Runaway

by Anne Laughlin

  “Isn’t it just as likely that she left during the day?” asked Peet. “She could have taken off when you thought she was going to school.”

  “She could have gone at any time, and it would probably have been a while before we noticed.”

  Jan and Peet looked at each other as Mrs. Harrington walked into Maddy’s room. She’d spoken as if it were perfectly normal for a family to not have any idea where their sixteen-year-old daughter was.

  “I’ll leave you to it,” Mrs. Harrington said. “The police have been through it already. You won’t find anything here to help you.”

  They remained silent until Mrs. Harrington left the room.

  “What a piece of work,” Peet said. “That poor kid is probably a thousand miles away by now. Who wouldn’t run away from parents like that?”

  Jan, for one. They looked around Maddy’s room, which was bigger than the living room in Jan’s condo. She thought Peet sounded naïve about what constituted bad parenting, especially as a former police officer. You’d think one night on the beat would be enough to make the Harringtons look like Ozzie and Harriet. One night in the camp she’d grown up in would make the Harringtons’ home look like Shangri-La.

  Maddy’s room looked like it belonged to a forty-year-old neat freak, which Jan recognized as a pretty good description of herself. There wasn’t a single thing out of place. There were no posters on the wall, no hint of any teenage passion. Instead, there were a series of mountain landscapes, professionally painted, framed, and hung, almost certainly not of Maddy’s choosing. A large desk and high-end ergonomic chair took up one corner of the room, and Jan imagined those might have been picked out by Maddy. The desktop was completely bare, except for a printer cord and a blank memo pad.

  “I’ll take the closet,” Jan said. She opened a door and stared at the huge walk-in closet. It was more than half empty, and Jan thought about the jeans and T-shirt that Maddy wore in the photo they’d been shown. The girl was not a clotheshorse. A few dresses hung toward the back, behind a row of flannel and oxford cloth shirts. Several pairs of blue and black jeans were ironed and hung next to the shirts. A built-in dresser took up the end wall of the closet, one drawer filled with folded underwear and socks, two others devoted to short and long sleeve T-shirts. None of the shirts were decorated with band names or slogans or causes. They were all plain and stacked together according to color. A shoe rack ran the length of the floor along the long closet wall, but Maddy didn’t have a thing for shoes either. There were cowboy boots, hiking boots, and snow boots, tennis shoes and soccer shoes, and a pair of dress shoes that had a fur of dust on them.

  Jan felt in every drawer, every nook and cranny, and found nothing else. The overhead rack that ran along each wall was completely bare. She needed to ask if it had once held luggage.

  She stepped back into the room to see Peet going through the drawers of Maddy’s computer desk. “There’s nothing in the closet except clothes,” she said. “It’s almost like a guest had hung their clothes there. Nothing personal at all.”

  “Nothing in the desk either. Some school records, a few letters from a grandma, office supplies. That’s it.”

  “Let’s ask the parents about the grandma. Maybe they didn’t think to call her. Maybe she’s hiding Maddy from them.”

  Next to the desk were a printer, a shredder, and a couple of scanners.

  “I wonder if she operated paperlessly?” Jan said. “Maybe she scanned everything and then shredded it.” She looked at the shredder bin, but it was empty also.

  “If there was anything in this room before she left, it’s gone now. But I get the feeling there wasn’t much to begin with,” Peet said.

  “I hope we find out more when we look at her computer activity. Otherwise, there isn’t squat to go on.”

  Peet took a look in the closet. “This is kind of creeping me out. It’s like this kid is a guest in her own house. Do you know what a teenager’s room is supposed to look like?”

  “What? Because I don’t have kids I’m not supposed to know what they’re like?” Jan failed again to keep the defensive tone out of her voice and hated hearing it there. “I was a teenager too, you know.”

  Peet raised her hands, palms forward. “Jan, that was a rhetorical question. You don’t need to get huffy.”

