A man of complicated tastes, my dad.
I click search on the start menu and look for “Sidonie Scott” in all documents, then in all files and folders and then, desperately, in pictures and videos. “Sidonie” turns up nothing either, so I open an internet window and Google “Sidonie Scott,” not for the first time. Not for the fiftieth time either. No dice. I’ve tried to use Google-fu to find out more about my mother than the next-to-nothing my dad’s been willing to tell me. But there’s no Sidonie Scott on Facebook, or LinkedIn, or in the online White Pages. No one’s written a single news article about a Sidonie Scott who could possibly be my mother. And it’s not like it’s a common name. As far as I can tell, she’s nowhere.
Of course, other than her name (and not even her maiden name, at that) I don’t have much to go on. Dad hasn’t heard from her since the divorce papers, filed through a lawyer who kept her location a secret. After that, Ma Ma Scott left my resilient Scottish grandfather alone in Maine for a few years to help Dad look after me. This I remember in a fuzzy slideshow of dress-up games and PB&J lunches and Dad staggering in from work and crushing me to him as if he hadn’t expected to find me at home waiting.
So we weren’t always the happiest family in Happy Town. But I wasn’t a gloomy kid or, contrary to Dad’s predictions, a creepy kid, and life wasn’t so bad. The worst that happened in an average day was my dad forgot to buy hot-dog buns because he was wrapped up in writing Vital Signs, so we used folded white bread like a pair of losers. Just sometimes, usually at night, and especially when Dad was going through one of his bad times, there was this thing, a dumb hungry animal in my chest. And I didn’t know what to call it, but I knew that it was my mother. My dad must’ve felt it too. Otherwise he wouldn’t have had the bad times, would he? At least, that was my theory.
On a whim I Google “Joshua Scott.” The usual turns up: “Joshua Scott is the author of a series of medical mystery novels following forensic pathologist Dr. Miles Faye,” yada yada. I scroll through, but there’s nothing about Joshua Scott disappearing. How long will that last?
I push myself back from the desk and hug the copy of A Time to Chill. I need to think. No, I need to think like Dad. How hard can it be to find him when I’ve been reading his mysteries since I was a kid? He even left a clue for me especially. The stone heart won’t be in Officer Griffin’s missing persons report. But then, I’m not sure Dad is missing. I mean, he’s clearly not here, but giving me the heart like this, it can’t be meaningless. He wouldn’t ditch me for any old reason. He must be searching for something. Or, considering what he left behind, for someone. And searching isn’t missing.
Well, I can search too.
I’ve even got an idea where to start. Whenever I’m trying to find a lost object—a favorite mystery, a very un-favorite textbook, my cell phone, a sneaker—Lindy’s well-meaning and unoriginal advice is: “Figure out where you last had it, and that’s where you should start looking.”
I don’t remember my mom, but the picture in back of this book is my proof that she was real, that she was a whole person who once held me. And if that’s the case, then maybe Good Shepherd is where I truly had her last.
FOUR
While Mr. McCormick fiddles with the volume on Love’s Labour’s Lost—not the play, but the musical where Alicia Silverstone’s Princess of France speaks with nearly the same accent as Cher—I reach across the aisle and poke Jessa Price with my pencil eraser.
It takes a few pokes to get her attention. Jessa’s face is forever blue-lit by the screen of an iSomething. iPod, iPad, iPhone, doesn’t matter. She rotates between them by the minute. Now she’s peeking at her iPhone below the lip of her desk, texting Jeremy White. I know it’s him because her texts are heavily sprinkled with winky-face emoticons. I prod her once more.
“What?” she huffs.
“Want to go into Boston this weekend?”
She looks up at last, big blue eyes surfacing to meet mine. “When?”
“Hmm,” I pretend to ponder. “When’s your mom working? Can she give us a ride?”