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.”

TWELVE

I WAS HAVING A DÉJÀ VU MOMENT. First Syd’s not working where she says she is. Now the mysterious Yolanda.

“You want to sit down?” Morgan said.

“Something’s wrong,” I said. My legs were rubbery, my stomach was doing a slow somersault. “Where the hell is she?” I said, more to myself than the woman sitting behind the desk.

Morgan sat down, leaned back in her chair, and sighed tiredly. “You might as well fill me in.”

So I did. Syd going missing. The hotel. The car. Then, a hit on the website I’d set up from a woman claiming to have seen her in Seattle.

“And she said she worked for us,” Morgan said. “That’s some story. Sounds like a scam. Maybe some kid, jerking you around.”

“No,” I said. “It didn’t sound like a kid, and she didn’t ask me for anything. Didn’t want a reward.” Wheels were turning. “If you knew someone here was sending tips to parents, telling them their kids were here, would that be against the rules?”

“Big-time,” she said. “We’d like nothing more than for these kids to get back together with their mothers and fathers, but some of those moms and dads don’t deserve to have them back. You got no idea the kind of crap a lot of these kids have had to put up with. Not that they’re all angels. Seventy percent of them, I’d probably kick them out myself if they were mine. But they’re not all trouble. Some of these girls, when their stepdads weren’t using them for punching bags, they were trying to get into their pants. We got kids out there whose parents are drunks and drug dealers. We had a girl here last year, her mom was pimping her out. She was getting a little too old in the tooth to do it herself and figured her daughter could take over the family business.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“Yeah, well, he seems to be M.I.A. at the moment. We had a kid here last week, his skin was a mess, like it had all peeled off and was growing back on again, especially his face. Anything that wasn’t protected. His dad was pissed he hadn’t taken a shower when he’d told him to. So he hauls the kid out to the driveway and takes a power washer to him. You ever feel the pressure of one of those things? You can strip paint with them.”

I said nothing.

“So we’re not exactly going to put a call into mommies and daddies like that and say hey, guess what, we found your little angel, why don’t you come on down and take them home.”

“I get it.”

“These kids trust us. They have to be able to trust us or we can’t help them.”

I was thinking. “So then, if you did have someone on staff who was doing this, who was trying to reunite kids with their parents, and you found out, they’d be fired.”

“Very likely.”

“So maybe whoever called me works here but didn’t use her real name.”

Morgan Donovan considered that a moment. “Why would someone have to give you a name at all? She could have gotten in touch with you anonymously.”

“I have an email address for her,” I said.

Morgan asked for it and wrote it down on the back of an envelope.

“There’s no one here with that address that I know of. A Hotmail address ain’t exactly that hard to get.”

“I know,” I said.

“So like I said, maybe someone’s yanking your chain,” she said. When I couldn’t think of anything to say to that, she said, “Wanna coffee or something? I’d offer you something stronger, but it’s a church foundation that tops up our budget and they take a dim view of my keeping scotch in my bottom drawer. Not that there isn’t a bottle in there right now. We’ve got a pot of coffee that’s been going continuously since 1992. Want some of that?” My face must have given away my reluctance. “A Diet Coke, then?”

I said sure.

“Hey, Len!” Footsteps scurrying down the hall, then Len poked his head in. “Can you grab us a couple cans of DC?”

Len continued farther on down the hall, where I could hear an old-fashioned fridge open and then latch shut, and then he was back with one can and a paper cup. “We’re running a bit low,” he said, putting both items on her desk and leaving.

Morgan got up and started clearing some papers off a wooden chair so that I could sit down.

“Let me get that,” I offered, but she held up her arm to deflect me, then used it to scoop up the files.

“I’m pretty good at this,” she said. “Although you know what pisses me off? Those taps in public washrooms, where you only get water so long as you’re pressing down? So as soon as you let go of the tap to get your hand under it, there’s no fucking water. I’ve just got the one fist, but if I could find the guy who invented that goddamn tap I could knock his teeth out.”

I smiled awkwardly.

“You can ask,” she said.

“Sorry?”

“How I lost it.”

“It’s none of my business,” I said.

“You ever hang your arm down the outside of the door when you’re in a car?”

Slowly, I nodded.

She smiled. “My husband’s driving, I’m chilling out in the passenger seat, my arm dangling out the window, the asshole runs a red and we get broadsided. I lost my arm in the front grille of a Ford Explorer. Maybe if the two of us hadn’t been three sheets to the wind, it wouldn’t have happened. Getting your wife’s arm cut off tends to put a strain on a marriage, so rather than look at me every day and be reminded of what he’d done, he hit the road. At least I had the one arm left to wave goodbye, the son of a bitch.”

She popped the Diet Coke can, filled the paper cup to the rim, and handed it to me. She sipped what was left in the can and returned to her spot behind the desk.

I sat in the chair she’d cleared for me.

“I don’t think you answered my question,” she said. There had been a question? I was still processing the lost-arm story. Morgan refreshed my memory. “Why couldn’t this person have just sent an anonymous tip? Why give you a fake name?”

“I guess she wanted me to know she was legit,” I said. “And she was. I’m sure of it. She even sent me a picture of my daughter.”

“A picture?”

“Sydney was caught in the frame of a shot she took with her cell phone.” I sipped Diet Coke from the paper cup. I hadn’t realized, until that moment, how parched I was. “It was her. In the picture. I’m positive.”

Morgan shook her head slowly back and forth. “Maybe she wanted you to know your daughter’s out here, she wants you to believe her, so she gave you a name. But maybe there was some reason why she couldn’t reveal her true identity to you.” Morgan laughed. “Makes her sound like Wonder Woman or something.”

“It wasn’t you, was it?” I asked. The idea had just popped into my head.

Morgan Donovan was too worn down by her job to register any surprise at my question. She said tiredly, “It’s all I can do to get these kids to have some breakfast, let alone reunite them all with their families.”

“I’m taking a lot of shots in the dark these days,” I said.

“Where are you staying?” Morgan asked me.

“I don’t know. I didn’t book anything before I left. I thought, maybe, if I found Syd right away, we’d catch a red-eye back home tonight.”

She smiled pitifully at me. “An optimist. It’s been so long since I ran into one of those I almost forgot they existed. Give me your cell number. I’ll put some of your snaps up on the bulletin board, tell everybody to see me if they know anything. Then I’ll call you. That a deal?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’d really appreciate that.” A couple more swallows and I had finished my cup of Diet Coke. “Would you mind if I asked the other people who work here if they’ve seen Syd, or heard of Yolanda Mills?”