Too Close to Home

“Hey,” I said, switching gears again. “If I was trying to find some sad-case kid from a couple of years ago, she’d have been around fifteen at the time, working the street, where would I go?”

“You got a name?”

“Sherry Underwood.”

Barry wrote it down in his notebook. “What’s she to you?”

I pondered a moment. “That’s hard to say. She’s someone I think I let down.” Barry looked at me. “Getting Derek back, getting him out of jail, I don’t know. I feel like we came so close to losing him, got him back from the brink. I wonder if it’s too late to do that for someone else.”

Barry studied me a moment longer, then said, “I’ll check the name out later if I get a chance. I love doing all this legwork for you. In the meantime, you could try the Willows.” I’d heard the name, but wasn’t sure what it was. Barry said, “A drop-in shelter for kids, on Lambton. There’s a guy there, Art, ask for him, tell him I sent you. What’s this about, really?”

I gave Barry half a smile. “It’s about how the mayor got punched in the nose.”

Lambton street wasn’t that far a walk from the diner, so I decided to hoof it. The Willows was settled in between a store that sold T-shirts and posters to the younger crowd, and a shop run by a Korean woman that sold thousands of different kinds of beads for people who wanted to make their own jewelry.

Half a dozen kids were milling around on the sidewalk outside the Willows. A couple of them were dressed all in black, their dark hair streaked with flashes of pink and purple, their lips and eyebrows adorned with silver studs and loops. The others didn’t appear to have adopted any actual uniform. It looked more as if they’d left home with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Ripped jeans, T-shirts, sneakers. One of the girls was standing on the sidewalk in bare feet. The one thing they seemed to have in common was an air of abandonment, that they were here because no one else wanted to take them in.

I went inside. There were about ten cafeteria-style tables set up, a couple of pinball machines, a video game, a bulletin board plastered with notes about places where one could sleep for the night or find short-term work. There was an opening in the back wall where kitchen workers could hand food through.

There was also a raised counter to one side, a kind of rundown hotel check-in, and it was there that I spotted a man probably in his forties leaning over some paperwork. He had almost no hair on his head, but at least two days’ worth of growth on his face, and even before he spoke there seemed a sense of weariness about him.

“Excuse me,” I said. He looked at me, still hunched over, resting on his elbows. “I’m looking for Art.”

“You found him,” he said. “What’s the matter? Kids blocking the sidewalk?”

“No. Barry Duckworth said you might be able to help me.”

He sat up straight. “You a cop?”

“No. I’m trying to find out what happened to a young girl. She might have come to a place like this.”

Art said, “Let me guess. You’re trying to find your daughter.”

I shook my head. “No. Not mine. Somebody else’s.”

“You a detective? Trying to find somebody’s kid?”

“No,” I said, getting annoyed. “It’s not that at all. This is someone I ran into a couple of years ago, someone I tried to help, but maybe I didn’t try hard enough.”

“You got a name?”

“Sherry. Sherry Underwood.”

He nodded right away. I expected him to have to think about the name for a while. “Yeah, sure, I remember her.”

“She comes to this shelter?”

“She did, for a while. But then she was gone. Someone’s here for a while, then they take off. Happens all the time. No one exactly gets their mail sent here.”

“What do you know about her?”

“Listen,” he said. “I run this place to help these kids out, not rat them out to parents and others who fucked them over and turned their backs on them.”

“It’s not like that. I just needed to know.”

“I can tell you this much. She had a mother who was useless and a father who wasn’t there and she gave old guys blowjobs and let them fuck her so she’d have money to eat, and when I last saw her she was high, which is how these kids pass a lot of their time, because if you had to live like they do you’d want to be high a lot of the time, too. I’d love to be able to tell you her story’s unique, but it’s not. What else can I do for you?”

“Do you know what happened to her after she stopped coming here?”

“She married a prince and lived happily ever after,” Art said. “Look, I don’t know, and good luck trying to find her. I’ve got a staff of four, a constant parade of heartbreak, and we do the best we can.”

“Sure,” I said. “How about any of the men who might have been her customers? Do you know who any of them might have been? You ever see any of them around here?”

“If she’d ever tried to run her hooking operation out of here, we’d have kicked her out. But I’d see her in here after, sometimes, counting her money, writing stuff down in her little notepad.”

I was pretty sure I knew that notepad. I’d written down my name and number in that notepad.

THIRTY-FOUR