Leaving Time: A Novel (10 page)

My father was not screaming or panicking. He was making his move. “King me,” he said, as if nothing at all had happened.

It took me a while to realize that in his world—wherever that was—nothing
had
happened. And that I couldn’t be mad at him for not caring if I had been carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey by a
psycho teenager. You can’t blame someone if they honestly don’t understand that their reality isn’t the same as yours.

Today, when I get to Hartwick House, my father isn’t in the lounge. I find him sitting in his room, in front of the window. In his hands is a bright rainbow of embroidery floss, twisted into knots—and not for the first time I think that someone’s enterprising idea of therapy is another person’s frustrated hell. He glances up at me when I walk in, and he doesn’t go ballistic—which is a good sign that today, he’s not too agitated. I decide to use this to my advantage, and broach the topic of my mother.

I kneel in front of him, stilling his hands as they tug at the floss, tangling it even worse. “Dad,” I say, as I draw the orange thread through the loops of the other colors and drape it over his left knee. “What do you think would happen, if we found her?”

He doesn’t answer me.

I tug free the candy-apple-red thread. “I mean, what if she’s the only reason we’re broken?”

I let my hands grasp his, where they are clasped around two more strands of floss. “Why did you let her go?” I whisper, holding his gaze. “Why didn’t you ever tell the police she was missing?”

My father had a breakdown, sure, but he’s had moments of lucidity in the past ten years. Maybe no one would have taken him seriously if he said my mother was lost. But then again, maybe they
would
have.

Then, maybe, there would be a missing persons case to reopen. Then I wouldn’t have to start from scratch, trying to get the police to investigate a disappearance that they didn’t even know was a disappearance ten years ago, when it happened.

Suddenly the expression on my father’s face changes. The frustration melts like foam where the ocean hits sand, and his eyes light up. They are the same color as mine, a too-green that makes people uneasy. “Alice?” he says. “Do you know how to do this?” He lifts the handful of thread.

“I’m not Alice,” I tell him.

He shakes his head, confused.

I bite my lip, untangle the strands, and weave them to make a bracelet, a simple series of knots any day camper would know by heart. His hands flutter over mine like hummingbirds as I work. When I’m done, I unclip it from the safety pin that is fastened to his pants and tie it around his wrist, a bright bangle.

My father admires it. “You were always so good at this kind of thing,” he says, smiling up at me.

That’s when I realize why my father did not report my mother as a missing person. Maybe she wasn’t missing, not to him. He’s always been able to find her, in my face and my voice and my presence.

I wish it were that easy for me.

When I get home, my grandmother is watching
Wheel of Fortune
on television, calling out the answers before the contestants, and giving Vanna White fashion advice. “That belt makes you look like a tramp,” she tells Vanna, and then she sees me in the doorway. “How did it go today?”

I falter a moment before realizing she is talking about babysitting, which of course I didn’t really do. “It was okay,” I lie.

“There are stuffed shells in the fridge if you want to reheat them,” she says, and her gaze flits back to the screen. “Try an
F
, you stupid cow,” she shouts.

I take advantage of this distraction and run upstairs with Gertie at my heels. She makes herself a nest on my bed out of pillows and turns in circles to get comfortable.

I don’t know what to do. I’ve got information, and nowhere to go with it.

Reaching into my pocket, I take out the wad of bills I brought and peel one of the dollars off. I start folding it mindlessly, seamlessly, into an elephant, but I keep screwing up and finally crumple it into a ball and throw it on the floor. I keep seeing my father’s hands making angry knots in the embroidery floss.

One of the original detectives who investigated the elephant sanctuary has Alzheimer’s. The other is dead. But maybe it’s not the end
of the road. I’ll just have to find a way to get the current detectives in the department to see that the department screwed up ten years ago, and should have considered my mother a missing person.

That
should go over really well.

I turn on my laptop, and with a buzzy chord, it comes alive. I type in my password and open a search engine. “Virgil Stanhope,” I type. “Death.”

The first article that pops up is a notice about the ceremony where he was going to be made detective. There is a picture of him, too—sandy hair swept to the side, a big, fat, toothy grin, an Adam’s apple that looks like the knob on a door. He looks goofy, young, but I guess ten years ago, that’s just what he was.

I open a new window, log in to a public records database (which costs me $49.95 a year, FYI), and find the death notice of Virgil Stanhope. Tragically, it’s dated the same day as his detective ceremony. I wonder if he got his badge and crashed in a car accident on the way home or, worse, on the way there. A life interrupted.

Well. I can relate to that.

I click on the link, but it won’t open. Instead, I get a page stating there’s a server error.

So I go back to my first search and rummage through the article descriptions until I find one that makes all the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

“Stanhope Investigations,” I read.
Find the future in the past
.

It’s a crappy slogan. But I still click to open the page in a new window.

Licensed. Domestic and marital relationship investigations. Surveillance services. Bail recovery agent. People searches. Child custody investigations. Accidental death investigations. Missing persons
.

There is another button at the top: About Us.

