On the dashboard sat a half-eaten pile of French fries that had begun to soak through the thin cardboard tray. I was hungry, but I couldn’t stomach to finish it.
“Tell me where you’re at; maybe I can take a long weekend and come join you.” He sounded earnest, a shiver in his voice, like he longed to escape the normalcy of his perfect, sterile life. Two kids and a corgi named Scotch and a wife who bakes sugar cookies in the shapes of trees and hearts every damn Thursday. Every goddamned Thursday, he told me once. Like he both loved and loathed it. He longed for dirty hotel rooms and shitty roadside diner food and smoky bars and smoky girls who all have the same names. Who all think you’re a better man than what you really are.
Ben wanted what I had.
But Ben’s average life had something mine didn’t: a home. Shelter. A place you went after a long day that folded you into its center and held you there, safe, protected from everything that lurked beyond your front door. Instead, I had an old truck that wheezed and choked every time I started it, and a quarter tank of gas. And that was about it.
But I didn’t deserve a safe, average life. Those things were given to good, decent people. I was not good or decent.
I was destruction and missed chances and moments I couldn’t take back.
“You don’t want to come here,” I said into the phone. “Trust me. Jack Kerouac wouldn’t be sitting in a truck stop parking lot eating day-old fries and considering how far I might get into Canada before I run out of money.” I sounded morose, desperate, and I didn’t like the feeling.
“You’re right, Kerouac would be drinking his dinner,” Ben said. “Maybe that’s your problem.”
“Maybe.” I smiled.
Silence cut through the phone and I could hear Ben breathing. He didn’t just call to check up on me, make sure I wasn’t dead. He called for something else. “I’ve got something you might be interested in.”
I swallowed and turned my gaze to the truck stop diner a good distance across the parking lot. Two men were walking through the double doors, and I could make out a long bar inside with metal stools that ran the length of the diner and several booths set beneath the windows with sad, olive-green upholstery. Most of the stools and booths were occupied. The place was meant to be brightly lit, to serve coffee all night, to keep drivers awake for whatever long stretch of road they faced ahead.
“What’s that?” I asked Ben.
“A job.”
“I don’t do that anymore.”
He exhaled into the phone. “I know, but it might be good for you. Give you something to focus on.” So he didn’t truly think the Jack Kerouac life was the one I should be pursuing after all: He was trying to lure me back to my old life. Ben was a detective now. After eight years as a cop he finally got promoted, but now he spends most of his time behind a desk, and he hates being sedentary. A slow fucking death, he once said. Over the years, he’d sent cases my way, referred families to me when they started to lose hope. And I knew how this call would go, he would try to convince me to take one more job. One more missing person. Like he thought it might bring me back.
“I can’t,” I said. My work was the very thing I was trying to escape.
Again, he made a sound, drawing in a deep breath, like he was trying to think of the right words that might convince me. “You’d be doing me a favor,” he added. So, he would use guilt, a favor for an old friend. Only an asshole refuses that.
“How’s that?” I asked cautiously.
“They’re friends of my family. I’ve known them my whole life. Their daughter disappeared.”
My heart began to pound inside my chest. A missing daughter. A string of words I’ve heard too many times over the years—the most common type of disappearance. Also, the kind of disappearance that now makes my skin break into a sweat. Regret and grief and sickening dread wove itself through me, suffocating me with a wave of memories that I had been working so hard to forget.
“You might have heard of her,” he continued. “Her name is Maggie St. James. She’s a writer. She vanished five years ago, police have stopped searching, and the family’s desperate.”
Desperate family. Another common phrase. That’s when they track me down, that’s when someone suggests they call Travis Wren: He might be able to help. I’m the last resort.
“Five years is a long time,” I said. Even though I knew it wasn’t. I once found a kid who had been abducted seventeen years earlier when he was only six months old. And I found him, alive, living with a family up in Rhode Island. Not his real family—but the family who kidnapped him. They wanted a baby so bad that they stole one from a stroller in a Kroger parking lot while his real mother was loading bags of produce and dog food into the back of her silver Honda.
“Not for you,” Ben said. He knew about most of my cases. But he probably also knew I was looking for an excuse, any reason to say no to what he was about to ask. “They need your help,” he said then. “Do me this favor, Travis. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t know the family; they live in the same neighborhood as my parents. You remember Aster Heights, with that old Rotting Hill Cemetery at the east end?”
Its real name is Rooster Hill Cemetery, but we always called it Rotting Hill, for obvious reasons. It was also the cemetery where my sister was buried, set down into the earth much too soon, eyes wide and blue beneath her closed lashes, as if searching, searching. Waiting for me.
I’m not sure if Ben remembered it was where Ruth had been buried, but hearing him mention the cemetery caused memories to coil tight inside my mind, painful and blunt-edged, like being struck on the back of the head with a hammer.
If it weren’t for this single thing, if he hadn’t brought up Rotting Hill, I might have flat-out said no. But instead I sat, watching the sky turn a muddy, washed-up gray as rain began to fall in oversized drops against the windshield.