Jeremy Finley - The Darkest Time of Night

I had talked to her off and on for several weeks. But then her parents listened in on one of the calls and forbid her from calling “those whackos in Illinois” again. So she called from pay phones when she got off work at the restaurant around the corner from her house. I stayed late at work to accept her calls.

A month after her first call, Barbara showed up at the office.

“I took the bus all night. I had to see your face,” she had said to my astonished expression. “You’re as nice as I pictured.”

Barbara sat and talked with Dr. Richards and me for hours, pleading with us to come to Michigan to help her search. The more she talked, the more she twisted a strand of hair on the back of her neck. “Nervous habit,” she said, smiling sheepishly.

Dr. Richards had explained they didn’t have a budget for traveling. She vowed to give them all her money. Steven shook his head. “I can get you in touch again with my colleague at the University of Michigan, who told you about us—”

“I don’t want him. I want you. And Lynn. He talked about theories of missing people, including something called… Argentum? Am I saying that right?”

Dr. Richards frowned. “I’m sorry, Barbara. I can’t help you, especially with that.”

Even though I didn’t have the money either, I had paid for her bus ticket back to Michigan. I gave her one of the laminated poems. She had cried at the bus terminal, and I cried along with her.

“That can never happen again,” Dr. Richards later said. “Sometimes people expect us to drop everything and find their loved ones. Give them one of the cards and end it with that. It can’t work any other way. We only gather information, take careful notes—”

“If all we’re doing is gathering facts, how does this ever help anyone?”

“Because it might not now. Might not in ten years, twenty years. But one day, we’ll have enough cases to show that this can’t be ignored.”

“Why was she asking about Argentum? Who is that? What is that?”

“I’m going to have a long talk with my esteemed colleague in Michigan about that. He knows better. It’s a theory about extraterrestrials that we are all instructed to dismiss outright. I’ve heard some talk that it’s about aliens inhabiting human form, or that it refers to interdimensional travel. It’s our Loch Ness monster—everyone has heard of it, and no one has any proof.” Dr. Richards didn’t bother to hide his irritation.

“Perhaps I should refer her to some of the other organizations. I’ve read quite a bit about UFO theorists—”

“For God’s sake, don’t do that. Me and my… peers… we aren’t like the others in those other groups. I mean, I appreciate the work APRO and NICAP are doing—”

“But you don’t belong to them. The Aerial Phenomena Research Organization and the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena are quite open with their mission. Why not join them?”

When he raised his eyebrows, I shrugged. “I do research. I pay attention.”

“Good organizations, good people, their focus is just different than ours.”

“How?”

“We have a primary mission of trying to connect people who have gone missing to abductions. APRO and NICAP are doing admirable work on people who are returned quickly from abductions. My theory, and the theory that I share with my peers, is that unexplained disappearances of people all over the world can be tied to the abductions.”

“Where’s your proof, besides the stories told by people they leave behind?”

He chewed on the end of his pencil. “I wonder what you think…”

“What I think?”

He jotted down something on the paper in front of him. “You have a brilliant mind, Lynn.” He looked once more, intently, at his writing.

I pulled my cardigan tighter around me.

I left work early, taking Barbara’s file home with me. At home, I read through it five more times. Then I grabbed my coat. Tom had come home at that exact moment, and I told him I’d be back later. When he asked about dinner, I pretended I didn’t hear.

Dr. Richards had already left his office, but he recently had given me a key, for emergencies. I figured this counted.

Three hours later, I found what I was looking for. I cleared off the battered couch in his office and lay down to read. At midnight, I’d meant to only close my eyes for a moment.

I awoke to Dr. Richards standing over me. “Your husband is banging on the doors outside the Curry Hall entrance. You better go.”

“What time is it?”

“Seven A.M. Did you sleep here all night?”

“I have to tell you what I found.”

“No, you have to go.”

“It’s the weather. That’s the commonality. It’s the weather.”

“We can talk about this later. Go home. Take the day off and get some rest—”

“I have to tell you about this.”

“Not a good time. Not only is your husband outside, but I have a faculty review today. I will have no time today.”

“Then I will be here at the end of the day. Wait for me.”

Tom and I had fought all day. I called him a stranger, he called me disconnected. I cried, he paced. I was grateful at dusk when he announced he needed to go out for a run. I lied about going to a coffee shop to work on my book.

I didn’t even knock when I reached Dr. Richards’s office. He put on his glasses as I sat down.

“You may not remember the Soothe case in Alaska; we don’t have much on it,” I began. “But something jogged my memory about the date. I realized why when I studied Barbara’s case. A man went missing there, exactly two years to the day Barbara’s brother went missing. In a snowstorm.”

“There’s always a snowstorm in Alaska in winter.”

“His wife told police she saw lights in the snowstorm. You mentioned the abductions in Arkansas and on that Greek island. But you failed to mention it was during blistering nights of temperatures in the upper nineties—ninety-eight degrees to be precise—with scattered storms producing heavy downpours that lasted mere minutes. Same dates, almost exact same weather pattern. What if that’s what happens? If we started to piece together all those dates, and match them up with the weather…”

I then slowly shook my head in realization. “That’s what you’ve been having me do, isn’t it? You’re not putting them in some kind of chronological order. You’re matching the dates of the missing and comparing the weather.”

Dr. Richards slid back his chair and walked around the desk, clearly uncomfortable in his proximity to me. “I think they come on the same days, in different years, but in the same weather. And I think they return to the same places, too, over and over again. But the abductions can come years, even decades apart. I don’t know why. But that’s the key, I think. Lynn, it took me my whole life to figure this out. You put it together in a few months. I hoped you would help me get organized. But I never expected you’d become a colleague.”

When I smiled, he did too. I was surprised at how his entire face lit up, his usual downtrodden eyes forming crescent moons.

I’ve found that life has no tolerance for dwelling in memories. I may have wanted to stay in bed, examining those thrilling and confusing times to seek clues that could help find William. But my recollection was ended by an exhausted sleep, and then the cat pawing at my face, ready to be fed. Since school hadn’t let out for fall break yet, I had to rush to get Greg to school and check in on Brian, followed by a complete collapse by Anne, in which she sobbed on the couch for an hour, and then a call from Tom that we needed to have dinner together tonight to discuss some important things. I’d put some salmon in the oven, but when we sat down to dinner, I quickly lost my appetite over what my husband had to say.