Vic Stanhope is a licensed private investigator and former law enforcement officer and detective. He holds degrees in criminal justice and forensic science from the University of New Haven. He belongs to the International Association of Arson Investigators, the National Association of Bail Enforcement Agents, the National Association of Certified Investigators
.

It could be a coincidence … if not for the tiny thumbnail photograph of Mr. Stanhope.

True, he looks older. And true, he has that buzz cut guys get when they’re losing their hair and they try to channel Bruce Willis to look supertough. Yet his Adam’s apple is still front and center in the photo, unmistakable.

I suppose Vic and Virgil could be twins. But still. I grab my cell phone and punch in the number on the screen.

Three rings later, I hear someone grab the receiver on the other end. It sounds like it falls to the floor with a run of static and curses, and then is recovered. “What.”

“Is this Mr. Stanhope?” I whisper.

“Yeah,” the voice growls.

“
Virgil
Stanhope?”

There is a pause. “Not anymore,” the voice slurs, and he hangs up.

My pulse is racing. Either Virgil Stanhope is back from the dead or he never
was
dead.

Maybe he just wanted people to think that, so he could disappear.

And if this is the case—he’s the perfect person to find my mother.

Anyone who has ever seen elephants come across the bones of another individual would recognize the calling card of grief: the intense silence, the droop of the trunk and ears, the hesitant caresses, the sadness that seems to wrap the herd like a shroud when they encounter the remains of one of their own. But there’s been some question as to whether elephants distinguish between the bones of elephants they knew well and those of elephants they did not.

Some of the research that has been coming out from my colleagues at Amboseli up in Kenya, where they have more than twenty-two hundred elephants that are recognized individually, has been intriguing. Taking one herd at a time, the researchers revealed several key items: a small bit of ivory, an elephant skull, and a block of wood. They did this experiment as one would have in a lab, carefully maintaining the presentation of the objects and recording the responses of the elephants to see how long they lingered at each item. Without a doubt, the tiny piece of ivory was the most intriguing to the elephants, followed by the skull and then the wood. They stroked the ivory, picked it up, carried it, rolled it beneath their hind feet.

Then the researchers presented the families with the skull of an elephant, the skull of a rhino, and the skull of a water buffalo. In this set of objects, the elephant skull was the item that interested the herd the most.

Finally, the researchers focused on three herds that had, in the past few years, suffered the death of their leader. The families were presented with the skulls of those three matriarchs.

You’d think that the elephants would have been most interested in the skull that belonged to the matriarch who had led their own herd. After all, the other parts of the controlled experiment clearly show that the elephants were capable of showing preference, instead of randomly examining the items out of general curiosity.

You’d think that, given the examples I had personally witnessed in Botswana of elephants who seemed deeply moved by the death of one of their own, and capable of remembering that death years later, they would have paid tribute to their own leader.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, the Amboseli elephants were equally attracted to the three skulls. They may have known and lived with and even deeply mourned an individual elephant, but that behavior was not reflected in these results.

Although the study proves that elephants are fascinated by the bones of other elephants, some might say it also proves that an elephant experiencing grief for an individual must be a fiction. Some might say if the elephants did not distinguish between the skulls, the fact that one of those skulls was their own mother wasn’t important.

But maybe it means that
all
mothers are.

Every cop has one that got away.

For some, it becomes the stuff of legend, the story they tell at every department Christmas bash and when they have a few too many beers with the guys. It’s the clue they didn’t see that was right in front of their eyes, the file they couldn’t bear to throw away, the case that was never closed. It’s the nightmare they still have every now and then, from which they wake up sweaty and startled.

For the rest of us, it’s the nightmare we’re still living.

It’s the face we see over our shoulder in the mirror. It’s the person on the other end of the phone, when we hear that mysterious dead air. It’s always having someone with us, even when we’re alone.

It’s knowing, every second of every day, that we failed.

Donny Boylan, the detective I was working with back then, told me once that
his
case was a domestic dispute call. He didn’t slap cuffs on the husband, because the guy was a reputable business owner everyone knew and liked. He figured a warning was enough. Three hours after Donny left the house, the guy’s wife was dead. Single gunshot wound to the head. Her name was Amanda, and she was six months pregnant at the time.

Donny used to call her his ghost, the case that haunted him for years. My ghost is named Alice Metcalf. She didn’t die, like Amanda,
as far as I know. She just disappeared, along with the truth about what happened ten years ago.

Sometimes, when I wake up after a bender, I have to squint because I’m pretty sure Alice is on the other side of my desk, in the spot where clients sit when they are asking me to take pictures of their wives in the act of cheating, or track down a deadbeat dad. I work alone, unless you count Jack Daniel’s as an employee. My office is the size of a closet and smells of take-out Chinese and rug-cleaning fluid. I sleep on the couch here more often than I do at my apartment, but to my clients, I am Vic Stanhope, professional private investigator.

Until I wake up with my head throbbing and a tongue too thick for my mouth, an empty bottle next to me, and Alice staring me down.
Like hell you are
, she says to me.