92

I lost an hour.

I closed my eyes to blink and when I opened them, there were two cops standing in our house talking into radios and phones and looking in every room, as if Dad was playing hide-and-seek. It took a few minutes to register how much time had passed and that a blanket was wrapped around my shoulders and Finn was helping me hold a cup of hot something.

I had been talking, that was clear. The cop had written down Dad’s name, his favorite bars, and Trish’s phone number. That was her voice shouting from the phone the officer held. Another cop, a woman, was copying down the information from Dad’s prescription bottles. She set them back on the table.

“Try not to worry,” she said. “Your father has only been gone a few hours. Technically, we can’t consider him missing until tomorrow morning. He probably got picked up by a buddy and is drinking in the guy’s basement right now.”

“But that letter,” Finn said.

“If I take that letter to my chief, he’ll say that it means nothing until Mr. Kincain has been gone for twenty-four hours. Then he’ll chew me out for not being on the road helping with the accidents that this snow caused.”

“What are we supposed to do?” Finn asked.

“Sit tight. We see a lot of this around the holidays, especially with vets. He just needs some time and space. Your stepmom says she’s on her way back, so I won’t call Child Protective Services, but you need to stay here.”

The first wave of shock was wearing off. The edges of my mind were slowly waking up, tingling painfully.

“So you guys won’t search for him?” I asked.

“We can’t,” she admitted. “Not until this time tomorrow.”

“What if he’s dead by then?”

Her eyes were sympathetic. “He won’t be, honey. My guess is we’re going to get a call midafternoon about him being drunk and disorderly in a bar downtown. Not pretty, but he’ll be alive. Here’s my number.”

Finn took the card from her and said something, but I stopped listening. The engine in my brain turned over. The police wouldn’t help until it didn’t matter. Trish was on her way back, but she’d be too late.

Finn stood in front of the window, watching the police car drive away. “Want some more hot chocolate? A sandwich?”

“Sure.”

I blinked again, eyes so dry. Sunshine flooded the floor. Handfuls of fluffy snow blew off the edge of the roof and floated to the ground like feathers. The wind whirled snow devils in the yard, but the clouds had thinned and the snow had stopped.

Daddy wasn’t at a bar.

He wasn’t drinking.

He was on a mission. He was sober, clear-thinking, and following a plan. He’d organized everything. He tied up the loose ends. He could not live anymore, so he’d gone off to die alone, like a wounded animal. But where?

I tried to see him, tried to picture what he had been doing here after I left this morning, what he’d been doing when I was asleep. I saw him writing those damn cards, checking to make sure they were in the right order. Had he looked through the photo album before he put it in the box? Had he cried?

The house was quiet except for Finn rattling in the silverware drawer and the distant roar of a snowplow.

I’d always been afraid that he would kill himself at home, but now I realized why he wouldn’t do that: he didn’t want me to find him. I flashed on the way he had hugged me before I left: sudden and fierce, a true Dad hug.

A good-bye hug.

How was he going to do it? Where?

When we were on the road, there’d been a couple of nights he’d gone on incredible rants when shit-faced drunk. He talked about the all the deaths, all the blood that had soaked him.

(He didn’t take any guns.)

He talked about the faces of dead soldiers. Eyes wide in terror. Mouths open in pain. He didn’t want their families to see those faces.

(His meds were all here. Did he have an illegal stash?)

What did he want me to see?

Finn set a plate with bologna sandwiches and two steaming mugs on the table, and sat next to me. “I bet she’s right.” He took my hand in his. “I bet he’ll be back before dinner.”

The furnace kicked on, making the curtains move like someone was hiding behind them and pushing smells around the room. Hot chocolate. The tang of mustard, lots of mustard. The smell of the swimming pool, overchlorinated, leeching out of our clothes . . .

 

ripping . . . sun glaring off the pool grown-ups crowded I can’t find him music so loud nobody hears when I slip into the deep end water closes over my face I open my mouth to yell for Daddy and water sneaks in my mouth my eyes watching the water get thick and then thicker and grown-ups dancing . . .

 

“Hayley?” Finn frowned.

The whole room snapped into focus so sharp it made my eyes water. Finn had a smudge on the bottom of the left lens of his glasses. Dog hair on his jeans where Spock had rubbed against him. I could see everything: ghost squares on the walls where Gramma used to hang our pictures, a sliver of glass in the carpet that I had missed, the memory of Daddy under the water.

“I know where he is,” I said. “I know how he’s going to do it.”