Find You First

by Linwood Barclay

  And a week later, in what was seen as a tragic coincidence, Jason’s family’s home in Baltimore burned to the ground. An electrical fault was blamed.

  Eighteen

  Providence, RI

  Chloe usually worked the evening shift at the Paradise Diner, but today she was filling in for one of the other girls, who was sick—Chloe had a theory she was pregnant and experiencing the first indications—so she’d started at seven in the morning and was going to work through the crazy breakfast hours, have something of a lull between nine and half past eleven, and then do her best to survive the lunchtime madness. With any luck, she could hang up her apron and walk out the back door shortly after one.

  So things weren’t too crazy around ten when, glancing out the window, she saw the black limo pull into the lot. Didn’t get a lot of limos stopping by the Paradise, she mused, and turned her attention to clearing off some tables.

  Seconds later, the bell on the door jingled. A guy came in and looked about, as if waiting to be shown to a table.

  “Wherever you want,” Chloe said.

  He nodded and slipped into one of the booths by the window. If it had been a busier time, Chloe might have steered him to a stool at the counter, or maybe a table for two, but this time of day, if he wanted a whole booth to himself, that was fine.

  He didn’t exactly look like someone who’d be chauffeured around in a limo. But then again, what did she know about people who took limos? But this guy was what she thought of as “professor casual.” Jeans, sports jacket, collared shirt. Couple of decades ago, that jacket would have had patches on the elbows.

  The Paradise didn’t exactly appeal to a high-end clientele. You could get three eggs, toast, and home fries, as well as a choice of bacon, ham, or sausage, for $6.99, and that included coffee. A BLT at lunch was $5.99, or $7.99 if you wanted a side of fries. Most of the folks who ate here arrived in pickup trucks, a few outfitted with a set of truck nuts dangling off the back bumper.

  Who showed up in a limo?

  Okay, maybe it wasn’t a limo limo. It wasn’t half a block long and the windows weren’t all blacked out. She could see the driver, at least. A heavyset woman, looking at her phone. It looked like one of those cars that people who didn’t have to bum rides from their friends took to the airport.

  She approached the man, now scanning the menu he had taken out from between the paper napkin dispenser and a ketchup bottle.

  “Coffee?”

  “Um, yeah,” the man said, smiling.

  He seemed to be looking at her chest. That would hardly make him unique. Half the men she served could never get their eyes above the tit line.

  “Chloe?” he said.

  Oh, okay, he was reading her name tag. Once he’d read it, he looked her in the face.

  “At your service,” she said. “I’ll get your coffee.”

  He looked like he was about to say something else but she’d already turned on her heel. Within a minute she was back with a white ceramic mug of coffee.

  “Put enough cream and sugar in it and it’s even drinkable,” she said. “Know what you want?”

  “How are the pancakes?”

  “Flat.”

  The man chuckled. “Just the way I like them. I’ll have those and a side of bacon.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Thank you, Chloe,” he said.

  A little too much emphasis on her name, she thought, walking away. Like he enjoyed saying the word. Was that weird?

  She thought of Anthony Hopkins saying Clarice. Yeah, kinda like that. Making your name sound like it was coming out of a sewer grate.

  She put in the order, turned her attention to a single mom who brought along her toddler for a late breakfast once a week, then cleared dishes from another table.

  Before the pancakes were ready, she delivered a bottle of syrup and some extra pats of butter, each in their own sealed container, to the guy. Before she could turn away, he cleared his throat again to get her attention.

  “Do you have a second?” he asked.

  “You wanna change your order?”

  “No. I just wanted to ask, have you worked here long?”

  “About a year.”

  “Like it?”

  “I’m just here till some big-time movie director comes in and discovers me. I’m gonna go check on your—”

  He reached out and grabbed her arm before she could walk away. “Hang on a second,” he said.

  She looked at the hand on her arm and quickly wrenched it away. “Hands off, mister.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “But I was wondering—”

  This dude was creeping her out. Shoot him a lie and shut this down. “Let me help you out here. I have a boyfriend, and even if I didn’t, you’re old enough to be my daddy.”

  The man chuckled. “I don’t know about that.”

  Chloe departed before he could say anything else. She’d been hit on before—like, maybe every single fucking day—but it was usually by guys closer to her age. Sure, you had some dirty old men, guys who probably couldn’t get it up if you rubbed your boobs right in their face, but that didn’t stop them from pinching your ass as you walked by.

  The other waitresses, who’d been at it longer than her, said things were better than they once were. The message was slowly getting through, even to the Neanderthals, that you couldn’t pull that kind of shit.

  She sidled up next to Vivian, who was working the cash register and had been at Paradise for pretty close to twenty years now, and said, “Seen that guy in here before?”

  Vivian shot him a look. “Maybe. Might be a professor from Brown, wanting to mix it up with the common folk. Could be we’re part of a research project.”

  “You seen the black car out front?”

