fuck are you talking about?” I screamed, causing everyone, including the detective, to spin around and stare at me. “What do you mean he’s missing? How do you lose a person?”
“I … um … he was sitting in his chair by the window, and then when they went back to give him his medication, he … he was gone.” She sounded as terrified as I was furious. “We’ve got him on the security camera leaving the facility and walking toward the bus stop.”
“The bus! I’m on my way.”
“Your dad?” Jake asked, running with me as I headed to my car.
“Yeah, he’s missing.”
“Here, let’s go in my car,” Detective Cosgrove said, ushering me toward his black Chevy Tahoe. “No need for you to be driving in such a state.”
I nodded obediently, not really thinking about anything but the fact that my father was alone and confused in a town he was completely unfamiliar with. He could literally be anywhere. At least back in Ottawa, we could check his usual haunts, but here, here he wouldn’t know how to find his way back if he tried.
My mind began to race.
What if Yanni got to him before we did?
What if now that Emma was safe, and the detective said he was going to have the Edmonton PD put a car outside Stacey’s house, what if Yanni decided to get to me through my dad?
“Any idea where your father might have decided to wander?” the detective asked as we backed down the driveway and headed on to the road.
I shook my head in the front seat. “No, we’re not from here. We just moved here less than a year ago. I take my dad out occasionally, but he doesn’t know Victoria.”
“Maybe the university?” Jake said from the back. “You said he was a professor. Maybe he hopped on a bus that was headed to the university, not putting two and two together that it’s a different town.” Immediately my mind drifted back to that day he’d run away and interrupted a lecture. Maybe Jake was right.
“Let’s go to the care home first, and then we’ll follow the trail from there,” the detective said, driving the big SUV with such grace and ease you would think he was flying a plane. At first, I wondered how he knew where to go, but then I remembered telling him in my long-winded story that my father was in Shady Ridge Long Term Care Home.
We pulled into the parking lot a few minutes later, and I bailed out of the passenger side before he’d even put the car in park, running full tilt to the lobby and up to the front desk.
“Is he back? Have you found him?” I hollered at the mousy little care aide in peach and pink scrubs.
“Wh-who?” she stammered, her eyes darting around the area looking for help. “Who is missing?”
“Roland Lapierre!”
Another older aide, one with RN on her name badge, came around the corner and paled when she saw me. “Miss Lapierre, we still have no word of your father.”
Just then Jake and the detective walked in through the front doors. “Detective Cosgrove,” he said, flashing his badge. “Can I have a look at the security footage?”
“Y-yes, of course,” Nurse Jablonski stuttered, her eyes flitting between me and the cop and then back to her trembling little protégé, who was still cowering in the corner and watching everything happen, wringing her hands in the front of her shirt.
“I’ve put out an APB on your dad and we’ve alerted transit, so if any bus drivers picked him up, we should hear about it,” Cosgrove said.
Everything started to blur. The nurse in front of me and her salt and pepper no-nonsense ponytail, the shaking mouse in pink scrubs behind her, and Jake beside me, they all swirled as my feet felt as though they were about to drift out from under me.
“Whoa, whoa, hey, Freya?” Jake said, all panicky and grabbing me under the arms. “Come sit down for a sec.”
“No, I can’t. We have to figure out where my dad is,” I growled, shaking him off but then faltering again and nearly toppling into an elderly lady who was shuffling by with her walker.
“Come sit down,” he ordered, practically dragging me over to a row of chairs along the wall. “We need to wait for the detective anyway. Have you eaten?”
“What?” I shook my head and reluctantly sat down. “No, I—”
“We just got a call about your father. A bus driver recognized his description, said he got off in the university bus turnaround,” the detective said, coming out and punching something into his phone. “Let’s go.”
“Go with him,” Jake said, standing up and heading toward the dining room. “I’ll catch up.”
I followed Detective Cosgrove back out into the parking lot, and we climbed into his car. He continued to natter away into his cell phone. A couple of seconds later, Jake came loping out of the building and jumped into the vehicle. “Here, this is all I could grab without getting serious stink-eye. Eat!” He dropped an apple, pudding cup and a giant oatmeal raisin cookie in my lap.
But I couldn’t eat, not until I knew that my dad was safe. I thanked him half-heartedly and stared out the window as we raced across town and up to the university. I didn’t wait for the vehicle to stop before I opened the door and jumped out.
