Barclay, Linwood Novel 08 - Never saw it coming

today, call them every hour if he had to. It had been a full day since the news conference. Half a dozen stations had aired the story. There was a clip on YouTube. It had made that morning’s papers. If anyone was going to call in with a tip, it would be now. Wendell needed the police to know just how impatient he was. How he was expecting some action on this.
    He’d called demanding to speak to the lead detective, a woman named Rona Wedmore. But she was out, and Wendell was transferred to someone else who claimed to be more or less up to speed on the investigation, and what sort of response the news conference had produced. There had been half a dozen calls to the hotline police had set up. None had been considered useful. At least one was from an outright lunatic—a woman who claimed to have seen an actress on an Italian soap opera who looked just like the picture of Ellie Garfield. Had the police checked to see whether the woman had run off to pursue an acting career?
    After hanging up, Garfield decided to make himself some tea, thinking it would help calm him. He hadn’t slept more than a few minutes overnight. He was trying to think, since Thursday, when this had all started, just how much sleep he’d had. Five, six hours maybe? His daughter Melissa had probably had a little more than that, if only because the pregnancy so exhausted her.
    Garfield hadn’t wanted Melissa to go before the cameras. He’d told the police he wasn’t sure she could handle the stress. She was seven months pregnant, her mother was missing, and now they wanted her to be on the six o’clock news?
    “I don’t want to put her through that,” he’d told the police.
    But it was Melissa herself who’d insisted she appear alongside her father. “We’ll do it together, Dad,” she told him. “Everyone needs to know we want Mom to be found, that we want her to come home.”
    With some reluctance, he agreed, but only on the condition that he would do all the talking. Once the lights were on and the cameras in their faces, Melissa went to pieces. She managed only to splutter, “Mommy, please come back to us” before she dissolved into tears and put her face into her father’s chest. Even he wasn’t able to say very much, just that they loved Ellie and wanted her back.
    He could hear murmurs among the news people, all indistinct save for one: “Good stuff.”
    Leeches.
    He took Melissa home with him, tried to get her to eat something. “It’s going to be okay,” he told her. “We’re going to get through this. We will, I promise you. But you have to eat. You have to take care of yourself. You have to think about the baby. You’re going to have this baby, and you’re going to take care of it, and everything’s going to be okay.”
    She sat there at the kitchen table, looking as though she would crumble. “Oh, Daddy . . .”
    “Trust me,” he said. “Everything will turn out fine.”
    “How can you say that?” Melissa asked, her eyes red from crying.
    “Because it has to,” he said.
    Melissa spent the night at her parents’ home, but around six in the morning she walked into her father’s bedroom to say she wanted to go back to her apartment across town. Garfield was still under the covers, but he was awake, and had been all night. He was reluctant to let her out of his sight, but Melissa said she could handle it. She wasn’t going to stay at her place. She’d return and stay overnight in the room she lived in before moving out. But she needed to pick up some things, clothes mostly, and wanted a moment or two by herself. Melissa shared the apartment with her friend Olivia, but Olivia was away right now, visiting her parents in Denver. She didn’t know anything about Melissa’s mother.
    Garfield said, hesitantly, “You’re not going to do anything I should be worried about, are you? I mean, your state of mind and all.”
    She said no.
    So he drove his daughter back to her place. Parked out front of the apartment, which was actually the top floor of an old house with a separate entrance. “Why don’t I just wait here while you grab a few things?” he said. “Then you can come back with me.”
    Melissa told him to drive home, that she would call him when she was ready for him to pick her up.
    Even though she was only nineteen, Melissa had been living away from home for three years. She was willing to admit, on the eve of becoming twenty, that she had been a difficult teen. She’d been a handful even