Free Daddy's Gone a Hunting by Mary Higgins Clark Page A

everything you owned in. Two maybe half that size. One by one he tested the handles. All of them were locked.
    Then he saw it. The very last one. The night was overcast but there was enough for him to see that this one had been in a crash. The hood was crumpled, the side door jammed, the windshield shattered, the tires flat.
    But it wouldn’t be too bad to sleep under it, and then get out in the morning before anybody showed up. Then Clyde had an inspiration. Try the big back doors. He was getting really cold and the cartwas heavy. When he turned the latch that connected those doors they swung open. The sound they made was like a welcome to him.
    He fished his pencil flashlight out from his grimy pocket, pointed its beam, then gave off a grunt of joy. The walls and floor of the back of the van were covered with heavy cotton padding. Clyde climbed in, lifted his cart, dragged it inside, then pulled the doors closed.
    He sniffed and was glad when a stale smell filled his nostrils. It told him that no one had bothered to open those doors for a long time. Trembling with anticipation, Clyde fished out of his cart the newspapers that were his mattress and the odds and ends and rags that served as his blanket. He had not been so comfortable in years. Totally secure in the knowledge that he was alone, he sucked on his bottle of wine and fell asleep.
    No matter how late it was when he found a place to squat, his internal clock always woke him at 6 A.M. He shoved his newspapers and rags into his cart, buttoned up his coat, and opened the back doors. In a few minutes he was blocks away, just another homeless man shuffling along on his endless trip to nowhere.
    That night he was back in the van again and after that it became his nocturnal retreat.
    Sometimes Clyde heard one of the vans pull out and figured it was on a delivery to a faraway place. Sometimes he could even hear the murmur of voices, but he quickly realized that they were no danger to him.
    And always he left by six o’clock with all his belongings, leaving no trace of himself behind, except for the newspapers that had begun to pile up.
    Only one bad thing had happened in the two years before the morning explosion that had sent him scurrying away barely in time to escape the police and the fire trucks. That was the night early on when that girl had followed him from the subway and wouldn’tleave him alone and got into the van before he had closed the door. She had been a college kid and told him she just wanted to talk to him. He had spread out his newspapers and covered himself with his blanket and closed his eyes. But she wouldn’t stop talking. And he couldn’t suck his wine bottle in peace. He remembered that he had sat up and punched her in the face.
    But then what happened? He didn’t know. He’d had a lot of wine, so he fell asleep fast, and she was gone when he woke up. So she must have been all right. Or did she start yelling? Did I put her in the cart and push her away? No. I don’t think so. But anyway she was gone.
    He didn’t come back to the van for days, but when he did it was all right. She mustn’t have told anyone about it, he decided.
    But then the explosion happened and he had had to rush out of the van before the fire trucks came and try to get everything in his cart, but he worried he had missed some of his belongings.
    I’ll miss my secret space, Clyde thought sadly. When I was there I felt so safe that I never dreamed about Joey.
    He knew enough not to go near the burned-out complex the following day, because in a newspaper he fished out of the garbage can in Brooklyn he read that some old guy who had worked at the plant and the daughter of the owner were there when it happened and were suspected of setting the fire. Funny he never heard them that night. But now there’d be cops all over the place.
    He probably could never go back to his van. Even when he realized on Friday that somehow, in his rush to get out, he had lost the picture of