The Missing Person by Alix Ohlin

Author:Alix Ohlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307429001
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

Twelve

I followed Harold Wallace into a back room. His blue eyes were crisscrossed violently with blood, but his hair was neatly gathered in a ponytail, he was again wearing expensive, loosefitting clothes, and overall he seemed more alert than the last time. On the phone he’d been annoyingly mysterious, refusing to explain what he’d remembered until I arrived on his doorstep, and this morning he’d offered me coffee, tea, and even a plate of bizcochitos before I suggested, politely, that we just get down to business.

“Well, here we are. My office. The nerve center of the entire operation,” he said. If this was true, then the operation was in a lot of trouble. The small bedroom—underneath a stack of books and loose papers, barely visible, was a single bed—had been buried beneath years’ worth of bureaucratic detritus. Several filing cabinets stood half-open, their drawers stuffed beyond capacity with manila folders. Framed paintings and prints were leaning against every available surface.

“It’s a system I devised myself,” he said. “I know it looks strange, but it works for me.”

“How long have you been retired?”

“Oh, I’m not really retired. I still sell work from home. Yes, I’ve still got the eye, if you know what I mean.” He eyed my chest. I caught his bloodshot gaze and shook my head, and he shrugged and turned away, his smile hinting that it was mostly done out of habit anyway.

“So you remembered something,” I said.

“After you left, I got to thinking about what you said about the child, and I remembered a girl who got pregnant and kind of disappeared. She was a wild one, that girl. Anyway, a few years later, she sent me a photograph of herself. A look-whatyou’re-missing-out-on sort of thing, if you—”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

“So I just have to go through these files and look for it. Maybe you’d like to sit down? This could take a while.”

I cleared a spot for myself on the bed and sat down to watch as he withdrew files, examined them, muttered to himself, then moved on to the next handful. Of course he could have done this before I came over, or left me alone to wade through the files myself. But he either meant for me to witness all his hard work or simply wanted company; watching him rifle through stacks of dog-eared manila folders, every once in a while glancing at me over his shoulder, I suspected it was the latter. Humming as he worked, Harold seemed perfectly happy to devote the entire morning to the search.

Actually, I felt more or less the same way. The night before, when I’d gotten off the phone, my mother was in her bedroom with the door closed, and I slunk off to my room feeling guilty and agitated. If she was going to run around with a married man whose wife was mentally ill, then she had to expect people to comment on it from time to time. That’s what I told myself, but still I’d stayed awake for hours, thinking that I’d made my mother cry.

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