Nicholas Sparks - Safe Haven

He went to the bus station. He showed his badge and carried a larger photograph of her. The first two times he visited, none of the ticket sellers had recognized her. The third time, though, one of them hesitated and said that it might have been her, except that her hair was short and brown and that she was pregnant. He didn’t, however, remember her destination. Back at home, Kevin found a photograph of her on the computer and used Photoshop to change her hair from blond to brown and then shortened it. He called in sick again on Friday. That’s her , the ticket seller confirmed, and Kevin felt a surge of energy. She thought she was smarter than he was, but she was stupid and careless and she’d made a mistake. He took a couple of vacation days the following week and continued to hang around the bus station, showing the new photograph to drivers. He arrived in the morning and left late, since the drivers came and went all day long. There were two bottles in the car, and he poured the vodka into a Styrofoam cup and sipped it with a straw.

On Saturday, eleven days after she’d left him, he found the driver. The driver had taken her to Philadelphia. He remembered her, he said, because she was pretty and pregnant and she didn’t have any luggage.

Philadelphia. She might have left again from there to parts unknown, but it was the only lead he had. Plus, he knew she didn’t have much money.

He’d packed a bag and hopped in his car and drove to Philadelphia. He parked at the bus station and tried to think like her. He was a good detective and he knew that if he could think like her, he’d be able to find her. People, he’d learned, were predictable.

The bus had arrived a few minutes before four o’clock, and he stood in the bus station, looking from one direction to the next. She had stood here days earlier, he thought, and he wondered what she would do in a strange city with no money and no friends and no place to go. Quarters and dimes and dollar bills wouldn’t go far, especially after purchasing a bus ticket.

It was cold, he remembered, and it would have been getting dark soon. She wouldn’t want to walk far and she would need a place to stay. A place that took cash. But where? Not here, in this area. Too expensive. Where would she go? She wouldn’t want to get lost or head in the wrong direction, which meant that she probably looked in the phone book. He went back inside the terminal and looked under hotels. Pages and pages, he realized. She might have picked one, but then what? She’d have to walk there. Which meant she’d need a map.

He went to the convenience store at the station and bought himself a map. He showed the clerk the photograph but he shook his head. He hadn’t been working on Tuesday, he said. But it felt right to Kevin. This, he knew, was what she did. He unfolded the map and located the station. It bordered on Chinatown and he guessed she had headed in that direction.

He got back in his car and drove the streets of Chinatown, and again it felt right. He drank his vodka and walked the streets. He started at those businesses closest to the bus station and showed her picture around. No one knew anything but he had the sense that some of them were lying. He found cheap rooms, places he never would have taken her, dirty places with dirty sheets, managed by men who spoke little English and took only cash. He implied that she was in danger if he couldn’t find her. He found the first place she’d stayed, but the owner didn’t know where she’d gone after that. Kevin put a gun to the man’s head, but even though he cried, he couldn’t tell Kevin anything more.

Kevin had to go back to work on Monday, furious that she’d eluded him. But the following weekend, he was back in Philadelphia. And the weekend after that. He expanded his search, but the problem was that there were too many places and he was only one person and not everyone trusted an out-of-town cop.

But he was patient and diligent and he kept coming back and took more vacation days. Another weekend passed. He widened his search, knowing she would need cash. He stopped in bars and restaurants and diners. He would check every one in the city if he had to. Finally, a week after Valentine’s Day, he met a waitress named Tracy who told him that Erin was working at a diner, except she was calling herself Erica. She was scheduled to work the following day. The waitress trusted him because he was a detective, and she’d even flirted with him, handing him her phone number before he left.

He rented a car and waited up the block from the diner the following morning, before the sun was up. Employees entered through a door in the alley. He sipped from his Styrofoam cup in the front seat, watching for her. Eventually, he saw the owner and Tracy and another woman head down the alley. But Erin never showed, and she didn’t show up the following day, either, and no one knew where she lived. She never came back to pick up her paycheck.

He found where she lived a few hours later. It was walking distance from the diner, a piece-of-crap hotel. The man, who accepted only cash, knew nothing except that Erin had left the day before and come back and left again in a hurry. Kevin searched her room but there was nothing inside, and when he finally raced to the bus station there were only women in the ticket booths and none of them remembered her. Buses in the last two hours were traveling north, south, east, and west, going everywhere.

She’d disappeared again, and in the car Kevin screamed and beat his fists against the wheel until they were bruised and swollen.

In the months that Erin had been gone, he felt the ache inside grow more poisonous and all-consuming, spreading like a cancer every day. He had returned to Philadelphia and questioned the drivers over the next few weeks, but it hadn’t amounted to much. He eventually learned that she’d gone on to New York, but from there, the trail went cold. Too many buses, too many drivers, too many passengers; too many days had passed since then. Too many options. She could be anywhere, and the thought that she was gone tormented him. He flew into rages and broke things; he cried himself to sleep. He was filled with despair and sometimes felt like he was losing his mind.

It wasn’t fair. He’d loved her since the first time they met in Atlantic City. And they’d been happy, hadn’t they? Early on in the marriage, she used to sing to herself as she put on her makeup. He used to bring her to the library and she would check out eight or ten books. Sometimes she would read him passages and he would hear her voice and watch the way she leaned against the counter and think to himself that she was the most beautiful woman in the world.

He’d been a good husband. He bought her the house she wanted and the curtains she wanted and the furniture she wanted, even though he could barely afford it. After they were married, he often bought flowers from street vendors on the way home, and Erin would put them in a vase on the table along with candles, and the two of them would have romantic dinners. Sometimes, they ended up making love in the kitchen, her back pressed against the counter.

He never made her work, either, and she didn’t know how good she had it. She didn’t understand the sacrifices he made for her. She was spoiled and selfish and it used to make him so angry because she didn’t understand how easy her life was. Clean the house and make a meal and she could spend the rest of her days reading stupid books she checked out from the library and watching television and taking naps and never having to worry about a utility bill or mortgage payment or people who talked about him behind his back. She never had to see the faces of people who had been murdered. He kept that from her because he loved her, but it had made no difference. He never told her about the children who’d been burned with irons or tossed from the roofs of buildings or women stabbed in the alley and thrown in Dumpsters. He never told her that sometimes he had to scrape the blood from his shoes before he got in the car, and when he looked into the eyes of murderers he knew he was coming face-to-face with evil because the Bible says To kill a person is to kill a living being made in God’s image .