I Will Find You(63)

But all that said, I don’t know my father’s hopes and dreams, his worries and concerns, how he felt about my mother dying or if he wanted more or less from this life.

I sit now and wait for him to open his eyes and recognize me. I expect the miracle, of course—that my coming home would somehow cure him, that my very presence would make him rise from the bed, or at least, he’d have a moment or two of clarity and a final word of wisdom for his only child.

None of that happened. He slept.

After a while, Aunt Sophie said, “It’s not safe, David. You should go.”

I nod.

“Your cousin Dougie is away for the month on a shark expedition. I have the key to his place. You can use that for as long as you need.”

“Thank you.”

We rise. I study my father’s limp hand for a moment. There used to be such power in that hand. It’s gone now. The knotty muscles on his forearm as he would work a screwdriver or wrench are gone too now, replaced with spongy tissue. I kiss my father’s forehead. I wait one more second for his eyes to open. They don’t.

“Do you think I did it?” I ask Aunt Sophie.

“No.”

I look at her. “Did you ever—?”

“No. Not for a second.”

We leave him then. I realize that I will probably never see my father again, but there is no time or need to process that. My phone buzzes. I check the message.

“Everything okay?”

I tell Aunt Sophie that it’s Rachel. She’s half an hour out. I text her Dougie’s address and tell her to come in through the back entrance.

“Rachel’s helping you?” my aunt says.

“Yes.”

She nods. “I always liked her. Shame what happened. You’ll be safe at Dougie’s. Both of you. Contact me if you need anything, okay?”

I hug her then. I close my eyes and hold on. Then I ask something stupid, something that has been annoying me like a sore tooth I keep probing with my tongue: “Did Dad think I did it?”

And because Aunt Sophie can’t lie: “Not at first.”

I don’t move. “But then?”

“He’s an evidence man, David. You know that. The blackouts. The fights with Cheryl. The way you used to walk in your sleep as a teenager…”

“So he…?”

“Not on purpose, no.”

“But he thought I killed Matthew?”

Aunt Sophie lets go of me. “He didn’t know, David. Can we leave it at that?”

*



With the bob cut, I barely recognize Rachel.

“What do you think?” she asks, trying to keep the mood light.

“Looks good.”

And it does. The Anderson sisters have always been considered beautiful, albeit in different ways. Cheryl, my ex, was a little more traffic-stopping. You noticed her. It hit you right away. Rachel’s beauty came at you slower and grew with time. She had what Aunt Sophie called—and she meant this in the best of ways—an interesting face. I got that now. What society would call imperfections made it more like a painting where you keep discovering new things every time you look at it and it changed depending on the time of day or light in the room or angle at which you stood. The bob suited her, I guess. It accentuated the cheekbones or something, I don’t know.

I fill Rachel in on what’s happened with Hilde and Eddie and the Fisher family. As I do, the phone chirps with a text from Eddie:

Don’t come back here. Cops were here looking for you.





I write back that they seem to know I’m around. He replies:

Revere’s crawling with them. Meet is at Pop’s Garage. 280 Hunting Street in Malden. 3PM. Can you get there?

I tell him I can.

Pull into the bay on the left. Come alone. That’s what they told me to tell you.



Rachel is reading over my shoulder. Dougie is a fifty-four-year-old bachelor, and the place is done up as if to prove that. The walls are all dark wood paneling like a dive bar. He has a dart board, and a huge-screen TV takes up an entire wall. The carpet is green shag. The chairs are faux leather recliners with metal poking through the footrests. There’s an old oak bar with oversized neon beer signs—one for Michelob Light, one for Blue Moon Belgian White hanging over the bar. The place was dark when I came in except for those neon signs. I didn’t turn any lights on or off, so right now they provide the only illumination.

“I’ll drive you,” Rachel says.

“You saw the ‘come alone’ part?”

“I still don’t get it,” she says. “The Fishers are all about extortion and drugs and prostitution, stuff like that. Why would they be involved in Matthew’s…” She stopped. “I don’t even know what to call it.”

“Let’s call it kidnapping,” I say.

“Okay. Why would they be involved in that?”

“I don’t know.”

“And you expect them to just tell you?”

“We don’t have any other leads.”

“But maybe we do,” Rachel says, opening up her laptop. She clicks on a file, and photographs start downloading. “I started going through various image searches in line with what we know about Irene’s photo from Six Flags. We know the location. We know the date. I started with that. I looked up on Instagram, for example, any photo that was tagged for Six Flags on that day. I spread it out three days forward to start because I figured some people wouldn’t get to posting right away. Then I did image searches of Irene and her family, hoping that maybe they’d be in photographs someone else posted, all hoping maybe we’d get another glimpse of Matthew.”