Will gave a grunting sigh. As soon as he’d rounded his father’s door, he stuffed the small wad of cash into his pocket and bent to “retie” his firmly knotted shoelace, wary of anyone who might catch him eavesdropping.
“Carrie,” his father said in a voice that gave little away. “No. I am glad to hear from you. I’ve been worried you might not call me back …”
There was an agonizing pause. A pair of goateed men strode past and eyed Will with interest. The secret to being a good private investigator was blending in—not exactly Will’s forte, but he stood and flipped through his notebook in a way that he hoped looked purposeful.
“I can’t tell you how much I want to,” Douglas said. “But I’ve got my kid here today. I was gonna take him out to lunch. Yes, I know. Well, that makes me a very sick man. Yes, I’ll call you later. I swear. I will. I won’t ever stand you up like that again. I do appreciate you. I know you worry.”
Will’s ears roared. His horror was like an earthquake. The hallway walls around him swayed and liquefied. He felt the polished office floor swell beneath his Top-Siders, and he worried he was on the verge of a seizure.
There was a woman in the world—even closer, in the state, the county, even—who felt close enough to Will’s dad to worry about him. Triumphant as Will was that his detective skills had paid off, he felt a crushing wave of anger and heartbreak for his mother. His father’s affair didn’t sound like a fling. It sounded powerful and devastating, like something destined to blow their whole lives apart.
Later, Douglas went to a meeting, leaving Will to watch a video. The video was on YouTube, meaning Will really could have watched from the comfort of his mother’s kitchen desk. It said nothing about his father’s business associates. It gave little insight into the extroverted work persona Douglas appeared to slip on each morning along with his wrinkle-resistant dress shirt.
On the upside, the video gave Will forty untroubled minutes to scroll through his father’s computer files.
Will was no tech prodigy. His mother wasn’t exactly peppering his school curriculum with HTML lessons. Heck, she still thought WordPerfect was the industry standard.
Still, Will managed to search his father’s hard drive for any documents that might mention sex, Carrie, affair, or love. When those resulted in no hits—aside from a PowerPoint presentation titled “Eight Reasons You’ll Love Using Lotus Notes”—Will dug into his burgeoning mental gutter. He searched for hotel (this only brought up a few ancient itineraries for his father’s work conventions). He hunted for divorce, lawyer, and even custody, before zeroing in on his father’s open e-mail.
I’ve got my kid here today. Whoever Carrie was, she knew about Douglas’s family. Will decided to start with Rose. Eigne, a naming word, meaning “firstborn.” An in-box search of Rose’s name brought up dozens of e-mails.
The most recent was a series of e-mail messages to a man his dad appeared to be considering hiring to sniff out Rose’s address. At least according to his signature box, this man worked at a “bonded and insured private investigations firm servicing greater New York City.” Will felt a touch competitive, knowing he wasn’t the only PI on the case. He couldn’t help imagining the man he was up against. Did he have real spy tools: voice changers and night-vision goggles? Did he turn up the collar on his black leather trench coat?
In the first message, written a few months earlier, Douglas wrote that he “just wanted to verify” that his runaway daughter wasn’t stalking or harassing his wife and remaining children. There had been some incidents, he said. His wife was feeling jumpy.
What kinds of incidents? the PI had written.
Nothing conclusive, Douglas wrote. My car was keyed. A few personal items have gone missing. There were some defaced photos in the family album, although my younger daughter might have done that.
“Are you hanging in there?” When Will looked up, his father’s secretary was standing in the doorway, smiling the kind of exaggerated smile that made the tendons stand out in her neck.
It took Will a second to figure out what she was talking about. He felt like he had chewed gum in his ears. “Uh-huh,” he said, and turned up the volume on the IBM school-spirit video.
The assistant—Peggy was her name—nodded vigorously. A woman on the brink of retirement, she had large dangling pieces of jewelry and pictures of grandchildren on her desk. In the name of thoroughness, Will had added her name to his list of potential mistresses anyway.
“Okay,” Peggy said. “You’re awful self-reliant, aren’t you? You’re just like your dad. Okay … If you need anything, give me a holler.”
Will bit his lip. His ears were buzzing, and his fingers had turned so inexplicably cold that he had trouble moving the cursor across the computer screen.
The defaced photos, things stolen … it was all news to Will. But he had felt something strange in the air over the past couple of weeks, even beyond Violet’s usual weirdness. Twice, bears had battered the garbage cans and made trash salad all over the garage floor (no Hurst would cop to leaving the door open). Once, he’d found his mother in her master bathroom, crying over the shards and puddles of her favorite perfume bottle.
He did, of course, remember his father’s keyed car. He’d heard his parents fighting about it through their closed bedroom door:
“You pissed someone off, Douglas!” his mother had wailed. “Just admit it! You cut someone off! Or you blocked a bike lane! Or you, I don’t know … You stole a parking space someone else was waiting for!”
And his father: “It happened here, Josephine! In our garage!”
“Well, it serves you right for leaving the garage door open!”
“Could Violet have done this? Or one of her friends?”
It went on and on and on.
Also, there was the incident a few nights before Violet flipped her biscuits. It was a humid night, unseasonably sweaty. Will’s windows were open, and his striped blue drapes twitched in the barely there wind. He’d been waking every thirty minutes, playing WrestleMania with his sheets. His hair was drenched and his pillowcase was damp with perspiration. But when he reached a hand underneath to flip his pillow to the cooler side, his fingers had tripped over a sharp metal point. By the glow of his ancient Noah’s Ark night-light, Will had pulled out eight gleaming inches of his mother’s sewing scissors. He’d turned the orange handle over in his hand and thought of various reasons why they might have ended up one down-filled inch away from his face: Some chance Violet was playing a joke? Maybe his mother, midway through making Will’s bed, had left them there by mistake? Eventually, Will got up and returned them to the sewing box on his mother’s desk. When he woke up the next morning, he didn’t breathe a word about the scissors to anyone. He’d chalked it up to a very vivid dream.
The last e-mail from his father’s potential PI was dated just one week before Violet’s breakdown. I feel very confident I can find your daughter. To begin with, I will need some information from you, including Rose’s birth date, a recent photograph, driver’s license number, social security number, a list of alternative names she might be using, as well as information on her electronic communication devices, such as known cell phone numbers and e-mail addresses. As far as Will could see, either his father hadn’t responded or, covering his tracks, he’d deleted that message and every one that came after.
Will stared up the web of scribbles on his father’s whiteboard. He tried to will his brain into the same kind of organized algorithm, every arrow leading him from one logical thought to the next.
There was no end of explanations, but only two immediately jumped out. One was that Douglas had changed his mind. Maybe he’d found another culprit for the hacked-up family photos and the car. Like his father