Chapter Fifteen

WAS IT TOO late?

Trey—or Bruno or whomever the hell he was—had married her father. It was a done deal. Should she leave them alone? Let them get on with their lives as a couple? Try to do the unthinkable and well-nigh impossible—accept Trey and attempt to make peace?

Miranda shook her head and opened her laptop. It was around 4:00 a.m. The house was quiet. She was a little buzzed from the beer she’d consumed with her pizza earlier (vegan cheese and plant-based sausage) and the neat Jack Daniel’s she’d followed up with for dessert.

Sleep had been elusive, despite her having passed out at around ten across the bed fully clothed. She’d awakened sweating, mouth dry, and with a headache around one in the morning, trying to make sense of scattered dream remnants where she had been a tiny bird about to fall out of its nest.

Now, she knew she’d be welcoming the dawn in a little while, watching as the light outside her window morphed from black to gray. If she was lucky, some of the clouds might clear and there could actually be a little color—electric blue, orange—in her sunrise.

Unlikely. This was, after all, Seattle.

She was relieved that for once the idea of the hair of the dog sickened her. Drinking was beginning to take over her life, and in these wee hours of the morning, she couldn’t avoid the truth that she might have a problem. Might? She laughed ruefully to herself.

Drinking alone? Check.

Drinking too much? Check.

Imbibing to escape the real world? Also check.

The worst part of her drinking, now that she was beginning to be honest with herself, was that it was impeding her life in bad ways. She was supposed to have a novel finished for her senior project in a very short time—the deadline loomed like a threat. A good idea did not a finished book make. Perhaps if she were some Hollywood whiz kid with a portfolio of success, she could pitch her concept and let someone else execute it while raking in the big bucks. But her creative writing professor, a snarky white-haired failed novelist from the East Coast, wanted a fully polished and completed book of at least 80,000 words.

She’d withdrawn from the world. She used to do stuff with her campus friends and her roommates—movies, plays, hiking, long walks around Green Lake, dreaming about their futures.

Now she kept herself to herself. She didn’t mind her own company so much. After all, she’d grown up with a somewhat isolated and mostly introverted dad whose stock-in-trade was living alone in his own imagination. But what did bother her was the fact that, increasingly, she was having lapses in time where she couldn’t remember what had happened.

Okay if she woke up in her own bed and in her own house.

Not okay if she woke up in a “heavenly bed” at the Westin downtown with a heavyset dark-bearded man whom she couldn’t remember.

She shuddered and forced the recent memory out of her mind.

She took a sip of water and entered Bruno Purdy into Google’s search box. She thought she might be confounded again with her search leading nowhere. The top results were social media profiles, and although she spent the next hour exploring these, going down a Facebook and Twitter rabbit hole, she found no one who looked like or even matched the little she knew about Trey.

And yet she persisted.

She clicked on the pages and pages of Google findings for the name and, at last, along about page seven, she found something that could be him. It was an obituary from a funeral home for a man named Carl Purdy, who had been a mere eighteen years old at the time of his death in Wellsville, Ohio. The poor guy had perished in a house fire. The obituary described him as sweet, sensitive, with a particular affinity for animals. He’d been a freshman at Ohio University in Athens, home for Christmas break and in the house alone when the fire broke out. He’d had dreams of being a veterinarian.

Miranda thought she had gone down another useless trail until she came to the end of the obituary. It described Carl’s survivors—a mother, father, and an older brother named, bingo, Bruno. The fire had occurred in 1991. Bruno’s age at the time was listed as twelve, which would jibe with the age Trey appeared to be now.

Beyond survivors, date of birth, and Carl’s status as a student, there wasn’t much more to glean in terms of details.

But the fire made her suspicious. Spidey-sense, she’d call it. So she typed in: Wellsville Ohio fire December 1991.

The Evening Review, the paper of record in neighboring East Liverpool, Ohio, had an article about the “tragic” fire. There were details about the modest wood-frame home on the banks of the Ohio River. A little bit about the parents, who’d barely escaped the blaze. Carl was eulogized once more. Last, there was mention of twelve-year-old Bruno, who had been spending the night at a neighbor’s.

The cause, according to Wellsville Fire Department Chief Sam Soldano, was suspicious. Arson hadn’t been ruled out, and the house fire was under investigation.

Miranda searched for more details, or at least if the case was ever resolved, but found nothing, not even in other nearby small-town newspapers.

She looked over at her window, where the sky had lit up with a kind of pewter light. A few drops of rain slid down the pane. There was a distant rumble of thunder.

She got up from her desk and flung herself across her bed. The sheets smelled of sweat and alcohol. In spite of this, exhaustion was fast overcoming her. Before she passed out (drifted off was too kind), she had one thought—she had enough—a name and a possible location and age, to take to a private investigator.

But right now, all she needed was sleep.