The old Adirondack chair was still on the Sandquist back porch, weathered but sturdy. Ethan angled the chair away from a view of the Jordan home next door and eased himself into it. Trees planted along the property line when he was a small boy towered now, with broadened branches and thickened trunks. Burnished leaves trembled against the threat of plummeting to the ground, obscuring the line of sight between the two houses, but Ethan didn’t want to take any chances. The size of the chair would disguise his form lest one of his parents happen to step outside the Jordan house and glance toward the Sandquists’ back porch. Sitting on the front steps would have left him exposed, and Nicole would pull her car around to the back even if she didn’t bother with the garage. Ethan’s Lexus was parked up the street.
He jiggled one foot while he waited. Church was at nine thirty. It was after twelve now. What was taking her so long?
His phone buzzed. “Hey, Hansen. What’s the word?”
“I can help you out.”
“That’s good news.”
“It’s only one day,” Hansen said. “And you’ll still have to deal with Gonzalez.”
“Rounds are covered tomorrow. That’s all I wanted.” One day at a time, Ethan told himself as he pocketed his phone.
Finally he heard the engine of Nicole’s white Hyundai purr into the driveway. He’d been right. She did pull the car to the back. Ethan sat still, listening to the sounds of her opening the car door and shuffling some bags. The door slammed and Nicole made her way along the path of narrow cement rectangles embedded in the ground. When she reached the edge of the porch, Ethan stood up.
She met his eyes and shifted a pair of paper sacks in her arms. “I stopped for food. There’s nothing in the house, obviously.”
“You knew I would be here, didn’t you?” Ethan took one of the sacks from Nicole.
“You don’t walk away from things, Ethan Jordan.” Nicole fumbled with her keys and moved toward the back door.
He had walked away from her ten years ago, or more like slithered away.
Nicole unlocked the door. “The food is from Fall Shadows Café. I got the pot roast you used to like. You’ll have to tell me if it’s the same as it always was.”
Ethan could think of no other person in his life with whom he could slip into old habits so comfortably. “It’s good of you to feed me.”
Nicole laughed. “Says the boy who is secretly relieved that the girl is not going to try to cook again.”
“Have you given that up?” Ethan set the sack on the kitchen table, a flimsy maple set with four spindled chairs.
“Mostly.”
“My recollection is you were starting to get good at it.”
Nicole shrugged and lifted a Styrofoam container from one bag. “I live alone. It doesn’t seem worth the bother.”
He owned the zing she hadn’t meant to shoot. Nicole stated a simple fact, but if Ethan hadn’t slithered away, they could have been married, and she wouldn’t be living alone.
“The other one is pork, if you’d rather have that.” Nicole opened both containers on the table and pulled two iced teas out of the second bag. “Extra sweet, no lemon.”
She remembered everything. And she knew he couldn’t leave town.
“I only finagled one more day.” Ethan could stay until midnight on Monday and still be in Columbus in time for morning rounds on Tuesday and the surgery schedule that followed.
“Then we’ll have to find Quinn in one day.” Nicole opened a drawer, pulled out two dusty forks, and moved to the sink to rinse them. Old pipes rattled against the unexpected demand.
And if we don’t? Ethan thought. He would still have to leave at midnight the next night or risk his residency.
“Do you keep the water on when the house is empty?” he asked.
“Quinn taught me to work a main valve when I was eleven.” Nicole sat down and handed Ethan a fork. “There’s something you should know.”
While they ate, Nicole relayed details of discovering Quinn’s car.
“Could he have an accident because he’s sick?” Nicole asked.
“It’s possible.” Ethan forked the last of the pot roast. “But if he was that seriously impaired medically, I’m not sure he could walk away and out of sight so thoroughly.”
“I want to start looking for him,” Nicole said. “We can check things out at his house, for starters.”
“I thought the police said he hasn’t been there.”
“A good reporter always double-checks her sources.” Nicole stuffed the empty food containers back into the paper sacks. “If we don’t find anything there, we can hike toward the falls.”
“Seems like an obvious place to go for a man who is trying not to be found,” Ethan said.
“First of all, we don’t know he’s trying not to be found, and second, I have to get inside his head. Try to think like he thinks. And the falls or the lake seem like the best place to do that.”
She had a point.
“Just give me a minute to change into jeans.” Nicole pushed the swinging door from the kitchen into the hallway.
Ethan heard the rhythm of her feet taking the stairs. He started to put the trash in the bin under the sink before remembering that an empty house wouldn’t have any trash service. Though it had been unoccupied for years, everything in this house was exactly as Ethan remembered it, down to the collection of red and yellow wooden roosters on the shelf above the sink. Nicole’s father must have decided to decorate from scratch in his new home. Perhaps there were too many memories in Hidden Falls, like the ones that pressed in on Ethan.
