“Actually, yes, I would,” Morgan said. “I’ll do what I can for you, but I don’t want you stirring things up around here.”

I didn’t like her answer much. I got up from the chair, nodded, and said thanks. She went back to the mounds of paper on her desk. When she noticed I hadn’t left yet, she said, “Was there something else?”

“You were going to put my daughter’s picture on the bulletin board,” I said.

“So I was.” She brushed past me on her way out of the room, went down the hall and into the main reception area, where kids were still milling around. There seemed to be more here than before I’d gone into Morgan Donovan’s office. She crossed the room and stuck Syd’s face to a bulletin board and wrote under it, If you’ve seen this girl, see Lefty.

The board was a collage version of a graduating class photo. Hundreds of photos. Boys and girls. White, black, Hispanic, Asian. Some as young as ten or twelve, others who looked to be in their thirties. The moment Morgan stepped back from the board, Sydney’s face blended into all the others. Not one lost daughter, but the latest addition to a lost generation.

I stared hopelessly at the wall.

“I know,” Morgan said. “It’s a bitch, isn’t it?”

I ASKED LEN FOR A SHEET OF PAPER from his printer before I left. I leaned over the door that was his desk, positioned a photo of Syd in the middle, and wrote above it, HAVE YOU SEEN SYDNEY BLAKE? Below the shot I printed my own name and cell phone number, adding, PLEASE CALL.

I left and found a drugstore with a photocopying machine, positioned the picture in the center of the sheet, and placed the two items on the glass. I set the counter to one hundred and pressed Print. Once I had the copies, I went up and down the street. I figured if Syd had been in this area at least a couple of times, she might have frequented other businesses. Maybe she’d even have gone into some of them looking for work. She’d always been a pretty resourceful kid, and I could see her looking for odd jobs so that she could afford to feed herself.

Most of the shopkeepers politely took the flyers, glanced at them, put them aside. Some just said, “Sorry.” Others glanced at the sheet and crumpled it up.

There wasn’t time to get angry with any of them. I just moved on to the next shop.

I did that until about nine. There was a diner across from Second Chance, and I managed to get a seat by the window. I put my cell phone on the table and ordered a hot open-faced turkey sandwich and coffee and sat there, rarely taking my eye off the front of the drop-in center. There was a streetlamp on the sidewalk there, and it cast enough light that if Syd appeared, I was confident I could spot her, even through the off-and-on drizzle.

I ate my dinner mechanically. Put the food in my mouth, chewed, swallowed. Drank my coffee.

I tried the Yolanda Mills number again. No answer, no way to leave a message.

I’d no sooner put the phone down than it rang. I grabbed it so quickly I knocked my fork to the floor. I didn’t stop to see who was calling before I flipped the phone open and put it to my ear.

“Yes?” I said.

“It’s me,” Susanne said.

“Hey,” I said. “What are you doing up? What time is it? It must be after midnight where you are.”

“I’ve been sitting here by the phone all night, waiting for you to call.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “The lead… hasn’t panned out.”

I heard a sigh of disappointment. “You sound… beat,” she said.

“I’m going to find a place to stay. There’s a Holiday Inn or something up the street. I’ll get an early start tomorrow. See if I can find the woman who called me, hit all the other shelters I can find, see if Syd went to one of those.”

“You haven’t connected with the woman who called you?”

“No one’s heard of her.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I know.”

I could sense Susanne’s frustration thousands of miles away. “I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

I propped my elbow on the table and rested my head in the hand that wasn’t holding the phone, still watching the Second Chance shelter across the street.

A girl stood in the doorway of the shelter. Blonde.

“It’s just, you get some hint that maybe this is it, you grab on and hold on with everything you’ve got,” she said. “If you hear anything, you’ll call?”

“I will,” I said. Switching gears, I said, “Susanne, how close are Evan and Sydney? I mean, before she disappeared.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Not that close, as far as I could tell. I mean, they’d be civil with each other at the dinner table, but it’s not like they hung out together or anything.”

“What do you think he’s into?”

“What do you mean ‘into’?”

“You think he’s stealing from you; he’s always on the computer with the door closed. You don’t think it’s porn. What’s your best guess?”

“I don’t know. I mean, it may be nothing. He’s really into music. You know, they’ve got all these programs where you can create music on the computer. Maybe he’s doing that, with the headphones on so we don’t hear it.”

But she didn’t sound convinced.

I kept watching the girl across the street.

“Do you think Evan might have dragged Syd into whatever he’s up to?” I asked.

“I never saw anything to suggest-”

“Susanne? Hello?”

“Sorry. I just closed the study door. I don’t want to wake Bob. Anyway, no, I don’t think Syd was mixed up in anything Evan’s up to. But there’s something I have to tell you.”

The girl kept moving in and out of the shadows. She’d move in close to the shelter entrance where I could barely see her, then poke her head out to watch the cars go by, the streetlights catching her blonde hair.

Come on, come on, step out, step out all the way.

“I saw that van again tonight,” Susanne said.

“What van?” I said. The girl took a step forward, the light hitting her face for less than a second. She glanced down the street, then retreated into the shadows.

“The one on our street? The one Bob doesn’t think is a big deal?”

I knew what van she meant the first time, but I was having a hard time keeping track of the conversation while I watched the girl.

“When did you see it?” I managed to ask.

“Tonight. A couple of hours ago. After it got dark, I happened to look outside and saw a van parked a few houses down, and when I went out and walked down to the end of the driveway it started up and backed up to the corner and took off.”

A boy-a young man-was approaching the shelter from the right. He came up to the door, and the girl threw her arms around him, kissed him. He had his back to me, and all I could really see of the girl was the top of her head and her arms.

“Susanne…”

“It’s freaking me out. Bob says I’m getting paranoid about everything because of Syd. Why the fuck wouldn’t I be?”

The girl stepped out from the entrance, into the streetlight, but the way she had her arms wrapped around the boy, her head tucked down onto his chest, I couldn’t see her face. But my gut said it wasn’t her. There was something not quite Syd about her. This girl’s legs, they seemed a little shorter.

They started walking up the street. In another moment, they’d be gone.

“So I’m thinking, is someone watching our house? Or one of the other houses on the street? If it’s our house, are they watching me, or are they watching Bob? Or has this got something to do with Evan?”

Then the girl leaned her head back, tossed her hair back over her shoulder.

I’d seen Syd do that a thousand times.

“Susanne, I have to go for a second. Hang on.”

“What? Why-”

I bolted from the diner, leaving my bag behind, my phone on the table. I threw open the door and ran into the street, forcing drivers coming from both directions to hit the brakes. Horns blew, someone shouted, “Asshole!”

They were forty yards ahead, thirty, twenty. Arm in arm. She had an arm around his waist, her thumb in a belt loop.