Fall’s come, it’s cold, cottage isn’t insulated, everyone they know has left, she wants to return to their apartment in the city, he wants her to stay with him here but in a heated house. “Maybe Olivia will turn up somehow. At the very least, if we’re here and badgering the police, they’ll continue looking for her more than they would if we weren’t here, or at least not give up looking for her completely or investigating what might have happened that day. Maybe, while Miss Reinekin wasn’t looking, someone came and snatched Olivia away — possibly one of the persons or a group of them sunbathing on the grass that day; or even the sailor of the sailboat I saw when I swam in the lake — and will want to turn himself in for whatever reason and also give up Olivia. Or Olivia could escape from her kidnapper — a door left unlocked a first time and she just walks out or something. I’ve read about such things — sometimes happening weeks later, sometimes years. That wouldn’t explain why Miss Reinekin insists I was never at the lake with Olivia. Maybe she was threatened by this person or group not to say anything about the kidnapping or they’ll kill her and maybe kill Olivia also, and that’s why she’s been lying all this time. Maybe Olivia was taken away at gunpoint. Lots of maybes, maybe one of then on target, or one future one. But I can’t leave feeling Olivia might still be around here or in an area near here and that I might, by just sticking and looking around, think of or do something to get her back.”
Denise leaves with Eva, he rents a room in town. He looks for Olivia or does something to help find her every day. Asks everyone he can about her in this county and the surrounding ones. Goes to houses and logging camps in the woods and other remote areas with photos of her. Places ads in newspapers with a photo of Olivia and him, asking if anyone was or knows anyone who was at the lake that day and saw him with Olivia or just saw anyone with her that day or any day since. Puts up her missing-child poster everywhere he can. Tries to generate news interest in her disappearance, by calling and sending letters to news editors, and when that doesn’t work, in the story of the father obsessed with the search, so her picture will appear again in the papers and on local TV. Goes to the Kaden house sometimes. It’s boarded up for the winter. Explores the beach and woods around the house, thinking he might have missed something the previous times; studies the house from all sides, trying to determine by the windows and dormers and roof shape and size of the walls whether he missed a room or two when he went through it. Would like to break inside, but he might get caught and jailed or ordered out of the county or even the state for a while. Many people in the area think he had something to do with Olivia disappearing and that by staying on and looking for her so hard he’s just trying to establish his innocence and get their sympathy. That’s what the anonymous notes say that frequently come through the mail or are slipped into the letter box of his building and a couple of times under his door.
He searches through different parts of the lake woods almost every day. Goes into them in high boots because of the snow, calls out for her, nails her poster to trees, thinks he’ll one time find a sign of her, something hanging from a tree branch or message or article of clothing left someplace, though maybe not till the spring thaw. Maybe there’s a habitable cave in the woods no one knows about or a hut, same thing, but completely camouflaged. Pollard said the searching teams covered every part of the woods, but there had to be areas too thick for anyone to go in to, or at least not without the cutting tools he always takes with him. He imagines coming on one of these huts — he’s come on two already not shown on the town’s survey maps he has, but with no doors or roofs — and looking inside the window, seeing Olivia and a man talking, eating. He smashes down the door with his foot and charges inside and knocks the man down and beats him, continues beating him with his fists or one of the tools till the man doesn’t move. Till he’s dead — the hell with him. Two or more men, he’d charge in the same way and use his tools on them, cutting through them, aiming for their faces and necks and groins, and then scoop up Olivia, dress her for the cold, or not dress her — just run with her to his car and drive to the one doctor in town.
He goes to the lake a lot, mostly to look around it but sometimes to think. Gone out on the ice several times to see what he could make out on the shore from there. Crisscrossed it, walked in to every cove, stood in various spots on it to see if any smoke was coming from places where no houses were supposed to be. Once he thought he saw a girl around Olivia’s height on the beach not far from where he lost her. Walked back without taking his eyes off her, yelled while he walked “Don’t move, don’t go away, stay there for God’s sakes, it’s Daddy,” then imagined her on shore when he got there and putting his coat and scarf around her and picking her up and kissing her head and hands all over and carrying her back to the road where he left the car — running with her, shouting “I’ve found her, my little baby; everybody, I’ve found her, found her.”
Sits in the snow in the same place he last sat with her. Tries to bring her back. Talks to where she sat. Says “Olivia, please be here. Materialize from wherever you are. Just by some miracle or something, be with me now. Or walk through those woods there, say you’ve been kidnapped and you just broke free or they let you go. Please, my dearest child, come back. Daddy’s heartbroken. He can’t live without you. He’s sad all the time knowing what might have happened and might still be happening to you. If it can only be a miracle that brings you back, you never have to tell me where you were or how you got back to me or anything about it. Never, I swear.”
Later he calls the police chief as he usually does once a week and says “Please bear with me again, I know I’ve become a terrible nuisance to you, but is there anything new regarding my daughter here or in this country or the world?” “Nothing,” Pollard says; “I wish there was.” “But you’re still doing your best to find her, right?” “Whatever there is to be done, and there isn’t anything anymore without new information or leads on her, we’re doing it, sir, you can count on it. If anyone calls the special phone number we set up for her, the news would reach me in minutes. And believe me, if I couldn’t get hold of you by phone right away, I’d come, or send another officer, to wherever I thought you were. As I’ve said I don’t know how many times, I fully understand how you feel, so you call me anytime you like.”
15. Frog Dies
He dies. How does he? He’s running, collapses. Happens that quickly. Doesn’t even know it, or barely. Sharp pain in the chest a few minutes before but he thought it was an upper abdominal stitch, stopped, pressed on it to move the gas bubble down, waited till the pain went, pain went, continued running. Then a sharper pain in the chest a few minutes later, and maybe just when he realizes what’s happening or might be, he’s unconscious, never recovers. He’s in his car. He’s thought for a long time he might die in a car accident. Not a heart attack in one, making him lose control of the wheel, but because of some wrong move or bad decision on his part or the driver’s in another car. It’s been close several times. Several times he’s thought if he’d been a second slower in reacting to this or that, or if he hadn’t looked to the right just then, or if the car behind him or to his side had been a foot closer, a few inches closer…. He just hoped neither of his children nor his wife would be with him when this accident happened. This time he pulls off the highway into a one-way street and a truck speeding his way. He tries to avert it by making a sharp right but the truck tries to avert him by making a sharp left. Three young man come up to him at a bus stop, say it’s a holdup, give them everything he has, he gives them everything he has, they shoot him in the head. Stomach pains, been feeling them late at night for weeks, thinks they’re because of the wine and liquor he drinks too close to bedtime while he reads, tells himself to stop drinking at least two hours before he goes to sleep, can’t, one hour, never does it, treats himself with antacids, pain increases, turns out to be pancreatic cancer, he has one to two months, three to four weeks, barely has time to prepare for it, his wife and children barely have time. Then he gets so sick and weak that just about all he can do in his few waking hours a day is think about his nausea and pain. He also cries a lot, that he’ll be dying and losing his children and wife, the growing up of his children, his children as adults. He’s in a restaurant, fishbone gets caught in his throat, tries coughing it up, someone runs up behind him, clears a table with a sweep of his arm, throws him on the table facedown and uses a method on him to dislodge the bone, it doesn’t come out, he continues to choke, can’t breathe, just as another diner is about to cut into his windpipe with a steakknife, he dies. He’s crossing the street, hat flies off his head, he chases it, looks both ways, no cars are coming, picks it up, gets clipped by a car. A plank is blown off a building going up and hits him on the head. A hammer falls from a building going up, a flowerbox in an apartment windowsill, part of a cornice of an old building.