Stay close

3

With a heavy sigh, Detective Broome approached the doomed house and rang the bell. Sarah opened the door and with nary a glance said, “Come on in.” Broome wiped his feet, feeling sheepish. He took off the old trench coat and draped it over his arm. Nothing inside the house had changed in all these years. The dated recessed lighting, the white leather couch, the old recliner in the corner-all the same. Even the photographs on the fireplace mantel hadn’t been switched out. For a long time, at least five years, Sarah had left her husband’s slippers by that old recliner. They were gone now, but the chair remained. Broome wondered if anybody ever sat in it.

It was as though the house refused to move on, as though the walls and ceilings were grieving and waiting. Or maybe that was projecting. People need answers. They need closure. Hope, Broome knew, could be a wonderful thing. But hope could crush you anew every single day. Hope could be the cruelest thing in the world.

“You missed the anniversary,” Sarah said.

Broome nodded, not ready to tell her why yet. “How are the kids?”

“Good.”

Sarah’s children were practically grown now. Susie was a junior at Bucknell. Brandon was a high school senior. They had been little more than babies when their father vanished, ripped from this tidy household, never to be seen by any of his loved ones again. Broome had never solved the case. He had never let it go either. You shouldn’t get personally involved. He knew that. But he had. He had gone to Susie’s dance recitals. He had helped teach Brandon how to throw a baseball. He had even, twelve years ago and to his great shame, had too much to drink with Sarah and, well, stayed the whole night.

“How’s the new job?” Broome asked her.

“Good.”

“Is your sister coming in soon?”

Sarah sighed. “Yep.”

Sarah was still an attractive woman. There were crow’s-feet by the eyes, and the lines around her mouth had deepened over the years. Aging works well on some women. Sarah was one of them.

She was also a cancer survivor, twenty-plus years now. She had told Broome this the first time they met, sitting in this very room, when he had come here to investigate the disappearance. The diagnosis had been made, Sarah explained to him, when she was pregnant with Susie. If it wasn’t for her husband, Sarah insisted, she would have never survived. She wanted Broome to understand that. When the prognosis was bad, when the chemo made Sarah vomit continuously, when she lost her hair and her looks, when her body started to decay, when no one else, including Sarah, had any hope-that word again-he and he alone had stuck by her.

Which proved yet again that there was no explaining the complexities and hypocrisies of human nature.

He stayed up with her. He held her forehead late at night. He fetched her medicines and kissed her cheek and held her shivering body and made her feel loved.

She had looked Broome in the eye and told him all this because she wanted him to stay with the case, to not dismiss her husband as a runaway, to get personally involved, to find her soul mate because she simply could not live without him.

Seventeen years later, despite learning some hard truths, Broome was still here. And the whereabouts of Sarah’s husband and soul mate was still very much a mystery.

Broome looked up at her now. “That’s good,” he said, hearing the babble in his own voice. “I mean, about your sister’s visiting. I know you like when your sister visits.”

“Yeah, it’s awesome,” Sarah said, a voice flat enough to slip under a door crack. “Broome?”

“Yes?”

“You’re giving me small talk.”

Broome looked down at his hands. “I was just trying to be nice.”

“No. See, you don’t do just being nice, Broome. And you never do small talk.”

“Good point.”

“So?”

Despite all the trappings-bright yellow paint, fresh-cut flowers-all Broome could see was the decay. The years of not knowing had devastated the family. The kids had some hard years. Susie had two DUIs. Brandon had a drug bust. Broome had helped both of them get out of trouble. The house still looked as though their father had disappeared yesterday-frozen in time, waiting for his return.

Sarah’s eyes widened a little as if struck by a painful realization. “Did you find…?”

“No.”

“What then?”

“It may be nothing,” Broome said.

“But?”

Broome sat resting his forearms on his thighs, his head in his hands. He took a deep breath and looked into the pained eyes. “Another local man vanished. You may have seen it on the news. His name is Carlton Flynn.”

