An hour into the first day of the new semester, he opened the gallery and shuffled through the mail, fretful as Charlotte had left it late to tell him that her sneakers hurt her feet. It was as he went to place the mail in the pile for Sammy that he saw the envelope fallen down the back of the desk.
He was about to drop it into the sack, ignored, when he saw the postmark.
By noon they had joined Route 63, Charlotte pulled from school, the lady in the office eyeing Patch like an abduction was playing out but she was too polite to intervene.
Charlotte watched an eternity of greens, craned her neck when they passed through Jefferson City and over the Missouri River.
They stopped for lunch in Columbia, across from the university, the columns and lawns. Charlotte picked at her fries, watching the students head up the stone steps.
“You ever think about what you want to be?” he said.
“Maybe a writer. I’ll tell stories and dazzle people with my words. I want to go to Harvard.”
“Like your mother.”
“But I won’t be a dropout.”
“She was smart.”
“And then you knocked her up. I know I was an accident. A bastard out of Boston.”
“That could be your pen name.”
She ate two slices of pie, coveted a third till he caved, and then puked out the window beside the Finger Lakes State Park. “I feel better now it’s out,” she said, and puked once more outside the Silver Fork Buddhist Temple.
“Pretty sure that’s a hate crime,” Patch said, as he dabbed her mouth with a napkin.
“You have to purge before nirvana can be obtained,” she said, and he questioned the library books he allowed her to choose.
She slept a little, woke when the sprawl of Minneapolis unfolded on a horizon dying out.
They threaded through city streets as office workers spilled from high-rise buildings, crawled in traffic by the Mississippi River, Charlotte watching the lights as he found the tree-lined Saint Paul Street.
The house was gray clapboard; the wire fence kept broadleaf weed from reaching the neighbor. They knocked at the door and waited, though it was clear enough the place had lain empty for a long time.
That night as she slept in their cheap motel room, he took the phone into the small bathroom and closed himself inside, the door jamming the wire as he dialed her.
“Where are you?” Saint said.
“I don’t know.”
“How’s the girl?”
“I don’t know that either.”
He smelled the mold, the pall of smoke woven into each fabric, and next door heard the light moan of a woman plying her trade.
“I got a letter,” he said.
“I thought you were done with the letters.”
“This one had fallen out. Like a sign. And it carried a Saint Paul postmark. Grace once mentioned the way city lights bounce from the Mississippi River.”
He heard the tired in her voice. “So you drove five hundred miles to an empty house.”
“I got the name though. The neighbor came out and said the Carters moved a while after their daughter went missing. Said he’d call me here if he finds out where they headed.”
“Charlotte should be at school.”
He clutched his knees, hid himself fully in the dark. “The missing girl’s name was Rosie. Will you run it if I give the address?”
She sighed, quiet awhile. “You know I will.”
“You ever think of the child you used to be, Saint?”
“Take her home.”
His voice caught. “These…the missing, they’re like a flicker of light on a map of the dark. I see one and I head toward it, but it blinks out before I arrive. And then another. And they’re just…”
“I’m working a murder. We got a confession but still we work each angle. We compile till that window of doubt is closed up tight. Statements and background, phone records and credit card receipts. We answer each question before they get asked. I still track abduction cases with a loose fit. I still do that.”
He cracked the door. Moonlight lay on his daughter.
“I spoke to the professor at State. They’ll get Tooms another stay,” Patch said. He’d made a dozen such calls over the past decade, each time he presented, one time even wrote a couple of thousand words asking the judge to be lenient. They thought he was doing the noblest thing, that he’d found a god that stole the thirst for revenge, the restoration of some perceived equilibrium.
“People are self-serving, Patch.”
“You can’t—”
“You have a daughter. You drag her from state to state because you need absolution.”
He looked at the lime basin, smelled hard water, the room bereft. “How do you figure that?”
“You ever hear of survivor’s guilt?” she said, her voice a note quieter.
“Good night, Saint.”
“Hey. We don’t do that.”
He sat in silence awhile.
“How come…how come you never painted me?” Saint said, quiet.
“Because you never needed me to.”
He listened to Saint breathe. And after a long time asked if she was sleeping, and she did not reply.