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And then it hit me. I didn’t have one daughter missing, and in danger.

I had two.

THIRTY-SEVEN

“SO YOU MUST HAVE TOLD PATTY ALL OF THIS,” I SAID.

“No, never,” Carol Swain said. “I didn’t want her to know.”

“But she must have found out,” I said. “How else could she have connected with Sydney?”

“I’ve been thinking about that from the moment you turned up in my driveway. You know how once in a while, you read some story in the paper, about a couple who meet and fall in love and then find out that they’re brother and sister? You think, what are the odds, but it happens. At least in this case, it wasn’t a brother-sister thing, thank God.”

“I don’t know,” I said. I wasn’t a big believer in coincidences, although I knew they could happen. “When the detective reported everything back to you, he must have included the names of my wife and daughter.”

“He did.”

“So when Patty said she had a friend named Sydney, didn’t that set off any bells?”

“In the report I got, your daughter’s name was down as Francine,” Carol Swain said.

Francine was Sydney’s first name, the name that showed up on her birth certificate. But when she was just a toddler, her second name, Sydney-and ultimately, Syd-just seemed to suit her better, and we stopped calling her Francine altogether.

I explained this to Patty’s mother. “So there was never a time that I suspected,” she said. “Maybe, if Patty had ever brought your daughter around, I’d have noticed some similarities.”

“This report you got from the detective,” I asked. “Do you still have it?” She nodded. “Is it here, in the house?” She nodded again. “So then maybe Patty found it.”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “It’s hidden.”

“Hidden where?”

She set down her beer and went upstairs. I heard her moving around up there, then she came back downstairs clutching a thick manila business envelope with her name printed on the front. She tossed it onto the coffee table. “There it is. Everything anybody ever wanted to know about Timothy Justin Blake. It was in a zippered compartment in a travel bag I keep under the bed.”

I slid the envelope’s contents out onto the table as Carol sat back down and resumed her relationship with the beer.

There were quite a few pages. Photocopies of birth certificates, my father’s death certificate, a photo of me from a Bridgeport Business College graduation ceremony, a picture of the house I grew up in and the house I had been living in at the time. All that, and a copy of the bill for services rendered from Denton Abagnall.

“Have you spoken to Mr. Abagnall lately?” I asked.

She shook her head. “He got killed a couple of years ago. It was in all the papers. He’d been hired by that woman whose family disappeared when she was a kid.”

I remembered reading something about that at the time. “So you never showed this to your daughter?”

“I’m telling you, no,” she said.

“Who else might have known?” I asked. “That you’d hired someone to find out I was Patty’s biological father?”

Carol Swain shook her head. “No one,” she said. “Unless Abagnall told someone. And I don’t think he would have done that. He seemed like a real professional, you know?”

“What about your husband, Ronald?” I asked.

“I don’t see how…” she said, but then her voice drifted off. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Do you and he still keep in touch?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Off and on.” There was something in the way she said it. Her eyes did some kind of twinkle.

“What do you mean, ‘off and on’?”

She looked away, drank some beer. “It’s just… He’s a total asshole, okay? I know that. It’s just that, sometimes, we hook up. You know? No strings, just get together for old times’ sake.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s not like I’m going to get pregnant or anything with the guy shooting blanks.”

“How often do you see him?”

She shrugged. “Every few months. Maybe, if it’s been a long time for either one of us, someone gets an itch that needs scratching, we kind of send out a little email, you know, like, what’s doing?”

“When was the last time?”

“Maybe eight, ten months ago. It’s been a while. And the last time before that was way more than a year ago, for a few days.”

“He came here?” I asked.

“His wife wouldn’t exactly be crazy about it if I went and stayed with him at their place.”

“Ronald stayed here for a while? More than a year ago?”

“He had a blowout with his missus, needed a place to camp out for a while. So I shipped Patty off to stay with my sister in Hartford for a bit so I could have some peace and quiet. Seemed like a good time for a bit of a reunion with Ronald.”

“He slept in your room?”

She looked at me and said, “Duh.”

“I’m just asking because he’d have been in the same room with this file.”

She shook her head. “You’re wrong.”

“I’m not accusing him of anything,” I said. “I’m just saying it’s possible. He might have gone looking through your things, looking for something else-”

“What, a pair of my panties to try on?”

“I was thinking more like money. And instead, he came across that envelope. Maybe he’d have thought there was money in it, looked inside, found something else.”

“Anyway,” she said dismissively, “it’s not like it would be a huge shocker, even if he had looked inside. He already knew he wasn’t Patty’s father.”

“But he’d never known the actual identity of Patty’s biological father. And that I had a daughter of my own, about Patty’s age.” My mind was racing, trying to see whether any of these pieces fit together. “If he did see the file, do you think he would have told Patty?”

This time she was more definite. “No way,” she said. “Even though he was a piss-poor father to her, he still felt he was more her father than anyone else was. He wouldn’t have wanted to admit you existed.”

That made sense to me. “But if he read the file, is there any way he might act on the information?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just thinking out loud here. Do you think he might have engineered a way for the girls to meet each other?”

“Why?”

“I’m telling you I don’t know. I mean, would he do it out of mischief? Because he liked the idea that he knew they were half sisters, even if they didn’t know?”

And did it have anything to do with the fact that they were both, now, missing? I didn’t pose the question out loud. I felt I was already too far down a strange road without a map.

“That sounds crazy to me,” Carol said.

“Have you been in contact with Ronald since Patty went missing?”

“Yeah, the first day, before I called the cops,” she said. “I felt like an idiot doing it, because I knew what the chances were. So I call him at work and say, you know, has Patty been by your place or anything, and he says, you’re kidding, that’d be a first.”

“She doesn’t keep in touch with him,” I said.

“No. And he couldn’t be happier. He’s not bad in the sack, but as a dad he’s a complete and total washout.”

I tossed the various pages of the report onto the envelope and stood up, paced back and forth a few steps. “We need to talk to him,” I said.

“Huh?”

“We need to go talk to Ronald.”

“What’s the point of that?”

“I want you to introduce me. Just tell him the truth. That I’m Tim Blake, my daughter Sydney is a friend of Patty’s, the two of them are missing. I want to see his face when you tell him who I am.”

“You think that’ll prove something,” she said.

“It might,” I said. “He still work for Sikorsky?”

“In his dreams. He works at a liquor store.” Right, I thought. I did know that. “He’s probably still on. I’d shop there, but the son of a bitch doesn’t give me a discount. So I take my business elsewhere.”

My cell phone rang.