My mother was on her way to ruin the most important sale of my life. I felt it in the chill breeze snaking its way between the small cracks of our repair shop’s bay doors. It tickled the back of my neck with its icy breath and whispered discouragement into my ear with a voice so soft I wouldn’t believe it. If my sister hadn’t interrupted with her own unique style of intrusive ultimatum, I might have been prepared for our mother’s betrayal before it derailed everything.

I was elbow deep in 240Z engine grease, replacing the ignition switch for the umpteenth time, when the Nokia trumpeted its Spanish bugle call. 

I should have ignored it. It was no time to play detective. Not today. The sale was the thing. The biggest of my career. The one that would save the family’s car dealership.

My head bounced off the car hood as I reached for the phone. I cursed, slapping the hood with one hand and checking my head with the other.

Akira trapped a Chilton manual between his compact torso and the fender of a 1998 Acura in the bay next to me. 

“You going to get that?” he asked in a voice full of the wisdom that his ancient Japanese frame projected. Since he’d been my father’s chief mechanic starting long before I’d taken over, his voice usually kept me on track with perfectly timed aphorisms. Right now it aggravated an increasingly anxious morning.

“It’s just bad news trying to interrupt a perfectly good day,” I said.

I concentrated harder on the Datsun, an obsession that drove me to sell big like my father before me. Dad’s first purchase from 1972, this vehicle had launched a Japanese car dealership in the middle of cattle country. The car simultaneously swelled me with pride and broke me out in hives. 

Today its primary role was clarity. Prepare my mind for the deal of the 21^st century. Launch the new version of myself. I had determined to change the trajectory of my life. And the Nokia’s fancy waltz wasn’t going to trip me up. Demands from aggrieved citizens could wait. If I found myself thinking about other people’s problems, I kicked those thoughts to the curb and directed my attention toward getting this business back on its feet.

Akira piped in once more. “Don’t have to let a phone call decide how your day will go.” 

I grunted at him and glanced at the clock. Johnny Horton Martin was due in minutes. I’d spent half the night turning over every possible way Mother might sabotage this deal. She’d done it before, with her preternatural knack for bad timing and general disdain for the dealership. If you told me she’d orchestrated Y2K, I would have believed it. We made it through, but economic gurus warned of a looming recession and Mother reminded me daily. It also spooked potential buyers. But since gas prices refused to hold still, I was glad for that. We’d sold several of our smaller foreign vehicles. Meanwhile, my trade-in inventory of gas guzzlers had doubled. 

Poking around in Dad’s little sports car kept my mind off that financial malaise, so I could focus on hitting the big time with Johnny. Today’s deal was the precursor to providing his ranch with six brand new Tundras. That kind of contract put a dealership on the map. Any chance at it filled my head with helium gas. I was trippy with hope.

Until my phone started singing its ardent refrain. The redundant melody ricocheted around the mechanic’s bay, off corrugated walls, tool trolleys and stamped metal car bodies.

“Doubt you’ll get much done with that noise pinging all over the shop,” Akira said, with a rare bit of irritation in his tone.

My teeth chattered, holding in the bad language that threatened to vomit over the polished concrete floor. If I didn’t wrestle my aggravation to ground, it could tank the sale and our failing car dealership would fall apart like the 2000 presidential election. A deep inhale pulled the scent of used oil into my lungs, lubricating those jagged nerves.

I scooped the noisy little pest between my little finger and the crook in my thumb, pressed answer, and decorated the keypad with one more black smudge. 

“Connor.”

“I need your help,” Renée blurted in scratchy tones. The refuge into which she’d escaped, high in the Montana Rockies between the panhandle of Idaho and the Canadian border, snatched bits of her inevitable plea. 

“You need someone to drive you home?” I put little effort into hiding my sarcasm. 

“Connor!” Her insolence boosted the signal strength a whole bar. “I need you to find a little girl.”

“Cool beans,” I said, refusing to take the bait. “It so happens I have one at home. When do you need her?”

“Stop pissing around, Connor.” Anger kicked at me through the modulation. “This is serious.”

“It’s always serious with you, Sis.”

“This time I’m for real. This little girl, this child, she’s missing. No older than Penny.”

An electric jolt zapped me between the shoulder blades, and a tiny growl rattled my voice box. Use of my sweet baby girl to leverage sympathy rankled. I still held a pack mule full of resentment toward Renée for abandoning the business. Left us high and dry with no accountant to manage purchases and loans. “I’ve got a life here, Sister run-for-the-hills. I can’t drop it all to calm your jitters.”

