Chapter 56 Caro
CARO
“HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN?” Caro is at the Spring Creek Police Station, her head in her hands. She doesn’t know why she’s asking this. It’s not the police’s fault.
“I’m so sorry,” Dan says next to her. It’s not his fault, either. She knows this, even though she’s furious at him. He was bringing Henry to see her, and he lost him.
She can’t look at Dan. She knows he’s there—his steady presence, his brown eyes and hair, his hand on her knee. She knows there is more comfort there if she would turn and fold into his arms, but she can’t.
She is so angry with him, with the staff at Lookout Pointe, with everyone, but she knows it’s only her brain trying to create a distraction from where the blame really lies.
It’s her fault. Hers alone. She is his daughter. She is the one responsible for him.
Dad, where did you go?
“What about his tracking device?” Caro asks Dan, lifting her head.
They’d picked one up yesterday, and the bracelet is supposed to be impossible to remove.
“Was he wearing it when you went inside the grocery store?” The last time the device updated it said that he was at the hotel.
Now it says it’s “inactive,” which means it’s either not working or he’s turned it off.
But he’s not supposed to be able to do that.
“Yes,” Dan says. He had taken Henry into the Spring Creek Grocery on their way to Sonnet, to get some snacks Henry wanted, and he’d given Dan the slip somehow.
Her dad is still fast when he wants to be.
“I don’t know why it’s not updating and saying we were there.
He had the bracelet. I saw it on him.” His voice is deep and sad.
“Caro, I’m so sorry. All I did was look down and pick up a box of granola bars and he was gone. ”
“We have a Silver Alert out on him,” Officer Clark says.
“We usually find people quickly once we’ve done that.
I’m sure he’ll turn up. The waiting is the hardest part.
” He slides a phone and a wallet across the table to Caro.
“Someone did find these in the Wendy’s at the edge of Spring Creek, about half a mile away from the grocery store. ”
“He loves Frostys,” Caro says. Okay. This is good. He’s been seen since he disappeared. He’s going to places he likes.
“That’s good to know,” Officer Clark says. “Are there any other spots he likes to go? Or places from his past that he might want to revisit?”
“Yes, but they’re mostly in St. John,” Caro says.
“We’ll call the police there and have them start looking, too,” Officer Clark says.
“All the Wendy’s, the diner on Main Street, the independent bookstore, gas stations.” Caro lists them out. “The library. His old house. Do you need the addresses?”
The officer takes them down.
“And the university,” she says. “He used to teach a class there.”
“Wait,” Officer Clark says. “Dr. Stewart.” His face lights up. “I actually took medical anatomy from him as an undergrad, years ago. I hadn’t connected the dots. He’s a wonderful person.”
“He is,” Caro says around the lump in her throat. Dan’s hand grips her knee, gently. She still can’t bring herself to look at him head-on. In spite of knowing it’s not his fault, she’s so damn angry with him. And, of course, even more so with herself.
The receptionist comes over with two bottles of water. “He helped us out here once, too,” she says. She looks about Caro’s father’s age, but her eyes are sharp and lucid. “That awful case with that girl, years ago.”
“He did?” Caro asks. That must have been the girl who fell in the Underground, the one he couldn’t save. Right? Or had there been another?
Officer Clark gestures to Henry’s phone. “Do you mind checking that out, seeing if everything looks normal?” he asks. “I assume you might have had some hand in setting it up for him, given it’s a very new model?”
“Yes,” Caro says. “He likes having a good camera on his phone. He loves taking pictures.”
She gives the phone a once-over while the others make small talk in the background.
For the most part everything looks fine: There are the apps she has installed.
Libby, for the audiobooks she checks out for him from the library online.
Weather, messaging, email, of course. Spotify, for his music.
He’s on her account, and it’s bittersweet to look it over each day, seeing what songs he’s listening to, getting the tiniest glimpse into his brain.
She can sometimes tell it’s been a bad day by what he’s listened to—the same song, over and over and over, likely to comfort himself, or perhaps because on those hard days he can’t remember how to select another song. Either option breaks her heart.
