Toward closing time on a Friday afternoon in August, Neddie Doyle called me at my office. “Mike needs you,” she said.
I started to make a joke out of it. I said, “Hell, Mike doesn’t need anybody. Least of all me.”
But when she said, “Yeah, Brady, he does, and he insists that it’s you,” her tone told me that this was no joking matter.
I asked her what was up, but all she’d say was, “It’s Mike’s idea. He should tell you.”
It occurred to me that Mike could’ve called as easily as Neddie, and the fact that he hadn’t gave me a spooky feeling. The Doyles lived in Hancock, New Hampshire, a two-hour drive from Boston. I told her I could be there the next morning.
I hadn’t seen Mike Doyle since he abruptly and mysteriously quit his Federal Street firm three years ago and moved to Hancock in the sticks of southwestern New Hampshire. I still remembered him as the idealistic guy I’d known in law school, the Peace Corps volunteer who’d given two years of his young life to teaching African villagers about irrigation. He’d been a whip-smart, handsome, athletic stud who ran rings around Charlie McDevitt and me when we played Sunday-morning touch football at the Yale Law School, argued rings around us in late-night discussions about constitutional law, and picked up girls that snubbed the rest of us in New Haven bars.
After we graduated, the young idealist quickly matured, if that’s the word for it, into a relentless litigator. Mike made partner in two years, got his name added to the letterhead, earned about a million dollars a year, and quickly turned stodgy old Fisk, Evans, and Burleson into F. E. B. and D., the top-billing law firm in Boston. When I was still a struggling attorney determined to make it as a lone wolf, Mike threw cases my way that were too insignificant for his big-time firm. In those days, I took anything, and he helped me to get my feet under me.
I was Mike’s personal lawyer, and I suppose if I’d ever wanted to sue somebody, I’d’ve hired him. Smart lawyers always hire other lawyers to do their legal work. Mike and I were both smart that way.
Over the years, we remained friends. Not buddies, the way he and Charlie and I had been in law school, but friends. Mike was a good guy. His success didn’t go to his head. When our kids were young, our families would get together a few times a year for cookouts, and now and then Mike and I would meet after work for a drink to talk about old times.
Neddie, Mike’s wife, was a gifted watercolorist. She also happened to be gorgeous, of course. Christa, their daughter, was vivacious like her mother and smart and athletic like her dad. And lucky Mike, he managed to retire from the rat race after just twenty years of it. Some guys manage to get it all right the first time around. It was hard not to envy Mike Doyle.
Or at least, that’s what I used to think.
It took a little less than two hours on Saturday morning to drive to Hancock, New Hampshire, from my apartment on the Boston waterfront. I headed for Peterborough, then followed Neddie’s directions through a maze of wooded country roads, found the dirt driveway that wound through the pine forest and up the hill to the clearing where the Doyle house overlooked Mount Monadnock.
It was a pretty nice house—all glass and raw cedar and New Hampshire granite—and the way it perched there on the hilltop with its rock gardens and stone walls and fieldstone paths and clumps of paper birch, it looked like part of the rocky landscape.
Neddie greeted me at the door, gave me a hug, took my hand, and led me inside. “Don’t be shocked,” she said.
But I was.
Mike Doyle was lying in a hospital bed that they’d set up in the big living room. A gray-haired nurse was fiddling with the needle in the back of his hand. Plastic bags filled with transparent fluids hung on the aluminum rack beside the bed, and thin tubes snaked down from the bags to the needle. More tubes sneaked out from under the thin blanket that covered Mike and emptied into bags hanging off the foot of his bed. A blue oxygen tank sat in the corner of the room.
Outside the floor-to-ceiling glass wall, the view of the green, rolling New Hampshire hills and, on the horizon, craggy Mount Monadnock was spectacular on this sunny August morning. But Mike’s head was turned away from the vista, and his eyes were shut, and his breathing was slow.
In the couple of years since I’d last seen him, Mike Doyle had become an old man. His skin had that translucent look that you see on very old people, and it stretched so tight over his cheekbones that his face looked more like a skull. His hair had gone white.
Neddie, who was standing beside me, touched my arm. “He’s not going to wake up for a while,” she said. “It’s the morphine. I’m sorry. He’s desperate to talk to you. He’s usually okay in the morning. Come on. I’ll get us some coffee. Let’s go out on the terrace.”
It was one of those sticky August mornings in New England that promised to turn downright hot, with thunderstorms building in the afternoon, but out there on the Doyles’ fieldstone patio high above the surrounding valleys, the breeze was cool and the air smelled sweet.
Neddie poured some coffee, and we sat in the big wooden armchairs.
“I didn’t even know he was sick,” I said.