“Come up, Connor! You have to. You’re the only detective I know.” Behind the crackle of a poor connection, I distinguished a whimper. 

She wasn’t wrong. Even if she knew of another detective, her reliance on me to bail her out since she was a baby would render them useless in her mind. Renée had mastered the art of co-dependence. Her expertise used my every weakness to meet her needs. Already, my brain searched out the quickest way to complete the sale with Johnny Martin so I could rush up and solve this mystery. I was even considering acceptable excuses for Nansi, who’d insisted I improve personal boundaries with Renée. “Let her stand on her own, Connor.” She’d said it often.

I shoved thoughts of crime-solving aside and kept the boundary. “Nothing doing, sis,” I said. “This deal with Johnny Martin saves the business. You should be here to witness it.” 

She whinnied like an angry mustang. “Connor, you have got to help. There’s no one else.”

I tucked the Nokia between my ear and shoulder. “I can’t be a detective and a car salesman, dammit.” Filth from the Datsun’s engine penetrated my skin and resisted scrubbing with the shop rag. “Besides, I’ve got no time for P.I. work, it just gets me into trouble.” The opportunity to solve a missing person case tingled beneath the skin. I resisted the urge to submit. 

“I need someone who can find things out,” she pleaded.

“No, Renée. You left me here—and by that I mean deserted me. Left me to handle things. I’m handling things. Can’t do both.”

“A couple of days, Connor. That’s all it’ll take.” 

I chafed more skin off with the rag and then shook the sting out. “It’s a day’s drive one way, Sis! What are you trying on? This kid’s gonna pop to the surface just because I drove six hundred miles?” 

“My God, Connor! Don’t use language like that. She could be drowned in a lake for all we know.”

A baby girl as young as my own, floating…. Oh my gawd! How low would she stoop? I scrubbed harder at my grimy hand. “Sounds like there’s nothing for me to do.”

She gave another whimper. “This child’s father is crazy.” 

“Your father was crazy and you turned out okay.” A total lie and we both knew it. 

“This guy is ten times the crazy Dixon ever was!” she yelled. I swear her spit hit me in the ear.

“Tell the cops, Renée. They have cops up there, right?”

“Please, Connor. She needs your help.”

“Sorry, Sis.” Refusal to help Renée, and the missing child she represented, created a heartache that began to split my ribcage open. I held it in place with a closed fist, pressed against my chest. “Mother’s hellbent on derailing the dealership. And now you expect me to take off on one of your wild goose hunts. I need to lock this deal in, and save us from bankruptcy.” This dash of blame I tossed at her conscience, hoping to end the argument. 

She let out a wail that deadened the connection for a second.

“Renée?” Vivid images of a small child stumbling through a forest, tears streaming down her dirty face, filled the empty space. 

“I’m here,” she said, quieter. 

“I want to could help,” I said, squeezing my eyes tight against the scary mental pictures.

“Then help.” Her voice had turned calm. The gears of her mind ground with a nearly audible gnawing. “These local yokels aren’t even looking. The mother believes the father is hiding the girl, and the father is a blatant liar.”

The conversation tangled my thoughts. I needed to focus on the upcoming sales pitch to Johnny Horton Martin. Concerns for a missing child, a child that no one was looking for according to her own account, had no place in my business plan. So, Renée was rattled. She always got facts and dramatic tension confused. Still, the grain of truth that seeds a rumor niggled. 

“You talked to the father?”

“He’s a liar, Connor. Like I said,” her voice shifting toward outrage. “He won’t admit to anything, he talks in circles. Nobody knows what’s going on with him. You’ve got to come and prove he’s lying and find the girl before something bad happens to her.”

I shifted focus back onto the Datsun’s engine compartment. “I’m in the middle of working on Dad’s car.” 

“That’s a piece of metal,” she shouted. Crackles of tiny lightening singed my ear. “How much time does a five-year-old have before she’s… I can’t even say it. What if it was Penelope?” 

The line went flat.

I waited. Blood red heat ascended into my neck and face. How could she use fear for my own beautiful little girl to manipulate me? My heart pounded hard, flogging me from the inside. It didn’t matter how much I wanted to help, even if Renée’s judgment could be trusted. I had no time to search for a lost child in the distant mountains of Northwestern Montana. No way could I drop the biggest sale we’d ever seen simply because my histrionic sister chose to involve me. 

The Datsun’s engine mocked me. Renée’s words shouted out from the dead silence behind the earpiece, What if it was Penelope?