Thread of Hope (The Joe Tyler Series, #1) (42 page)

“Kids?”

“Mostly teens,” she said. “Runaways. Homeless. Some others. I try to get them home. Or at least to a safe place.” The smile appeared again. “Run Home is the opposite of run away.”

I nodded. “I get it. So what do you have to do with Jacob?”

She sighed. “We kind of have a deal. He runs into anyone that really needs help, he calls me. In turn, I don’t turn him into the cops.”

“Sweet deal.”

“Believe it or not, he does call me,” she said. “I check in with him a lot. But he does call.”  She paused. “So maybe he’s not a scumbag. Maybe just a bit of a jerk.”

The snow fell in earnest and the entire street was blanketed in white.

“Why are you here?” she asked. “And why did you have him on his ass?”

I shoved her card in my pocket and held onto the photo of Elizabeth and Bailey. I stared hard at it, willing Elizabeth to speak to me, to tell me where she was, where she’d gone, who’d taken her.

But she said nothing.

I offered the photo to Isabel. “I’m looking for my daughter.”

FOUR

Isabel Balzone blew the steam off the top of her coffee. “You’re still looking?”

The steady snow had morphed into a blizzard while we talked in front of Jacob’s house. She’d suggested grabbing coffee at a diner down the road. With nowhere else to go, I said okay.

The diner, like Jacob’s house, was in a run-down neighborhood west of Minneapolis. Just off 94, north of the skyline and the baseball stadium, nestled in a thicket of brick ramblers and falling-down clapboard homes. The crowd inside was decidedly local.

I cupped my hands around the warm porcelain mug. My eyes zeroed in on the chipped rim. “Yeah.”

“Even when you don’t know what you’ll find?”

“I need to know,” I said. “The not knowing is almost worse than not having her around.”

She nodded as if she understood. But she didn’t. The only way she could was if she had lost a child.

Maybe she had. “How’d you get into this?” I asked.

The waitress returned and set a slice of apple pie in front of Isabel. She hadn’t ordered it.

“Just wanted to do something helpful,” Isabel said. “I worked at a couple of non-profits out of college but the red tape and restrictions chafed at me. I’m not really a sit around and wait for an answer type. So I just started going out at night. Finding kids, giving them blankets, getting them food, stuff like that.” 

She shrugged. “I got some cards printed up and learned how to write grant proposals. I pay myself a ridiculously small salary. And here I am.”

“You do anything with missing kids?” I asked. “Help look or locate?”

She ate a forkful of pie and shook her head. “Not much. It’s mostly assistance. Making sure they’re safe, have food, stuff like that. Most of the kids I work with, they don’t wanna go home. And some of them have good reason not to. I don’t think it’s my job to put them back home unless they want to be there, you know?”

“But your organization is called Run Home.”

“Well, sure.” She wiped her mouth with her napkin. “For those who have a decent home to go back to, it’s the best place for them to be.

“And the others? It’s okay to let them run away?”

She smiled, like she’d been asked that a million times. “It’s never okay because it means a kid doesn’t feel loved. But like I said, a lot of these kids
…
they’re not better off at home.”

I could imagine the reasons, but I didn’t have the ability to be so objective. I lost that ability the day Elizabeth disappeared.

“But there is one kid I’m concerned about,” she said, lines forming on her forehead.

“Who?”

“He was a regular. And he’s nowhere to be found.”

“How old?”

“Nineteen.” She sighed and rubbed her forehead. “And, yeah, I know. He’s old enough to go do his own thing now.”

I nodded.

“But Marc
…
is different.”

I didn’t say anything, just watched the snow fall outside the window. Cars were moving slower now as it piled up, slicking the street. It was like watching the world through a snow globe.

“He helped me,” Isabel said. “He wouldn’t tell me much about himself. I know he was on bad terms with his father. Never spoke a word about his mother. So he was one of the ones that didn’t want to go home.”

The waitress refilled my mug and Isabel waited for her to leave.

“But he wanted to be around, you know?” she continued. “He didn’t want to be by himself. So he started coming with me at night, helping me with the blankets and food. He’s smart, good sense of humor. Didn’t mind me asking him questions as long as I didn’t mind when he didn’t answer. I talked to him about getting a job. He wasn’t against it.”

“Doing?”

She pushed the plate away and toward the edge of the table. “Working for me, actually. I just picked up another grant two weeks ago. Enough to cover a part-time employee. I asked him if he wanted the job. And he said yes.”

