Fear the Worst: A Thriller (2 page)

We’d had a bigger house, once.

The idea of some horny teenage boy living under the same roof with Syd had pissed me off from the get-go. I was surprised Susanne was going along with it, but once you moved out of your own house and into someone else’s, you lost a bit of leverage. What could she do? Make her boyfriend kick his own son out?

“Yeah, Evan,” Sydney said. “He was just commenting, is all.”

“He shouldn’t even be living there.”

“Jesus, Dad, do we have to get into this again?”

“A boy, a nineteen-year-old boy, unless he’s your actual brother, shouldn’t be living with you.”

I thought I saw her cheeks flush. “It’s not a big deal.”

“Your mother’s cool with this? Bob and his boy telling you to be the next Cindy Crawford?”

“Cindy who?”

“Crawford,” I said. “She was—never mind. Your mom’s okay with this?”

“She’s not having a shit fit like you,” Syd said, shooting me a look. “And besides, Evan’s helping her since the thing.”

The thing
. Susanne’s parasailing accident in Long Island Sound. Came down too fast, did something to her hip, twisted her knee out of shape. Bob, behind the wheel of his boat, dragged her a hundred yards before he knew something was wrong, the dumb fuck. Susanne didn’t have to worry about parasailing accidents when she was with me. I didn’t have a boat.

“You never said what you paid for the shades,” I said.

Sydney sighed. “It wasn’t that much.” She was looking at several unopened envelopes by the phone. “You should really open your bills, Dad. They’ve been there like three days.”

“Don’t you worry about the bills. I can pay the bills.”

“Mom says it’s not that you don’t have the money to pay them, you just aren’t very organized, so then you’re late—”

“The sunglasses. Where’d you get them?”

“Jesus, what’s the deal about a pair of sunglasses?”

“I’m just curious, is all,” I said. “Get them at the mall?”

“Yeah, I got them at the mall. Fifty percent off.”

“Did you save your receipt? In case they break or something?”

Her eyes bored into me. “Why don’t you just ask me to show you the receipt?”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because you think I stole them.”

“I never said that.”

“It was two years ago, Dad. I don’t believe you.” She pushed her eggs away, unfinished.

“You come down here in Versace sunglasses, you think I’m not going to ask questions?”

She got up and stomped back upstairs.

“Shit,” I said under my breath. Nicely played.

I had to finish getting ready to go to work myself, and heard her run down the stairs while I was in my bedroom. I caught her coming out of the kitchen with a bottled water as I came down to say goodbye before she headed out to the Civic.

“Being with you for the summer is going to suck if you’re going to be like this all the time,” she said. “And it’s not my fault I’m living with Evan.”

“I know, it’s just—”

“I gotta go,” she said, walking away and getting into her car. She had her eyes fixed on the road as she drove away, and didn’t see me wave.

In the kitchen was the receipt for the sunglasses, right next to the eggshell character she’d flattened with her fist.

I
GOT INTO MY
CR-V and headed to Riverside Honda. We were just this side of the bridge that crosses over into Stratford, where the Housatonic empties into the Sound. It was a slow morning, not enough people dropping in for my turn to come up in the rotation, but shortly after noon a retired couple in their late sixties dropped by to look at a base model four-door Accord.

They were hemming and hawing over price—we were seven hundred dollars apart. I excused myself, said I was going to take their latest offer to the sales manager, but instead went into Service and scarfed a chocolate donut from a box at the coffee stand, then went back and told them I could only save them another hundred, but we were going to have a custom pinstriper on site over the next couple of days, and if they took the deal, I could get the Accord custom-pinstriped for free. The guy’s eyes lit up, and they went for it. Later, I got a ten-buck pinstriping kit from Parts and attached it to the order.

In the afternoon, a man interested in replacing his decade-old Odyssey van with a new one wanted to know how much his trade was worth. You never answered that question without asking a few of your own.

“Are you the original owner?” I asked. He was. “Have you maintained the car?” He said he’d done most of the recommended services. “Has the vehicle ever been in an accident?”

“Oh yeah,” he volunteered. “Three years ago I rear-ended a guy, they had to replace everything up front.”

I explained that an accident translated into a much lower trade-in value. His counterargument was that all the parts in the front of the car were newer, so if anything, the car should be worth more. He wasn’t happy with the number I gave him, and left.

Twice I called my ex-wife in Stratford, where she worked at one of the car lots Bob owned, and twice I left messages, both asking how thrilled she was with Bob’s plan to immortalize our daughter on a bathroom calendar at the local Goodyear tire store.

