The John Milton Series: Books 1-3 (74 page)

Milton thanked him, and the old man went back to his front door. Milton turned back to the big house again. The place was quiet, peaceful, but there was something in that stillness that he found disturbing. It was as if the place was haunted, harbouring a dark secret that could only mean bad things for Madison.

MILTON PRESSED THE buzzer on the intercom and then stepped back, waiting for it to be answered. It was early, just before nine, and the sun was struggling through thinning fog. The brownstone was in Nob Hill, a handsome building that had been divided into apartments over the course of its life. Rows of beech had been planted along both sides of the street twenty or thirty years ago, and the naked trees went some way to lending a little bucolic charm to what would otherwise have been a busy suburban street. The cars parked beneath the overhanging branches were middle-of-the-road saloons and SUVs. The houses looked well kept. Both were good indications that the area was populated by owner-occupiers with decent family incomes. Milton thought of Madison and her reticence to talk about the money she was making. It must have been pretty good to be able to live here.

“Hello?”

“It’s John Smith.”

The lock buzzed. Milton opened the door and climbed the stairs to the second floor.

Trip was waiting for him inside the opened door.

“Morning, Mr. Smith.”

“Anything?”

He shook his head.

Milton winced. “Two days.”

“I know. I’m worried now.”

He led the way into the sitting room.

“You’ve spoken to the police?”

“About ten times.”

“What did they say?”

“Same—they won’t declare her missing until this time tomorrow. Three days, apparently, that’s how long it has to be. It’s because of what she does, isn’t it?”

“Probably.”

“If this was a secretary from Sacramento, they would’ve been out looking for her as soon as someone says she’s not where she’s supposed to be.”

Milton gestured to indicate the apartment. “Do you mind if I have a look around? There might be something you’ve missed. The benefit of fresh eyes?”

“Yeah, that’s fine. I get it.”

“Could you do me a favour?”

“Sure.”

“Get me a coffee? I’m dying for a drink.”

“Sure.”

That was better. Milton wanted him out of the way while he looked around the apartment. He would have preferred him to have left the place altogether, but if he worked quickly, he thought he would be able to do what needed to be done.

The place was comfortably sized: two bedrooms, one much smaller than the other, a bathroom, a kitchen-diner. It was nicely furnished. The furniture was from IKEA, but it was at the top end of their range; Milton knew that because he had visited the store to buy the things he needed for his own place. There was a sofa upholstered in electric blue, a large bookcase that was crammed with books, a coffee table with copies of
Vogue
and
Harper’s Bazaar
and a crimson rug with a luxurious deep pile. A plasma screen stood on a small unit with a PlayStation plugged in beneath it and a selection of games and DVDs alongside. There was a healthy-looking spider plant standing in a pewter vase.

Milton went straight to the bedroom. It was a nice room, decorated in a feminine style, with lots of pastel colours and a pretty floral quilt cover. He opened the wardrobe and ran his fingers along the top shelf. He opened the chest of drawers and removed her underwear, placing it on the bed. The drawer was empty. He replaced the clothes and closed the drawer again. Finally, he took the books and magazines from the bedside table. He opened the magazines and riffled their pages. Nothing. Once again, beyond the detritus of a busy life, there was nothing that provided him with any explanation of what might have happened to her in Pine Shore.

He went back into the sitting room. A MacBook sat open on the coffee table.

“Is this hers?”

“Yes.”

“Did you have any luck?”

“No. Couldn’t get into it.”

He tapped a key to kill the screensaver, and the log-in screen appeared. He thought of the specialists back in London. Breaking the security would have been child’s play for them, but his computer skills were rudimentary; he wouldn’t even know where to start.

“The police will be able to do it if they have to.”

“You think that’ll be necessary?”

“Maybe.”

Trip had left a cup of coffee next to the laptop. Milton thanked him and took a sip.

“So,” he said, “I went back to Pine Shore last night.”

“And?”

“It was quiet. Peaceful. I had a look in the house—”

“You went in?”

“Just looked through the window,” he lied. “It was clean and tidy, as if nothing had ever happened.”

