed. “Shit, Mr. B., you’re something.”

Laura Cantrell was doing a slow walkabout through the showroom, graceful as a gazelle despite the five-inch heels. She swept by my desk, not saying a word to either of us, wandered between the cars. It felt as though the thermostat had been turned down.

Laura Cantrell slipped back into her office. Patty had been aware of her the whole time.

She said, “Seriously, that chick needs to get banged.”

“I know I’ve asked you this a thousand times, Patty, but where could she have gone?” I asked. “If she wasn’t working at the hotel, where was she?”

“I don’t know. It’s totally fucked up.”

“I’ve been all up and down Route 1, going into every shop and business. No one knows anything about her.”

That made me think, just for a second, about Ian, from Shaw Flowers, how he could have looked at Syd’s picture a little longer before saying he hadn’t seen her.

“You were her best friend,” I said. “And yet she didn’t tell you what she was really doing.”

She nodded. “I swear, I thought she was working at that place. She never told me any different. The thing is, she’s not like me. She wouldn’t be looking for trouble. I was born for it.”

I flashed her a weary smile. “Thanks for dropping by. If you think of anything…”

She nodded, blinked furiously several times, like maybe she was warding off tears. “Sure,” she said, getting out of the chair. “The thing is, I was wondering…”

“What is it, Patty?”

“You know this new job I got at the mall?”

“At the jewelry place?”

She nodded, like this was no big deal. “Yeah. So you have to work for a month before you get your first paycheck, and my mom, well, you know, she’s kind of tapped out herself at the moment, and it’s not like my dad’s sending me a check every month.”

“You can’t be asking me for money, Patty,” I said.

“Sure,” she said, her face flushing. “I get that.”

I looked at her a moment, then took a twenty out of my wallet and handed it to her. She took the bill and stuffed it down the front pocket of her jeans. They were on so tight she had trouble getting her fingers in there.

“Thanks,” she said. “You want to grab something tonight or anything?”

Trying to fill the gap left by Sydney, Patty had dropped by half a dozen times in the last few weeks with surprise deliveries of McDonald’s or Burger King or Subway, which I always paid her back for.

“I don’t think so, not tonight,” I said.

I could see the disappointment in her eyes. “That’s okay,” she said. “Catch you later.”

As she walked past Andy Hertz’s desk, hips swaying, she said, “Hey there, Andy Panda,” and kept on walking.

Andy, who was working his way through the page from the phone book, making cold calls, mumbled a “Hey.”

Patty had been in here enough to know Andy, but that seemed a little familiar.

Jeff got out of the Civic and ran to catch up to Patty, dropping a set of keys on my desk as he went by. “Someone left these in the car,” he said.