“Where?” I asked. “Do they have numbers? Can you tell me where—”
“Hold your horses,” she said and, along with Wyatt, led us down a sidewalk, around the side of the building to a row of cabins dimly lit by some lamps attached to wooden poles. They all backed onto a wooded area. I hoped Wyatt was groggy enough not to notice the bulges under the backs of our jackets. It was dark out, so I figured we were okay.
“It’s this one over here,” she said. “This better be a real emergency, because she’s going to be pissed, getting woke up in the middle of the night. I know I am.”
I didn’t have anything to say. I was so excited about finally finding Sydney that my body was shaking.
The woman reached the door and rapped on it lightly with her knuckle. “Hey, Kerry, it’s Madeline. Kerry?”
The windows stayed dark. I didn’t hear any stirring inside. I came up to the door and called out, “Sydney! It’s Dad! Open the door! It’s okay!”
Still nothing. “Open the door,” I said to the woman I now knew to be Madeline.
“I’ll have to go back and get the—”
Bob had come around behind her and kicked the door in. “Hey!” she said.
“Whoa!” said Wyatt. It was the first word we’d heard from him. He grabbed hold of Bob’s arm, but Bob shook him off and reached around inside the door, found a light switch and flicked it on.
It was, at best, six by nine feet. A cot, two wooden chairs, an antique washstand. No running water, no bathroom. A quaint prison cell, in many ways. There were a few toiletry items on the washstand: a hairbrush, a set of keys, a pair of sunglasses. The cot didn’t look slept in.
“Where the hell is she?” Madeline asked. “She needs to be stripping beds first thing in the morning.”
I stepped over to the washstand, picked up the keys. There were three house keys—that made sense: my house, Susanne’s, and now Bob’s—plus a remote and a car key, both stamped with the Honda emblem. I touched the hairbrush, then picked up the sunglasses.
They had Versace written on the arms.
“This is Sydney’s stuff,” I said to Bob, trying to keep my voice from breaking.
I began looking about the cabin for any other clues, anything that might give me a hint as to where she was now.
“When did you last see her?” I asked Madeline, who was huddling up close to Wyatt.
“Sometime today,” she said vaguely. “I don’t really keep track. Kerry usually works an early shift, finishes up midafternoon. After that she can do what she wants.”
“So she did work today?” I asked. “You actually saw her?”
“Yeah, I saw her.”
“What was she like? How was she?”
“You mean today, or since she got here?”
“Both, everything.”
“She’s just about the unhappiest girl I ever did see. Mopey and down, skittish, always looking over her shoulder; you come up behind her and say something and she jumps out of her skin. Cries all the time. Something’s wrong with that girl, you don’t mind my saying.”
I’d felt so hopeful moments earlier, now very uneasy. We’d come so close to finding her. Where would she have gone in the middle of the night?
What if someone else had already found her?
I looked in the corners of the cabin, in the washstand, under the cot. I found some shorts, underwear, a couple of tops. What few items there were looked brand new. Syd had left Milford without packing, after all. There were a couple of prepaid phone cards she must have used to make long-distance calls, and some sheets of paper with material that had been printed off the Internet. Some of it was from the website I’d set up to find her. There was an online version of a New Haven Register story on her disappearance.
“You have a computer here people can use?” I asked.
“There’s one in the office I let the kids working for me borrow. Send emails home, that kind of thing.”
“Has Sydney—Kerry—used it?”
“Yeah, she sneaks some time on it every day. And yeah,” she said, nodding at the papers in my hand, “she’s printed some stuff off it, but I don’t know what it’s about. She was always clearing the history every time she was done.”
I asked Madeline, “Did you hear anything unusual tonight, see any people around you didn’t recognize?”
“I run a tourist business,” Madeline said. “I see different people around here every day.”
“How about you?” I asked Wyatt.
The boy shrugged. “I never talked to her,” he said.
I turned to Bob. “I don’t know what to do,” I said.
He stood there in the dim light of the cabin, shaking his head. He didn’t seem to have any ideas either.
“Maybe it’s time to let Detective Jennings in on things,” he said. “Tell her where we are, see if she can get the locals involved.”
“Locals?” Madeline said.