Laura Dave - The Last Thing He Told Me

“So, if you’ve got it handled, why are you sitting here by yourself, in the middle of the night, staring at your daughter’s piggy bank?”

“Thinking of breaking it open,” he said. “In case we need the money.”

“What’s going on, Owen?” I said.

“Do you know what Bailey said to me tonight? When I told her we had to evacuate? She said she wanted to go with Bobby’s family instead. That they’re staying at the Ritz and she wanted to be with him. It turned into a whole, big thing.”

“Where was I?”

“Locking down your workshop.”

I shrugged, trying to be gentle. “She’s growing up.”

“I know, it’s totally normal, I get it, but… the strangest thing happened when I told her no,” he said. “I watched her stomp after me toward the car. And I just kept thinking, she’s going to leave me . Maybe it’s being a single parent all this time, just trying to keep the two of us above water, but I don’t think I ever fully thought about the fact… or maybe I just didn’t let myself.”

“So that’s why you are downstairs, looking at her piggy bank in the middle of the night?”

“Maybe. Or maybe it’s just a strange bed,” he said. “Can’t sleep.”

He picked up his bourbon, held it near his lips.

“When she was a little girl, when we first got to Sausalito, she was scared to walk down the docks. I think it was because the day after we moved in, Mrs. Hahn slipped and fell and Bailey saw her almost go down, almost land in the water.”

“That’s terrible!” I say.

“Yeah, well, for those first couple of months, she would make me hold her hand the whole way down the docks. From our front door, all the way to the parking lot. And she’d ask as we went, Daddy, you’re going to keep me safe, right? Daddy, you’re not going to let me fall? It took us like six and a half hours to get from the front door to the car.”

I laughed.

“It drove me crazy. The hundredth time I had to do it, I actually think I went a little crazy.” He paused. “And you know the only thing worse than that? The day she stopped.”

I put my hand on his elbow, held him there. My heart exploding a little at his love for her.

“There is going to come a time when I won’t be able to keep her safe anymore, not from anything,” he said. “I won’t even be able to tell her no anymore.”

“Well, I can relate to that,” I said. “I can’t even tell her no now.”

He looked over at me, bourbon still in hand, and laughed. He really laughed—my joke breaking his sadness, splintering it for him.

He put down his drink and turned toward me. “On a scale of one to ten, how weird is it that I’m sitting here?”

“Without the piggy bank?” I said. “It would be a two, maybe a three…”

“With the piggy bank? Am I breaking six?”

“Afraid so.”

He put the piggy bank on an empty stool, and motioned for the bartender.

“Would you please make my wonderful wife here the drink of her choice?” he said. “And I’ll take a cup of coffee.”

Then he leaned in, put his forehead against mine.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be. It’s hard, I get it, but it’s not happening tomorrow, she’s not leaving tomorrow,” I said. “And she loves you so much. She’s never going to leave you completely.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“I do.”

He kept his forehead there, touching mine. “I just hope Bailey doesn’t wake up and find us gone,” he said. “If you look outside, you can see the Ritz.”

Little White Churches

Elenor H. McGovern peers at Bailey over her bifocals.

“So let me get this straight,” she says. “You want to know what?”

We are sitting in Elenor’s office at an Episcopal church. It’s a large church, one of the oldest cathedrals in Austin, more than a hundred years old. And just over a half mile from the football stadium. But most important, it is the only church we’ve walked into—the final of the six contenders—that Bailey said felt familiar to her.

“We are just looking for a list of weddings that were held here during the 2008 football season,” Bailey says.

Elenor, who is in her early seventies and pushing six feet tall, looks at us, overwhelmed.

“It’s less complicated than it sounds,” I say. “We actually just need a list of the weddings your pastor performed during the home games of the 2008 season. And we don’t need the weddings that fell on the other days of those weekends. Just the weddings that happened to actually take place during the Longhorns’ home games. That’s all.”

“Oh, during the home games from twelve years ago. Is that all?”

I ignore her tone and plow forward, hoping to turn her around. “I actually already did the legwork,” I say.

I nudge the list across the table toward her. I’ve created a chart with the Longhorns’ schedule from twelve years ago. I had Jules cross-check it at the San Francisco Chronicle , using their research tools, just to be sure that we didn’t miss any of the games, just to make sure we checked all the boxes.

There are only eight dates in question. There are only eight dates when a small Bailey could have been walking into the stadium with Owen, could have found herself sitting here.

Elenor stares at the list. But she doesn’t make a move to pick it up.

I look around the office, for clues about her—clues that may help me win her over. Christmas cards and bumper stickers cover her desk; photographs of Elenor’s family are lined up on the fireplace mantel; a large bulletin board is brimming over with photographs and notes from parishioners. The office reveals forty years of building relationships right in this room, in this church. She knows everything about this place. We just need to know one small piece of it.

“I know it seems like a lot,” I say. “But, if you take a look, you’ll see we have downloaded the home game schedule from the 2008 season. And we are looking at fewer than ten weekends. We have them all for you, ready to go. Even if your pastor officiated two weddings a weekend, it’d be fewer than twenty couples.”

“Look,” Elenor says. “I’m sorry. I’m simply not authorized to give out that information.”

“I understand that’s the policy and why that’s the policy,” I say. “But you must agree these are exceptional circumstances.”

“Of course. It’s terrible to hear that your husband is missing. It seems you are dealing with a lot because of his absence. But that doesn’t change our policy.”

“Can’t you make an exception to your policy?” Bailey says, her tone too harsh. “We clearly aren’t serial killers or anything. We could care less who these people are.”

I put my hand on Bailey’s leg, trying to calm her.

“We can sit here while we read the names,” I say. “No printouts or addresses even have to leave this room.”

Elenor looks back and forth between us, like she is torn between helping us and kicking us out. But it looks like she is leaning toward kicking us out. I can’t let that happen, not when it’s possible we are onto something. If we can figure out what wedding Owen and Bailey attended, we’ll understand their tie to Austin. And maybe that tie will help explain what Grady was doing on my doorstep, what Owen is doing so far away from it.

“I really think Bailey may have been at this church,” I say. “It would be very helpful to her, to both of us, to know for sure. And if you knew what we’ve been through this week, without her father… let’s just say, it would be an act of kindness.”

I see the sympathy percolate in Elenor’s eyes and feel hopeful suddenly that my plea has put her on the side of helping.