“How else to get the lay of the land?” I asked Angie.
“Local newspaper.”
I looked around for a newspaper but didn’t spy one, so I did my best to catch the counter girl’s attention.
She was about nineteen. A pretty face had been damaged by acne scars and she wore an extra forty pounds on her frame like a threat. Her eyes were dull with anger disguised as apathy. If she kept on her current path, she’d grow into the type of person who fed her kids Doritos for breakfast and purchased angry bumper stickers with lots of exclamation points. But right now, she was just another in a long line of pissed-off small-town girls with a shitty outlook. When I finally flagged her down and asked if there was a newspaper behind the counter, she said, “A what?”
“A newspaper.”
Blank stare.
“A newspaper,” I said. “It’s like a home page without a scroll button?”
Stone face.
“The front page usually has pictures on it and, you know, words below those pictures. And sometimes? Pie charts in the lower left corner.”
“We’re a restaurant,” she said, as if that explained everything. Then she went over and leaned against the counter by the coffeemaker and began texting on her cell.
I looked over at the guy nearest to me, but he was engrossed in his meat loaf. I looked at Angie. She shrugged. I swiveled my stool and spotted a wire rack by the door that held some kind of printed matter. I crossed to it and discovered the top rack offered a real estate monthly while the lower rack held brochures of the region. Nothing fancy on the outside—local ads mostly. When I opened it, though, we were greeted with a color map. The gas stations were labeled, as were the summer stock theaters and antique shops, the outlet mall in Lee and the glassworks in Lenox, places that sold Adirondack chairs and others that sold quilts and spools of yarn.
We found Becket and West Becket on the map easily enough. A school we’d passed on a hill this morning was, I learned, the Jacob’s Pillow Dance School, the pond we’d passed a few dozen times was apparently unnamed. Otherwise, the only attractions labeled in Becket were the Middlefield State Forest and McMillan Park, which contained, within its environs, Paw Prints Pet Park.
“Dog park,” Angie said just as I was noticing it. “Worth a stab in the dark.”
The counter girl plopped Angie’s cheeseburger on the counter and then placed the turkey club in front of me with a weary drop of her hand and disappeared into the back before I could mention that I’d asked for no mayo. While we’d been looking at the map, most of the patrons had cleared out. We were alone except for a middle-aged couple who sat by the window and stared out at the road rather than at each other. I walked two stools over and found myself a knife and fork wrapped in a paper napkin and I used the knife to scrape most of the mayo off my bread. Angie watched me, bemused, and then went back to her cheeseburger. As I bit into my sandwich, the short-order cook disappeared from behind the kitchen cut-in. A door opened somewhere out back and shortly thereafter I could smell cigarette smoke and hear him talking in low tones to the counter girl.
My sandwich sucked. Turkey so dry it was chalky. Rubbery bacon. Lettuce that browned as I watched. I dropped it on my plate.
“How’s your burger?”
Angie said, “Awful.”
“Why you still eating it?”
“Boredom.”
I looked at the check left behind by Miss Charm School Graduate—sixteen bucks for two crap lunches delivered by a crappier personality. I left a twenty under the plate.
“You are not tipping her,” Angie said.
“Of course I am.”
“But she doesn’t deserve it.”
“No, she doesn’t.”
“So . . . ?”
“All the years I waited tables before becoming a PI?” I said. “I’d tip Stalin.”
“Or his granddaughter, apparently.”
We left the money, took the map, and walked out.
McMillan Park contained a baseball field, three tennis courts, a large playground for school-age kids and a smaller, more brightly painted one for toddlers. Just past that were the two dog parks—the one for small dogs formed a fenced-in oval within the park for larger dogs. Someone had put a lot of thought into the park—it was strewn with tennis balls and had four water fountains that also fed large metal dog bowls at their bases. Several lengths of thick rope, the kind you’d use to tie off a boat, lay on the ground. It was good to be a dog in Becket.
It was the middle of the afternoon, so it wasn’t terribly populous. Two guys, one middle-aged woman, and an elderly couple tended to two Weimaraners, a Labradoodle, and a pretty yippy corgi who bossed the other three dogs around.
No one recognized Amanda from the photo we passed around. Or maybe no one wanted to recognize her in front of us. Private investigators don’t get much benefit of the doubt anymore. People often consider us just one more symbol of the End of All Privacy Age. And it’s hard to argue the point.
The two guys with the Weimaraners did note that Amanda looked a little like the girl in the Twilight movies, if not in the hair and the cheekbones, then in the nose and the forehead and the close-set eyes, but then they got into an argument over whether said actress was a Kristen or a Kirsten, and I wandered over to the middle-aged woman before it devolved into a Team Edward vs. Team Jacob imbroglio.
The middle-aged woman was smartly dressed but you could have stored loose change in the pockets under her eyes. The top third of the index and middle fingers of her right hand were yellowed by nicotine and she was the only one in the park who kept her dog, the Labradoodle, on a leash. Her teeth gritted every time he jerked against her hold, and the other three dogs taunted him.
“Even if I knew her,” the woman said, “why would I tell you? I don’t know you.”
“But if you did,” I assured her, “you’d think I was the cat’s pajamas.”
She gave me an unblinking stare that felt twice as hostile if only because there was nothing overtly hostile about it. “What’d this girl do?”
“Nothing,” Angie said. “She’s just missing from home. And she’s only sixteen.”
“I ran away at sixteen,” the woman said. “I came back after a month. To this day, I don’t know why I did. I could’ve stayed out there.”
When she said “out there,” she chin-gestured past the area where a group of mothers and toddlers gathered around the smaller playground, past the parking lot, and past the hills that rose and were subsumed into the great blue mass of the Berkshires. On the other side of that mountain range, the gesture seemed to say, a better life had waited.