“She really has to stop doing that,” I heard the detective mumble. But I was too busy to care. I started calling my dad’s name, not realizing until that moment that he might have hopped on another bus already and be God knows where. Or be in any one of the hundreds of buildings on campus or wandered into the woods. I saw the detective and Jake speaking to a couple of security guards, and then everyone fanned out and we went on the hunt. I ran around like a fool, getting weird stares, and startling aimlessly wandering co-eds who were making their way back to their dorm after indulging at the cafeteria, but I didn’t care. I needed to find my dad before it got dark, before he got scared.
I was just coming out of the student union building when my phone rang. It was Jake.
“I found him. He’s at the fountain. We’re just sitting and chatting. Do you know where that is?”
“No.” My heart beat wildly, and my stomach did flip-flops. “Where?”
“Where are you?”
I spun around. “I’m in front of the student union building.” Just then I spotted Detective Cosgrove and a security guard coming out of a big tall building with lots of windows. I waved them down and ran, the phone to my ear. “Jake found him. They’re at the fountain. Where is that?”
“Just over here,” the security guard said, ushering us around the tall building and past a weird red metal sculpture and a bunch of bike racks. I followed him, wishing that he’d run so I could run too. I did as soon as we rounded the corner in front of the library and Jake came into view; I left them in my wake and sprinted toward my dad.
“Dad,” I sighed, slightly out of breath but more from the fear than from the run, “why are you here?”
He blinked up at me, quietly munching on the cookie that Jake had brought for me. “Freya? They’ve done a lot of changes to the school. I couldn’t find my class. They’re going to be wondering where I am.”
I exhaled loudly, my stomach finally grumbling as hunger took over the fear. Jake grabbed me by the hand and stood up, letting me take his spot next to my dad. Detective Cosgrove and the security guard joined us. “It’s okay, Dad. I think your class was canceled anyway. Let’s just head home, okay?”
Looking up at me with panic, he struggled to stand, his hands shaking so wildly that the cookie fell to the ground. “Canceled? Why was it canceled? I don’t cancel my classes.”
“Uh, fire,” Jake blurted out. I shot him a dubious look and mouthed the word “what?” but he just shrugged.
“Fire!” my father exclaimed, trying to stand up again, but we helped him sit back down. “In my classroom? In my building? But all my books!”
“Uh, it wasn’t a big fire. Everything’s safe. But they had to evacuate the building,” Jake continued, building on his ridiculous lie. Somehow, against all odds, it actually seemed to satisfy my father, and he sat back down.
“Oh, well, I hope no one was hurt. Will class be moved to another building tomorrow? I’ll check my email when I get home to see where they’ve relocated us.” He picked up his cookie from the ground and took a bite.
“No, no, Dad,” I said, taking it from his hand. “We don’t eat food off the ground. Come on, let’s go home and we can get you another cookie, a clean cookie.” He batted my hand away like a petulant toddler and reached for it again. “No, Dad, it’s dirty.”
“Come on, Mr. Lapierre, there’s a café in the library, and it looks like it’s still open. Shall we go buy you a cookie for the road?” Jake asked, offering my dad his hand, which he took willingly and then linked his arm through Jake’s before turning to look back at me and smiling like a child at Christmas.
The detective was busy on his phone, and the security guard had wandered away. I followed Jake and my dad into the library, where we all bought monster-size white chocolate macadamia nut cookies and then slowly shuffled our way across campus to the waiting SUV, where Detective Cosgrove was once again glued to his phone. The sugar rush from the cookie was a much-needed savior to my blood-sugar, and I managed to find it in me to climb into the back with my dad and not keel over across the seats.
“So how are we going to make sure this doesn’t happen again?” I asked the detective as we drove back to the care home. “Do we get a tracking device or something?”
He nodded in the front seat, running his hand over his chin, the stubble making a raspy sound. “We might have to. We’ll talk to the nurse when we get back, see what they suggest.”
I laced my fingers through my dad’s and squeezed his hand tight. The liver spots and arthritic knuckles represented grains of sand in the hourglass of his life, and the longer I looked at him, the more grains I saw fall. I realized that every day I saw my father very well might be my last. I choked on a sob and squeezed his hand tighter, not as tight as I would like, because I didn’t want to hurt him, but enough that I could feel the pulse in his wrist against mine. His life blood, still pumping, still fighting. He looked at me and smiled, his mouth full of cookie.