  Vivian took a step away from the register to get a better look. “Hmm,” she said. “Forget the professor thing. I say he’s a reviewer from the Michelin guide. This is the big break we’ve been waiting for. Hey, you find a credit card the other day? Someone phoned, was asking.”

  Chloe said no.

  The pancakes were up. As she was heading to the table something outside caught her eye. The limo driver was outside the car, and opening the back door for someone. So maybe this guy wasn’t—

  “Looks delicious,” the man said as Chloe set the plate in front of him.

  “Can I get you anything else? Need a refill on your coffee?”

  “Maybe in a second.” He looked into his mug. “Still got half a cup. Warm it up in a couple minutes.”

  “Sure.”

  Behind her, she heard the bell on the door jingle again.

  The man tipped his head back, looked her square in the face, and said, “I hope I didn’t get off on the wrong foot before.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I was here before but you didn’t wait on me. I’m glad it was you this time.”

  That was when he ran his hand up her leg.

  “Jesus!” Chloe shrieked, jumping back.

  And then she screamed because something very horrible happened to the man’s face. It appeared to explode, to erupt in blood.

  Except it wasn’t blood. It was ketchup, streaming at him from a squeeze bottle being held by another man who seemed to have come out of nowhere.

  “What the fuck!” said the man in the booth, wiping ketchup from his eyes.

  Chloe whirled around, saw someone else standing there, the man who had seconds earlier gotten out of the limo. He was holding the ketchup container, ready to take another shot if need be. There was something slightly off about him. His head was rocking slightly on his neck, like he had some sort of palsy or something.

  “Leave her the fuck alone,” he said.

  “Get out,” Chloe added.

  The man in the booth grabbed a wad of paper napkins from the chrome dispenser and wiped his face as he shifted his butt to the end of the bench and exited the booth. He looked ready to fight back, but then he caught sight of Vivian, closing the di
stance between them, an iron skillet in her hand. She had it raised, like it weighed no more than a balloon.

  Holding up his hands in a gesture of peace, ketchup-smeared napkins clutched in his fingers, he said, “Okay, okay, I’m going.”

  Once he was out the door, he made a sharp left, and did not head toward the black limo. He got into a Civic parked just beyond it and drove off.

  Chloe, rattled, took the ketchup bottle from the second man’s hand and set it back on the table he’d grabbed it from.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “No problem,” he said.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  The man hesitated before replying. “My name is Miles,” he blurted, “and I think I’m your dad.”

  Nineteen

  New Rochelle, NY

  Something was not right with Dr. Martin Gold.

  His assistant, Julie Harkin, noticed he’d been acting strangely for several days. Showing up late to the office, leaving early. Canceling appointments with almost no notice, yet not leaving the building. He’d just sit behind his desk, staring at his computer screen.

  Julie knew he was drinking more. She believed he was keeping a bottle of something in his desk, because more than once, when he’d come out to ask her a question or hand her something to be filed, she could smell alcohol on his breath. And he was glassy-eyed. One morning, she’d been able to smell booze on him when he first arrived, like he was skipping coffee and having vodka shots with his bacon and eggs.

  Gold had always enjoyed a drink, but in all the years Julie had worked for him she had never seen him this way. Good thing he wasn’t a surgeon, she thought. You wouldn’t want this guy cutting into you.

  At first, she was worried that somehow his erratic behavior had something to do with her.

  Maybe he’d figured out what she’d done.

  The first few days after she’d given those files to that Heather woman, the one who’d approached her in the coffee shop with fifty thousand in cash in her purse, Julie was terrified she’d be found out. She’d tried to be careful, believed she’d covered her tracks. One day while Gold was out for lunch with a friend, she’d found in his desk the key to the storage unit a few blocks away where the clinic stored all the paper files from decades past. She also knew the keypad code to enter the facility—1825, which just happened to be the length of the Brooklyn Bridge, in meters. That night she went to the storage place, entered the code, then found Gold’s locker. There were no light switches that she could find. Everything was motion sensitive. You walked down a hall, the lights came on. She located Gold’s locker, used the key to open it, and rolled up the door.

  The information Heather wanted was most likely to be found in one of the many cardboard business boxes. The time period she was interested in was about a year before the ReproGold Clinic made the transition from paper to computer filing.

  The locker was about half filled, and not just with boxes of files. About five years ago Gold had refurbished the office, buying new furniture for the waiting room. Rather than throw out the old stuff, he’d stored it here, probably thinking someday he might be able to sell it.

  She found the files pertaining to Miles Cookson and the women who’d been the recipients of his contribution. She gathered them up, stuffed them into her bag, and went home, where she immediately made copies of everything on her home printer. And then she got back in her car and returned the files to their proper places in their proper boxes.

  It was as she was leaving the facility the second time that she noticed the security cameras.

  Well, of course there would be security cameras. How could she not have thought of this? The storage company had set up cameras in every hallway, at every entry and exit point. So both of her visits were recorded, monitored. Saved.

  She returned to the coffee shop the next day, handing over to Heather a thick envelope of the papers she’d photocopied.

  “I’m scared,” she’d said, telling her about the cameras.