After the second call, my head cleared some, and I realized this wasn’t just about Sydney. It was about Susanne, about Bob, about how much better her life was with him, about how much I’d screwed things up.

I’d been selling cars since I was twenty, and I was good at it, but Susanne thought I was capable of more. You shouldn’t be working for somebody else, she said. You should be your own man. You should have your own dealership. We could change our lives. Send Syd to the best schools. Make a better future for ourselves.

My dad had passed away when I was nineteen, and left my mother pretty well fixed. A few years later, when she died of a heart attack, I used the inheritance to show Susanne I could be the man she wanted me to be. I started up my own dealership.

And fucked the whole thing up.

I was never a big-picture guy. Sales, working one-to-one, that was my thing. But when I had to run the whole show, I kept sneaking back onto the floor to deal with customers. I wasn’t cut out for management, so I let others make decisions for me. Bad ones, as it turned out. Let them steal from me, too.

Eventually, I lost it all.

And not just the business, not just our big house that overlooked the Sound. I lost my family.

Susanne blamed me for taking my eye off the ball. I blamed her for pushing me into something I wasn’t cut out for.

Syd, somehow, blamed herself. She figured that, if we loved her enough, we’d stay together no matter what. The fact that we didn’t had nothing to do with how much we loved Syd, but she wasn’t buying it.

In Bob, Susanne found what was missing in me. Bob was always reaching for the next rung. Bob figured if he could sell cars, he could start up a dealership, and if he could start up one dealership, why not two, or three?

I never bought Susanne a Corvette when I was going out with her, like Bob did. At least there was some satisfaction when it blew a piston, and she ended up getting rid of it because she hated driving a stick.

On this particular day, I went home, somewhat reluctantly, at six. When you’re on commission, you don’t want to walk out of an open showroom. You know, the moment you leave, someone’ll come in, checkbook in hand, asking for you. But you can’t live there. You have to go home sometime.

I’d been planning to make spaghetti, but figured, what the hell, I’d order pizza, just like Syd wanted. It’d be a kind of peace offering, a way to make up for the sunglasses thing.

By seven, she had not shown up, or called to let me know she’d be late.

Maybe someone had gone home sick, and she’d had to stay on the front desk for an extra shift. Ordinarily, if she wasn’t going to make it home in time for dinner, she’d call. But I could see her skipping that courtesy today, after what had happened at breakfast.

Still, by eight, when I hadn’t heard from her, I started to worry.

I was standing in the kitchen, watching CNN, getting updated on some earthquake in Asia but not really paying attention, wondering where the hell she was.

Sometimes she got together with Patty or one of her other friends after work, went over to the Post Mall to eat in the food court.

I called her cell. It rang several times before going to message. “Give me a call, sweetheart,” I said. “I figured we’d have pizza after all. Let me know what you want on it.”

I gave it another ten minutes before deciding to find a number for the hotel where she worked. I was about to make the call when the phone rang. I grabbed the receiver before I’d checked the ID. “Hey,” I said. “You in for pizza or what?”

“Just hold the anchovies.” It wasn’t Syd. It was Susanne.

“Oh,” I said. “Hey.”

“You’ve got your shorts in a knot.”

I took a breath. “What I don’t get is why you don’t. Bob and Evan giving Syd the eyeball? Thinking she should model?”

“You’ve got it all wrong, Tim,” Susanne said. “They were just being nice.”

“Did you know when you moved in there with Sydney that Bob was taking his son in? That okay with you?”

“They’re like brother and sister,” she said.

“Give me a break. I remember being nineteen and—” The line beeped. “Look, I gotta go. Later, okay?”

Susanne managed a “Yeah” before hanging up. I went to the other line, said, “Hello?”

“Mr. Blake?” said a woman who was not my daughter.

“Yes?”

“Timothy Blake?”

“Yes?”

“I’m with Fairfield Windows and Doors and we’re going to be in your area later this—”

I hung up. I found a number for the Just Inn Time, dialed it. I let it ring twenty times before hanging up.

I grabbed my jacket and keys and drove across town to the hotel, pulled right up under the canopy by the front door, and went inside for the first time since Syd had started here a couple of weeks ago. Before heading in, I scanned the lot for her Civic. I’d seen it the odd time I’d driven by since she’d started, but it wasn’t there tonight. Maybe she’d parked out back.