Choosing to ignore the warning implicit in Dylan’s words, the old man said wonderingly, ‘I wasn’t actually looking for her here. Not in this town, this place. Pulled off the road, came for dinner, that’s all.’
‘Ben, listen, I said there’s an answer here, but I don’t know if the answer is the girl herself. Be prepared for that.’
The old man had taken his first taste of hope not a minute ago, and already he was drunk with it. ‘Well, like you said, if this isn’t the last link, you’ll find the next one, and the one after that.’
‘All the way to the last link,’ Dylan agreed, recalling the relentlessness of the compulsion that had driven him to Eucalyptus Avenue. ‘But—’
‘You’ll find my girl, I know you will, I know.’ Tanner didn’t seem to be the type who could flip from despair to joy in a manic moment, but perhaps the prospect of resolving fifty years of regret and remorse was sufficiently exhilarating to effect an immediate emotional transformation even in a stoic heart. ‘You’re an answer to prayers.’
In truth, Dylan might have been at least mildly enthusiastic about playing hero twice in one night, but his enthusiasm curdled when he realized how devastated Ben Tanner would be if this chase didn’t have a storybook ending.
Gently, he broke the old man’s grip on his arm and continued toward the restaurant. Since there was no turning back, he wanted to finish this as quickly as possible and put an end to the suspense.
Jinking bats, now three in number, frolicked in their aerial feast, and the paper-fragile exoskeleton of each doomed moth made a faint but audible crunch when snapped in those rodent teeth: entire death announcements in crisp strokes of exclamatory punctuation.
If Dylan had believed in omens, these lamplit bats would have warranted a pause for consideration. And if they were an omen, they certainly didn’t portend success in the search for Ben Tanner’s girl.
Dead man’s trail.
The words returned to him, but he still didn’t know what he ought to infer from them.
If a chance existed that the old man’s long-lost daughter would be found inside the restaurant, then perhaps it was equally likely that she was dead and that who waited to be discovered instead at the end of this particular chain was the physician who had attended her during her final hours or the priest who’d given her last rites. No less possible: She might not merely have died; she might have been murdered, and at dinner this evening might be the policeman who had found her body. Or the man who had murdered her.
With the buoyant Ben at his side, Dylan paused when he reached Jilly and Shep, but made no introductions, offered no explanations. He handed his keys to Jilly, leaned close, and said, ‘Get Shep belted in. Get out of the parking lot. Wait for me half a block that way.’ He pointed. ‘Keep the engine running.’
Events in the restaurant, whether they proved to be good or bad, might cause sufficient commotion to ensure that the employees and the customers would be interested enough in Dylan to watch him through the big front windows when he left. The SUV must not be near enough for anyone to read the license plates or to discern clearly the make and model of the vehicle.
To her credit, Jilly asked no questions. She understood that in his stuff-driven condition, Dylan couldn’t do other than what he was impelled to do. She accepted the keys, and she said to Shep, ‘Come on, sweetie, let’s go.’
‘Listen to her,’ Dylan told his brother. ‘Do what she says,’ and he led Ben Tanner into the restaurant.
The hostess said, ‘I’m sorry, but we’re no longer seating for dinner.’ Then she recognized them. ‘Oh. Forget something?’
‘Saw an old friend,’ Dylan lied, and headed into the dining area with the confidence that although he didn’t know where he was going, he would arrive at where he needed to be.
The couple sat at a corner table. They appeared to be in their middle to late twenties.
Too young to be Ben Tanner’s daughter, the woman looked up as Dylan approached her without hesitation. A pretty, fresh-faced, sun-browned brunette, she had eyes that were a singular shade of blue.