  Jan felt huffy. She felt like she probably knew more about Maddy than Peet did, or her parents. She felt a connection with a kid who ran away and didn’t leave a trace. She brushed by Peet and headed to the stairs in back.

  “Let’s get that info from them and get the hell out of here,” she said.

  The rear stairway took them soundlessly to the first level and out into a kitchen/great room area. Mrs. Harrington stood at the breakfast bar writing on a notepad.

  “I’m trying to get this information all in one place for you.”

  “Thanks,” Peet said. “I’m just curious whether Maddy has always been so neat?”

  “Neat? I’d call it more neurotic. She hated anything out of place. Hated clutter. Drove us all crazy, really. If you put a cup of coffee down, thinking you might get another cup in a minute, there was no chance it wouldn’t end up in the dishwasher if Maddy walked through the room.”

  “Hey, I’d love it if my kids were neurotic like that.”

  Mrs. Harrington looked at Peet again with doubt on her face. Something about Peet and motherhood wasn’t computing for her, which Jan thought was funny as hell. Peet’s kids were all happy at home.

  “It drove her brother wild. His room looked like a hurricane hit it.”

  “They’re pretty different from each other, I take it,” Jan said.

  “Night and day.” It was pretty clear which child Mrs. Harrington favored. She stared out the windows looking over the backyard. It was dark, but the deck and garage were lit up. Jan saw a car pulling out of the garage. “My husband is going back to work.” She turned back to the counter and picked up the slip of paper. “Here’s the information you asked for. I hope it’s helpful.”

  Jan looked it over. There were three names and numbers on the list, including Justin Harrington’s, along with Maddy’s telephone number and e-mail address, and a network log-in. “We’ll need a router log-in as well if we’re going to find out what she’s been looking at on the Internet. I should have mentioned that before.”

  Mrs. Harrington looked exasperated, as if there were no end to the demands on her. “I don’t even know what that is. I’ll have to have my husband help with that.”

  “And an e-mail to you or your husband from Maddy,” Peet said. “We need her IP address as well.”

  “Yes, yes. I promise we’ll do what we can.”

  “We saw letters to Maddy from her grandmother. Are the two of them close?”

  “They were, but all of Maddy’s grandparents are now dead.”

  “How about any other relatives she’s close to?”

  “There’s no one. I’m an only child, and my husband’s family isn’t close.”

  “Close as in tight, or do you mean they live far away?” Jan asked.

  “Both, I’d say.”

  She led them to the front door. Jan watched her face recompose itself into a concerned mother expression. She thought she’d seen better acting by Peet’s eight-year-old daughter.

  “One last thing,” Jan said. “Did Maddy have any luggage in her bedroom closet?”

  “Luggage? No, that was kept downstairs and there’s nothing missing. But she has a backpack. You know, the large kind for when you’re camping. She kept that in her room.”

  “It’s gone now.”

  Mrs. Harrington looked stricken. “So she has run away?”

  “It looks that way. Now we go find her.”

  Chapter Two

  Jan and Peet were back on Willow Road before either said a word. Jan stared out the passenger window, lost in thought.

  “Okay, let’s hear it,” Peet said.

  “What?” She turned to Peet. “What’s there to say? The Harr
ingtons are jerks and their daughter’s a runaway. We do our job; that’s all.”

  Peet’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel. “Jerks? No. A jerk is someone who spills beer on you at Wrigley Field and then laughs about it. These people are criminal, as far as I’m concerned. You probably had a better upbringing than Maddy did.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Jan felt a flush climb up her face.

  “You grew up in the system, right? Out west? I’m just saying you probably got more love and caring there than Maddy Harrington has.”

  Jan stared back out the window. “It was a group home. An orphanage, not a foster home with a brood of happy, mismatched kids.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Think Oliver Twist and you’re halfway there.”

  “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I just can’t imagine parents who don’t notice when their daughter’s been gone for two nights.”

