“I have a pretty good idea what happened to her.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I meant without knowing who was responsible for whatever happened to her.”
I didn’t say anything, just watched an older couple stroll by on the other side of the street. They were a pair I didn’t recognize and I wondered how many of the neighbors who’d lived there when I’d still been in the house were still around.
“I don’t know any of the story, other than what I’ve read in the paper,” he said. “But it doesn’t sound like they arrested anyone responsible, other than the guys you found her with in that warehouse. So I’m just assuming you’re biding your time, waiting for the right time to figure out who took her.”
I wasn’t biding my time. If I’d known right then who took Elizabeth, I would’ve had my hands wrapped around their throat, choking the life out of them. The problem was I wasn’t sure who was responsible and I had to be patient in order to make sure I got the right person. I didn’t want to be wrong. I wasn’t going to be wrong. I would find the right person.
“I’m looking,” I said.
He smiled. “I knew you would be. And I want to help.”
“You don’t have to. And to be honest, it might get ugly.”
“You think I care?”
I shrugged. “I’m just telling you. The stuff I’m starting to put together, I think it’s going to be bad.”
“Again. You think I care?”
I didn’t say anything.
He uncrossed his arms and shoved his hands into his pockets. “Look, Joe. I’d be offering to help no matter what. But you saved my ass. You believed in me when no one else did. No one. And that was after you hadn’t seen me in awhile and everyone else was telling you I was guilty.” He paused. “You were the only one. If you hadn’t come back, I’d probably be sitting in a cell somewhere, waiting for my trial, where I’d be virtually assured of some good old-fashioned jail time. But you made sure that didn’t happen.” He looked me in the eyes. “I owe you.”
“You don’t owe me,” I said. “We’re friends. That’s what friends do.”
“Bullshit,” he said. “Most of my so-called friends left me for dead and didn’t come near me. But not you. So that isn’t what friends do. It’s what you did.” He smiled at me. “I’m here to return the favor, brother.”
I nodded slowly. The smart thing to do would’ve been to tell him, no, his help wasn’t necessary, to not involve him in anyway. Because I had this feeling in my gut, a feeling that was growing by the day, that whatever I turned up in Elizabeth’s disappearance was going to be worse than I thought. And that was probably going to lead to even worse consequences, something I didn’t want to drop in Chuck’s lap.
But I knew Chuck. He meant what he said. I wasn’t going to scare him off and if he thought he owed me he was going to stand there, holding his breath, until I let him help.
“Alright,” I said, grateful that I had at least one person I knew I could trust without question. “I’ll let you know.”
SIX
After Chuck left, I went inside, showered, dressed and checked the news. Finding Elizabeth had completely detonated the routine I was used to. I would wake up, run, eat and then spend the day surfing the Internet, checking message boards, looking for any nugget of information that I might be able to cull that would point me in her direction. I’d spent years doing exactly that in cities all over the country, chasing down leads and helping other people in the process, searching for their loved ones who had gone missing. It had become my job, my vocation, my mission. Now that I had her home, though, I wasn’t really sure what to do with myself. I knew that if I opened up my email there would be at least two messages from people looking for help. But I wasn’t sure I was ready to go back to that.
Elizabeth ambled down the stairs as I sat in the kitchen, perusing news sites on my laptop. Her hair was wet from her shower and she had on a pair of orange basketball shorts and a yellow T-shirt. I had to pinch myself that it wasn’t a dream, that she really was coming down the stairs.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey. Who was that guy?”
“Chuck Winslow. You don’t remember him?”
She walked to the cabinet near the sink, pulled out a coffee cup and filled it from the pot on the counter. She brought it over and sat down across from me at the table. She blew on the surface of the cup, then shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“He’s been a friend of mine for a long time,” I said. “Since high school. I came back to San Diego a few weeks ago to help him, which actually helped me find you.”
She took a sip from the coffee and said nothing.
“Do you want cream for that?” I asked. It was the first time I’d seen her grab a cup and I didn’t want to admit the surprise, the weird sense of melancholy I felt, to see my daughter drinking coffee.
“No.”
“You drink black coffee?”
“Yeah.”
I shuddered. “That’s gross.”
She cracked a small smile. “No, it’s not.”
“Is to me,” I said, smiling back at her.
“What’s gross is drinking it when it’s already so warm outside.” She swiveled in her chair and looked out the living room window, at the now-cloudless sky. “Don’t you people drink iced coffee when it’s hot?”
“Now that’s gross,” I said, teasing her, enjoying the back and forth.
Her smile grew a little bigger, then disappeared. She took another sip of the steaming beverage. “What do you mean you came back to San Diego?”
I closed the laptop. “I wasn’t living here.”
“Where were you living?”
“I wasn’t really living anywhere,” I said. “I was looking for you.”
She cupped the mug between her hands. “So, what? You just, like, traveled all over the place, hoping you’d see me?”
“It was a little more organized than that.”
“Tell me. Please.”
I explained to her how I’d follow leads that would show up on message boards and go wherever I needed to in order to follow up. I told her how that had led to a semi-professional career as an investigator, helping to track down other missing people because I’d learned so much looking for her. And I told her that I’d stayed away from San Diego because it was too hard to come back without her.
She stared into the coffee cup. “Is that why you guys got divorced?”
I thought for a moment. “In part, yeah. I couldn’t focus on anything else until I knew what had happened to you.”
She shifted in the chair. “But she could?”
I shook my head. “No. Absolutely not. But your mom needed to handle it differently. She couldn’t spend every waking moment chasing down what almost always ended up being dead ends. It was too frustrating for her. Too painful. It nearly broke her. She had to create some separation. We each had to handle it our own way and that led to us being apart.”
“You guys don’t seem like you hate one another or anything.”
“That’s because we don’t. We don’t. But sometimes when…things happen…it’s hard to be together.”
She nodded slowly. I wasn’t sure if she understood or not. I wasn’t sure that I understood.
She looked around the house, like she was trying to see things she’d never seen before. I wondered what it was like for her, to be brought into a home and told it was your home, only to have it feel completely foreign.
“I’m hungry,” she said.
“You wanna go get some lunch?” I asked. “Get outta here for awhile?”
“Yeah. Maybe you could show me where she works, too?”
I nodded. “I can show you where your mom works, sure.”
“Gimme a minute,” she said, standing.
“Gonna put on some clothes that actually match?”
She looked down at her clothes, then looked at me. “Very funny. I look fine.”
“You look like you got dressed in the dark.”
She started to say something, then realized I was kidding and let another small smile crack her stoic expression. “Ha. Ha. I’ll be back down in a minute.”