“That’s why he quit the firm,” Neddie said. “It’s some damn exotic parasite he picked up in Africa. He was fine for over twenty years. Didn’t even know anything was wrong. Then…” She shrugged. “The doctors said there was nothing they could do about it. Mike told the partners he was leaving the day after he found out. He didn’t want anybody to…to watch him deteriorate.”
“He’s dying?” I said.
“Oh, yes.” She smiled softly. “He spent two years trying to convince the villagers they shouldn’t wash their dishes in the water downstream from where their animals sloshed around in it. He showed them how to dig wells and irrigation ditches and taught them to boil their drinking water. Ironic, huh?”
“How long?”
“A month. Six weeks at the most. He’s gone downhill fast this past year or so.”
“Jesus,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
We were quiet for a minute. Then Neddie said, “He wanted to talk to you himself. But I guess I better speak for him.” She looked at me. “This is his idea, not mine.”
“If there’s something I can do…”
“Mike thinks there is,” she said. “He’s got it in his head that you’re the only one who can. It’s about Christa.”
Christa was the Doyles’ daughter, their only child. “What about Christa?” I said.
Neddie looked at me. There was something hard in her eyes. “She’s gone. We’ve lost her. Mike wants her back. He wants to—to understand—before he dies. He wants to know that she loves him.”
“What do you mean, ‘gone’?”
Neddie spread her hands. “Run away. Disappeared. I don’t know how else to say it. She quit school the day after she turned sixteen. That was two and a half years ago last March. Packed up her backpack for school like she always did, left on the school bus, and…never came home. We haven’t seen her since then.”
“You must’ve—”
“At first she called at least once a week. Said she was okay, she was safe, had a job and a place to stay, had made friends. She was in Eugene, Oregon. She sounded happy. Promised she’d be back. We begged her to come home, of course, but all she said was that she would when she was ready, whatever that meant. Said we had to trust her and made it clear that if we went after her, she’d just leave again.” Neddie shook her head. “Mike and I argued about it. He was devastated. Took it personally. He was all for sending the troops after her. Me, I figured, take her at her word, give her a little time, don’t spook her, let her get whatever it is out of her system. As long as she kept in touch with us, as long as she was safe, I had faith that it would turn out okay. Christa was smart and resourceful. She’d figure it out. I absolutely believed her, believed she’d come back.”
“But she didn’t.”
“No. After three or four months, the phone calls suddenly stopped. She’d never given us a number. We had no idea how to reach her. So Mike contacted an investigator in Eugene. We paid him a lot of money. After two weeks, he called to tell us that he couldn’t find her. Shortly after that we got a letter from Christa. It was…terribly hurtful. It blamed us for giving her what she called false values. It accused us of being materialists, of corrupting her.” Neddie gazed off toward the mountains. “It was soon after that that Mike started going downhill.”
“You haven’t heard from Christa since then?”
“No. Not a word. I’ve come to terms with it. She’s gone from our lives, and I just pray she’s okay. Mike, though, he wakes up every morning with hope. Maybe today’s the day we’ll see Christa, he says. That lasts about an hour. Then he just seems to collapse into himself. Waiting for tomorrow, I guess. Another day, another hope.”
“Neddie,” I said gently, “where do I come into it?”
She smiled. “Remember when we used to get together with you and Gloria, when the kids were little, and we’d have cookouts in the backyard?”
I nodded.
“Christa used to call you Uncle Brady. She thought you were the greatest guy. Always talked about you. Mike was actually a little jealous. I bet you didn’t know that.”
I smiled. “That was a long time ago.”
“Yes,” she said. “Mike was healthy then, and Christa was our sweet little girl. A long time ago. Anyway, Mike is convinced that if anybody can talk her into coming home, it’s Uncle Brady.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you saying you want me to find Christa and bring her home before…”
“Before Mike dies. Yes. That’s what he wants.”
“What about you?” I said. “Is that what you want?”
Neddie looked up at the sky for a moment, and when she turned to me, I saw that her eyes glistened. “I don’t know, Brady. If she ever came home and then…then disappeared again, I don’t think I could bear it. It’s taken me a long time to learn to live with this.” She nodded. “But I guess it would allow Mike to die in peace. At this point, that’s worth everything to me. So, yes, it is what I want.”
“Neddie,” I said, “I’d do anything for you and Mike. I hope you know that. But I’m a lawyer. I’m not—”
“You know a lot of investigators and police and FBI people, right? You know how it works, finding people.”
“Yes, but—”
She touched my arm. “Mike says you’ve found people before. People who didn’t want to be found. That you’ve done it for other clients. He says you’re good at it. He says when you latch onto something, you don’t give up. He says people trust you. They talk to you.”