  Jan shrugged. “At least we have one motive for Maddy running away. I doubt it’s the whole story.” She wanted the conversation steered away from her own childhood. She’d known when Peet became her partner that she’d have to say something about her past. Peet was too curious and chatty to not ask questions and expect answers. Jan told her the same story she’d been telling since she was sixteen—parents killed, no relatives, the group home. It usually shut people up. She’d never had to flesh out the details because most didn’t probe too deeply. She rebuffed, ignored, or abandoned those that persisted. The lie was much easier and safer than the truth. She didn’t think she had the ability to describe her childhood.

  Though she tried to avoid remembering her life in the camp, she knew it was impossible. Just as it became impossible for her to stop thinking of a life outside the camp once she started to realize one might exist. In the two years prior to her escape, Jan had discovered ways to slip beyond the camp’s perimeter and explore the woods beyond. Timing and stealth were all she needed. She discovered a ranch four miles north of the camp, and in the ranch she found her hope. It was a small homestead run by a large family, and Jan would spend every moment she could tucked up next to a boulder on a ridge overlooking it. She watched men, women, and children doing chores, sitting together on the porch of the house, entertaining guests, hugging and kissing, coming and going from the property as they pleased. She knew she had to have some of that, any bit of it, in her life. She would somehow find a way to get it.

  Peet pulled into the parking lot of the Winnetka police station. It was past seven o’clock and they didn’t expect to see the detectives who’d taken the call from Mrs. Harrington, but they needed to let the department know as soon as possible that they’d been hired to find Maddy. The police would be only too happy to share information and offload as much of the work as they could on to the private investigators.

  The desk sergeant made a call to the back of the shop and pointed them toward some folding chairs lined up along a wall. He never said a word directly to them. Jan hated the scorn that some police felt toward private investigators, the kind she now saw on the sergeant’s face. She started to say something to him, but Peet took her arm and pulled her over to the waiting area.

  “It’s not worth it,” Peet said. “We want them to cooperate.”

  “We’re surrounded by assholes,” Jan said. She put her elbows to her knees and stared at the floor while they waited. Within a few minutes, a very short and very sharply dressed detective came to get them. If Winnetka had a minimum height requirement for its officers, this man had found a way around it. Peet towered over him as they shook hands.

  “Donald Hoch. Glad to meet you both,” he said. He led them down a hall and into his private office. It was small but painted a tasteful cream color and furnished in wood and leather. A new computer sat on his desk.

  “I talked to Mrs. Harrington this morning. Frankly, I’m glad they’ve called you in on this. We’re getting a late start if the girl’s really been gone two days.”

  “She’s likely to be far away by now,” Peet agreed.

  “Or she may be right here, just seeing whether her parents care enough to try to find her,” Jan added.

  “That too.” Hoch pulled a slim file off a stack on his desk and opened it.

  “She’s never been in trouble with us. Her teachers say she’s a good student, especially in the sciences, but not really working to her potential. They describe her as withdrawn. I haven’t met the father, but they seem like the kind of parents a kid would run away from.”

  “Exactly. Do you intend to keep trying to track her down?” Jan asked.

  “We don’t want to duplicate your steps or get in your way,” Peet said. “I used to be on the job. I know what a pain PIs can be.”

  “Oh yeah? Where did you work?”

  “Chicago. Homicide.”

  Jan knew Peet always worked this in for a reason. Cops were cops and the brotherhood ran deep. It pissed Jan off as a general rule, but she couldn’t deny the benefits. Peet often got information much more quickly from the police than she did. As Peet and Detective Hoch talked for a bit about cops they knew, what their shops were like, and who had the best benefits, Jan wondered where Maddy Harrington had disappeared.

  “Let me give you the bullet points,” Hoch was saying. He pushed a piece of paper across the desk. “Here’s her complete physical description. Pretty nondescript, no tattoos, piercings, scars. But that’s according to her parents. She may have tattoos and piercings in places they don’t see anymore. We’ve put out a BOLO on her car. The vehicle identification information is included here. We’ve gotten nothing back on any of it. We put her name and description in the NCIC, so we will be contacted if she’s picked up for any reason.”

