He looks up the Kaden address, tells Denise to take a couple of aspirins and maybe some port and try to get some sleep. “I know what I’m doing, honestly,” when she says what he’s doing probably isn’t such a good idea, and drives to the road the Kadens’ driveway leads to, parks, walks in a few hundred feet, ample moonlight, looks around, no outbuildings about, down to the beach, boathouse with a kayak and canoe, sailboat anchored in the water, different colored sail than one he saw in the lake, wades out to it and looks inside, back up the path, looks through all the first-floor windows, sees them sitting beside a fireplace in the only lighted room in the house, Kaden reading a magazine and drinking wine or something pale in a wine glass, two women talking, fireplace going. Knocks on the door. Kaden comes to it. “You.” “Listen, you’ve got to believe me, I’m not nuts. I had my daughter. I went for a swim. I left her with your friend. She’s lying about everything. My wife and I are desperate. Right now she’s going crazy from it. I’m about to too. You know what it means to lose a child like this? It’s the worst feeling in the world. There is no other. Maybe if she got hit and killed by a car right in front of me. That’s what it’s like. Or the doctor’s just told me she has cancer and only a month to live. If you have kids—” “Excuse me, but if you don’t leave our property — and I mean right up to the public road — this minute, I’m phoning the police.” “Hell with the police. Olivia might be here. There might even be a chance you don’t know about it. Now you have to—” but he can see by his face he won’t, so he pushes past him and goes inside. Kaden grabs his arm. He throws him against a wall, puts his fist under Kaden’s nose and says “I’m only going to look around for my daughter. Don’t stop me or 111 bust you, I’ll even break you in two,” and shoves him out the door, kicks but misses him, slams and latches the door, runs through the first floor turning on lights and opening doors looking for the basement, finds it, from another room the women are screaming for him to go. “Scream your bloody heads off; I’m looking, I’m looking.” Goes downstairs, yells “Olivia, are you down here? Are you anywhere around here, Olivia?” Turns over boxes, looks behind a huge wine rack and stacks of newspapers and magazines, only door is to a toilet, nothing else to hide someone in or behind, nothing he can see to show anything strange going on. Runs upstairs; nobody’s around. Runs through the first floor opening cupboards and a bathroom and closet doors. Runs upstairs to the guest bedroom, hallway bathroom, master bedroom, unused bedroom, kids’ bedroom where when he turns the lights on two boys in double-decker bunks and the women start screaming. Checks every room and closet for an attic entrance. Guest bedroom a third time. Dresser and night table drawers for anything that might lead to something, woman’s valise and handbag and under the bed and once more the shower stall. Goes downstairs. “Yes, this moment, walking right past me,” Kaden says on the hallway phone. “Maybe he’s now going to make good on his threat to bust me in two. Well, let him, since I’m not about to fight back. That’s not what I do, and you’re my aural witness on that, Chief Pollard… Now he’s leaving the house. Good riddance I want to say to him … No, the children and women all seem to be OK — Sure you’re all right, boys? Doris?” he yells upstairs. “We’re fine, Daddy,” a boy says. “Is he gone?” his wife says.
He starts up the driveway. “You should wait for them here,” Kaden says from the porch. “Or they’ll meet you at your place, Pollard told me to tell you. But they’re on their way. You’ve got a number of serious complaints against you, sir. You’d better get yourself a good lawyer — one who’ll be able to get you off with only a few years, for you can be certain I’ll see that you’re charged with everything that can be thrown at you. For slander, trespassing, verbal intimidation, assaulting Miss Reinekin, barging into a private home and tossing the occupants around like an ape. Whatever you’ve gone through and are going through, you can’t do these things to people because of it. You have — it gives you — no moral license to, do you understand that, sir? No, you wouldn’t.”
Drives home, Pollard’s waiting for him there, is arrested, taken to the police station, jailed overnight, state’s attorney and detectives question him the next day, released on is own recognizance, search continues, he drinks himself to sleep every night, Denise is on medication for a while, search is ended, woman’s exonerated, he’s indicted for the disappearance of Olivia, Kaden never presses charges, Miss Reinekin drops hers, he asks for a lie detector test and passes it unqualifiedly, he asks to be hypnotized by a court-appointed hypnotist and is told his story didn’t change one iota from the one he told before being hypnotized, state drops its case against him: no body or witnesses or evidence of any wrongdoing beyond parental neglect no matter how hard they looked, though the state’s attorney feels sure, he tells reporters, that Howard’s guilty of some heinous crime against his daughter which they’ll find out about in time and charge him with and send him to prison or even execute him for. Denise doesn’t know what to think through all this. She doesn’t believe the woman was involved in Olivia’s disappearance, but how couldn’t she be if Howard says she was? That’s not saying she thinks he had anything to do with it, she says, other than being irresponsible in leaving Olivia with a stranger, but how couldn’t he have anything to do with it if the woman didn’t? Did he lose Olivia someplace, she says once—“Quick, answer me now, no time to think of one, no or yes?” “No, absolutely not.” Maybe, she says, both he and the woman are responsible in a way she hasn’t figured out yet. “Are you lovers, and an accident happened with Olivia and you’re covering up for each other in some way where you both assumed you’d get off?” “What am I supposed to answer to that?” “Of course; that was ridiculous of me, but I simply don’t know what to think. I’m not afraid of you for Eva, but I’m also not entirely comfortable with you for her and myself. I’m just confused.” Goes on like that. She won’t make love with him anymore, the few times he’s felt like it since Olivia disappeared, and then she won’t sleep in the same bed and then the same room with him. Then she brings Olivia’s bed into Eva’s room and sleeps there. She puts it all down as just part of her continuing grief and confusion.