Fear the Worst: A Thriller (20 page)

THIRTY-SIX

S
YDNEY, AGE FOUR:

I am tucking her into bed. She usually asks for a story, but for some reason, not tonight. I’ve put in a long day, and think maybe I’ve caught a break here, because one story is not usually enough to satisfy Syd. If you pick one too short, she’ll demand a second. If you pick one too long she’ll insist you keep reading to the end, and there’s not a chance she’s going to nod off before you’re done. The trick was to find one that was just right.
A
book that Goldilocks would like
.

But I haven’t caught a break after all. Sydney has something on her mind
.

“Why is there just me?” she asks as I pull the covers up to her neck
.

“What do you mean, why is there just you?” I say. “You don’t see me here? Your mother’s coming up in a minute. There’s your friends, and—”

“I mean in our family. Why is there just me? Why isn’t there anybody else?”

“You mean, like brothers and sisters?”

She nods
.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe someday you will have a brother or a sister.” But I’m not really so sure about that. Susanne and
I
, things just aren’t clicking between us the way they once did. Lots of talk
about money, about the future, about whether I’m going to reach for the next rung of the ladder or just stay where I am now
.

“All my friends have brothers and sisters,” Syd says
.

“Do they like having brothers and sisters?”

She thinks about that. “Anita hates her brother. He’s older and he snuck up behind her and put dirt in her pants.”

“That’s not very nice.”

“And Trisha says her little sister gets all the attention since she got born and she hopes she moves out.”

“I think that’s kind of unlikely.”

I hand Syd her stuffed moose. Milt. She wraps her arm around him and draws him close
.

“If I had a sister, I wouldn’t hate her,” she says
.

“Of course you wouldn’t,” I say
.

“But I don’t think I want one,” she says, quickly reconsidering
.

“Why’s that?”

“Because you and Mommy would run out of love,” she says. “There wouldn’t be enough.”

I lean in and kiss her on the forehead. “That wouldn’t be a problem. We’d just make up some more.”

She nods. I think she’s picturing the kitchen, that love is like brownies. You make up a batch whenever you feel like it
.

“Okay, then,” she says. That’s good enough for her
.

I
SAT THERE, BREATHLESS FOR A MOMENT
, in Carol Swain’s house before I said, “I’m sorry, what?”

“You’re Patty’s father,” Carol Swain repeated. She grinned. “You should see your face right now.” She added, “The part that’s not
already
red.”

“Mrs. Swain, we’ve never even met,” I said.

“Well, you had to know from the outset that that wasn’t exactly necessary, right?” she said, smirking.

I shook my head and got to my feet. The wooziness I’d felt after finding Kate was returning. I wavered slightly, put my hand on the wall to steady myself.

“Whoa,” said Carol. “Steady there, pardner.”

“I think I should go,” I said, pushing myself off the wall, willing the room to stop spinning. “We’re not making any sense here.”

“You pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about, but I know you do.”

“No,” I said, feeling my pulse quicken again. “It’s not possible.”

Really? Is that what you honestly believe?

“What’s not possible? That you could be my daughter’s father, or that I could have found out it was you?”

I wanted to leave but felt rooted to the floor.

“You put all that information on the form,” she said. “Not your name, of course. But everything short of that. What would you like me to tell you about yourself?”

“You don’t have to—”

“Your father died at the age of sixty-seven—you were just nineteen at the time, that must have been rough—of lung cancer, but that was attributed to him being a heavy smoker, so it’s not like you necessarily had a genetic disposition, you know? Your mother at that time was sixty-four, reasonably healthy for that age, and no signs of heart disease even though there was some history of it in her family. How am I doing so far?”

“Pretty good,” I said.

“You were in good shape yourself, although how much of a history does someone have at twenty? That’s how old you were, right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You’d had chicken pox and measles and all those other childhood diseases, and your tonsils removed when you were six. They don’t do that very much anymore, do they? I can’t remember the last time a kid had his tonsils out.”

I didn’t bother nodding, but she was right on all points.

“You were going to Bridgeport Business College, although that wasn’t actually on the forms. It was easy to figure out, since it was the closest school to the clinic. Just down the street. That was where a lot of their donors came from. Sometimes you wonder if they do that deliberately, set up close to a college where they know the boys are desperate for money. So, anyway, we started the search there, and it paid off.”

I breathed in and out, slowly, half a dozen times before sitting back down. Carol waited until she was sure I wasn’t going to keel over or anything.

“This is all very exciting,” she said, but then her smile turned downward. “At least it would be, under different circumstances.” She leaned forward on the couch. “I bet you could use that drink now.”

“No, it’s okay,” I said. “It was all supposed to be confidential.”

“And it was,” she said. “No one at the clinic ever told me you were the sperm donor. But when I was making a choice as to whose sperm I would pick, they provided all these forms that you had to fill out when you, you know, made a deposit. There was all that family history, ages, educational profile, race. You wrote down that you’d excelled in math in high school and college, which was another reason why we zeroed in on the business college.”

“‘We’?”

“Me, and the detective I hired.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “This would be about ten, twelve years ago?”

“That’s right,” Carol Swain said. “How did you know that?”

