Part 2 (1/2)
Mrs. Harrington looked up from the pad of paper she was jotting on. ”Are you implying that I don't know what is happening with my own daughter?”
Jan could see that Peet was trying to restrain herself. Mr. Harrington, however, felt no such reticence.
”I don't think we need waste our time with implications, Lynette. Let's just come right out and say it. You don't.”
Jan jumped in. ”It's hardly unusual, Mrs. Harrington, for parents to not know what their teenage children are really up to.”
Mrs. Harrington looked worried. Mr. Harrington took a peek at his watch.
Jan went on. ”We also need her cell phone records. You can probably go right online and download the detail from her most recent bills.”
”Actually, we won't be able to do that,” Harrington said. ”Maddy set up and paid for stuff like that with her own credit card, and I paid the credit card bill each month.”
”Then print out the detail on the credit card statement and we'll take it from there. Don't cancel the card, whatever you do. It will give us some valuable information if she continues to use it,” Jan said. ”I'll also need the account number and pa.s.sword for your Internet service provider. We should be able to get some information on Maddy's recent Web activity.”
”I'll write down the name of friends I can think of, but there won't be many,” Mrs. Harrington said.
”Please be as thorough as you can be.”
”Of course.”
Harrington looked at his watch again and put his empty gla.s.s down. ”Listen, why don't we do this? You gals get on your way so you can start tracking Maddy down. We'll put the information together that you've asked for and call you when we've got it, probably tomorrow sometime.
Jan rose and stepped in closer to him. ”Actually, Mr. Harrington, here's what we're going to do. You'll a.s.semble that information while we go take a look at Maddy's room.”
Mr. Harrington opened his mouth and his wife stopped him with a hand in the air. ”We'll get it for you,” she said. ”I'll take you to her room while my husband gets you the other information.”
Mr. Harrington moved back to the drinks cart and turned his back on them. Jan couldn't remember meeting a bigger p.r.i.c.k, and she'd met her share of them.
Mrs. Harrington led them upstairs and down a long hallway. Jan lost track of the number of bedrooms along the way. Maddy's was the last one.
”Is your room also on this level?” Jan asked.
”Yes, it's at the opposite end of the hall. Why do you ask?”
”I'm wondering if you would have heard her leaving at night. Do you recall waking up to any noise?”
Mrs. Harrington shrugged. ”I wear earplugs because of my husband's incessant snoring. But Maddy could have slipped away and I wouldn't have heard it, with or without the earplugs.”
She opened a door next to Maddy's room, which led to carpeted stairs leading down to the back of the house. A perfect teenage escape route.
”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 naive about what const.i.tuted 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 pa.s.sion. 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-s.h.i.+rt 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 s.h.i.+rts. Several pairs of blue and black jeans were ironed and hung next to the s.h.i.+rts. 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-s.h.i.+rts. None of the s.h.i.+rts 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 h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l. Peet's kids were all happy at home.