“She lives three doors over from us, Dad. She goes for a walk every day after breakfast and again after lunch.”
Jack had hoped Brooke would not pick up that mannerism from Gianna, the tone that said, You should know this.
Brooke cupped her hands around her mouth. “Roxie! Roxie! Come here, girl!”
Jack scanned the view and saw no sign of the Airedale.
“We have to look in everybody’s yards.” Brooke started to march up a driveway.
“Whoa.” Jack pulled her back with a hand on her shoulder. “That’s trespassing.”
“I just want to find my dog, Dad.”
“I know. Let’s knock on doors, and if someone is home, we’ll ask permission to look around.”
“And if no one’s home?”
Jack hesitated. Brooke’s eyes pleaded with him to be a father, not an attorney. “Then we’ll look really fast.”
Thirty minutes, he thought. Then she’ll have to face facts.
2:32 p.m.
“I just need a day or two.” Speaking on the phone to her assistant, Nicole flipped a purple pen back and forth between her first two fingers. “I have my interview notes, and I can work on the rest of the research from here.”
The knock at the door was the same rhythm Ethan had always used.
“Terry, I’ll have to call you back,” she said. Nicole set the phone down on the coffee table and crossed to open the front door. “Anything yet?”
“Nothing.” Ethan stepped in and pulled his camera from around his neck. “I can’t think where else to look.”
“You want coffee?” Nicole picked up her empty mug and headed for the kitchen. “I broke down and bought some beans this morning.”
Ethan followed her toward the coffeepot and reached into the cupboard where the mugs had always been. Earlier Nicole had discovered there weren’t as many now. Her father had taken the favorites with him when he moved out of the house.
“How about you?” Ethan held his cup under the stream of liquid Nicole poured. “What have you turned up?”
“Eerily little.” Nicole filled her cup and leaned against the counter. “Oh, it didn’t take long to find Quinn’s name listed in property tax records and the school faculty. Those things are public records, but I didn’t come up with anything else.”
“No birth certificate? Military record?”
Nicole ran her finger around the rim of her mug. “Do you realize we don’t even know his first name?”
“Ted. You know that.”
“Is it Ted? Or is it Theodore? Theo? Or Edward? Or even Edwin?”
Ethan blew across his coffee. “I guess it could be any of those.”
“And what about a middle initial? Or the city he was born in?”
Ethan shrugged.
“I need more to go on if I’m going to find someone who knows him outside of Hidden Falls.” Nicole reached into a grocery sack, pulled out a bag of chips, and yanked it open. Along with the coffee beans, she’d also bought juice, milk, yogurt, apples, bananas, granola bars, and chocolate cupcakes. If she was going to stay in Hidden Falls for a couple of days, she would need something to eat.
“The mayor must know something,” Ethan said.
“We should know something.” Nicole put four chips into her mouth. “Are you still leaving at midnight?”
“That’s almost ten hours,” Ethan said. “Anything could happen.”
Or nothing could happen, and Ethan would still leave and Nicole would be on her own to track down Quinn.
“We can’t waste time jabbering here.” Nicole brushed crumbs from her hands. “I’m going to the newspaper office. What about you?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’ll find someplace else to look.”
“Think fast,” Nicole said. “Go back out to the lake. Ask around and see who might have seen him on Saturday—or even Friday night. Maybe he said something to somebody.”
Ethan downed his coffee. “I’ll try. Let’s meet for dinner in town.”
“Or sooner if you hear anything.”
“Right.”
They exited the house, got into their cars, and drove in separate directions. Nicole parked her Hyundai in front of the newspaper office where she had worked after school for her last two years of high school. She pulled open the door to the Dispatch and stepped inside, waiting for the old editor of the weekly to look up at her over his glasses.
“Why, it’s my star beat reporter!” Marvin Stanford pushed his glasses all the way to the top of his now bald head and came out from around the desk to hug Nicole. “Is it true that you’re working on a paper in St. Louis?”
