“I’ve seen a van,” he admitted. “But it was halfway down the block. It’s been there two, maybe three times over the last couple of weeks. I think there’s usually been someone in it, but it’s kind of hard to tell.”

“What kind of van?” I asked.

“Chrysler, probably,” he said. “An older one.”

I wondered if it could be cops. You normally expected to see them in a Crown Vic or an Impala, but cops working undercover could easily be in a van.

“You think it was watching the house?” I asked him. A van parked halfway down the block didn’t have to mean anything.

“You have to understand,” Bob said, “we’ve all been under a lot of stress lately. This thing with Sydney, it’s taking its toll.”

This thing with Sydney. He made it sound like we were having a stretch of bad weather. Hope this thing with Sydney passes soon so we can put the top down on the car.

“I’m sure it’s been very hard on you,” I said to him.

He gave me a look. “Don’t start, Tim. I’m trying to help here. And all I’m saying is, everybody’s radar’s on high alert. Every time a girl goes by, we’re looking to see if it’s Sydney. We hear a car pull into the driveway, we rush to see if it’s her being brought home by the police. So Suze-both of us-we’re looking at the world different, you know what I’m saying? So we see a car parked on the street, we just wonder what’s going on.”

“He was smoking,” Susanne said, her voice sounding very tired. “It was like a little orange dot behind the steering wheel every time he took a drag on the cigarette.”

“Did you call the police?” I asked.

“And say what?” said Bob, even though he wasn’t the one I was asking. “ ‘Officer, there’s a van parked perfectly legally down the street. Could you check it out?’”

“I wonder if it has to do with Sydney,” Susanne said, taking a tissue out of the sleeve of her pullover top and dabbing at her eyes.

“First of all,” I said, “you don’t know that it has anything to do with Sydney or you or anyone at all. Bob might actually be right about this. We’re all under a terrible strain. You look like you haven’t slept for weeks-”

“Thanks a lot,” she said.

I tried to backtrack. “Neither of us has been getting the sleep we need. You get so tired you lose perspective, you start misinterpreting things people say to you, misconstruing their meaning.”

“That’s right,” Bob said to Susanne.

“I just want you to take me seriously about this,” Susanne said to me.

“I am,” I said.

“I didn’t belittle your concerns, years ago,” she said.

“What?”

“You remember,” she said. “When you thought someone was going around asking questions about you?”

I hadn’t thought about that in a very long time. It had to have been ten, twelve years ago. The feeling that someone was looking into my background. A couple of people I knew said they’d had a call from someone, said I’d given them as a reference. What did they know about me? Was I reliable? As though I’d been applying for an apartment or a new job, except I wasn’t applying for either of those things.

And then it stopped, and I never heard another thing.

“I remember,” I said. “And I’m not belittling your concerns. If you think someone’s watching the house, I believe you.”

“That’s not all,” she said. “Things have been disappearing. Bob bought me a Longines watch, and I don’t know what happened to it. I’m sure-”

Bob said, “Honey, you just misplaced it, I’m sure.”

“And what about the money?” she asked him. “That cash? It was nearly a hundred dollars.” She looked at me. “In my purse.”

“Has there been a break-in?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But something’s going on.”

The back door on the Hummer’s driver’s side opened. I hadn’t realized anyone else was in the car. Evan-Bob had been married twice before, and if I’d ever known which wife he made this kid with I’d since forgotten-slithered out of the back seat like a piece of boneless chicken.

“Could you like turn on the car so I could put the AC on?” he asked. He had a handful of scratch-and-win lottery tickets-what Sydney and I call “scratch-and-lose” tickets-with panels already rubbed off. He had a penny pinched between the thumb and index finger of his other hand. “It’s roasting in there.”

“In a sec, Evan,” his father said. I’d only met Evan three or four times-just once since Syd had disappeared-and I don’t think he’d said more than ten words to me on all those occasions put together. Nineteen, out of high school-I didn’t know whether he’d left with a diploma or not-and not planning to go anywhere in the fall, so far as I knew. Since Bob had brought him into Susanne’s house, he’d been doing little more than hanging around there and a few odd jobs on one of Bob’s lots. He was tall like his father, with dark locks of hair hanging sheepdog-like over his eyes.

“Are we getting some food on the way back?” he asked. He hadn’t even looked at me.

“Hold on, for Christ’s sake,” Bob said, rolling his eyes, and for a moment there, you had to wonder whether he was thinking the wrong kid went missing.

“I need to go inside for a minute,” Susanne said. She started hobbling toward the front door, putting a lot of weight on the cane.

“You okay?” I asked.

“I just… I need to go in and sit down for a moment,” she said. “My hip’s really throbbing today.”

I tried to catch Bob’s eye, give him my “Nice boat driving” look, but he looked away.

“The house is locked,” I said, handing her my set of keys. She might still have had a key to the house on her key ring, but I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t had the locks changed since our split. It wasn’t as if I expected her to sneak back and make off with the furniture. Anything decent we still had after the divorce went to her place. It looked as though, ultimately, it would end up at Bob’s.

“You said we were going to stop and get something to eat,” Evan said, waving the scratched lottery tickets in the air to blow off the leftover debris.

“Just get in the car,” Bob said. “Open the doors if you need some air.”

Once Susanne was in the house, I said to Bob, “How is she?”

He looked down at the ground. “She’s fine, she’s good. Getting better every day.”

“What were you doing, anyway?” I asked. “Watching teenage girls sunbathing on the beach while Suze got dragged behind the boat?”

He glared.

“Any of them look like future models? I know how you’re always on the lookout for prospects.”

He shook his head in exasperation. “For fuck’s sake, Tim, let it go. I told you, weeks ago, that was a totally innocent comment. Okay, maybe it was inappropriate, I get that now. But for Christ’s sake, can we move on?” He stopped the head shake, lowered his voice. “Don’t you think there are bigger things to worry about right now?”

“Of course,” I said, keeping my voice even.

“Susanne, she’s on the phone night and day. Calling shelters across the state. Police departments. Faxing pictures.” He shook his head disapprovingly. “She can’t do this all alone, Tim. She needs help.”

“Excuse me?”

“You have to pick up some of the slack. Syd’s your daughter, too, you know.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

“I know you’re not a detail guy, Tim, that you kind of let things slip a bit, that that’s how you lost the business and all, but you gotta pick up the ball and run with it this time, you know what I’m saying?”

I wanted to slam his head into the Hummer.

“Suze can’t do it all,” Bob said. “The other day, she wanted me to drop her off at the Stamford Town Center so she could wander around, look at all the kids who were there in case she spotted Syd. You know how huge that place is, and with that pitlike thing in the middle with the tiered seating? And her on a cane, likely to fall over half the time if she’s not careful.”

I turned away for a moment, forcing the anger down, like trying to swallow a brussels sprout as a kid. I took a few steps down the driveway, motioning Bob to follow me.