There’s No Place Like Here

14

Only a week before Sandy’s no-show, Jack had quietly closed the bedroom door adjoining the living room so as not to disturb a sleeping Gloria. The Yellow Pages lying open on the couch stared back at him as he paced the far side of the room, one eye on the phone book, the other eye on the bedroom door. He stopped and traced his finger down the page until he came across the ad for Porch Light, the organization that helped counsel friends and relatives of the missing. Jack and his sister Judith had tried to convince their mother to talk to Porch Light after Donal’s disappearance, but her old Irish ways of refusing to speak her private thoughts to a stranger held her back. Below the ad was the number for Sandy Shortt’s missing-persons agency. He picked up his cell phone and switched on the television so as to cover the sound of his voice in case Gloria awoke. He dialed the number he had memorized when he first came across the advertisement. It rang twice before a female answered.

“Hello?”

Jack suddenly couldn’t remember what to say.

“Hello?” The voice was softer this time. “Gregory, is that you?”

“No.” Jack finally found his voice. “My name is Jack, Jack Ruttle. I got your number from the Yellow Pages.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the woman apologized and returned to her original businesslike tone. “I was expecting someone else. I’m Sandy Shortt,” she said.

“Hello, Sandy.” Jack paced the small cluttered living room, tripping over the unevenly rolled, mismatching rugs that adorned the old wooden floors. “I’m sorry to call so late.” Get to the point, he hurried himself, pacing faster while he watched the bedroom door.

“Don’t worry. A call at this hour of the night is an insomniac’s dream, pardon the joke. How can I help you?”

He stopped pacing and held his head in his hand. What was he doing?

Sandy’s voice was gentle again. “Is somebody you know missing?”

“Yes,” was all Jack could reply.

“How long ago?” He could hear her rooting for paper.

“A year.” He settled on the arm of the couch.

“What is this person’s name?”

“Donal Ruttle.” He swallowed the lump in his throat.

She paused, then: “Yes, Donal,” a tone of recognition in her voice. “You’re a relative?”

“Brother…” Jack’s voice cracked and he knew he couldn’t go on. He needed to stop now; he needed to move on like the rest of his family. He was stupid to think that an insomniac from the phone book with too much time on her hands could succeed where an entire garda search hadn’t. “I’m sorry, I’m very, very sorry. This phone call was a mistake,” he forced out. “I’m sorry for wasting your time.” He quickly hung up the phone and fell back on the couch, embarrassed and exhausted, knocking against his files and sending pictures of a smiling Donal floating to the ground.

Moments later his mobile rang. He dived for it, not wanting the ring tone to waken Gloria.

“Donal?” he breathed, jumping to his feet.

“Jack, it’s Sandy Shortt.”

Silence.

“Is that how you usually answer the phone?” she asked gently.

He was lost for words.

“Because if it is and you’re still expecting your brother to call, I don’t think your phone call to me was a mistake, do you?”

His heart was hammering in his chest. “How did you get my number?”

“Caller ID.”

“My number is blocked.”

“I find people, Jack. That’s what I do. And there’s a chance that I can find Donal for you.”

He glanced at all the photographs scattered around him, the cheeky smile of his younger brother staring up at him, silently daring him to seek him out as he had when he was a child.

“Are you back in?” she asked.

“I’m in,” he replied, and he headed to the kitchen for a cup of coffee in preparation of the long night ahead.

The following night at two A.M., as Gloria lay asleep in bed, Jack lay on the couch, on the phone to Sandy, his hundreds of pages of garda reports scattered around him.

“You’ve spoken to Donal’s friends, I see,” Sandy said, and he could hear her leafing through the pages he’d faxed to her earlier in the day.

“Over and over again,” he said wearily. “In fact, I’m going to call in to one of his friends again on Saturday while I’m in Tralee. I’ve got a dental appointment,” he added casually and then wondered why.

“The dentist, yuck, I’d rather have my eyes gouged out,” she murmured.

Jack laughed.

“Don’t they have dentists in Foynes?”

“I have to see a specialist.”

He could hear the smile in her voice. “Don’t they have specialists in Limerick?”

“OK, OK,” he said, laughing. “So I wanted to ask Donal’s friend a few more questions.”

“Tralee, Tralee,” she repeated, rustling through paper. “A-ha.” The paper rustling stopped. “Andrew in Tralee, friend from college, works as a Web designer.”

“That’s him.”

“I don’t think Andrew knows anything more, Jack.”

“How do you know?”

“Judging by his answers during questioning.”

“I didn’t give you that file.” Jack sat upright.

“I used to be a garda. Conveniently for me, it’s about the only place I managed to make friends.”

“I need to see those files.” Jack’s heart raced. There was something new, something more for him to stay awake at night analyzing.

“We can meet up soon,” she dismissed him politely. “I suppose talking to Andrew again wouldn’t hurt.” There was a sound of her leafing through more pages and she was silent for a long time.