“Your sources are impeccable, as always.” Nicole kissed Marv’s cheek. “Investigative reporting. Local political dirt, white-collar crime, that sort of thing. In between the juicy stories, I cover whatever they put me on.”
“A good reporter digs up her own stories.”
She waved a finger at him. “I learned that from you.”
“What brings you into my humble establishment?”
“I’m returning to my roots. You were the first one to teach me about the trove of information a newspaper’s archives can be.”
“The paper is a hundred years old. Just how far back are you planning to go?”
“To the year Quinn came to town.”
“Ah. So you’re sleuthing for our mutual friend.”
“It’s been almost forty-eight hours.” Nicole dropped her bag into a chair that hadn’t moved from the spot she remembered. “We have to find him, Marv.”
“My resources are your resources.” He waved a hand around the room. “You know where everything is.”
Nicole looked around. The arrangement looked the same—exactly the same. A wall of wide file cabinets divided the office area from the small printing press in the back. While the view was nostalgic, it made Nicole’s stomach sink. This was going to take a lot longer than she had allowed.
“I see the microfiche is still in the corner,” she said.
Marv repositioned his glasses on his nose and looked over them. “You were hoping we had digitized, weren’t you?”
“The thought had occurred to me.”
“Sorry. Not that far back. Hidden Falls is still Hidden Falls, not the big city.”
“It’s no problem.”
“No money. No time.” Marv shuffled back to his desk chair. “Everybody wants us to live in the digital age, but they don’t understand how expensive and time-consuming it is to get there.”
“It’s all right, Marv. It’ll all come back to me.”
“Anything in the last fifteen years is digital, but it’s not on the web, so you’ll have to use the computer here to search the database.”
The dust on the machine told Nicole no one had hunted through microfiche files in quite some time. It wasn’t even plugged in. She fished under the table for the cord and found the outlet before pushing the ON button. While she waited for the whirr of the warming machine, Nicole tried to recall the last time she searched microfiche. It was at least five years ago, in a small Missouri town a lot like Hidden Falls.
In the meantime, Nicole started with the digital files. In high school she routinely tagged articles with key words or topics, never imagining that someday she might come back to use her own system. But she remembered it well enough to search quickly for articles mentioning Quinn. Once she found them, she would have to read every word of each one. A sentence or two used to fill out a column in the paper might now yield a clue she could chase down.
Announcements about school plays Quinn directed. A charity event to which he donated time. Quotes from students acknowledging the role Quinn played in their academic success. References to small speeches he gave at local events.
In other words, practically nothing.
Nicole turned to the microfiche and pulled the first reel from the year she knew Quinn moved to Hidden Falls. She had lost her touch and didn’t control the speed of the reel at a consistent rate. Every time
she spun past something without being able to read the headline, she backtracked. As the years moved forward toward the time Marv started keeping digital files and the ground Nicole had already covered, two things struck her.
Quinn was mentioned in small ways in plenty of articles, but the articles were never about Quinn himself. Considering how people in Hidden Falls felt about Quinn, this was a curious omission.
She raised her second question with Marv. “Why isn’t there a single photo in the paper of Quinn?”
“If you look in the old files,” Marv said, “you’ll find some black-and-white prints. But Quinn would never let me use them.”
“What do you mean, ‘let’ you?”
“Anytime I had a photographer at an event, I’d get a call from Quinn the next day asking me not to run the pictures. I used to argue with him about freedom of the press, but he was politely persistent. He didn’t want his picture in the paper. Eventually I stopped shooting him.”
Nicole leaned back in her chair. “That’s odd.”
“Did you ever notice he’s not in the yearbook, either?”
“That can’t be. They print photos of all the faculty.”
Marv shook his head. “There are always a few who find themselves in a catchall category of ‘not pictured.’ Quinn is always in it.”
“For more than thirty years? How can that be?”
