“No—”
“I plan on paying you back. All of it, all five thousand.”
“I don’t care.”
“Abby?”
I paused. “She cares about it. But she’s also given up on you. She tells me she’s written off that money, like it was a business expense.”
He started tapping his right hand against the rim of the steering wheel. “The price of being related to me.”
“Something like that.”
“How about you? What are you doing with your time off? Writing a book? Who’s it about this time? Melville? Moby Dick? Dicky Moe?”
“Hawthorne. His short fiction. You know, it sounded like there was a woman with you when I talked to you on the phone the other day. Are you dating someone?”
“Why the sudden interest?”
“I just don’t want us to be pissed at each other. I know the stuff with your dad is tough. For both of us maybe, but certainly for me. I still dream about him, about him coming into our room at night, drunk and angry. The way he’d come after us, swinging at us. I see his figure there in the dark. Sort of a hulking presence. I can’t forget it.”
“We’re not going to solve all this sitting here in the car.”
“Do you remember the same things?” I asked. “At least tell me that.”
He didn’t hesitate. “No, Tom. I don’t remember it that way at all. Sorry.”
“We used to huddle together in the dark,” I said. “Hell, you used to try to protect me. You’d lay on top of me and keep me safe. Are you going to tell me you don’t remember? You’re really going to stick to that? Really?”
“I’m not sticking to anything,” he said. “It’s a fact.” He looked at the console clock. “I have to get back home, okay?” I opened the door, and before I was out he added, “But, Young Goodman Tom, if you do decide to change your life—really change your life—give me a call. You have my number.”
Chapter Four
In the weeks and months after Caitlin disappeared, rumors had started to spread. New Cambridge, Ohio, is a small college town of about fifty thousand people, mostly middle class, mostly quiet and pleasant. It was primarily populated by professors and their families and students who came and went based on the academic calendar. Bad things didn’t happen in New Cambridge, at least not bad things that people knew or talked about.
But even if friends tried to insulate us from the gossip, we still heard what people said: Caitlin was pregnant, and we’d sent her away. Caitlin met a lover over the Internet and ran off with him. Caitlin fell victim to an online predator who’d kidnapped her. Or Caitlin simply ran away. Tired of the boring life in a small college town, she’d taken matters into her own hands and run off for greener pastures. California or New York. Seattle or Miami.
The police, of course, interviewed all of our friends and family, and they talked to a handful of my students and examined police records, but they found nothing. In those first days and weeks after Caitlin didn’t come home from her walk, the police treated us with the due deference owed to the parents of a missing and possibly murdered child. They spoke to us in soothing tones, they offered us platitudinal encouragement—which actually felt wonderful to hear—and they answered our calls and questions promptly. But it didn’t take long for cracks to appear.
It began with Buster and his indecent exposure rap. He lived an hour away in Columbus and wasn’t in New Cambridge the day Caitlin disappeared—as far as we knew—but he couldn’t provide a rock-solid alibi. He said he was at his house. An ex-girlfriend claimed to have spoken to him on his cell phone an hour before the disappearance, but she didn’t know where he was while they talked. For a while, Buster became something of a suspect, even though the police refused to call him that to either Abby or me. He endured some heated questioning, and some not so subtle threats in the interview room. While he never requested a lawyer or offered anything close to a confession, and while no evidence linked him to the commission of a crime, word leaked to the newspaper that Caitlin’s uncle—unnamed—was a person of interest in the case.
I never offered a particularly strong defense of my brother. Not to Abby and not to the police. I did tell them I didn’t believe he would harm Caitlin. In fact, he was a surprisingly doting uncle to Caitlin, one who often sent birthday gifts and, on the rare occasions when he visited us, went out of his way to talk to Caitlin as though she were more adult than child.