“Who lives there?”

“One of the neighbours told me it belongs to a company.”

“Which one?”

“I don’t know. It was sold last year. I looked it up online. It was bought by a trust. The ownership is hidden, but the deal was for ten million, so whichever company it was has plenty of cash.”

“A tech firm. Palo Alto.”

“I think so.”

“Apple? Google?”

“Someone like that.”

“You get anything else?”

“I spoke to one of the neighbours. She ran into his house. He said she was out of it, didn’t make much sense. He called the police, and that was when she ran off again. He’s not going to be able to help much beyond that.”

The boy slumped back. “Where is she?”

He took a mouthful of coffee and placed the cup back on the table again. “I don’t know,” he said. “But we’ll find her.”

“Yeah,” he said, but it was unconvincing.

“You know what—you should tell me about you both. Could be something that would be helpful.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything you can think of. Maybe there’s something you’ve overlooked.”

He sparked up a cigarette and started with himself. He was born and raised in Queens, New York. His father worked as a janitor in one of the new skyscrapers downtown. His mother was a secretary. His father was Irish and proud of it, and it had been a big family with three brothers and six sisters. The children had all gone to Dickinson, the high school on the hill that drivers passed along the elevated highway connecting the New Jersey Turnpike to the Holland Tunnel. Trip explained that he was a bad pupil—lazy, he said—and he left without graduating. The area was rough, and he found himself without a job and with too much time on his hands. He drifted onto the fringes of one of the gangs. A string of petty robberies that passed off without incident emboldened him and the others to go for a bigger score. Guns were easy enough to find, and he had bought a .22 and helped hold up a fast-food joint on Kennedy Boulevard. They had gotten away with a couple of hundred dollars, but they hadn’t worn gloves, and they left their prints all over the place.

The police had taken about three hours to trace them.

Trip was sentenced to three years in a juvenile facility. He served most of the time at the New Jersey Training School for Boys in Jamesburg. He did thirty months, all told, most of it spent in boot camp, living in barracks with fifty other young convicts. He was twenty when he finally came out. He had relatives in San Francisco, moved west to get out of the way of temptation, and enrolled at community college to try to round out a few qualifications so that he could fix himself up with a job. He found out that he had an aptitude for electronics, and he took a course in electrical engineering. He parlayed that into an apprenticeship, and now he was employed fixing up the power lines.

He met Madison while he was out celebrating his first pay packet. She had been at the bar on her own, reading a book in the corner and nursing a vodka and Coke. He introduced himself and asked if he could buy her a drink. She said he could, and they had started to get to know each other. She was a big talker, always jawing, and he said how it was sometimes impossible to get a word in edgeways. (Milton said he had noticed that, too.) She was living out of town at the time, taking a bus to get into work. She said she was a secretary. Trip figured out the truth by the time they had been on their third date, and he had been surprised to find that it didn’t bother him. If he didn’t think about it, it was bearable. And of course, the money was great, and it was only ever going to be temporary. He always tried to remember that. She had big plans, and she was just escorting until she had saved enough to do what she wanted to do.

“She wants to write,” Trip said. “A journalist, most likely, but something to do with words. She’s always been into reading. You wouldn’t believe how much. All these”—he pointed at the books on the bookcase—“all of them, they’re all hers. I’ve never been into reading so much myself, but you won’t find her without a book. She always took one when she went out nights.”

Milton looked at the bookcase, vaguely surprised to see so many books, always a clue to a personality. They were an odd mixture: books on astrology and make-up, novels by Suzanne Collins and Stephanie Meyer. Some books on fashion. The collected poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Milton pulled it out to look at the cover. Several pages had their corners turned down. Not what he would have expected to find. He slipped it back into its slot on the shelf.

“That’s one of the things I love about her, Mr. Smith. She gets so passionate about books. She writes, too. Short stories. I’ve seen a couple of them, the ones she doesn’t mind showing me. And I know I’m no expert and all that and I don’t know what I’m talking about, but the way I see it, I reckon some of her stuff’s pretty good.”

