EIGHT

I WAS TREMBLING EVEN BEFORE I SAT DOWN.

The email, from a Hotmail address that was preceded by the letters “ymills” and a series of numbers, read:

“Dear Mr. Blake: I’m pretty sure I’ve seen your daughter. I work at a drop-in shelter for teens in Seattle-”

Seattle? What the hell would Syd be doing in Seattle? No, wait. What mattered was: Syd was alive.

Having just seen traces of blood on my daughter’s car, this email already had me fighting back tears.

I started reading again: “I work at a drop-in shelter for teens in Seattle, and because I’m in that line of work I’m often scanning websites about kids who are missing, and I came to your site and when I saw the pictures there of your daughter Sydney I recognized her because she’s very pretty. At least I am kinda sure that it was her but of course I could be wrong. I don’t think she said her name was Sydney, I think she might have said Susan or Suzie or something like that.”

She was using her mother’s name. I wondered, for a moment, whether there was something wrong with the computer, because the cursor was jiggling all over the place. I glanced down and saw that my hand on the mouse was shaking.

“Feel free to get in touch at this email address,” the note continued. “It must be very stressful not to know where your daughter is and I hope that maybe I can help.”

The note signed off with “Yours in Christ, Yolanda Mills.”

From downstairs, Kate shouted, “Come get this while it’s hot! This chow mein looks pretty decent.”

I hit the reply button and wrote: “Dear Ms. Mills: Thank you so much for getting in touch with me. Please tell me how to reach you other than email. What is the name of your drop-in shelter? What is the address in Seattle? Do you have a number where I can reach you?”

I was typing so quickly I was making numerous typos, then backspacing and fixing them.

“Tim? Everything okay up there?”

I typed, “Sydney went missing nearly a month ago and her mother and I are frantic to find her, to know that she is okay. When did you see her? How long ago? Has Syd been in there several times or just once? Here’s how you can get in touch with me.” I then typed my home phone number, my cell number, my number at the dealership. “Please get in touch the moment you receive this email. And call collect, please.”

I double-checked that I hadn’t entered in any of the phone numbers wrong, typed my name at the end, and hit Send.

“What’s going on?” Kate said. She was at the door, leaning into the frame.

I turned, and I know I must have had tears on my cheeks, because Kate suddenly looked horrified, as though I’d just gotten bad news.

“Oh my God, Tim, what’s happened?”

“Someone’s seen her,” I said, feeling overcome. “Someone’s seen Syd.”

Kate closed the distance between us, pulled my head to her breasts, and held me while I tried to pull it together.

“Where?” Kate asked. “Where is she?”

I pulled away and pointed to my screen. “This woman in Seattle. She works at a drop-in shelter. Some place, I guess, where runaways can go.”

“Seattle?” Kate asked. “What would Syd be doing in Seattle?”

“I don’t know and right now I don’t care,” I said. “Just so long as I know where she is, I can go get her and bring her home.”

“Have you got a number? Call this woman. It’s what, three hours earlier out there? She might even still be at work.”

“She didn’t send me a phone number,” I said. “I just wrote her back, asked her for one.”

“How about the shelter? Did she say what it was called?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t know why the hell she couldn’t have been a bit more specific.”

“What’s her name?”

I glanced back at the screen. “Yolanda Mills.”

“Shove a bum,” Kate said, motioning for me to get out of the computer chair. I stood while she sat down. “We go to the online white pages, find her, call her.”

Kate tapped away on the keyboard, went to a site with some empty fields where she entered the woman’s first and last name and the city where she lived. “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got… We got nothing yet. There are Y. Millses but none of them Yolanda.”

“So maybe she’s married and the phone number is listed under her husband’s name. Her last name might still be Mills.”

“Let me see how many Millses there are.” Kate whistled under her breath. “Okay, there’s like more than two hundred of them.”

I put a hand on the edge of the computer table to steady myself. Blood was pulsing in my ears.

“We could wait for this woman to get back to you, or we could just start calling all of them.”

“Maybe we can narrow it down another way,” I said. “Do a search on teenage drop-in shelters in Seattle.”

Kate’s fingers danced across the keyboard. “Holy shit,” she said. “There’s all kinds of them. Not as many shelters as there are Millses in the Seattle directory, but there’s quite a few. Hang on, I think I can narrow it down. Some are men’s shelters, so we can skip those… Let me see. Okay, look here.” She pointed to the screen. There were half a dozen listings for Seattle-area shelters aimed at youths.

I grabbed a pen and a pad and scribbled down web addresses. “I’ll grab Syd’s laptop and work on these downstairs. I’ll use my cell, and you can use the landline for some of the women’s shelters. She might be attached to one of those, for all we know.”

“I’m on it,” Kate said. She snatched the receiver off the cradle and punched in a number as I ran downstairs, grabbing my daughter’s laptop on the way. The house was equipped for wireless, so I could use Syd’s computer anywhere. I found my cell in the pocket of my jacket, which was hanging over a kitchen chair, and dialed the first of the five numbers that came up on the screen once I had the laptop up and running.

“Refuge Place,” a woman answered.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m trying to get hold of Yolanda Mills. I think she might work at your shelter.”

“Sorry,” she said. “No one here by that name.”

“Okay, thanks,” I said, ended the call, waited a beat, and then dialed the second number. Upstairs, I could hear Kate murmuring on the phone.

“Hope,” a man said.

“Is this the shelter?” I asked.

“Yeah, Hope Shelter.”

“I’m calling for Yolanda Mills.”

“What’s that name again?” he asked.

I repeated it. “I think she may be an employee there.”

“I know everyone here,” he said. “We got no one by that name.”

I thanked him and hit End.

“How’s it going?” Kate shouted from upstairs.

“Nothing yet,” I said. “You?”

“Ditto.”

There were two plates of shrimp fried rice, chow mein, sweet and sour chicken, and egg rolls on the counter, but I wasn’t hungry. I had next to nothing in my stomach and already felt like I was going to lose what was there.

I tried the next two numbers, struck out with both. I was just entering the last of the five I’d jotted down when Kate shrieked, “Tim!”

I flipped my phone shut and bolted up the stairs two steps at a time. “You got somebody?” I said breathlessly as I came into the computer room.

“You have mail,” she said, hopping out of the chair and letting me sit down.

It was Yolanda Mills. Her reply read:

“Dear Mr. Blake: Thank you for getting back to me. That was foolish of me not to give you more information. I work at a Christian youth center called Second Chance in the west part of the downtown area. There’s a number there but I’m in and out all the time (one of the things I do is arrange for the meals there, so I’m out a lot getting groceries and things) but I always have my cell with me, so you can usually get me on that. Here it is.” The number followed.

I had the receiver in my hand and was dialing, looking back and forth between the screen and the phone.

“What if she’s a nut?” Kate asked as I hit the last digit. “What if it’s someone just running a scam or something? A lot of people, they’re always thinking up ways to get innocent people to fall for things.”