  “I’m not familiar with all of the hangouts in Winnetka,” Peet said. “Tell me where the drug activity takes place.”

  “That’s back on your turf,” Hoch said. “The kids here buy their drugs in the city. Clubs on the north side for meth and coke, West Side for heroin, though there isn’t a big heroin problem around here.”

  Hoch stood to end the meeting.

  “If you find her you can call me and I’ll arrange to have her picked up. Other than that, I’m not sure our department will put much in the way of resources into this. You’re right about that.”

  *

  Peet drove back toward the city while Jan took out her phone and looked at the list of Maddy’s friends Mrs. Harrington had given them. None of the names had phone numbers.

  “This is pathetic.”

  “I think it’s sad,” Peet said. “My kids live for their friends. They’re everything to them.”

  Jan had a few friends growing up in the camp. There was only one who Jan found interesting—Holly Alvarez. She was beautiful and lively and willing to question the Colonel’s authority once in a while, which Jan found thrilling. As they grew older, Jan found thoughts of Holly thrilling in an entirely different way. She squirmed in her seat and felt nervous whenever they sat close. But when Holly was sixteen, the Colonel approved a match between Holly and a boy in the camp, the son of one of his close lieutenants. The ceremony would not take place until her eighteenth birthday, as was custom, but from that moment on, Holly was lost to Jan, and so was any remaining reason for Jan to stay in camp. She remembered seeing Holly the day before she escaped. She was tempted to tell Holly of her plans and urge her to come with. But then Holly looked up from the bread she was kneading in the cook tent. She looked right through Jan, as if she weren’t standing six feet in front of her, as if she didn’t exist.

  Jan dialed directory assistance and tracked down some numbers for families with the same last names as those on the list. By the time they’d reached the city, she’d left half a dozen messages. She was about to call Maddy’s brother when Peet took the Irving Park exit off the expressway.

  “I thought we were going back to the office,” Jan said.

  “How about we grab a bite at my house? We have to eat somewhere, and I have a sudden urge to see my kids
.”

  Jan agreed, but reluctantly. She always felt overwhelmed by the normalcy in Peet’s house. At least, it’s what she supposed was normal family life. Mom and Dad still in love after twenty years of marriage, sweet teenagers, an adorable eight-year-old. A dog. They lived in Kevin’s old family home, a rambling frame structure in the city’s Old Irving Park neighborhood. Everything about it made her feel anxious.

  They entered the huge kitchen that Kevin had remodeled the year before. Kevin and eight-year-old Lily stood at the kitchen island, decorating sugar cookies. When Jan and Peet came through the kitchen door, Lily ran over and took Jan’s arm, tugging her over to the cookies. Kevin kissed Peet and then gave Jan a kiss on the cheek.

  “Sorry to barge in unannounced,” Jan said. “It was her idea.”

  “Hey, we’re thrilled,” Kevin said. “Can you eat something? We just finished off a pizza, but I can scramble some eggs or make a sandwich.”

  Peet shrugged off her jacket and sat at the kitchen table. “Eggs would be great, hon.” She pulled out her phone and started texting. “Sit down, Jan. I’m just telling Sandy to come downstairs.”

  “It’s our new version of an intercom system,” Kevin said. He looked over at Peet. “Kevin Junior’s out tonight.”

  “I know that.” Peet sounded impatient and Kevin’s eyebrow went up a tad.

  She waved her hand in front her, like she was swatting a fly. “We just had a meeting with some parents who had no idea what their kids were up to,” she said. “I don’t want Jan to think we’re anything like that.”

  “No danger there,” Jan said.

  Peet’s daughter Sandy came into the room, phone in hand, and Jan stood to accept her hug. Sandy hugged Peet even though they’d seen each other a few hours earlier. There was an awful lot of hugging here. “I wanted to ask you something,” Peet said, pulling out a chair for Sandy. “What would you think of a high school junior who doesn’t have any friends?”

  “Who are you talking about?” Sandy asked.