Paul Cleave - Collecting Cooper

Donovan Green leaves me the car he arrived in-a rental-and catches a taxi. The rental is a white four-door sedan about a year old. It tells me Green knew I would take on the case, that he knew I had no car, and from the moment he realized his daughter was missing he knew he would be contacting me if she didn’t show up. If there had even been any doubt, he would have decided that Fate or Destiny played a part in this-his daughter going missing thirty-six hours before I’m released from jail-there has to be something in that, and thank God it wasn’t the other way around, otherwise, instead of coming to me for help, he may have come to blame me for her disappearance. He’s given me a thousand dollars in cash for expenses with the promise of more if I need it. The cash is to smooth any wheels that grind to a halt along the way. He’s given me the gun he threatened to shoot me with last year. It brings back memories. I hide it beneath my wife’s side of the mattress. He’s given me a photograph of Emma when she was ten years old, taken at her birthday party. He’s asked me to carry it with me until I find her. He wants that photograph burning in my pocket as a constant reminder to find Emma, as if I need reminding. I fold it into my wallet. And he’s told me how he thinks Emma would react. She’s a smart kid, he said, one who wanted to study psychology because she thought she was good at figuring out what people thought. He said no matter what the situation, she would adapt and she would survive it. I just kept nodding the entire time hoping he was right, but knowing there wasn’t a lot a young girl like Emma could say to talk her way out of the situation some sick bastard has put her in.

He’s also given me a photograph of Emma taken a month ago. She’s an attractive girl. Last time I saw her she was lying in a hospital bed with tubes coming out of her body. She was awake and didn’t know who I was. I didn’t go into the room, just stood outside it arguing with her father, telling him I was sorry. Her black hair is hanging to her shoulders, framing a face with an easygoing smile, the kind you love to see on any attractive girl, but the kind you don’t see on many of them. There’s no doubt that smile could break some hearts. Her eyes are squinting a little on account of the sun, the background a park or a backyard somewhere.

My parents arrive only moments after my lawyer leaves. I hear them pull up and go back outside and meet them. They climb out of the car and Mum runs over and hugs me and Dad, who has never hugged a man in his life, shakes my hand and I invite them inside and we sit down drinking cold drinks while we catch up on all the same things we caught up on when they visited me twice a week in jail. Dad is in his midseventies, his hair white but full, no signs of it receding out of existence, a fact he’s proud of. He has a beard with no mustache, which is a real shame. He is relieved when I tell him I no longer need to borrow a car. Mum is in her early seventies and knows she may not be around in twenty years, and is making up for that by getting in as many words as she can before passing away. She has thick glasses that hang around her neck, a holdover from her years working as a librarian in town, and dark blond hair that’s been coming out of a bottle for the last twenty years. She offers to stay longer so she can help me around the house but I turn her down. My parents are lovely people, but spending the last four months without them calling me every day or popping in all the time certainly gave jail an upside. There aren’t any uncomfortable silences because my mum doesn’t give them time to develop. Mostly she updates us on what other family members are doing. I don’t have any brothers or sisters, but I wish I did because it’d spread Mum’s attention toward me a little thinner. I hear about my cousins, uncles, and aunts; new jobs; new additions to the family; who’s sick. I almost need to take notes just so I can keep up.

It’s nice seeing them, but it’s also nice seeing them leave. When they’re gone I drive to a nearby mall. I was once told that Christ-church has more mall space per capita than anywhere else in the Southern Hemisphere. The rental is quiet and easy to speed in by accident. The air-conditioning works a treat and the seats are comfortable enough to fall asleep in. There’s a huge bouncy castle set up in the parking lot, with dozens of laughing children jumping in or around it, a couple of clowns making balloon animals, and a few barbecues endlessly cooking hot dogs that nobody seems to be eating, all of it covered by large sun sails set up to make shade. Parents are standing around and chatting while keeping an eye on their kids, the occasional calm down, Billy or a don’t sit on her, Judy coming from them.

I find a parking space and head inside and spend two minutes looking at cell phones before deciding on a cheap model, figuring any extra features won’t do me any good with the luck I have when it comes to keeping a cell phone in one piece. The guy behind the counter has earrings in each ear and a small one in his left nostril and to be honest I just don’t get the point. He tries to sell me an expensive plan to make the phone cheaper and I have to turn him down four times before he lets it go. He puts in a new SIM card and lets me know my phone will take about an hour to connect to the network. I use some of the cash Donovan Green gave me. Somehow I manage to leave my wallet on the counter, and don’t realize it until the guy who sold me the phone catches up with me in the parking lot and hands it over in what looks like a reverse mugging. I try to offer him some money as a reward, and he waves it away and tells me that’s not why he returned it, that doing the right thing is about doing the right thing, not about getting something out of it.

From the mall I hit a thin flow of traffic, which gets even thinner the closer I get to the care home. The driveway leading up to it has been paved since the last time I was here. The trees on each side of it are drooping in the heat. The building is gray brick and about forty years old and doesn’t have the kind of appeal to make you think you could live here. The grounds are scenic, there are five hectares of them, beautiful enough to be on postcards. I step through the doors into an air-conditioned foyer and nothing in here has changed and I figure nothing ever will, including the nurses. Nurse Hamilton greets me with a small hug and tells me it’s good to see me and I think she means it. She’s been looking after my wife for three years, and before my jail sentence I would try to come out here every day. I’ve seen Nurse Hamilton hundreds of times and there’s nothing I know about her other than the fact that she’s a woman and a nurse and never wears any perfume and is at that timeless age where you can’t tell whether somebody is fifty or sixty or seventy. She follows me to Bridget’s room and updates me-but there isn’t much to update. Bridget has gotten four months older and nothing else. She’s sitting in a chair looking out over the grounds where a gardener without a shirt is riding a lawn mower, cutting stripes into the lawn. She has a slight tan, so before the heat wave struck somebody was wheeling her outside to sit in the sun for small periods at a time. I hold Bridget’s hand and it’s as warm as it was the last time I held it, and I spend an hour with her. In the room are photos of our daughter.

“I’ve missed you,” I tell her, and I hope that she’s missed me when the reality is she doesn’t even know I’ve been gone and doesn’t even know I’m here now. My wife is a sponge that absorbs the words but can’t do anything with them. “And I’m sorry,” I add.

I check the cell phone on the way back into town and it’s connected to the network. I punch in Schroder’s number and the line is clear.