“I’m just telling you the way it is.” Marv’s desk phone rang and he snatched it up. He spun his chair around.
Nicole could only hear Marv’s side of the conversation, which consisted of a string of grunts and indefinite sounds, but the mention of Quinn’s name urged her out of her chair to stand in front of Marv’s desk.
He hung up the old phone and spun back around. “They found his glasses.”
“Where?”
“In the glove compartment,” Marv said. “They weren’t even cracked.”
Quinn had worn glasses for driving at night for as long as Nicole had known him. “But that means—”
“That’s right. Quinn wasn’t driving his car.”
“But was he in it?”
“That’s the question everybody’s asking. If he was a passenger, then somebody out there knows something.”
4:36 p.m.
Jack kept both hands on the steering wheel of his dated BMW, but he was watching his daughter more than he was looking for the puppy. They’d been at this for almost three hours, first on foot in their immediate neighborhood and then expanding the search radius in the car. His shoe barely touched the accelerator as they crawled down one side street after another. Brooke’s window was down and she hung her head and arms outside its frame. Every few minutes she ducked her head inside to glance at the dashboard clock, and each time she looked a shade paler to Jack. Gianna spent the entire morning searching, and Jack the whole afternoon. He was beginning to wonder what the statistics were about finding lost puppies that had been missing for more than eight hours. Roxie could be trapped in a hole, spattered on the highway, or perfectly healthy and contentedly wandering the miles of woods along the river and around the lake. Or she might be safe in the arms of another child who thought God had overridden the will of parents and answered a prayer for a puppy.
“Roxie has her tags on, right?” Jack fished for some encouragement.
“Mom never lets me take the collar off.” Brooke answered from outside the vehicle.
The BMW was moving so slowly that Jack figured Fred Flintstone could power it faster with his feet on the pavement. All afternoon Jack had tried to recall the conversations with Gianna about putting a chip in Roxie’s shoulder that would identify her wherever she ended up. He hadn’t been invested in the decision because he wasn’t invested in the puppy.
“What about a chip?” he finally asked. “Did Mom get the chip?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good,” he said. “You know that, right?”
Brooke nodded.
“If someone finds her, it will be easy to find us, too.”
“Only if they want to find us.” Brooke rested her chin on her arms, filling the bottom rim of the open window. Jack could see only the back of her head.
He turned the corner into the next block. They were miles from their own neighborhood. Was it possible a three-month-old puppy could find her way home from this distance? He didn’t know.
“Stop the car!” Brooke fumbled with the lock.
At the speed they were traveling, it didn’t take much pressure on the brake to stop. Jack put the car in PARK, and Brooke scrambled out. He didn’t know what she’d seen, but he couldn’t just sit in the car while his frantic thirteen-year-old hurtled down the street. Jack felt his age as he tried to keep up.
They came to a corner, and she stopped.
“What did you see?” Jack tried to catch his breath.
“It was Roxie. I’m sure of it. She ran this way, but now I’ve lost her.” Brooke cupped her hands around her mouth to shout, “Roxie! Here, girl!”
Jack scanned the area but saw no movement to suggest the presence of a puppy. Maybe Brooke only saw what she hoped to see.
“There’s an alley.” Brooke began trotting down a narrow strip of road that led to garages behind several houses. When they emerged from the alley, a young man was getting out of a parked car.
“Did you see a puppy?” Brooke asked.
The man slammed his car door. “Brown?”
“Yes! And black. Was she brown and black?”
“I didn’t notice the black.” With his thumb he pushed a button on his clicker and his car doors locked. “That dog just about gave me a heart attack. Almost didn’t see it in time.”
“Thank you for not hitting my dog.” Brooke rubbed her hands on her denim-clad thighs. “Did you see which way she went?”
He pointed, and Brooke began running down the street calling the dog’s name.