I decided not to tell her that several of the people I’d been hired to find had turned out to be dead. Being dead was often the reason they’d disappeared in the first place.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “Of course I will.”
She smiled. “Thank you.”
“No promises.”
“I understand.”
“It’ll probably mean retaining some investigators. If they can track down Christa, I’ll go to her, talk to her. Then it’ll be up to her.”
“That’s all we want,” she said. She stood up and held out her hand to me.
I took it, and as I did, I was thinking: What the hell have you gotten yourself into, Coyne?
“Let’s go back in,” Neddie said, “see if Mike’s awake so we can tell him.”
The nurse had cranked Mike’s bed up and wedged a couple of pillows behind his head. She was holding a glass for him, and he was sipping what looked like ginger ale through a straw and gazing out the big window. Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony—the “Pastorale”—was playing from hidden speakers. The music filled the room.
Neddie went over to Mike and kissed his cheek. “Brady’s here,” she said.
Mike turned his head slowly and looked at me. “Hey,” he said. His voice was weak and raspy.
I went over and gripped his shoulder. “Hey yourself.”
He smiled. “Thanks for coming.”
“Neddie told me about Christa,” I said.
He nodded. “Good. You’ll do it, huh?”
“Sure.”
“I just want to see my little girl,” he said. One of his hands crept out from under the blanket. He tapped his cheek with a shaky finger. “I want her to kiss me here and tell me she loves me. I want to say good-bye to her. That’s all.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
He let his head fall back on the pillows, closed his eyes, let out a long sigh, and smiled.
A minute later he was asleep.
Neddie touched my arm, and I followed her into her office. She sat at the desk and pulled out a checkbook.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Giving you a check.”
I shook my head. “That’s not necessary.”
“We’re hiring you, Brady. You don’t think we expect you to do this on your own time.”
“I’ll keep track of it. I’ll send you a bill.”
“Promise?”
“Sure.”
She smiled. “I mean it,” she said. “We’re not asking you for a favor here.”
“I like doing favors for my friends.”
“If we don’t pay you, the deal’s off.”
“I’ll send you a bill,” I said.
“You’d better.” She put the checkbook in a drawer. “What’s next?”
“I’ll need the most recent photo of Christa that you have,” I said. “I want that letter she sent you, too, and that Oregon investigator’s report. Write down the names of everybody you can think of she might have kept in touch with since she left. And I want to see her room, if that’s okay.”
“You can if you want,” she said. “Mike and I have been through it a hundred times. Looking for clues. Who might help us, where she might go, what was on her mind. She didn’t keep a diary or anything. No letters or cards or photos. Nothing like that. “
“I still want to see it.”
“Sure. Top of the stairs on your right.” Neddie smiled. “Mike insisted we keep the door open. To symbolize how we’re always ready to welcome her home, he says. He says shutting the door would be shutting her out. Anyway, go ahead up. I’ll get that stuff for you.”
Christa’s bedroom had a slanted ceiling with two big skylights. A wall-size window offered the same view of the mountains as the one from the living room downstairs. Objectively, it was a really nice room, sunlit and cozy. But it felt cold and unlived-in.
I wasn’t sure what a teenage girl’s bedroom was supposed to look like. Both of my kids were boys. Young men now. When they were teenagers, their rooms had featured posters of athletes and rock stars, piles of dirty clothes and hockey sticks, perpetually unmade beds, and television sets they never remembered to turn off. If I’d had to guess, I would’ve pictured a girl’s room with a neatly made pink canopy bed piled with stuffed animals, walls hung with posters of movie stars and pop singers, a Princess telephone on the bedside table, and a desk in the corner with a laptop computer and a little color TV.
Christa’s bed was, in fact, neatly made, with a patchwork quilt and a crocheted afghan folded at the foot. But there was no telephone, no television set, no computer, no stereo system, not even a clock radio. In fact, what struck me about Christa’s room was its emptiness. It reminded me of a guest room in a house that never had guests.
The walls were bare except for one framed picture over the bed—a generic seascape featuring sand dunes and wheeling gulls. A low bookcase under the window held about two dozen Nancy Drew mysteries that, if I had to guess, had been Neddie’s from when she was a kid. There were a few Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates novels, too, and the complete J. R. R. Tolkien, a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a few random paperbacks. There were several empty slots, as if some books had been removed from the shelves.
I pawed through the bureau and looked into the closet. Girl’s clothes. No hidden stacks of letters tied up in a ribbon, no videotapes or photo albums or diaries.
I was looking out the window with my hands clasped behind me when Neddie came in. “Find anything?” she said.