“What’s she like as a person?”

“What do you mean?”

He searched for the right word. “Is she stable?”

“She gets bad mood swings. She can be happy one minute and then the whole world is against her the next.”

“You know why?”

He screwed the cigarette in the ashtray and lit another. “Family.”

He explained. Madison had been born and raised in Ellenville. The place was up in the foothills of the Catskills, right up around Shawangunk Ridge, and it was on its uppers: the local industry had moved out, and Main Street had been taken over by dollar stores and pawn shops. Madison had two sisters and a brother; she was the oldest of the four. Her father had left the family when she was five or six. Her mother, Clare—a brassy woman full of attitude—told the children it was because he was a drunk, but Madison had always suspected that there was something else involved. She had no memories of her father at all, and whenever she thought of him, she would plunge into one of her darker moods. Clare moved a series of increasingly inappropriate men into the house, and it was after one of them started to smack her around that the police were called. He had been sent to jail, and the children had been moved into foster care. Clare got Madison’s sisters and brother back after a year once she was able to demonstrate that she could provide a stable environment for them, but she had left Madison with the family who had taken her in. She would run away to try to get back home and then be taken back into the foster system. There was a series of different places, several well-meaning families, but she never settled with any of them.

“Have you spoken to her mother?”

“Last night. She hasn’t seen her. Same goes for her sisters and brother.”

“Does she get on with them?”

“They used to go at it all the time, but I think it’s better now than it was.”

“Why?”

“The others got to grow up at home, and she didn’t. She hates that. She said it felt like no one wanted her. Always on the move and never where she wanted to be.”

“Why didn’t her mother take her back?”

“She never said. I think Madison was a little wild when she was younger, though. Maybe they didn’t know what to do with her. She has triggers like we all do, I guess—she’ll go off if she thinks somebody has lied to her, or if we’re running low on money, or if she’s having one of her arguments with her mom or her sisters. If she feels like she’s being ignored or rejected, it all comes back again, and then, you know”—he made a popping noise—“look out.”

“Could that be a reason for what’s happened? Something’s upset her?”

“No,” he said. “She’s been really good with her mom for the last couple of months. They’ve been speaking a lot. Now she’s got money, she’s been buying things for them—for her mom, her sisters, for her nieces and nephews, too. I’ve tried to tell her she shouldn’t need to do that, but she likes it. They never had much money growing up, and now she has some, she likes to spread it around, I guess.”

“All right,” Milton said. “Go on.”

He did. Around the time of seventh grade, Madison moved across country to live with her aunt in San Diego. The woman was young, and Madison felt that they had something in common. It was a better town, too, with better schools, and she was encouraged to work hard. That was where her love of reading and writing found expression, and she started to do well. For the first time in her life, he said, she felt wanted and useful, and she started to thrive.

“Have you spoken to her? The aunt?”

“No. I don’t have her number.”

Milton’s cellphone vibrated in his pocket. He scooped it up and looked at the display. He didn’t recognise the number.

“John Smith,” he said.

“Mr. Smith, it’s Victor Leonard from Pine Shore. We spoke last night.”

“Mr. Leonard—how are you?”

“I’m good, sir,” the old man said. “There’s something I think you should know —about the girl.”

“Yes, of course—what is it?”

“Look, I don’t want to be a gossip, telling tales on people and nonsense like that, but there’s a fellow who’s been saying some weird things about what happened up here the other night. You want to know about it?”

Trip raised his eyebrows: who is it?

“Please,” Milton said.

MILTON WAS GETTING USED to the forty-minute drive to Pine Shore. Trip was in the passenger seat next to him, fidgeting anxiously. Milton would have preferred to go alone, but the boy had insisted that he come, too. He had been quiet during the drive, but the mood had been oppressive and foreboding; Milton had tried to lighten it with some music. He had thumbed through his phone for some Smiths but then, after a couple of melancholic minutes, realised that that hadn’t been the best choice. He replaced it with the lo-fi, baggy funk of the Happy Mondays. Trip seemed bemused by his choice.