Page 6 of Last Seen

Chapter Three

The house Halley grew up in looks exactly the same, and there’s something so comforting about pulling into the drive.

Her headlights catch the rosebush they planted to remember her mother when they moved in; it now tops the six-foot trellis with cheerful aplomb.

They are Scots roses, a varietal of salmon and yellow with fuchsia edges that reminds her of sunshine and fire.

It’s too early for it to fully bloom, but in a month, there will be hundreds of tiny buds ready to spring out.

The house itself is a two-story redbrick colonial revival with a classic structure and symmetry, very similar to the rest of the houses on the street.

Two chimneys, three dormers, and memories a mile long.

Built at the turn of the last century in conjunction with the expansion of the Goode School, they are stalwart reminders of times past. Many of her dad’s fellow teachers live on this little street, an intellectual enclave that often sees classes conducted in drawing rooms and dinners afterward in the kitchens.

She grabs the mail from the box, then her bags, and walks up the steps.

Her keys jingle in her hand as she juggles everything, and the lock on the red door gives way with ease.

It smells like woodsmoke and Aqua Velva and red wine and dust. It smells like home.

But there’s something odd about this place now.

Everything feels different. Precarious. Her career has hit a massive speed bump, her marriage is all but over, and she’s standing in her dad’s foyer, wondering what it might be like to just move home.

She’s lived away since she was eighteen, coming back for holidays and breaks only.

DC has become her place, not sleepy little Marchburg.

Could she be happy here, after all she’s seen, all she’s experienced?

Can you ever really come home? She is a grown woman now.

Those simple days of safety and comfort are long gone.

And that’s what home means, much more than any sort of structure. It’s where you feel safe in the dark.

A plaintive meow and thudding from the stairs.

After her wedding, when she and Theo moved into the house in McLean, her dad, lonely, had adopted a Siamese cat from the shelter.

The kitten was barely weaned, crying for attention, and it was love at first sight for them both.

They were meant for one another. Her dad named him Ailuros—Greek for cat —and they are inseparable.

He’s now a fifteen-pound monster with a sweet disposition and an opinion on everything.

“Ailuros, my darling boy, where are you?” She maneuvers into the living room, dropping her bags by the entrance to the kitchen.

Ailuros skids into the foyer, and she kneels down to give him some love.

He yowls and purrs and prances around like the little king he is, and then runs into the kitchen and meows again.

His bowl is mostly full—he’s a free feeder—but he likes some tuna fish in the evening.

She makes him his treat, changes his water, and scratches his ears again.

“Sweet boy,” she says as he happily sticks his face in the tuna.

Her dad is going to be asleep for a while; she has time to pour a glass of wine and decompress. Maybe a bath, too, wash off this horrible day. But wine first.

She finds a bottle that looks interesting—her dad is an amateur oenophile and actually once taught an elective class on wine tasting for one of the nearby colleges.

Those were fun nights, the bohemian older students from Jasper coming up the mountain in a small chartered bus so no one would drink too much and drive home down the mountain.

Off the mountain. They seemed mystical to her, loud and vibrant and bursting with confidence, and sometimes it’s hard for her to reckon that she’s now a decade older than they were when they sat on the floor of the living room, rapturous, listening to her father explain varietals, terroirs, food pairings.

“Wine is an art,” he would say, twirling his glass so the ruby liquid sparkled and sang.

“Respect it, and it will always surprise you.”

There are several open bottles on the glass-topped bar to choose from; she reaches below for a cabernet glass and gives herself a healthy pour of a Super Tuscan, her salivary glands activating at the luscious plummy scent.

The first sip is like drinking liquid gold.

The second makes her think moving back home could have its benefits.

Her dad’s office is on the exact opposite side of the house.

All the first-floor rooms are a mirror image—off the gracious entry to the right is the sitting room with the oriental rug and the gold-and-glass bar cart, and to the left, his office.

She enters, smiling indulgently. It is messy, the oak-paneled bookshelves stuffed full of books, stacked haphazardly every which way.

It smells of ancient ideas and pipe smoke; though he quit years earlier, there’s no way to get that smell out of the books completely.

A state-of-the-art Celestron telescope stands in one corner, a large antique globe in a wooden stand in the other, and his desk, a rough-hewn slab of oak, is square in the middle on top of a worn kilim rug.

The desk. Just a glance tells her it might take more than a second to find the insurance paperwork.

Her dad is a vertical filer. He knows where every piece of paper he needs is based on the place in the stack.

It gives her hives; Halley is a dedicated folder lover and labeler.

She found him an antique filing cabinet a few years back, a Christmas gift she thought he’d love, but as far as she knows, he took one short stab at the filing system she built for him, then abandoned it.