“What are you looking at?”

“Donal’s photograph.”

Jack picked it up from his pile and stared at it too. It was becoming too familiar to him; it was looking more like just a photograph and less like his brother every day.

“Good-looking guy,” Sandy complimented. “Nice eyes. Do you two look alike?”

Jack laughed. “I feel inclined to say yes after that.”

They continued studying the pages.

“You don’t sleep?” Sandy asked.

“No, not since Donal went missing. What about you?”

“I’ve just never been a great sleeper.”

He laughed.

“What?” she asked defensively.

“Nothing. You being a light sleeper is a great answer,” he said playfully, dropping the pages onto his lap. In the deathly silence of the cottage he listened to the sound of Sandy’s breathing and her voice and tried to imagine what she looked like, where she was, and what she was thinking.

After a long silence her voice was gentler. “I’ve a lot of missing people on my mind. There’s too much to think about, too many places to look to allow sleep to come. You can’t find anyone or anything in dreams.”

Jack looked toward the closed bedroom door and agreed.

“But why I told you that, I have no idea,” she grumbled to the sound of more paper being shifted.

“Tell me honestly, Sandy, what’s your success rate?”

Paper rustling stopped. “It depends of the level of the missing case. I’ll be honest with you, cases like Donal’s are difficult. There has already been a large-scale search and it’s rare that I have found someone under these circumstances. But with general missing cases I find people around forty percent of the time. You should know that not all the people I find return to their families. You have to be prepared for that.”

“I am prepared. If Donal’s lying in a ditch somewhere I want him back here so we can bury him and give him a proper funeral.”

“That’s not what I mean. Sometimes people go missing deliberately.”

“Donal wouldn’t do that,” Jack said dismissively.

“Perhaps not. But there have been situations, just like this, that I’ve learned that people, just like Donal, from families, just like yours, voluntarily move on from their lives without a word to anyone close to them.”

Jack digested this. It hadn’t occurred to him that Donal would take off of his own free will and he found this scenario hugely improbable. “Would you tell me where he was if you found him?”

“If he didn’t want to be found? No, I couldn’t tell you that.”

“Would you tell me if you found him?”

“It depends on how prepared you are to accept being unable to know where he is.”

“All I would want to know is that wherever he is, he’s safe and happy.”

“Well, then I would tell you.”

After a long silence, Jack asked, “Is there much work for you? On the rare occasions that people go missing, don’t their families turn to the Gardaí to deal with it?”

“That’s true. There aren’t many severe cases for me like Donal’s, but there’s always something or someone to find. There are categories of missing people that the Gardaí can’t and won’t investigate.”

“Like what?”

“You really want to know this?”

“I want to know everything about it.” Jack looked at the clock: two thirty A.M. “And besides, I’ve nothing better to do at this time of night.”

“Well, sometimes I find people that others have merely lost contact with, long-lost relatives, old school friends, or adopted children trying to find their biological parents, that kind of thing. I work quite a lot alongside the Salvation Army, trying to trace people. Then there are the more serious cases such as people who have disappeared, many of them of their own volition, and families just want to know where they are.”

“But how would the Gardaí know it was their choice?”

“Some people leave messages behind saying they don’t want to return.” He could hear her unwrapping something in the background. “Sometimes they take their personal effects with them or sometimes people have previously expressed dissatisfaction with their situation.”

“What are you eating?”

“A chocolate muffin,” she replied with her mouth full. She swallowed. “Sorry, did you hear me properly?”

“Yeah, you’re eating a chocolate muffin.”

“No, not that.” She laughed.

Jack smiled. “So the families come to you for cases the Gardaí can’t deal with.”

“Exactly. A lot of my work, using the help of other missing-persons agencies in Ireland, is in specifically tracking cases that aren’t classed as high risk. If a person has left home of their own accord they won’t be accepted as missing but it doesn’t ease the worries of their families and friends.”

“So they’re just forgotten about?”

“No, a record will be made at the station but the extent of the enquiries is left to the discretion of the garda in charge of the station.”

“What if somebody who was incredibly unhappy with his life packed his bags to be alone for a while, but then went missing? Nobody would look for him because he previously expressed a dislike of his life. And haven’t we all done that at some point?”

Sandy was silent.

“Am I wrong in thinking that? Wouldn’t you want to be found?”

“Jack, I can only assume that there’s only one thing more frustrating than not being able to find someone, and that’s not being found. I would want someone to find me, more than anything,” she said firmly.

They both thought it over.

“I’d better go now.” Jack yawned. “I’ve to be up for work in a few hours. Will you sleep now?”

“After I go through all these files again.”

He shook his head in wonder. “Just so you know, if you’d told me you’d never found anyone, I’d still be on this phone.”

She was quiet for a moment. “And if I’d never found anyone, I would be too.”