“What specifically was he going to do for you?”

“Same thing he’d been doing,” she said. “Nothing really different. Figured I could introduce him to the grant writing stuff, too. Truth is, I need the help. It wasn’t a completely unselfish thing on my part. And Marc knows me, knows what I do. He knows this world. The kids I see on a regular basis, they know him. They trust him. That is a huge thing.”

I knew that was true. When I went looking for someone, the most difficult thing was gaining the trust of the people in the world the kid left. Kids especially were pessimistic, distrustful of adults. It took time to cut into that armor of skepticism.

Time a missing kid didn’t have.

“So when did he disappear?” I asked.

“Three nights ago,” she said, concern sitting heavy on her face. “He normally meets me to do the food run. He’s only not showed once before and he was sick that time. Sent someone to let me know. But this time? Nothing.”

“You asked around?”

“Yeah,” she said, blinking. “No one’s seen him.”

“You try the dad yet?”

She shook her head. “Not yet. Feels like I’d be stepping over some line I promised Marc I wouldn’t cross.”

“Waiting is sometimes a really bad thing.”

She stared at me for a moment. “That sounds like it comes from experience.”

I shifted in the booth. “It does. You promise things to kids that you intend to honor. But once things go haywire, the promises go out the window. At least for me they do. My goal is to find them. If they’re pissed when I find them, so be it. At least I found them.”

Snow ticked against the window, the wind blowing it into the glass.

“I might be able to put you in touch with some people,” Isabel said. “Might help, might not. But I could at least get you to them.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your daughter,” she said. “I know a little bit about what happened with Jacob and his family. No promises, but at the very least, I can probably get you to someone who knows where his sister is. Maybe a little about her history when she was here.”

“And in exchange, you want me to help you,” I said. “With Marc.”

She didn’t say anything.

But she didn’t have to. I’d gotten used to it. People meant well. I believed that. They wanted to help. But the world of missing kids was like one big giant swap meet. I’ll help you if you’ll help me. There was no fear of leveraging what you had to offer when it came to finding a missing child.

And I was the first one to leverage when I could.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll help you.”

FIVE

The two men standing near Isabel’s car did not look friendly.

I paid for the coffee and we walked out into the snow and dimming, gray sky. She ducked against the wind and then stopped cold when she saw them.

“You know them?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

They stared at us, the taller of the two mumbling something to his buddy, his eyes not leaving us. He was skinnier than the other, even bundled up in a field jacket. Scar across the bridge of a pointed nose, gray eyes and a small mouth. His partner wore a thick hooded sweatshirt over what looked like several lumpy layers. Small, close-set eyes, a pug nose and a frown. He was twitchy, jumpy, shifting his weight from foot to foot. Both looked like they were in their early twenties.

“It’s okay,” Isabel said. “It’s fine.”

Seemed like she was saying it to reassure herself more than me.

They ambled in our direction and the taller one nodded at Isabel. “Hey, Isabel.”

“Stevie.” She glanced at the short one. “Boyd.”

Stevie looked at me with the gray eyes. “Hey.”

“Hi.”

Boyd stared at me, looking me up and down, then shrugged, apparently not impressed.

“Have you seen him?” Stevie asked Isabel.

She hesitated, then shook her head.

His mouth curled into a small smile. “You sure about that?”

“I haven’t heard from him,” she said.

“Not sure I believe you.”

“Don’t know what to tell you then.”

“She’s lying, Stevie,” Boyd said, sneering into the falling snow. “You know she is. She always protects Marc.”

I glanced at her at the mention of Marc’s name. She didn’t look at me.

“You didn’t return my call,” Stevie said, ignoring Boyd. “Makes me think you’re avoiding me.”

“I’m not,” she said, shuffling her feet on the slick sidewalk. “But I don’t have any news for you and I’ve been busy.”

Boyd snorted. “Sure you have. What? With your new boyfriend here?”  He glanced at me again, his eyes glistening. “That who you are?”

I didn’t say anything.

“If I hear from Marc,” Isabel said to Stevie. “I’ll let you know. I told you that.”

“What are you?” Boyd asked, stepping in a little closer to me, tilting his head, mocking. “A mute or something?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Don’t be an idiot, Boyd,” Isabel said.

She glanced at Stevie. He just watched Boyd with an amused expression.

Boyd’s mouth cracked into a sneer again. “Or maybe you’re just really stupid and don’t know how to talk.”