He wandered into the living room and found the major pieces of furniture covered in drop cloths, but their shapes and positions evoked the evenings he and Nicole sat on the couch to watch TV while they did homework. The dining room furniture was exposed and dense with dust. Ethan stood with both hands in his pockets, remembering Nicole’s pile of cookbooks on one end of the table. What had become of them?
He took one hand out of a pocket, put a finger in the dust, and stacked two sets of initials. NS over EJ.
Ethan heard Nicole’s steps on the stairs and moved to the foyer. “That was fast.”
“No time to waste.” Nicole squatted and tightened a shoelace on a running shoe. “I’m not sorry I went to church, but I’m ready to get moving.”
“How was everything at Our Savior?”
“You should have come.” Nicole hooked her keys around a belt loop.
Ethan shook his head. “I don’t do that anymore.”
“Maybe you should.”
Ethan regretted asking about the church. “Let’s take your car.”
“You don’t want to go through the fence?”
Ethan wasn’t eager to be spotted in the neighborhood, much less in his parents’ backyard crawling between loose boards. “You’re the same size, but I kept growing during college.”
“Fine. We’ll drive around the block. But then I want to hike so we can look carefully.”
“Let’s stop at my car,” Ethan said. “My camera might come in handy.”
Fetching the camera and driving around the wide block took less than five minutes.
Nicole parked as close to Quinn’s house as she could get. “How do we get in?”
“Maybe we don’t.” Ethan winced at the blade Nicole’s eyes threw at him.
“That’ll make it hard to find any useful information.” Nicole opened her door and got out. “The place looks the same on the outside.”
Ethan circled the hood of the car to stand next to her. “Normalcy means something, doesn’t it? He wasn’t planning to leave.”
Nicole cocked her head. “Why do you suppose he always locked up?”
“You locked your house when we left.”
“I’ve been polluted by living in a city. Plenty of people in Hidden Falls wouldn’t even be able to tell you where their house keys are, but even when Quinn is inside the house, he keeps the door locked.”
Nicole paced toward the house, slipped between bushes, and pressed her face against the front window.
“Do you have X-ray vision to see through closed drapes?” Ethan stood behind her.
Nicole slapped his shoulder with the back of her fingers.
A teenage boy in running gear pounded the pavement down Quinn’s street. “Now there’s a man after my own heart,” Nicole said.
At the sight of them, the boy stopped and, with his hands on his hips, let his chest heave while he eyed Nicole and Ethan.
“I suppose you’re wondering what we’re doing.” Ethan had no plan for how he would answer that question.
“Looking for Quinn, I guess.” The boy used the sleeve of his sweatshirt to wipe sweat from one side of his face. “He’s not here, is he?”
“Nope.” Nicole stepped away from the window.
“Too bad. He could have helped me smooth things over.”
“You’re in trouble?” Ethan asked.
“Seriously,” the boy said. “I’ll never live down knocking over the video booth at the banquet last night. My parents were mortified.”
“Oh,” Nicole said, a knowing grin coming over her face. “You’re Zeke Plainfield.”
“Does the whole town know it was me?” Zeke squatted and tightened a shoelace. “There are no secret identities in this town. If you’ll point me to the nearest hole I can jump down, I’ll be on my way.” Zeke took off down the street.
Nicole turned to Ethan. “I think Quinn has a secret.”
“And this secret explains his disappearance?”
“It’s a workable theory,” Nicole said. “Now we have to test it. Isn’t that what you scientists do?”
“I agree.”
Nicole narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re full of surprises.”
Ethan took three steps back and tilted his head to survey the upper level of Quinn’s house. “Ever since I saw him last night, I’ve been thinking about something Quinn once said that I never understood.”
“I need more than that to go on.”
Ethan shrugged. “There isn’t much more. He knew I didn’t get along with my parents. One day when I was whining about it, he said that as estranged as I might feel, I had no idea what it felt like to truly be separated from people you love.”
“I’ll bet that was the end of that.”
“Pretty much. I didn’t dare ask what he meant.” Ethan wished he had.
“He told me once how he used to play in the water sprinkler with his little brother,” Nicole said. “But millions of kids do that every summer. All I ever knew about his family is that they were back East somewhere.”
“So we grow up running to Quinn like he’s the parent we wish we had, and this is the best we can do?” Ethan spread his arms wide. “Maybe he had family somewhere between here and the Atlantic Ocean?”
They stood silent. A car swished past on the road behind them, and a crackling swirl of leaves blew up in its wake.
Finally Nicole spoke. “Like you said last night, we were kids. We were so hungry for what he gave us that we didn’t really see the world through Quinn’s eyes.”
“Do you think he was—is—happy?”
“Yes,” Nicole answered without hesitation. “He helped—helps—people because he wants to, because he cares if they’re happy. And he has his faith. It’s real.”
Ethan clamped his reply closed. He wasn’t going down the faith trail.