For the next several days the park stays closed to the general public as the search for Emily Linton intensifies. The days are cloudless, searing hot, over a hundred degrees, but it doesn’t stop volunteers from showing up before dawn and staying until the rangers make them leave.
Equine rescue teams arrive from Scottsdale and Houston. The riders divide the park into grids and search in pairs. Although they cover more ground, at the end of the day the riders return, like me, sunburned and exhausted.
I spend an afternoon watching a team of divers search Tacoma Well. When they break the surface, the black hoods of their wetsuits remind me of the heads of turtles I used to feed in the pond near my house in New Jersey.
The dogs find a faint trail that leads from the parking lot to the base of the cliffs. The dogs, of course, can’t climb the ladders to follow the scent, and for a while there’s talk of men carrying them up into the ruins, but that doesn’t happen. Instead, Dr. Shum and my father lead teams of officers up the cliffs. They spend several days prowling around the honeycomb of rooms, jagged stone corridors, and hollowed-out crevices in the walls.
Rumors fly. Emily has run away and is sunning herself on the sandy beaches of Southern California. Emily was the victim of a serial killer who preys on girls at national parks. Emily’s disappearance is part of a publicity stunt to bring more tourism to the park. Emily met the same fate as the hundreds of Native Americans who vanished from the cliffs more than six hundred years ago.
One night, as my father and I eat our respective microwave dinners in front of the television, the news flashes the same photo of Emily and the reporter repeats the story of her disappearance and the discouraging news that there are no developments.
After the story ends, my father turns off the television. “Listen, honey, I know Emily’s disappearance is disturbing, but there’s something else we need to talk about. Ray came by my office today.” He pauses. His blue eyes are intent behind the black frames of his glasses. My stomach tightens. “The police have cleared Jeremy.”
A bite of Stouffers’s lasagna lodges itself in my throat. “What?”
“He has an alibi. He was home all night with his mother.”
“That’s impossible. He’s lying.”
“He was home with his parents. The story checks out.”
“He could have slipped out, met Emily at the park.”
His eyes look skeptical behind his glasses. “The odds of that are small.” He pauses, pushes the skin on his face as if he dreads delivering the next bit of news. “Ray and I talked about you and Jeremy.” He pauses, giving me a long, dreadful moment to imagine them discussing the details, maybe even passing back and forth the pictures the police took at the hospital. “We’re going to temporarily suspend Jeremy from the university. Dr. Shum is going to talk to him and the other interns before he makes a final decision.”
“Great. Maybe he can make copies of my photos from the hospital and pass them around.” Or they could post them, I think bitterly, next to the flyers of Emily.
“He promises to be discreet, but this is a serious charge against Jeremy. The university has a very strict sexual harassment policy.”
“I don’t want to press charges. I just think that he isn’t who he seems. He comes across as nice, but he has a temper, Dad. Don’t you think it’s more than a coincidence that Emily disappears the day after I told her what happened to me?”
My father cleans his glasses with the hem of his shirt and then replaces them. “I don’t know what to think,” he admits. “It’s still possible she’ll turn up.”
“And it’s also possible that Jeremy’s mother lied to protect him. Wouldn’t you lie to protect me?”
He shakes his head. “I hope I would never be in a position to have to answer that.”
It isn’t the answer I want, and I shift impatiently on the couch. “Come on, Dad. He’s lying. I want to talk to him.”
“No,” my father say in a tone of voice that says the conversation is finished.
“I’ll know if he’s lying.” I know the taste, touch, and scent of him. I know both more and less than I want.
“No, Paige. This is for the police. Stay out of this.”
“Are you kidding me? Emily is missing and you don’t want to get involved?”
“Of course I want to help. Look, Emily’s disappearance—it’s terrible…” He mutes the television and shifts on the couch to face me. “It’s beyond terrible, actually. But you’re my priority. He hurt you. You need to stay away from him.”
“But he might know something.”
“Paige. This whole…incident between the two of you is serious. The Browns have spoken with Dr. Shum. They’re hiring a lawyer. They say…the statements you’re making about their son are false and inflammatory. Until everything is resolved, any communication has to go through the university.”
