At 3:00 in the afternoon she began to have serious thoughts about calling the police, but she quickly decided against doing so. She had a feeling that he might somehow be in trouble if his own child reported him missing. David had always displayed, and had fostered in Ada, a low-level mistrust of the police, and of authority in general. One of his many obsessions was the importance of privacy; he often expressed a lack of faith in elected officials, a sort of mild skepticism of the government. Once, Ada had witnessed an accident in front of their house—nothing major, a minor scrape-up at most—and had asked David if they should call 911. At this he shook his head emphatically. “They’ll be fine,” he said, and added that he’d never known a more corrupt group of officials than the Boston Police Department, whom, if at all possible, the two of them should seek to avoid. In general, though, he came across merely as a far leftist with, perhaps, mild anarchist tendencies. In this way he was not so different from the rest of his colleagues.
She would call Liston, she decided.
Ada very rarely rang her at home. In general she did not like to use the telephone; she never seemed to know when to speak, and she did not know how to end conversations. She could hear her own breathing in the receiver as the phone rang once and then twice and then three times. She prayed that it would be Liston who answered the phone, but instead one of her three boys answered—Matty, Ada thought, because the voice was childish and high.
“Is Liston there?” she fairly whispered.
“Who is this?” asked Matty, and she told him it was Ada Sibelius.
“Mum,” he called, without much urgency, “it’s David’s daughter.” And finally Liston picked up the phone.
Ada didn’t know what to say.
“Ada?” Liston asked. “Is everything all right?”
“Yes,” said Ada.
“Are you just calling to say hi?” Liston asked her.
“No,” said Ada.
“Well,” said Liston. “What’s going on?”
“When I woke up this morning David was gone,” Ada said, “and he’s still gone.”
“Okay,” said Liston. “He didn’t leave a note?”
“No.”
“Did you look all around the house?”
“Yes.”
Liston said, “What time is it?” as if talking to herself, and then sighed.
Ada paused. She wasn’t certain how to ask what she needed to ask. She wanted to know what Liston knew. “Do you know where he is?” she asked finally, because it was as close as she could come.
“I don’t, honey,” said Liston. “I’m sorry.
“Did you call the police?” asked Liston.
“No,” said Ada, and then she said it again for emphasis.
Liston paused. “That might be a good thing to do,” she said.
Ada was silent. She looked at the clock on the wall: watched its second-hand tick.
“I’m sorry, kiddo,” said Liston finally. “Listen, come over. We can go for a drive and look for him, okay?”
Ada left a note for David before she left the house. It said, David. I’m out looking for you with Liston. Please wait here until we’re back. Ada.
She put it on the kitchen table, facing the kitchen door, where he was most likely to see it upon his return. Though David and she always came through the side door of the house, nearest the kitchen, he insisted on letting visitors in through the front door. “It’s nicer that way,” he said once, when she asked why. He was like this, always: old-fashioned and formal in certain ways—he was knowledgeable, for example, on subjects such as tea and place settings, heraldry, forms of address—irreverent, outrageous, in others.
She walked outside toward Liston’s house, and saw that Mrs. O’Keeffe, their next-door neighbor, was sitting in her lawn chair in her yard. She had macular degeneration and wore dark glasses all year-round. She was perhaps ninety years old, and in the warmer months she sat outside beginning at sunrise and only went in to eat. Ada walked over to her, and she raised a veined thin hand in greeting. Ada leaned down to address her.
“Mrs. O’Keeffe,” Ada said to her, bent at the waist. “It’s Ada Sibelius.”
She turned her face up in Ada’s direction. “Hello, Ada,” she said.
“Did you see my father leave this morning, by any chance?” she asked.
“Let me think,” said Mrs. O’Keeffe.
She put a hand to her cheek tremblingly.
“I believe I did,” said Mrs. O’Keeffe.
“Was he carrying anything?” Ada asked.
“Now, I can’t recall,” said Mrs. O’Keeffe.
“Which way did he walk?”
“That way,” she said, pointing down Shawmut Way toward Savin Hill Ave: the way one walked to cross over the bridge into the rest of Dorchester.
“What was he wearing?” Ada asked her. “Did he say hello to you?”
But again she couldn’t recall.
Liston’s car was a station wagon with wooden sides and a bench seat across the front. She was leaning against it when Ada arrived, and she held the passenger door open.
“Hi, baby,” said Liston. She looked worried. She was wearing sunglasses on her head and an oversized windbreaker. They pulled out, and Liston turned left on Savin Hill Ave. She asked where Ada thought they should look for him and she suggested they go over the bridge, first to David’s favorite restaurant, Tran’s; and then to the library in Fields Corner; and then along Morrissey Boulevard, passing the beaches on the way to Castle Island, toward which David often jogged; and finally to the lab.
“Anyplace else?” asked Liston.
“I don’t know,” said Ada.
“He didn’t give you any hints? He hasn’t been talking about going anyplace in particular?”
“No,” said Ada, wishing she could answer differently.
“And has he disappeared like this before?”
Ada hesitated. She did not want to tell Liston the truth, which was, of course, that he had. A few hours here, there. She settled on an answer that sounded all right in her head: “Just a couple of times,” she said. “Never for long.”
Liston shook her head. “Oh, David,” she said, and in her voice Ada heard some piece of knowledge that she was not sharing.
It was true that Liston and David were close, and had been since he had hired her almost fifteen years before, but there was no one, Ada felt, who understood him as Ada herself did. She didn’t like to hear Liston speak of him dismissively; she didn’t want her to feel that they were conspiring, or that they shared any common criticisms of David.
Ada thought back to the telephone conversation she had overheard Liston having with David and wondered if there was any possible way to explain how she had come to overhear it. She decided, at last, that there was not. She wanted badly to know what Liston had been speaking of; not knowing made her feel less close to David. She had always imagined herself as his confidante, his right hand, and didn’t like to think of anyone knowing something about him that she herself wasn’t privy to.
“How long has he been gone now?” Liston asked, and Ada checked her watch. It was just after 3:00 in the afternoon.