There would be no wand to wave. Nothing to reveal. No man to find.
There would be no suspect charged. No arrest made. No trial. No conviction. Without bodies there was no murder or proof of a crime.
There was only absence.
And speculation. Brutal scrutiny. Unholy persecution. Unwarranted suspicion. Of Jonah.
After a spell, no TV van or police cruiser parked across the road from his house. No one visited. No one called. He had nothing to live for except the return of his wife and daughter, and with each breath that eventuality grew less likely.
What savings he had were depleted by the end of his first workless year. He’d tried to return to teaching but could not focus. Could not engage. He’d wanted to, wanted to immerse himself in the work he’d loved, distract himself if only for fifty minutes of class a few times a week. But he couldn’t. The questions in his students’ eyes, the curiosity, the suspicion, might have been bearable, and faded with time. They were young. Curiosity and intrigue part of their makeup. But his last day on campus came when he’d dragged himself in early to try to work away from home, and heard, from just outside the door of his shared office, two colleagues in dialogue:
“You think he did it?”
“Let’s just say, he’s a strange bird, that one.”
Jonah had left and never returned.
What money he earned from odd jobs went straight to paying the mortgage and taxes. As torturous as it was to remain in the house, he dared not leave in case they returned. He sold the old Gremlin to pay bills and bought an even older jalopy truck.
All this time, he searched for them, his wife and child, on his own. He wandered every hill and field and ditch and riverbank what seemed a hundred times. He searched in the day and night, all night, calling their names, pleading to the darkness to give his wife and daughter up to him, hoping that in the night’s silence his voice would carry farther and reach them, their voices would carry farther and reach him.
He found only more silence.
He searched for the man in the woods, too, for a sign or clue of him, that he existed. At times in the nighttime woods, Jonah sensed he was being followed in the darkness. By someone who knew something. Someone who had caused all this. No one could be trusted, perhaps even himself. He ranged deeper and deeper into the woods, farther and farther up into the mountains.
On one search he stumbled upon an abandoned miner’s cabin, tucked up in treacherous terrain.
Despite not believing in an entity found in any books written with a man’s hand, he’d done his praying. Prayed for their return. Begged for it. Their safety, at least.
His prayers and pleading and weeping were met with the same response: silence.
He offered himself in their place. Wept for forgiveness for what he could not remember. Pleaded for it not to have been his wife’s hand in this. To spare her memory, he considered confessing to the crime, committed in a spontaneous rage. He would gladly pay for it to save his wife’s name. But he could not lead the police to any bodies.
The money ran out; the mortgage went unpaid. The bank foreclosed. Took ownership. But they’d never sell the house. People did not move to Ivers from other places; people left Ivers for other places. And no one in town would ever buy this tainted home.
He took the yellow dress and coat he’d bought Sally, photos of Rebecca, his books of poetry and science and short stories, and what few other cherished belongings would fit into a trunk and drove the truck up to the Gore and settled into the deserted miner’s cabin, where all he asked for was to be left alone to wait for the miraculous return of his daughter and wife.