“I got hints that someone had been asking around about me. I wondered if it was some kind of credit history check. But then it stopped, and I didn’t think about it again. Until the last few weeks, when my ex-wife reminded me about it. But even then, I kind of let it go. It didn’t seem to have any bearing on what’s going on now.”

“It doesn’t really,” she said.

“Why did you hire a detective?”

“I wanted to know who Patty’s real father was. A few years after we got married, Ronald and I decided to have a child. Turns out his little swimmers weren’t up to the job. At first we thought it must be me.” She laughed. “Ronald always felt anything that didn’t go right around here was my fault, and not being able to get pregnant was just added to the list. So I went to the doctor and it turned out that everything was just fine, so then Ronald finally agreed to go, and then we found out just whose fault it was.”

“Go on.”

“So finally I ended up going to the Mansfield Clinic. They said I could be artificially inseminated, and I thought, hey, that could work, but it took Ronald a long time to come around to the idea, no pun intended.”

“Not being the real father, that didn’t sit well.”

Carol thought about that. “He just wasn’t sure he could come to love a child that wasn’t really his. Even if it was half mine. But we talked about it, and he finally said he was okay with it, that even if he wasn’t, technically speaking, the father, he’d be a father to our child. So I had it done, chose you from the samples they had in the freezer, and then guess what happened?”

“He never really felt she was his daughter.”

“Yeah. We had this beautiful baby girl named Patricia, and he tried, but he just didn’t have it in him. You know he nearly killed her?”

“Left her in a locked car in the heat,” I said.

“Patty told you that story?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s true. Stupid bastard. Claimed he just forgot, and I have to give him the benefit of the doubt, I suppose, but honestly, you had to wonder. The marriage was already on the skids by that point, but that was it for me. I wanted him gone, and he was happy to oblige.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be,” she said and waved her hand. “I was better off without him. We were both making pretty good money in those days. He was at Sikorsky, I was assistant manager of a company that made plastic molds. Even after we split, I managed to look after me and Patty, and Ronald sent along the odd check, but his heart wasn’t in it, supporting a kid he had no real connection to. I kept wishing I had a decent man in my life, someone who could be a real father to Patty, because I believe from the bottom of my heart that it takes a mother and a father to raise a child, but it also has to be a mother and a father who give a shit, you know what I’m saying.”

“I know what you’re saying,” I said.

“So I started wondering, who
is
Patty’s real father? What kind of man is he? Is he a good man? Would he make a good father to Patty? Wouldn’t he want to see his daughter, and once he did, wouldn’t he fall in love with her and want to look after her?” She reached across the coffee table and touched my hand. “Didn’t you ever wonder? Didn’t you ever stop and think, is there a kid out there who’s mine and I don’t even know what he or she looks like? Didn’t you ever wonder, when you went to the supermarket and there was some kid stocking shelves, could that be my son? Could that kid taking my order at Burger King be carrying my DNA? Didn’t you?”

I took a moment to find my voice. “Yes,” I said. “Occasionally.”

“Didn’t you want to know?”

“Sometimes,” I said. “But learning something like that… I don’t know how to put it… would come with some obligations. I mean, once you knew, you’d feel you should reach out, something.”

“Yeah,” Carol nodded, taking her hand away.

“And it was so long ago,” I said. “I never thought about it all that much, not back then. At the time, it seemed meaningless. A way to make a few extra bucks.” I sighed. “Beer money for the weekend. It’s only later in life that you start thinking about the implications of things.”

“Did you ever tell your wife? That there might be other kids out there who are yours?”

“No,” I said. “I never have.”

“So,” she said, picking up her story, “there was no father on the scene, and I couldn’t stop thinking about finding out who Patty’s real father was. I had this fantasy that if I could find you, you’d fall in love with us. That you’d fall for me and Patty and come into our lives and everything would end up just like in the movies. A friend of mine knew someone who was a private detective, a man named Denton Abagnall, and it took me a couple of months to work up the nerve to call him. I asked him if it was even possible to find out, that the clinic was very strict about confidentiality, but when I showed him the form you’d filled out with the background information, he said he might be able to figure out who you were through the process of elimination. He started with the college, got the names of all the male students over a three-year period, checked all their names against death records, looking for any of them who were nineteen when they lost a father at the age of sixty-seven, and he started putting it all together. Once Mr. Abagnall was sure he had the right student, he had to move ahead six years or so, and he tracked someone down with your name working at a Toyota dealership. He went in, got one of your business cards with your picture on it, and the minute I saw your face, I knew.”

It had never occurred to me that Patty and I looked anything alike. But I was pretty sure there had been times when it had occurred to me—almost subconsciously—that she and Sydney shared certain characteristics. The way they arched their eyebrows, twitched their noses.

“Mr. Abagnall wrote up an entire report for me, and that’s when I found out that you were married, that you had a daughter of your own. That’s when the fantasy died for me. I knew I couldn’t turn your life upside down. I didn’t want to take away another little girl’s father to give my daughter one.”

“But still you came into the dealership.”

“I just had to see you. In person. Just once. Then I put it behind me. I moved on.”

I sat back in my chair, trying to take it all in.

And then it hit me. I didn’t have one daughter missing, and in danger.

I had two.