She has always felt torn since she moved away, but these last few years have been excruciating.
Her job and Dan’s are in Salt Lake City.
That is their home. Henry needs to be in St. John, because that’s his.
And so she has two homes and no home; her heart is in two places and she rarely feels whole.
The ache and measure of what she can and can’t do, of how badly she is failing everyone, is breaking her.
But there’s one app she didn’t install for him.
Uber. What? She clicks on it, sees that there have been a few rides to and from the library and Lookout Pointe.
That place did not keep close enough tabs on him.
None of them are suspicious—the library is fine; he does like to go there—but that’s not the point.
She had no idea he could use Uber. And he’s been going to the library a lot.
She hopes, hopes, hopes that none of these drivers took advantage of him in any way.
Financially, emotionally—she can’t even bear to think about the other possibilities—
She opens the notes app on a whim, in case he’s somehow managed to learn that, too, but there’s nothing there.
His email looks normal—she’s heartened to see that he has been keeping in touch with a few more friends than she realized, talking with them about old memories they share and current political events.
There might be something there, but a cursory read of a few of them doesn’t result in anything immediately jumping out at her.
Some of his emails are more lucid than others, which is par for the course with all his communications these days.
Then she opens the photos on his phone. They seem boring at first—he has taken a picture of every Frosty he’s ever had, every time he eats dinner, all the books he’s reading.
It takes her only a few seconds to realize what he’s doing.
He’s trying to keep track of his day. He’s trying to remember what he does.
Her heart is sick. She is about to close out of the photos when she sees a screenshot of something that looks familiar.
An article about Hope.
That’s not all that strange. She’s mentioned her friendship with Hope to him.
She assumed he wouldn’t recognize or remember the name.
But as she goes back she sees that he did.
There are many screenshots on his phone of articles about Hope over the past two years.
About her movies, who she’s dating, what she wore to different events.
And a couple of the old articles about how she had a stalker who the police didn’t take seriously, who ended up making it all the way into her house before they took him down.
It’s no big deal that Dad has these articles, she tells herself. That’s part of what he was doing, trying to keep track of things and people and learn about and remember my life. Yet it’s vaguely unsettling, seeing her friend’s face so many times on her father’s phone.
And she still feels guilty about telling her father who Hope really was when she didn’t tell Dan.
“There’s nothing obvious,” Caro says. “Can I hold on to it? Keep looking?”
“Yes, of course,” Officer Clark says. “We may ask for your permission to sign off on our accessing his data at some point, but we’re not there yet. I assume you have power of attorney?”
“I do.”
He pushes back his chair. “Then I think what might be best for you to do is to go back to Sonnet, where he went the last time he was missing, and stay there. Would that work? He was in the drive-in movie theater, correct?”
“Yes,” she says.
“Do you remember which car he turned up in?”
“I think so.” Caro pushes back her chair, too, the phone in her shaking hand.
“Have you heard anything about Hope?” She should have asked that the minute she got here.
The twin worries, the twin losses, of Henry and Hope, are eating her alive one at a time, consuming everything in her so there’s no space for the other.
“No,” Officer Clark says. “I’m sorry. We’ll let you know as soon as we do.”
He sees them to the door, and as they step out into the afternoon heat and bright of southern Utah in summer, Caro blinks and reaches for her sunglasses.
“I’ll come to Sonnet with you,” Dan says.
“No.” Caro says it sharply, and he flinches.
“I’m sorry. I don’t blame you. I’m not mad at you.
” She is, but Henry is her responsibility.
She shouldn’t have handed it off. “It seems to make more sense for you to go somewhere else to look for him, since he knows you. What if you go back to St. John, maybe, to our old house, and wait there? He might get freaked out if he goes back and sees police officers.”
“Of course,” Dan says. She doesn’t mean to look at him full-on, but he won’t let her glance away this time. And oh. There he is. Her Dan, with his kind eyes and his floppy brown hair. His mouth with its Harrison Ford quirk at the side when he’s worried or amused. He’s the former now.
“Caro.” He puts his hands, very gently, on either side of her face. “I’m so sorry.”