Jack’s stomach sickened at the thought of the puppy under the tire of a car or tossed to the roadside. There was no telling how many drivers that day had braked for a puppy oblivious to the danger. The imminent darkness would soon bring a stop to their search. Keeping an eye on Brooke, Jack pulled out his phone and hit Gianna’s number on his contact list as he followed his daughter.
“Jack, where are you?”
“Some old neighborhood to the west. Brooke thinks she saw the dog.”
“Then you’re close.”
“Maybe, maybe not. We don’t know for sure it was Roxie, and she’s nowhere in sight now.” He moved his phone to the other ear. “It’s going to get dark, Gianna. How realistic is it to keep looking?”
“She won’t want to stop.”
“I know. But we put a chip in the dog for a reason. Someone will call.”
Gianna sighed into the phone. “I’ll start dinner. You see if you can get Brooke to come home.”
Gianna had the easier job, Jack thought as he dropped his phone back in his pocket and lengthened his stride to catch up with Brooke.
“Do you see her?” Jack scanned a block for the hundredth time that day.
“We have to knock on doors again.” Brooke marched toward a house. If there was a system to her choice, Jack didn’t discern it.
“We’ll make posters,” he said. “You can print them on the good photo printer, and I’ll help you get them up first thing tomorrow.”
Brooke halted. “Are you saying we should stop looking for Roxie?”
“Sweetheart, it’s going to get dark. I think we have to call it a day.”
“But we’re so close! We can’t stop now.” Brooke punched her hands into the pockets of her hoodie and fixed her stare at her father’s face.
Even if the dog Brooke spotted was the right puppy, she could be four blocks in any direction by now. It was like starting the search all over again.
“I just talked to Mom,” Jack said. “She thinks we should come home, too.”
“Fine. You go.” Brooke turned away. “I’m not leaving without Roxie.”
“Brooke, come on. I promise we’ll look again tomorrow.”
Her face scrunched. “One more block. Please?”
Jack blew out his breath. “All right. But if no one has seen her in this block, we need to go home.”
He stood on the sidewalk and watched her knock on one door, her shoulders raised in hope only to droop again as she turned around. At the second house, he saw the way she swallowed back her fear, but the woman in the door frame still shook her head. Jack held his tongue. He had promised her the whole block. She would be disappointed enough without being rushed.
In front of the third house, Jack took out his phone to look for an icon announcing a voice mail or text message.
“Dad!”
He glanced up. Brooke waved him up to the porch.
“They found a puppy. Just now!”
Jack raised his eyes to the middle-aged woman who stood on the step.
“That’s right,” the woman said. “I just put her in the garage. She wouldn’t hold still long enough for me to get a look at her tags yet, but when I saw her in the yard, I knew a puppy that young and frisky had to be lost.”
“Let’s have a look,” Jack said. It did sound like Roxie.
The woman led the way to the detached garage, set slightly back from the house, and opened a side door. As soon as the light went on, the puppy pranced across the garage.
Brooke gathered the dog in her arms and buried her face in Roxie’s fur. Jack had never seen such joy and relief on his daughter’s face.
“Let’s go home,” Jack said to Brooke. He extended a hand to Roxie’s rescuer. “Thank you. You’ve made my daughter very happy.”
Brooke strapped herself into the backseat of the car where she could play with the puppy. Jack paused long enough to send Gianna a text.
FOUND ROXIE. COMING HOME.
As he drove, he glanced in the rearview mirror every few minutes. When he pulled into his own driveway, Gianna and Eva clambered down the front steps and out to the car, both eager to get their hands on the dog. Gianna looked over the heads of their girls and mouthed, “Thank you.” Inside, Colin turned off the enormous flat screen and welcomed Roxie with her favorite green chew toy.
Jack closed the front door behind him and leaned against it. Not many things rallied his family. He was as guilty as any of his children of being antsy to be on his own, to be released from family togetherness and let his mind chase down what interested him. The moment before him now was the stuff of Christmas letters he rarely bothered to read, from people he barely knew anymore.
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