“What if there’s still a chance Emily’s alive and he knows where she is?”
“He doesn’t know, Paige. If he did, the police would have found out.”
“The police don’t know him. I do.”
My father shakes his head. “When I pictured you coming here, I thought it might be like when you were little. You loved going on-site with me. I thought it…” His voice trails off, and for a moment I think he’s going to say that he hoped it would bring us together. His eyes fix on me, unblinking. “Maybe it would be best if you went back to New Jersey.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“I want to do what’s right for you.”
My fingers trace a small dark stain on the sofa where I spilled grape juice when I was little. I was terrified my father would be mad, but all he said was that I’d given the couch a history, a story, a memory. He said it was a good thing, but Mom always turned the cushions over when we had company.
“I don’t want to leave—not until I know what happened to Emily.”
His gaze softens. “We might never know. Sometimes bad things just happen.”
“I thought you cared about her.”
“I do care about her. I’m just saying that sometimes things happen and you wonder if you could have changed them if you’d done something differently.” His brow furrows, and his face forms that faraway look he gets when he slips into professor mode. “You can second-guess the choices you make, but you can’t change anything. The truth is that sometimes it is our fault and sometimes it isn’t. Ultimately, either way, you have to let go and move on.”
What is he talking about? What choices have either of us made when it came to Emily?
“Are you serious?” I’m supposed to accept that Emily is missing? That there’s nothing I can do about it? I’m on my feet before he’s finished. “You can’t give up on her, Dad. You just can’t say, ‘Okay, it’s been a week. Time to move on.’”
“Look, I’m still going to do everything I can to find her.” He takes a breath and releases it slowly. “I’m just trying to make sure you’re prepared if this doesn’t turn out the way we hope. I know we’ve hurt you in the past. I don’t want to do that again.”
The last sentence stops me from heading to my room. It’s the first time he’s ever admitted that the divorce happened to me, too. I’ve been waiting for him to say this for so long now, and yet suddenly I’m afraid. I make myself hold his gaze. “Why did you divorce Mom? She wanted to try to work things out. She told me.”
He takes off his glasses again. His blue eyes look larger, somehow younger. “Is that what she told you?”
“Yes. She said she wanted you to go to counseling with her. She said you wouldn’t.”
He replaces his glasses. “That’s true. What you need to know, honey, is that what happened between me and your mom had nothing to do with you.”
“How can it have nothing to do with me when it happened to me, too?” That was something I was supposed to think, not say. He isn’t allowed into my head, into my thoughts. He isn’t allowed to see he can make me cry or laugh or feel anything at all.
The couch cushions shift under his weight, and then he sits beside me. “I know,” he says. “I know it happened to you, too.” His arms go around me, but I make myself go away so that he can’t reach inside me. I stay absolutely still, and after a moment his arms fall away.
“I love you,” he says, searching my eyes. “I don’t say that enough. I’m sorry. I’m sorry about the divorce. It was never about leaving you. I just couldn’t stay there anymore.”
“Why?”
A wry, ironic-looking smile lifts the corners of his mouth but doesn’t touch his eyes. “I thought that I could give you more if I started liking myself again.”
“You give me more by moving two thousand miles away?”
“Back in New Jersey…it was all academic. It was never going to be right for me.” He shakes his head. “It was never about leaving you, Paige.”
Of course it was about leaving me. He chose. It wasn’t like I had the same ability. No one asked me where I wanted to live or took my feelings into consideration. Yet when I look into his eyes, I could swear he’s telling the truth. He’s happier here. He belongs here. I don’t want to admit it, but it’s the truth. And maybe he does love me—not a lot, but enough to do what he thinks is best for me. But then I remember that night I heard them arguing. The word affair rising just above the crack of a slamming door. Maybe Mom thought he was having an affair, but he wasn’t. He might be this really famous archeologist, but sometimes he’s a total geek. I almost cave in, let myself reach for him, but then my mind wanders back where I don’t want it to go—to the night Emily disappeared. My father sent me to get the pizza, but where did he go? What if the real reason my father wants to send me back to New Jersey isn’t because he loves me and wants to protect me, but because he’s somehow involved?