I turned to look at her. “Did you clean it up after Christa left?”
She shook her head. “This is exactly the way it was the day she went away.”
“It’s like…”
“I know,” she said. “Like nobody ever lived here. Christa hated it when we moved up to New Hampshire. We never told her it was because of Mike’s health. Maybe that was a mistake, but he didn’t want to upset her. As far as we’ve been able to tell, she didn’t make a single friend around here. The people at school said she was a good student, but a loner. She refused to join any clubs or go out for any teams. They encouraged her, and so did we. She was into everything when we were living in Belmont. After we moved up here, she’d come home on the bus right after school, change her clothes, and walk around in the woods or come up here to her room and read. She refused to have anything mechanical or electronic in her room. No music, no TV, no computer. You noticed that, right?”
I nodded. “Would you say she was depressed?”
“You know,” said Neddie, “since she’s been gone we’ve tried to understand. Tried desperately. But honestly, she didn’t seem at all depressed. She was pleasant with us. No rebellion, no sulking, nothing like that. She laughed a lot, actually. Helped me cook sometimes. She liked to work in the gardens. Always did her homework. Got excellent grades. Hardly ever got sick, rarely missed a day of school. We were here less than a year when she…she left. We figured she was just making a slow adjustment.”
“That doesn’t sound like the portrait of a runaway,” I said. “Are you sure you’re remembering it accurately?”
Neddie smiled. “That’s a fair question, Brady. It’s a question I’ve asked myself a hundred times. What are we overlooking? What have we been repressing? Where were the hints?” She shrugged. “You know Mike. He’s a pretty hard-nosed guy. I’m pretty hard-nosed myself, in my own way. We’re remembering it accurately. Her teachers up here remember her the same way. Good kid. Quiet but pleasant. No trouble.”
I took one more look around Christa’s bedroom. Then Neddie and I went back down to her office.
“I’ve got what you wanted,” she said. She handed me a snapshot. “I took this on Christa’s sixteenth birthday. The day before she left. I can hardly stand to look at it.”
In the photo, Mike and Christa were standing in their backyard with the long vista of Mount Monadnock behind them. They were both smiling directly into the camera. Mike had his arm around her shoulder, and Christa had hers around his waist, and she was leaning her cheek against his shoulder. Mike looked healthy. Christa looked happy.
She was nearly as tall as Mike, with her mother’s ebony hair and flashing brown eyes. Her hair was cut very short, almost a boy’s haircut. She wore big silver earrings, a tight white T-shirt, and low-cut blue jeans that showed her belly button. She looked grown-up.
“Here’s that letter,” said Neddie. It was in its envelope, postmarked San Francisco. I decided I’d read it later.
She gave me a manila envelope. “That detective’s report is in there, and I wrote down the names of all the people Christa might’ve been in touch with that I could think of. I don’t have phone numbers or addresses, but they’re all from Belmont, from before we moved up here. Is that okay?”
“Sure,” I said.
I put the snapshot and the letter into the manila envelope. “Can you think of anything else that will help me?”
“Like what?”
“What kind of job might she take? Does she like to dance, go to concerts, movies, plays? Does she swim, play tennis?”
Neddie frowned. “It seems like so long ago. I mean, to us she was just our smart daughter. She seemed…normal, you know? She never had any job except babysitting. She always liked to read. She was wonderfully athletic, but sometime about when she turned twelve, she decided she hated competitive sports. She said competition was destructive. She believed in cooperation. She was idealistic. Like Mike.” She smiled. “Christa was a good kid, Brady. Everybody said so.”
I nodded.
“I can’t think of anything else to tell you.”
“Okay. If you do, just give me a call.” I tucked the manila envelope under my arm. “I guess I’d better get started.”
We went back into the living room. The nurse was sitting in a straight-backed chair beside Mike’s bed reading a magazine. Mike was asleep.
At the front door, Neddie put her arms around me, pushed her face against my chest, and said, “This is really stupid, isn’t it?”
“It’s not stupid,” I said.
She tilted her head back and looked up at me. “Hopeless, I mean. Not a word from her in two years. She could be anywhere. Even if…”
Even if she’s alive, is what I guessed Neddie was thinking.
“There’s always hope,” I said. I gave her a squeeze. “Tell Mike good-bye for me. I’ll keep in touch with you.”
She nodded. “Thank you, Brady.”
“Understand one thing,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“If I do find Christa and talk to her, I will tell her that Mike’s dying and wants to see her. I’ll do my best to convince her to come home. If she refuses, I can’t force her. It’ll have to be up to her. I may have to promise her that I won’t tell you where she is, and I would never break a promise like that.”
“I know.” She smiled. “That’s why Mike trusts you.”