His mind is anything but messy, though. It doesn’t surprise her, considering how diligent he is about everything else. The man can read Greek and Latin and navigate by the stars—taught her to, as well—but putting a piece of paper in a file folder eludes him.

She takes a sip of her wine and sits at the desk. Ailuros jumps into her lap, his bulk a pleasant weight. The brown leather chair creaks in a friendly greeting. It is as old as she is, has burst at the seams and been stitched back together like a well-loved baseball glove.

She starts with the pile on her left, flipping through the pages.

Bills. Papers he’s grading. Papers he hasn’t gotten to.

A stack of pristine note cards with his name embossed along the top edge—a gift?

She doesn’t recognize them. More bills. Comics cut from the paper—he mails her ones he thinks she’ll enjoy. Tax returns.

There is nothing from the insurance company.

She moves over a stack. Then another. Fifteen minutes later, she’s touched every piece of paper on the desk, and none of them hold an insurance card.

It’s not like him to mistake where something is. Then again, he was on a morphine pump—God knows if his brain was functioning.

She goes through it all again, then eyes the filing cabinet. Surely not, but it’s worth a try.

“Sorry, buddy,” she says, dumping the cat on the floor. He leaps back into the leather chair with an indignant mirp and settles into the warm spot.

The filing cabinet, too, is devoid of insurance papers, though she sees he has halfheartedly attempted to put a few things in order. Mostly it’s her childhood information—immunizations, the homeschooling records, an entire file full of report cards from Goode.

Halley is a joy to have in class, she has such a bright future, A, A, A, blah blah blah.

Little did they know adult Halley would click on a link in an email and ruin her life. Three, two, one ... go.

She doesn’t linger on these moments of her past. She has a mission now. Find the insurance card.

She pours out the rest of the wine, careful not to dump the last bit in her glass, and sorts the mail. Not there.

She goes room by room through the downstairs, ferrying the flotsam and jetsam of her dad’s life back to their proper homes.

The teacup in the bathroom back to the kitchen; the jacket with the patched elbows from the living room sofa to his closet.

There’s paperwork on his bedside table—another stack of papers he’s grading, and some odds and ends, but nothing insurance related.

The cat’s plaid blanket is nestled at the foot of the bed.

She looks under it, just to be sure. Nothing.

She’s getting frustrated, and convinced that perhaps he’s losing it entirely, when she sees a piece of paper sticking out of his top dresser drawer.

Halley used to know the details of every drawer in his dresser.

Not that she snooped, not at all; she was in charge of folding the laundry and putting everything away.

T-shirts and undershirts in the top left and right, boxers in the middle, slacks and jeans folded in thirds in the bottom, and the small middle drawer with the silver knob for socks.

Once, hanging up his freshly ironed long-sleeve work shirts, she’d discovered a stack of Playboy s in the back of the closet under his winter ski clothes. She’d flipped the pages with a growing sense of awe, then unease, put them back, and never looked again.

Seeing her father as a man was ... odd.

He was her dad . He was funny and goofy and smart, and hers.

He never dated when she was growing up, not for lack of trying by the women around Marchburg, both married and single.

A handsome, solid, and eligible widower with a smart daughter?

He was a popular choice. She asked him about it once when she was about ten and one of her friends asked why she didn’t have a mother.

She reported the conversation like the little blue jay she was and asked.

He just shook his head. “I’ve had my marriage.

And I have you, and work, and the stars. That’s all I need, jellybean.”

Those magazines told her maybe he needed more but was happily sacrificing himself for her so there wasn’t any more upheaval. She loved him even more that day.

Now, wondering where else she should look without totally invading his privacy, she steels herself and opens the dresser drawer.

Papers and magazine articles, a thick heavy book on Magellan and his exploits circumnavigating the globe.

She hasn’t seen this book since she was a kid.

Smiling, she takes it out, memories of her dad reading it as a bedtime story crowding in.

She flips the softened pages. Inside, holding his place, is a yellowed manila envelope.

It is old. It was sealed at one point, but the gummy flap is no longer stuck, and her brows twitch closer as she debates opening it.

Watermarked, the edges bent, it is clearly not the new insurance card, and not her business, either.

But something makes her sit down on the bed and unwind from two circular tabs the red string that holds it closed.

The papers inside are varied. Newspaper articles, something from the Tennessee Department of Correction, blue-backed papers from a law office she’s never heard of.

She sees her mother’s face staring up from the clipping, but the last name doesn’t match.

As she reads the rest of the headline, horror spreads through her body, chilling her blood.

Susannah Elizabeth Handon, 35, Found Murdered

16-Year-Old Daughter Held for Questioning