Dana Essex sat with her bag balanced atop her knees, holding its torn flaps together. She looked a few years older than me, mid- to late thirties, dressed in tweed and slacks and a pair of scuffed laceless shoes. Her hair was hacked simply to her jawline, unstyled. No makeup or jewelry. With her thick Clark Kents and mismatched clothes, she looked like she’d been dressed by the costuming department of a Canadian TV show. A background player, College Professor Number Three.
She accepted a cup of tea and didn’t speak for a long two minutes. Kay looked at me for a prompt, but I shook my head slightly. There are different types of silence; some are necessary precursors for speech.
Finally she said, in a halting voice, “The person I want you to find is a student named Tabitha Sorenson. I’m not sure if she’s missing, per se. But I’d like to talk with her.”
I wrote Tabitha Sorenson across the top of a pad of foolscap, added student below it. “What do you mean, you’re not sure if she’s missing? You’ve tried contacting her? Her family?”
“I couldn’t bring myself to talk to her; how on earth could I talk to her mother?”
“Let’s start with why you want to talk to her,” I said. This engendered more silence. This time I pushed through. “Was she a friend?”
Essex nodded. “A student of mine first, and then a colleague of sorts. She served in student government, and I was on a committee with her. Yes, we were friends.”
“Are you worried about her?”
“I’m worried about myself,” she said. “I’m thirty-eight, and—this is difficult to say.”
“Want me to leave?” Kay asked.
Essex shook her head. “Mr. Wakeland,” she said to me.
“Dave.”
“Dave.” Essex smiled. “Are you married? I was, for two years, to a very good man who I think tried his best to make me happy. I told myself what we had must be a type of love—why else would we have gotten married? If we weren’t as passionate or affectionate as other couples, well, I chalked that up to life running contrary to our expectations.”
“Everyone being different,” I offered, “who’s to say how it should work?”
She nodded. “After a while, though, we couldn’t kid ourselves. I realized I’d married out of fear—of aging, and of being alone.”
Essex rubbed her eyes and the bridge of her nose.
“None of which interests you, I’m sure. I’m sorry to burden you with it.”
Kay offered her a tissue, but Essex ignored it. She wasn’t in tears. Rather she seemed to have drawn inward, as if strategizing how best to unpack her heart.
“Tabitha told me when she finished at the college—Surrey Polytech—she wanted to go to either UBC or Simon Fraser. I’ve checked. She’s not registered at either university, or any other in the Lower Mainland.” She took a steadying breath, adding, “I don’t believe she’s at school anymore—anywhere.”
“Disappeared,” I said.
“I couldn’t locate her, at any rate.”
I marked up my note paper. “Tell me about her.”
Essex’s face softened. “She wasn’t the best student I’ve had. She was competent—she could take a poem apart as well as most undergrads—but more than once I could tell she hadn’t done the readings. Her heart was in econ and poli-sci; lit was merely an elective for her.”
“What was she like as a person?”
Essex frowned. “Didn’t I just say?”
“Outside of class.”
“Well, as student events coordinator she was diligent. She hadn’t wanted the job—Harpreet, the woman Tabitha replaced, had transferred to Dalhousie with two semesters left in her term. The president appointed Tabitha as interim coordinator. She did well, considering the circumstances. Even through the unpleasantness she tried her best.”
“Unpleasantness?”
“The scandal,” Essex said.
When she saw I was going to pursue it, she clarified: “There were allegations surrounding members of student government. Misappropriation of funds. There was a forensic audit. But Tabitha wasn’t involved. It started before and ended after her.”
“How much money was missing?” I asked.
“Millions,” Essex said. “I’m not sure of the specifics.”
I wondered how well Dana Essex knew Tabitha Sorenson, and how well she thought she knew her.
“A million dollars is a million dollars,” I said.
“Meaning?”
“People do a lot worse for a lot less.”
“Like ‘Gary’?”
“I doubt he was trying to rob you.”
Her eyebrows arched in ironic agreement. “Yes, he explained more than once that he was trying to help me. Yet he watched another man make off with fifty dollars of mine, and didn’t feel a Samaritan urge then.”
“When was this?” I asked.
“Just before he accosted me. A man in a wolf T-shirt asked me for change for the Skytrain. I opened my pocketbook but all I had was a fifty-dollar bill.”
“You showed it to him?”
“Only so he’d understand I was refusing out of circumstance, not out of tightfistedness. The man in the wolf shirt snatched the money right out of my wallet. He said he’d go make change and bring it back. I told him to stop but he’d already crossed the street. It was right after that when Gary took hold of my bag.”
“He probably thought you’d be safer if he carried it for you.”
“He watched me get robbed.”
“Cheated.”
“The distinction being?”
Before I could answer, Essex nodded. “Partial complicity,” she said. “One allows oneself to be cheated by misreading the situation, being ‘duped.’ Robbery implies force or coercion, implies unavoidability. I see.”
I looked at Kay. She was smirking.
“It’s not a mistake people make twice,” I said, pulling a standard Wakeland & Chen contract from the filing cabinet. “We’ll find Tabitha for you, if we can. Just know going in that there’s no guarantee.”
“There never is,” she said.
Dana Essex had parked three blocks away, in a multistory garage that charged a daily rate. There were cheaper and closer places to park, but I didn’t point that out. I walked her to the mouth of the garage. She cradled her torn book bag like an injured kitten.
I told her I’d update her in three days unless I found Tabitha before then. She nodded and we shook hands. Her smile was perfunctory and timid, but she held it a second longer than necessary. She had something left to say.
“You’re talking to a coward, Mr. Wakeland. I like to pretend I didn’t know what I wanted until I’d lost it. But the truth is, I was simply too afraid. By the time I could accept my feelings and deal with what—whom—I wanted, she was gone.”
“Tabitha.”
“I just need to speak to her,” Essex said. “If nothing comes out of it, I need at least to know I tried.”
I walked back to the office, thinking about Dana Essex, who’d confessed more in an hour than most people manage in a lifetime. Who seemed out of her element in Downtown Vancouver, though Surrey was less than an hour’s drive. And I wondered what about Tabitha Sorenson had fired her with such passion that she’d brave the evil city to employ a private investigator to track her down.