I didn’t have time for this. “Mr. Sanders, just tell me where Claire is. I’ll bring her home. It’s what I do,” I said.
He wasn’t hearing me.
He said, “You think the cops are sitting out on that street watching out for me? Is that what you think?”
“Why don’t you just tell me?”
“They’re not watching out for me. They’re just watching me. Intimidating me. Trying to get me to back off.”
“I still don’t understand what—”
I stopped. I heard something — or someone — upstairs.
Twenty-eight
“What was that?” I said, looking up. It had sounded to me like someone moving around. Definitely not a squirrel running across the roof.
“I didn’t hear anything,” Sanders said.
“Then you’re deaf,” I said. “It was upstairs.”
“There’s nobody upstairs,” he said. “I’m alone.”
I studied him. “Is she here? Is Claire here now?”
He shook his head quickly again. “No.”
I raised my head to the ceiling. “Claire!” I shouted.
“Shut up!” Sanders said. “Keep your voice down!”
“Why do I have to keep my voice down if there’s no one here?”
I made my way to the stairs, shaking Sanders’ hand off my arm as he attempted to stop me.
“Get out,” he said. “You’ve got no right to search my house!”
I glanced back at him. “Maybe you should call the cops.”
He stammered something unintelligible as I ascended the stairs. I was nearly halfway up when he charged after me. I felt arms locking around my knees, and I toppled forward. I reached out to brace my fall, but my right elbow connected with one of the hardwood steps, sending a charge up my arm.
“Shit!” I said.
“You son of a bitch!” Sanders said, grappling with my lower legs.
I managed to slip one free, then placed the bottom of my left shoe against his bare right shoulder and pushed. He flew back down the stairs and landed on his ass, the sash of his robe coming undone, exposing him. Nothing looks much more foolish, or more vulnerable, than a man with his junk hanging out for the world to see.
He scrambled to his feet, pulled the robe around himself, and retied the sash. I was half sitting, half standing on the steps, giving my elbow a gentle rub.
“We can make this easy or we can make this hard,” I told him.
“Please,” he said, in a voice that bordered on whimpering. “Just get out. What does any of this have to do with you, really? Can’t you just go?”
“Stay there,” I said, and climbed the rest of the flight. “Claire,” I called again, but not shouting this time. I didn’t want to sound threatening. “It’s Mr. Weaver, Scott’s dad. We met last night.”
At the top of the stairs I took a second to orient myself as Sanders, now halfway up the steps behind me, said, “I told you, she’s not here.”
I ignored him. There was a bathroom immediately to my right, and just beyond it a door to what looked like the largest of the three other rooms up here. This, I guessed, was Sanders’ room. A queen-sized bed, the covers thrown back. He’d clearly been under them when I’d arrived and had thrown on the robe to greet me at the door.
To the left, what had probably been a bedroom but was currently an office. A desk, bookshelves, a desktop iMac.
And straight ahead of me, the door closed, was Claire’s room. I didn’t need to be Poirot to figure that out. Stuck to the door was a miniature plastic license plate, the kind you can buy at novelty and souvenir shops, that bore the girl’s name.
“Claire?” I said hesitantly before pushing the door open and running my hand along the wall for the light switch. I flicked it on. The first, most obvious thing I noticed was that the bed was empty, and made, although it was littered with about a dozen magazines.
“I told you,” Sanders said behind me.
I stepped into the room.
There were several stuffed animals, a few dogs and two furry bunnies — a pink one and a blue one — that all looked worn with age, adorning the pillow. She’d probably had them since she was a child. The magazines were not what I might have expected. While there was one issue of Vogue, most were copies of the New Yorker, the Economist, Harper’s, and the Walrus, a Canadian magazine of news and commentary. On the bedside table were an iPad and the Steve Jobs biography that had come out a couple of years ago.
I picked up the iPad and pressed the button to see what came up. An array of icons, most of them news sites.
“You’ve got no right to look—”
I whipped my head around and snapped, “Enough.”
I tapped on the stamp icon and brought up Claire’s e-mails. I gave recent messages in the in-box, and those that had been sent, a ten-second scan. The thing was, my generation felt so advanced, communicating through e-mails, but most kids texted, having abandoned e-mail long ago. No message jumped out at me.
I looked up, caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror. When I was young, we tucked the edges of snapshots under mirror frames, but there were none displayed here. These days, hardly anyone had a picture that was on a piece of paper. Photos were shared online, posted, e-mailed, flicked across smartphone screens. Technology allowed us to share our photos with more people now than ever before, but where would these captured moments in time be in twenty years? On some outdated piece of hardware at the bottom of a landfill site? What happened to memories you couldn’t hold between your thumb and forefinger?
These thoughts running through my head prompted me to tap on the iPad’s photo icon. Up popped the kinds of shots teenagers most often took of each other. Laughing, vamping, sticking out their tongues, standing around at parties, drinks in hand.
“Those pictures are private,” Sanders said.
He was wearing me out. “Like I said, call the cops.”
There were several shots of Claire and Hanna together. Hanna kissing Claire on the cheek. Claire grabbing Hanna’s nose. The two of them in prom dresses, hands on hips.
But there were shots of Claire with boys, too. Some that, by their placement farther down the screen, were probably taken longer ago, and featured an older-looking, round-faced kid. Young man, actually.
I turned the iPad toward Sanders. “Is that Roman Ravelson?”
“Honestly, would you please get—”
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
“And what about this boy?” In the more recent pictures, Claire was snuggling, kissing, and laughing with a young, clean-shaven black man with closely cropped hair. He stood a good foot taller than Claire.
“Dennis.”
“Dennis who?”
“Dennis Mullavey. Someone she used to go out with.”
“From Griffon?”
“No, I don’t know where from. He had a summer job here. He went back home, wherever that is.”
“Was it serious?”
Sanders shook his head in exasperation. “I don’t know. It was a summer romance. You remember those? They’re all the more intense because the time seems so limited. This is a — this is a total invasion of my daughter’s privacy.”
I set the iPad down and surveyed the top of the desk. It was cluttered with what I would have expected. Some makeup, bottles of nail polish, schoolbooks. I rounded the bed to see whether anything was tucked between it and the wall — I was thinking someone could have been hiding there, but no one was — then went to the closet door and opened it.
“For God’s sake,” Sanders said.
I was greeted with a kind of congealed mass of clothing. I doubted it was possible to stuff one more thing in there. I turned, looked at Sanders standing in the doorway, trying to look imposing.