homes stared back at me from one bulletin board, and next to that another one held flyers advertising missing pets. We didn’t make a new flyer for Caitlin this year. The police created an age progression image, one showing Caitlin at age fifteen, and it was so warped and distorted-the eyes too large, the hair artificial-I couldn’t bear to look at it. I thought it belonged in a mortician’s textbook, an example of what not to do to preserve the image of a loved one. But the police distributed it anyway, and from time to time I came across a faded, wrinkling copy in the corner of a coffee shop or stuck to a community bulletin board downtown.
The woman reappeared so quickly I knew she bore bad news.
“He’s gone,” she said matter-of-factly, as though talking about a housefly.
“I thought you kept them for a week-”
“He’s been adopted,” she said. “Someone got him yesterday.”
“Okay, can you just tell me who it is? I need him back.”
She shook her head, the lips pursed again. “We can’t do that, sir.”
“But he’s my dog.”
“You brought him in here. You gave him away.”
“It was a mistake. A misunderstanding.” I leaned against the counter, letting it support most of my weight. I felt drained by the day. And guilty. I’d hoped having Frosty back would lift me.
“We can’t give out that information. It’s private.”
“I know, but-”
“We can’t just have people coming in here and getting personal information about our clients.”
“Okay, okay. I get it.”
“We have plenty of other dogs here,” she said. “Good dogs.” She seemed suddenly cheery and upbeat. “Is this for a family? Are you looking for a dog for your children?”
“No, just for me, I guess. And I only wanted that dog.” There was nothing more to say, so I turned and left.
When I climbed back into the car, Buster didn’t say anything. He dropped it into gear and drove me home, the voice of the talk radio host our only companion. Buster stopped at the curb in front of the house, but neither one of us got out.
“Thanks for coming today,” I said. “I’m glad you made it.” I extended my hand, which he shook.
“That’s what brothers do for each other,” he said.
“I didn’t even ask what you’re doing these days.”
He shrugged. “A cell phone company. Sales. It pays the bills. Look, I know why you’re asking about that-”
“No-”
“I plan on paying you back. All of it, all five thousand.”
“I don’t care.”
“Abby?”
I paused. “She cares about it. But she’s also given up on you. She tells me she’s written off that money, like it was a business expense.”
He started tapping his right hand against the rim of the steering wheel. “The price of being related to me.”
“Something like that.”
“How about you? What are you doing with your time off? Writing a book? Who’s it about this time? Melville? Moby Dick? Dicky Moe?”
“Hawthorne. His short fiction. You know, it sounded like there was a woman with you when I talked to you on the phone the other day. Are you dating someone?”
“Why the sudden interest?”
“I just don’t want us to be pissed at each other. I know the stuff with your dad is tough. For both of us maybe, but certainly for me. I still dream about him, about him coming into our room at night, drunk and angry. The way he’d come after us, swinging at us. I see his figure there in the dark. Sort of a hulking presence. I can’t forget it.”
“We’re not going to solve all this sitting here in the car.”
“Do you remember the same things?” I asked. “At least tell me that.”
He didn’t hesitate. “No, Tom. I don’t remember it that way at all. Sorry.”
“We used to huddle together in the dark,” I said. “Hell, you used to try to protect me. You’d lay on top of me and keep me safe. Are you going to tell me you don’t remember? You’re really going to stick to that? Really?”
“I’m not sticking to anything,” he said. “It’s a fact.” He looked at the console clock. “I have to get back home, okay?” I opened the door, and before I was out he added, “But, Young Goodman Tom, if you do decide to change your life-really change your life-give me a call. You have my number.”
Chapter Four
In the weeks and months after Caitlin disappeared, rumors had started to spread. New Cambridge, Ohio, is a small college town of about fifty thousand people, mostly middle class, mostly quiet and pleasant. It was primarily populated by professors and their families and students who came and went based on the academic calendar. Bad things didn’t happen in New Cambridge, at least not bad things that people knew or talked about.
But even if friends tried to insulate us from the gossip, we still heard what people said: Caitlin was pregnant, and we’d sent her away. Caitlin met a lover over the Internet and ran off with him. Caitlin fell victim to an online predator who’d kidnapped her. Or Caitlin simply ran away. Tired of the boring life in a small college town, she’d taken matters into her own hands and run off for greener pastures. California or New York. Seattle or Miami.
The police, of course, interviewed all of our friends and family, and they talked to a handful of my students and examined police records, but they found nothing. In those first days and weeks after Caitlin didn’t come home from her walk, the police treated us with the due deference owed to the parents of a missing and possibly murdered child. They spoke to us in soothing tones, they offered us platitudinal encouragement-which actually felt wonderful to hear-and they answered our calls and questions promptly. But it didn’t take long for cracks to appear.
It began with Buster and his indecent exposure rap. He lived an hour away in Columbus and wasn’t in New Cambridge the day Caitlin disappeared-as far as we knew-but he couldn’t provide a rock-solid alibi. He said he was at his house. An ex-girlfriend claimed to have spoken to him on his cell phone an hour before the disappearance, but she didn’t know where he was while they talked. For a while, Buster became something of a suspect, even though the police refused to call him that to either Abby or me. He endured some heated questioning, and some not so subtle threats in the interview room. While he never requested a lawyer or offered anything close to a confession, and while no evidence linked him to the commission of a crime, word leaked to the newspaper that Caitlin’s uncle- unnamed-was a
I never offered a particularly strong defense of my brother. Not to Abby and not to the police. I did tell them I didn’t believe he would harm Caitlin. In fact, he was a surprisingly doting uncle to Caitlin, one who often sent birthday gifts and, on the rare occasions when he visited us, went out of his way to talk to Caitlin as though she were more adult than child.
“But that’s just it, Tom,” Abby said to me on one of the days Buster was going a few rounds with the cops. “He paid so much attention to Caitlin. Didn’t it seem out of character to you?”
It did. It really did. And I allowed the suspicions of the police and Abby’s doubts to become my own to such an extent that they never fully went away, even when the police finished with him and let him go. I still found myself returning to those questions again and again: Where was he that day? Why did he seem to care about Caitlin so much? Was his indecent exposure charge really just a drunken misunderstanding?
But if my doubts about Buster remained alive, even in the back of my mind, the police-absent any conclusive proof of his involvement-moved on to other things. They examined every scrap of mail, every phone call, every bill and financial statement we possessed, and none of it led anywhere-except for the computer we’d purchased for Caitlin, the one she used in her room. There were no unusual e-mails, no evidence that she made contact with a man who might have lured her away or taken her. But Caitlin had been searching the Web the day she disappeared,
