I felt a twinge, a small flutter, in my chest. “With your sister?”

“Maybe. But I haven’t seen Bailey since probably about then.”

The twinge died.

Like it always did.

I stood and offered a hand to help him up. He refused and got up on his own.

“Why haven’t you seen her since then?” I asked.

He brushed snow from his shirt. “She left with my mom.”

“What do you mean?”

“My parents got divorced,” he said. “She went with my mom. Chicago first, then down to Florida.”

“Where is she now?”

“No clue.”  He looked away. “I stopped talking to my mom when they got to Florida. So I didn’t talk to Bailey, either.”

“And you stayed here?”

“Yeah.”

“What about your dad?” I asked. “Would he know where they are?”

“He’s dead,” he said, his voice flat. “And he wouldn’t have known anyway. He took off right after my mom and I never heard from him again.”

“Where’d you go?”

“I stayed here,” he said. “By myself. I didn’t need them. Either of them.”

“You didn’t have any contact with them?  At all?”

He wiped at the snow on his face. “I got some Christmas cards and shit, I think. But I was fine. I didn’t need them.”  He shrugged. “My dad didn’t wanna be a dad. That was cool. He split, I bailed school and life was fine.”

It was easy to see that it wasn’t cool and that life wasn’t fine, but I wasn’t there to play life counselor. I was there to find my daughter and Jacob was connected to a girl in a photo with her. I wasn’t going to waste time solving his problems.

I wanted to solve mine.

An engine sputtered at the curb and I looked up.

A red SUV idled and a woman stared at me from the windows.

“Oh, great,” Jacob muttered. “My day is just kicking ass.”

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“No one,” he said.

The passenger side window dropped and the woman leaned across the seat. “Everything okay, Jacob?”

“Fabulous,” he said.

“You sure?”

He rolled his eyes. “I’m going inside.”

I folded my arms across my chest. “I’m not done talking to you.”

His face screwed up in agitation  “Man, I don’t have shit to say to you, alright? I haven’t seen my sister in years. I have no idea where she is. And you know what? I don’t care where she is. So I don’t know where your kid is, either. Sorry. Life sucks, sometimes.”  He shook his head and pushed past me. “Get used to it.”

THREE

The woman got out of the SUV and trudged across the snow-covered yard.

Waves of dark hair snaked out beneath the knit beanie on her head. A large parka covered most of her short, compact frame. Pale blue eyes stared at me, curious.

“Hi,” she said, holding out a gloved hand. “I’m Isabel.”

I shook her hand. Feathery crows feet and tired eyes couldn’t convince me she was old. I put her somewhere in her early thirties.

“Joe Tyler,” I said.

“You have an issue with Jacob?”

“I just met him.”

“Doesn’t answer my question.”

“I wasn’t trying to.”

She folded her arms around the parka. “Okay. For the record, I don’t like him. So it’s alright with me if you do have an issue with him.”

“How do you know him?”

She stared over my shoulder at the house, choosing her words carefully. “We sort of work together.”

“Sort of?”

Her eyes refocused on me. “You know anything about Jacob?”

“I wasn’t kidding. I just met him. No. I know nothing about him.”

She nodded. “He’s kind of a scumbag.”

I smiled. “In my experience, you either are or you aren’t.”

She returned the smile. “Probably so. He’s a scumbag, then.”

“How so?”

“Deals,” she said. “Probably a bunch of other crap I don’t know about.”

“So how do you know him?”

“I find kids through him.”

“What do you mean?”

She fished in the pocket of her jacket, pulled out a card and handed it to me.

The card listed her full name, Isabel Balzone. A cozy image of a brick home was centered above her name. Below, the words Director, Run Home.

“Don’t let the director title fool you,” she said. “I’m a one-woman organization.”

“What’s Run Home?”

“Mostly a failing endeavor,” she said, smiling dryly. “I try to get kids home.”

“Kids?”

“Mostly teens,” she said. “Runaways. Homeless. Some others. I try to get them home. Or at least to a safe place.” The smile appeared again. “Run Home is the opposite of run away.”

I nodded. “I get it. So what do you have to do with Jacob?”

She sighed. “We kind of have a deal. He runs into anyone that really needs help, he calls me. In turn, I don’t turn him into the cops.”

“Sweet deal.”

“Believe it or not, he does call me,” she said. “I check in with him a lot. But he does call.”  She paused. “So maybe he’s not a scumbag. Maybe just a bit of a jerk.”

The snow fell in earnest and the entire street was blanketed in white.

“Why are you here?” she asked. “And why did you have him on his ass?”

I shoved her card in my pocket and held onto the photo of Elizabeth and Bailey. I stared hard at it, willing Elizabeth to speak to me, to tell me where she was, where she’d gone, who’d taken her.

But she said nothing.

I offered the photo to Isabel. “I’m looking for my daughter.”

FOUR

Isabel Balzone blew the steam off the top of her coffee. “You’re still looking?”

The steady snow had morphed into a blizzard while we talked in front of Jacob’s house. She’d suggested grabbing coffee at a diner down the road. With nowhere else to go, I said okay.

The diner, like Jacob’s house, was in a run-down neighborhood west of Minneapolis. Just off 94, north of the skyline and the baseball stadium, nestled in a thicket of brick ramblers and falling-down clapboard homes. The crowd inside was decidedly local.

I cupped my hands around the warm porcelain mug. My eyes zeroed in on the chipped rim. “Yeah.”

“Even when you don’t know what you’ll find?”

“I need to know,” I said. “The not knowing is almost worse than not having her around.”

She nodded as if she understood. But she didn’t. The only way she could was if she had lost a child.

Maybe she had. “How’d you get into this?” I asked.

The waitress returned and set a slice of apple pie in front of Isabel. She hadn’t ordered it.

“Just wanted to do something helpful,” Isabel said. “I worked at a couple of non-profits out of college but the red tape and restrictions chafed at me. I’m not really a sit around and wait for an answer type. So I just started going out at night. Finding kids, giving them blankets, getting them food, stuff like that.”

She shrugged. “I got some cards printed up and learned how to write grant proposals. I pay myself a ridiculously small salary. And here I am.”

“You do anything with missing kids?” I asked. “Help look or locate?”

She ate a forkful of pie and shook her head. “Not much. It’s mostly assistance. Making sure they’re safe, have food, stuff like that. Most of the kids I work with, they don’t wanna go home. And some of them have good reason not to. I don’t think it’s my job to put them back home unless they want to be there, you know?”

“But your organization is called Run Home.”

“Well, sure.” She wiped her mouth with her napkin. “For those who have a decent home to go back to, it’s the best place for them to be.

“And the others? It’s okay to let them run away?”

She smiled, like she’d been asked that a million times. “It’s never okay because it means a kid doesn’t feel loved. But like I said, a lot of these kids…they’re not better off at home.”

I could imagine the reasons, but I didn’t have the ability to be so objective. I lost that ability the day Elizabeth disappeared.

“But there is one kid I’m concerned about,” she said, lines forming on her forehead.

“Who?”

“He was a regular. And he’s nowhere to be found.”