Sarah looked confused. “When you say vanished-”

“Just like…” He stopped. “One moment Carlton Flynn was living his life, the next-poof-he was gone. Totally vanished.”

Sarah tried to process what he was saying. “But… like you told me from the start. People do vanish, right?”

Broome nodded.

“Sometimes of their own volition,” Sarah continued. “Sometimes not. But it happens.”

“Yes.”

“So seventeen years after my husband vanishes, another man, this Carlton Flynn, goes missing. I don’t see the connection.”

“There might be none,” Broome agreed.

She moved closer to him. “But?”

“But it’s why I missed the anniversary.”

“What does that mean?”

Broome didn’t know how much to say. He didn’t know how much he even knew for sure yet. He was working on a theory, one that gnawed at his belly and kept him up at night, but right now that was all it was.

“The day Carlton Flynn vanished,” he said.

“What about it?”

“It’s why I wasn’t here. He vanished on the anniversary. February eighteenth-exactly seventeen years to the day after your husband vanished.”

Sarah seemed stunned for a moment. “Seventeen years to the day.”

“Yes.”

“What does that mean? Seventeen years. It might just be a coincidence. If it was five or ten or twenty years. But seventeen?”

He said nothing, letting her work on it herself for a few moments.

Sarah said, “So I assume, what, you checked for more missing people? To see if there was a pattern?”

“I did.”

“And?”

“Those were the only two we know for certain who disappeared on a February eighteenth-your husband and Carlton Flynn.”

“We know for certain?” she repeated.

Broome let loose a deep breath. “Last year, on March fourteenth, another local man, Stephen Clarkson, was reported missing. Three years earlier, on February twenty-seventh, another was also reported missing.”

“Neither was found?”

“Right.”

Sarah swallowed. “So maybe it’s not the day. Maybe it’s February and March.”

“I don’t think so. Or at least, I didn’t. See, the other two men-Peter Berman and Gregg Wagman-could have disappeared a lot earlier. One was a drifter, the other a truck driver. Both men were single with not much family. If guys like that aren’t home in twenty-four hours, well, who’d notice? You did, of course. But if a guy is single or divorced or travels a lot…”

“It could be days or weeks before it’s reported,” Sarah finished for him.

“Or even longer.”

“So these two men might have vanished on February eighteenth too.”

“It’s not that simple,” Broome said.

“Why not?”

“Because the more I look at it, the pattern gets even tougher to nail down. Wagman, for example, was from Buffalo-he’s not local. No one knows where or when he vanished, but I was able to trace his movements enough to know that he could have gone through Atlantic City sometime in February.”

Sarah considered that. “You’ve mentioned five men, including Stewart, in the past seventeen years. Any others?”

“Yes and no. Altogether, I’ve found nine men who sort of very loosely could fit the pattern. But there are cases where the theory takes a bit of a hit.”

“For example?”

“Two years ago, a man named Clyde Horner, who lived with his mother, was reported missing on February seventh.”

“So it’s not February eighteenth.”

“Probably not.”

“Maybe it’s the month of February.”

“Maybe. This is the problem with theories and patterns. They take time. I’m still gathering evidence.”

Her eyes filled with tears. She blinked them away. “I don’t get it. How did no one see this-with this many people missing?”

“See what?” Broome said. “Hell, I don’t even see it that clearly yet. Men go missing all the time. Most run away. Most of these guys go broke or have nothing or got creditors on their ass-so they start new lives. They move across the country. Sometimes they change their names. Sometimes they don’t. Many of these men… well, no one is looking for them. No one wants to find them. One wife I spoke to begged me not to find her husband. She had three kids with the guy. She thinks he ran off with some-as she put it-‘hootchy whore,’ and it was the best thing that ever happened to her family.”

They were silent for a few moments.

“What about before?” Sarah asked.

Broome knew what she meant, but he still said, “Before?”

“Before Stewart. Did anybody disappear before my husband?”

He ran his hand through his hair and raised his head. Their eyes locked. “Not that I could find,” Broome said. “If this is a pattern, then it started with Stewart.”