Stan had tears in his eyes. He shouted at Patterson, “My dad didn’t snap! Something happened to him!”
Patterson nodded gently. “That, again unfortunately, is also a possibility and we will absolutely follow that line of inquiry as well. Listen, Stan, I wonder if you’d go into the front room with this officer here. He has a form we need you to fill out to start an official missing persons case.”
The uniformed officer rose. After hesitating a moment Stan got up too and followed him out of the room. Patterson looked at me carefully.
“Your brother…”
“There was an accident when he was eleven. He was underwater for a long time, he suffered some damage.”
Patterson made another entry on his laptop. “Must have made it doubly difficult for your dad bringing him up.”
“I can see where you’re going, but honestly it’s impossible for me to imagine my father just running away.”
“Was he seeing anyone?”
“How do you mean?”
“How do you think I mean?”
“Well, I don’t-”
“Johnny, this is not the time to get creative. Being discreet won’t help him or us.”
“A couple of weeks ago he told me he was having an affair with Patricia Prentice. I really don’t know any more than that, my father didn’t like to talk about anything personal.”
Patterson raised his eyebrows. “The Patricia Prentice who recently committed suicide?”
I nodded.
“How long had they been seeing each other?”
“Six months, apparently.”
“Did her husband know?”
“As far as I know, no.”
Patterson winced. He asked a few more questions then had me fill out a formal missing persons report. By the time we were done Stan and the officer were back in the kitchen. Patterson packed his laptop away and shook our hands and told us someone would be in touch every day and that the minute they knew anything, we would. He stopped in front of Stan before he left and put his hand on his shoulder.
“We’re going to do everything we can to find your dad. I promise.”
After he’d gone Stan walked around the kitchen running his hands through his hair.
“Oh boy, Johnny, oh boy… What’s happened to Dad?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did he mean about the car when he said marks?”
“Just anything that was a clue, I guess.”
Stan shook his head solemnly. “He was talking about blood.”
“I don’t think he was talking about blood, but anyway he said they didn’t see any.”
“Do you think he got on the bus? Do you think inside he always wanted to go somewhere else?”
“No, I don’t. Do you?”
Stan looked at me miserably and shook his head. “I have to put a costume on, Johnny, I don’t have enough power.”
“Stan, listen, calm down. What we have to do is wait and let the police do their stuff and try not to freak out before we know anything solid, okay?”
But although that’s what we did, and although Patterson was genuine and diligent and the Oakridge police combined forces with the larger Burton department, nothing came of it.
During the two weeks following my father’s disappearance the police interviewed the people he worked with and the one or two acquaintances who were the closest thing he had to friends. None of them had any idea what might have happened to him. Police patrols covered all the roads that ran through the hills around Oakridge and the forestry service did the same with the fire trails. Neither found any trace of him. His bank and credit card accounts were monitored but they remained unused and a photo of my father, e-mailed to the driver of the San Francisco bus that had picked up at Jerry’s Gas, brought forth no excited cry of recognition. A story about my father’s disappearance in the Oakridge Banner was similarly unproductive.
At one point Patterson showed us a video from a security camera in the San Francisco bus terminal. He asked us to look for anyone who might be our father. It was black-and-white and shot from high up. We watched it twice but we didn’t see him and I got the feeling that Patterson wasn’t seriously considering the bus scenario anymore.
It seemed, briefly, that Stan and I may have become suspects because Burton sent over a forensics team to go through our house. But the fact that there was nothing to find and that my father, although he carried home and car policies, had only minimal life insurance, turned the investigation back out toward the world again.
Bill Prentice, too, had his fifteen minutes of institutional scrutiny. As the husband of my father’s lover the notion that he might have exacted a fatal revenge was not something the police could ignore. It turned out almost immediately, though, that the day after Pat’s funeral, Bill had taken his BMW and headed down to Los Angeles to visit his mother. While down there, grief over his wife’s death had driven him to the bottle and on the evening and night of my father’s disappearance he had the cast-iron alibi of having been locked up in Santa Monica while he was processed for DUI.
Patterson came around to our house for the last time a month after my father vanished. He told me the police had run out of ways to approach the case. Stan was up in his room at the time and Patterson asked me not to call him down. We went out into the back garden and sat in the shadow of the house.
“Truthfully, we have no indication as to what might have happened to him. We’ve listed him as missing but I have to tell you, those details have been available to the California law enforcement community since the start of the investigation and nationally for the last two weeks and we haven’t had a bite. The length of time is very much a negative factor. On the other hand, we have nothing concrete to say he isn’t alive and well-no items of clothing, no blood, nothing. The case will stay open of course, and we’ll keep doing what we can, but we’re off that part of the curve now where we could expect any sort of timely resolution. I’m sorry. Basically, all we can do is hope he makes contact with you, or…” He shrugged, and didn’t say any more, but it was plain enough he meant:… or the body turns up.
After Patterson had gone I went upstairs to Stan’s room. He was sitting on the corner of his bed, crying quietly. His head was bowed and he didn’t look up when I came in. I sat beside him and put my arm around his shoulders. After a long time he cried himself out and his breath shuddered through his heavy body.
“I saw him through the window. I didn’t want to come down.”
“It’s okay.”
I told him what the detective had said. When I’d finished he said solemnly, “Dad’s dead.”
“Yes, I think he must be.”
“Does it feel weird to you, Johnny? That there’s just you and me now? It feels like we’re in the sea and there’s nothing holding us in the right place anymore. Like everything around us is empty.”
“Yeah, it’s weird.”
“Remember that night at the beach, when you were showing me the stars?”
When I had just turned sixteen and Stan was nine our parents took us on a short summer vacation to Santa Barbara. One warm night Stan and I lay on the beach after dark and looked up into the sky and I pointed out the few constellations I knew and told him how a planet didn’t twinkle and how sometimes you could see satellites moving against the backdrop of stars. And Stan had been lost in thoughts of infinity and dreams of what might be out there, and I felt his wonder and shared it, and in sharing had been drawn so close to him that it seemed we became for those moments almost part of each other, seeing with the same eyes, feeling together the vastness of the universe passing through us…