“Adam Harper.”
“Is that what you call him?” I ask.
“What else? He is a man I’ve never seen, who doesn’t have a name. The closer I get, the more quickly he slips away.”
“Why did you come here?”
“Because it’s a place that you and Melissa have in common. And I’m out of leads, out of time. This is the last solid thing I have.”
“Same.”
He turns to regard me, gives me a kind of up and down assessing glance. Is he looking at me? Or trying to decide if I’m telling the truth? “Fair enough.”
I walk over to his bedside and pick up the book he has there about the dark web. It’s a floppy paperback, looks self-published with bad art and unprofessional looking typeface.
When Bailey speaks again, his voice has gone soft.
“Time is running out. She’s slipping away. Time is a kind of distance, isn’t it? It’s a road you can’t turn back on.”
Maybe he’s fallen in love with Mia, I think. Or the ghost of her, his idea of her—since they’ve never met. Maybe he’s been chasing her so long, tracking her, that he’s formed a kind of attachment. There’s a tug to him, a kind of sad understanding.
“My firm,” he says. “My boss, Nora, she wants to pull the plug and tell the client our case is cold.”
“Is it?”
“I haven’t found a single thing that brings me closer to her. Except for you.”
I tell him about the email message I received. The texts on my phone. They are lures on the end of a line. All I have to do is bite and he’ll reel me in.
“This is not a game,” he says when I’m done. He moves closer to me, his face dark with worry. We stand a foot apart in the middle of the room. “He’s a dangerous man. A predator. What do you think he wants from you, Wren? Why is he reaching out?”
“I don’t know.”
But I do. I feel the pull of that darkness, a deadly riptide. It reminds me in a weird way of my father, how the things he said about the world, and nature, and mankind both frightened me and made a kind of sense. How I wanted to get away from him and get closer to him all in one complicated twist of the heart.
“Because he knows you’re hooked into him,” Bailey says. “He knows you’ll go to him. And then what do you think will happen?”
In tracking, it’s a known quantity that your quarry may, will probably, elude you. You can follow the sign—the prints, the broken branches—but you may never find the creature that left little pieces of himself behind. Even when he’s in your sights, one wrong move and he will dash away. Every good hunter knows that nature is smarter, faster, more sensitive than he will ever be. If you catch what you’re stalking, it’s a gift, something that’s been offered, not something taken. But you still hunt if you want to survive.
“Do you have another plan?” I say, already knowing the answer. “Another way to find him? To find out what happened to Mia?”
The frown he wears deepens, he rubs at his temples with a thumb and forefinger.
“I don’t.” He sounds weary with the admission.
A photograph falls out of the book I’m holding. When I bend to pick it up, I see that it’s a portrait—a man who looks like an older, thicker version of Bailey, a woman with dark hair and kind face, a younger girl who looks like her but slimmer. All of them wind whipped and smiling, a beach behind them. I’m guessing it’s his family—parents, a sister. Something about that makes me like him a little more. I remember that he mentioned a brother and wonder why he’s not shown. It seems rude to ask. So, I slip the picture back in the book, and say nothing.
I walk back over to the desk, put down the book. From the stack of Bailey’s files, I take the one labeled Greenwood. He nods to acknowledge that it belongs to me. Then I walk out the door, and climb into my car. He comes out after me right away, climbs into his own truck.
As I pull out of the lot, Bob waves to me from the office window. And Bailey Kirk follows me back to town.
thirty-three
Then
My mother took me to town the next day, a rare thing. She had a bruise on the side of her face; she’d done an artful job of covering it with makeup and styling her hair in a way that it was barely noticeable, nothing more than the faintest shadow. If you didn’t know it was there, maybe you wouldn’t see it all.
In the cab of the old pickup truck, we bounced down the rural road. We were headed out to find the ingredients for Guinness stew, my father’s favorite. A way to appease him maybe, to make him happy. She was always looking for ways to make him less angry.