  “Don’t worry,” Heather told her. “As long as Dr. Gold has no idea you did this, there’s no reason for him to ask the storage people for a review of the surveillance video. Most companies keep the video for two weeks to a month. You’ll be okay. I trust you left everything as you found it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

  Easy for her to say. She wasn’t the one sneaking around behind her boss’s back. But as each day went by and the issue didn’t come up, Julie became more confident that she was going to get away with this.

  Julie hid the cash in the back of her bathroom closet, behind the towels and the extra rolls of toilet paper. She got back in touch with the various contractors who’d stopped working on her house when she could no longer pay them. “Can you come back?” she asked. “And is cash okay?”

  It was.

  But she hadn’t mentioned anything to Dr. Gold about work resuming on her house. She didn’t want to raise any questions about where she’d found the money. She became increasingly confident he did not suspect her, or anyone, of getting into the storage unit.

  So something else was bothering him.

  Finally, she asked, “Dr. Gold, is everything okay?”

  She put the question to him shortly before noon when he announced, without warning, that he was not coming back after lunch, that she would have to cancel the afternoon appointments.

  “I’m fine,” he said without conviction. “Just do it.”

  Women and their partners trying so hard to start, or enlarge, their families did not respond well to these cancellations. Some of these people, desperate for the clinic’s help, had scheduled their appointments weeks earlier. They’d taken time off from work. Some had driven long distances.

  Gold seemed not to care.

  If the man didn’t pull himself together, the clinic’s future would be in jeopardy. Julie would have to find herself another job.

  She was starting to think she might have to rein in the contractors again. She might need that fifty grand to live on.

  Twenty

  Providence, RI

  Miles had actually spent quite some time in the back of the limo before working up the courage to go into the diner. Going over in his head what he was going to say. He thought back to when he was in high school, the butterflies he had in his stomach while he worked up the courage to ask a girl to the prom. That, in retrospect, was nothing compared to telling a young woman that she was your biological daughter.

  It had taken a little more than two hours to make the drive here from New Haven, and he’d spent much of it in quiet contemplation. His frequent driver, Charise, had noticed.

  “Hope you’ll forgive the intrusion, Mr. Cookson,” she’d said, “but you seem a little preoccupied today.”

  He had told her more times than he could remember to call him Miles, but Charise was a stickler for protocol. When you drove someone around, you wore a white shirt, jacket, and tie, no matter how warm it got outside. You opened the door for your passengers. You addressed them formally. You didn’t take personal calls in your employer’s presence.

  “Yeah, a little preoccupied,” he’d said.

  “Would you like the radio on?” Her finger had been ready to bring in the Sirius station of his choice. “Beatles?”

  “No, that’s okay,” he’d said. “I’m happy with quiet.”

  He had not necessarily meant that she, personally, should zip her lip, but she had almost nothing to say for the rest of the trip.

  As per Dorian’s suggestion, Miles was beginning this process with Chloe Swanson. Much was riding on the encounter. If it went well, he’d feel encouraged about getting in touch with the others. If it went badly, well, he might have to rethink everything.

  He had settled on a go-slow approach. Head into the Paradise Diner, find a place to sit away from other patrons, order a cup of coffee, hope Chloe Swanson would wait on him, and if she did, engage her in conversation. Get a feel for her before asking if he
might speak to her privately.

  Heather had found out for him that Chloe would be working the morning shift. She’d called the diner, pretending to be someone who’d lost a credit card. Chloe had been her waitress, Heather said, and maybe she’d found it? Come by in the morning, she was told. Chloe was covering someone else’s shift.

  And so here he was.

  Miles was going to meet his biological daughter.

  He took a deep breath, got out of the car, walked into the diner, and right into a nasty situation between Chloe and some asshole customer.

  It was at that moment a hint of the Huntington’s made its presence known. A sudden flash of irritation, anger. He grabbed the ketchup from the next booth over and shot it all over the guy’s face. Like throwing water on a dog in heat.

  And then he’d just come out with it.

  My name is Miles and I think I’m your dad.

  God, talk about smooth.

  The look on her face. Stunned, dumbfounded, gobsmacked. Just stood there, staring at him for several seconds before finally saying, “What?”

  There was no way to ease into it at that point. The proverbial cat was out of the bag.

  He said, “That didn’t come out the way I’d planned. I—”

  “Jesus,” she said, now looking at the table, which was covered with rivulets of ketchup that crisscrossed the pancake order. “What a fucking mess.”

  “I’m sorry. I saw him grabbing you and—”

  “Yeah, you’re a hero. Like I don’t know how to deal with handsy dickheads.”

  It was like she hadn’t even heard, or comprehended, what he’d told her.

  “Is there someplace we could talk?” he asked her.

  She grabbed the cloth tucked into the waistband of her uniform, took a preliminary run at wiping up the ketchup, saw that some of it had hit the vinyl-covered bench, and said, “Shit.”

  She took the untouched plate of food and the mug of coffee and walked them over to a nearby station filled with other dirty dishes, Miles following her.