If I were them, I wouldn’t have bought it. And my motives hadn’t been entirely pure. I had been wondering whether to try and get some information about Scott out of her, although I’d quickly abandoned that idea.
The hope of getting her to answer some questions wasn’t what kept me here now. I just couldn’t abandon a young girl out on this strip, at this time of night. Certainly not without telling her I was leaving.
I decided to go in and find her, make certain she was okay, then tell her to find her way home from here. Give her cab fare if she didn’t have anyone else she could call. I got out of the Honda, went into the restaurant, scanned the seats I hadn’t been able to see from my outdoor vantage point, just in case Claire was sitting down for a moment. When I didn’t find her at any of the tables, I approached the restroom doors at the back, which were steps away from another glass door that led outside.
I hesitated outside the door marked WOMEN, screwed up my nerve, then pushed the door open half an inch.
“Claire? Claire, you okay?”
There was no answer.
“It’s me. Mr. Weaver.”
Nothing. Not from Claire or anyone else. So I pushed the door open a good foot, cast my eye across the room. A couple of sinks, wall-mounted hand dryer, three stalls. The doors, all closed, were painted a dull tan and bubbling with rust at the hinges. They stopped a foot from the floor, and I didn’t notice any feet beneath any of them.
I took a couple of steps, extended an arm and gently touched the door of the first stall. The door, not locked, swung open lazily. I don’t know what the hell I was expecting to find. I could tell before I’d opened the door there was no one in there. And then the thought flashed across my mind: what if someone had been in there? Claire, or someone else?
This was not a smart place for me to be hanging around.
I exited the bathroom, strode quickly through the restaurant, looking for her. Homeless guy, woman with kids—
The man in the brown leather jacket, the one who’d been ordering food last time I saw him, was gone.
“Son of a bitch,” I said.
When I got outside, the first thing I noticed was an empty parking space where the black pickup used to be. Then I saw it. Turning back onto Danbury, flicker on, waiting for a break in the traffic. It wasn’t possible to tell, with those tinted windows, whether anyone was in the car besides the driver.
The truck found an opening and took off south, in the direction of Niagara Falls, the engine roaring, back tires spinning on wet pavement.
Could this have been the truck Claire’d been referring to when I allowed her to jump in at Patchett’s? If it was, had we been followed? Was the driver the man in the leather jacket? Had he grabbed Claire and taken her with him? Or had she decided he was less threatening than she’d originally thought, and now was going to favor him with the opportunity to drive her home?
Goddamn it.
My heart pounded. I’d lost Claire. I hadn’t wanted her in the first place, but I was panicked now that I didn’t know where she was. My mind raced while I worked out a plan. Follow the truck? Call the police? Forget the whole damn thing ever happened?
Follow the truck.
Yeah, that seemed the most logical thing. Catch up to it, come up alongside, see if I could catch a glimpse of the girl, make sure she was—
There she was.
Sitting in my car. In the passenger seat, shoulder strap already in place. Blond hair hanging over her eyes.
Waiting for me.
I took a couple of breaths, walked over, got in, slammed the door. “Where the hell were you?” I asked as I dropped into the seat, the interior lights on for three seconds tops. “You were in there so long I was starting to worry.”
She stared out the passenger window, her body leaning away from me. “Came out the side door I guess when you were going in.” Almost muttering, her voice rougher than before. Throwing up must have taken a toll on her throat.
“You gave me a hell of a start,” I said. But there didn’t seem much point in reprimanding her. She wasn’t my kid, and in a few minutes she’d be home.
I backed the car out, then continued heading south on Danbury.
She kept leaning up against her door, like she was trying to stay as far away from me as possible. If she was wary of me now, why hadn’t she been before she’d gone into Iggy’s? I couldn’t think of anything I’d done to make her fearful. Was it because I’d run into the restaurant looking for her? Had I crossed some kind of line?
There was something else niggling at me, something other than what I might have done. It was something I’d seen, when the light came on inside the car for those five seconds while my door was open.
Things that were only now registering.
First, her clothes.
They were dry. Her jeans weren’t darkened with dampness. It wasn’t like I could reach over now and touch her knee to see whether it was wet, but I was pretty sure. She couldn’t have stripped down in the bathroom and held her jeans up to the hot-air hand dryer, could she? I could barely get those things to blow the water off my hands. Surely they couldn’t dry out denim.
But there was more. More disconcerting than the dry clothes. Maybe what I’d thought I’d seen I hadn’t seen at all. After all, the light was on for only those few seconds.
I needed to turn it back on to be certain.
I fingered the dial by the steering column that flicked on the dome light. “Sorry,” I said. “Just had this thought I left my sunglasses at the Home Depot.” I fumbled with my right hand in the small storage area at the head of the console. “Oh yeah, there they are.”
And I turned the light back off. It was on long enough for me to be sure.
Her left hand. It was uninjured.
There was no cut.
Two
I’d seen that wound on Claire’s hand, the ragged bits of skin, the tiny bubbles of blood just below the surface, waiting to come out. She’d suffered that injury — small as it was — only a few minutes before she’d gotten into my car at Patchett’s.
Unless Claire was one of the X-Men team, and had super healing powers, the girl sitting next to me now was not the same girl who had been sitting next to me when we pulled into Iggy’s.
I had a surreal feeling as we continued along Danbury, like I’d stumbled into a Twilight Zone episode. But this was real, and there had to be some kind of rational explanation.
I tried to think it through.
This girl was dressed pretty much identically to Claire. Blue jeans and a short dark blue jacket. The same long blond hair. But, glancing over, I noticed that this girl’s hair, like her jeans, was not nearly as wet as Claire’s had been. And there was something slightly off about it, like her entire head was askew. I was pretty sure I was looking at a wig.
I broke the silence. “Do I make a turn soon or anything?”
The girl nodded, pointed. “Two lights up. Go left.”
“Okay.” I paused. “You feeling better now?”
A nod.
“When you were gone so long, I wondered if you were even sicker than you’d first thought.”
“I’m okay now,” she said quietly.
There was a sudden glare coming from my rearview mirror, even with the night setting. Raised headlights again.
“You were telling me before,” I said, “about how you met my son.”
“Hmm?” the girl said.
“I was just wondering where it was that thing happened, where he spilled an ice cream cone on you.”
“Oh,” she said, not staring out her window, but still down and to the right, so that the side of her face was still shrouded by the wig. “Yeah, that was pretty funny. It was at the Galleria Mall. I ran into him at the food court. Like, literally. He was eating this cone and the ice cream fell off the top and landed on my top.”