David Morrell - Long lost

The air at the lake became colder. "But surely they know the dentists who worked there before them."

"Nope. Gader says you don't remember the name of the dentist you went to or his address."

My head throbbed. "It was too long ago."

"Then it's a dead end. Gader says he's sorry."

"Yeah, I bet."

"He says if you're relying on dental records to prove that Lester Dant is really your brother using an alias, you're setting yourself up for a big disappointment. Anyway, how's that going to help find your family?"

"I don't know, but I can think of words that are a whole lot stronger than disappointment."

The cell phone's reception became staticky.

"Where are you calling from?" Payne asked.

"South Dakota."

"Nice there?"

"I didn't come for the scenery," I said.

"Well, as long as you're determined to be on the road, do you want some advice?"

"Provided it's not Take it easy and get some rest.'"

"No, something else. This might surprise you," Payne said. "It'll sound like encouragement."

"Then go ahead and surprise me."

"Until I put on all this weight and I got to relying on the Internet," Payne said, "I was a hands-on kind of investigator. That's why I noticed things others didn't. When there's time, nothing beats going to the places and people you want to know about."

" 'When there's time.'"

"Which you seem to have plenty of."

"You're suggesting that if I'm determined to find that dentist, I should do it myself?"

"More or less."

"You're right-it does sound like encouragement. Why the change?"

"Because I'm worried about you."

The reception became staticky again. I listened hard.

"I'm afraid, if you don't satisfy yourself one hundred percent that you've done everything you can, if you lose hope…"

I strained to hear, but the static became worse.

"… you'll destroy yourself."

"I'll get back to you later in the week," I said.

"What? I can't hear you."

I broke the connection.

As I imagined spending days in secluded places asleep in the back of the car, using my nights to drive as far as I could, I knew that Petey wouldn't have tolerated that routine much longer. The one thing that would have kept him motivated was his discovery- from the widespread news reports on the car radio a couple of days later (the media really loved the story)-that I hadn't died in the mountains. He wouldn't have told Kate and Jason that I was alive, of course. But his secret would have given him resolve, imagining how my fear and longing for my family made me suffer. No crowing midnight phone calls to me, no gleeful postcards, nothing with an inadvertent clue that might have led the police to him. Only taunting, gloating silence.

But, damn it, where would he have taken them? I thought about the South Dakota badlands ahead. In the old days, rustlers used to hide in the maze of sun-scorched canyons, the environment so hellish that posses wouldn't go in after them. It was too desperate a choice, even for Petey. After the badlands, there were hundreds of miles of flat grassland, hardly a tree anywhere, everything exposed. But Petey wouldn't have tolerated being in the open. Hide in plain sight? I doubted it. He wouldn't have felt protected without the shelter of hills and woods.

So had he found a place in the Black Hills? A deserted cabin maybe, or a…

I'd come as far as intuition could take me. A dead end, just as Gader had said that the idea about the dentist was a dead end.

The dentist. "Nothing beats going to the places and people you want to know about," Payne had said.

Yes.

After sleeping in the back of the car until sundown, I set out toward where I now realized my route had already been taking me, toward where everything had started so long ago.

Toward Petey's lost youth.

BROCKTON NEXT EXIT.

The sign caught me by surprise. It was two nights later. I'd gone through Iowa and Illinois and was now on Interstate 70, continuing relentlessly east through Indiana. My destination was Ohio. Just beyond Columbus. Woodford. My hometown.

But as I saw the sign for Brockton, Lester Dant's birthplace, I frowned. Although I'd long ago made myself familiar with Brockton's position on the map, this was the first time I'd realized that it, like Woodford, was close enough to 70 to merit an exit sign. Fixated on the dental records that I hoped to find in Woodford, I hadn't focused on Brockton. But at that moment, my attention rapidly shifted. I made the turn.

A two-lane road wound through shadowy farm country. After twenty miles, street lights revealed run-down houses and a bleak main street. Two-story buildings flanked it, some with for sale notices on windows. A sputtering neon sign announced brockton motel, vacancy. It too looked run-down, but with no other choice, I stopped.

A bell rang when I opened the office door. Harsh overhead lights hummed. A puffy-eyed woman in a robe shuffled from a room behind the office. "How many nights?"

I said, "Two," determined to stick around and learn as much as I could.

The elderly woman seemed puzzled that anyone would have a reason for staying in Brockton more than one night. "Cash only." She named an amount, a narrowness in her eyes suggesting that she thought the rate was a fortune, which it wasn't.

When I gave her the money, she looked relieved, handed me a key, yawned, and shuffled back to her room. "Soft-drink machine's outside next to the candy machine," she murmured over her shoulder.

"Sorry for waking you."

"Plenty of time to sleep when I'm dead."

Outside, in the humid night, a single bulb illuminated the parking area. There weren't any vehicles at any of the ten motel units. The key I'd been given was for number one. Imagining that I was Petey I noted that all the units were behind the manager's room. In the shadows, I couldn't be seen if I took a bound and gagged woman and child from my trunk.

The room was small, the sheets thin, the mirror dusty. I stared at my thickening beard stubble. My eyes looked haunted. I was a stranger to myself.

"Do you know this man?"

The manager looked as tired as when I'd wakened her the previous night. Her wrinkled mouth left a trace of lipstick on her coffee cup. Behind the counter, she tilted the police photo this way and that. "Not exactly flattering. How'd he get the scar on his chin?"

"Car accident."

"Can't say I recognize him. You another FBI agent?"

"Another?"

"Last year, somebody from the FBI asked me about this guy."

My optimism sank. If Gader had arranged for Dant's background to be double-checked, I was wasting my time.

"He must have done something really bad for you to keep looking for him," she said.

"Yes. Something really bad. Does the name Peter Denning sound familiar?"

"Nope."

"How about Lester Dant?"

"Dant." The woman thought a moment. "That's the name the other FBI agent asked about. There used to be a couple of families named Dant around here."

I felt more discouraged.

"The hardware store's named after one of them," she said, "but the man who owns it now is Ben Porter."

Wasting my time, I repeated to myself. Tempted to drive on to Woodford, I decided not to take anything for granted. "Where's the hardware store?"

"I don't know him." Ben Porter was in his fifties, as was just about everybody I'd passed in the sparsely populated town. His coveralls were flecked with sawdust from boards he'd been cutting. "But that doesn't mean much."

"Why not?"

"I never met the store's original owner. I kept the name Dant on the building to maintain tradition."