“My cat.”
“What’s his name?”
“Toast.”
“Good name.”
“He steals bread.”
“Then an earned name.”
Sarah pressed her fingers against her mouth.
The absurd conversation nearly undid her.
Ruth kept her eyes on the road.
“We’ll get him,” she said.
“You don’t know that.”
“No. But I know who I can ask to help.”
Sarah studied the woman’s profile.
“Were you there?”
“When?”
“When my father died.”
Ruth’s hands tightened on the wheel.
“No.”
“Was Hank?”
“I think you should ask him that.”
It was not an answer.
It was enough to make Sarah turn back toward the mirror.
Hank rode behind them, headlight pale in the rain.
At the precinct, they put her in a small interview room with a table, four chairs, and a poster about reporting identity theft.
Someone brought her coffee.
She pushed it away.
Someone brought water instead.
She drank half the bottle without realizing how thirsty she was.
Hank sat in another room.
Ruth remained with Sarah until a detective came in and asked to speak to her alone.
The detective introduced herself as Mara Velez. She was perhaps forty, dressed in a charcoal jacket over a blue blouse, with reading glasses hooked into her collar.
She placed a recorder on the table.
“I’d like to go through this carefully,” she said. “If you need a break, tell me.”
Sarah looked at the recorder.
“Do you believe me?”
“I believe something frightened you badly this morning. I’m going to find out what it was.”
“Another careful answer.”
“An honest one.”
Sarah began again.
This time she remembered more.
The stranger’s shoes. The way the second man had stayed close to the register. Hank’s untouched toast. The coffee spreading toward the edge of the table.
Velez asked whether Michael Mitchell’s death had ever been discussed at home.
“His disappearance,” Sarah said. “Not his death.”
“What did your mother tell you?”
“That he left before I was born.”
“Any relatives on his side?”
“None that I know.”
“Do you have a birth certificate?”
“Yes.”
“Is he listed?”
Sarah opened her mouth.
Closed it.
“I don’t know.”
She had needed the certificate for college enrollment and her first job. She remembered the seal, the paper, her mother’s plastic folder.
She could not remember looking at the father’s line.
Velez wrote something down.
“Your mother is on her way.”
Sarah stared at her.
“Who told you that?”
“Ms. Calder spoke with her.”
“I don’t want them planning things around me.”
“I understand.”
“Do you?”
Velez set down her pen.
“Yes. You’re the person who was threatened. You’re also an adult. I’ll speak to you directly.”
Some pressure inside Sarah’s chest loosened.
“What happens now?”
“We check the diner’s cameras. We identify the men if we can. We look at the old report.”
“There is an old report?”
“Yes.”
“About my father?”
Velez hesitated.
Sarah leaned forward.
“Please don’t do that. Everybody does that. They stop right before the part I need.”
“There’s a missing person report for Michael James Mitchell, filed in September 2002.”
“By my mom?”
“By Diana Mitchell.”
Sarah looked down at her hands.
Her mother had reported him missing.
Not gone.
Missing.
A word with uncertainty inside it. A word that meant looking.
“What did it say?”
“I’ve only seen the summary. I’ve requested the file.”
“Did they look for him?”
“I don’t know enough to answer that yet.”
Sarah nodded, because if she spoke she might say something she could not take back.
Velez waited.
The building hummed around them. A phone rang on the other side of the wall. Someone laughed, then stopped abruptly.
“Can I see Hank?” Sarah asked.
“In a little while.”
“Am I allowed to leave?”
“Yes.”
“Is he?”
“At the moment, yes.”
“At the moment.”
“I’m asking him questions too.”
“What kind?”
“The kind you’d want me to ask.”
For the first time that morning, Sarah almost smiled.
When Velez left, Sarah picked up the water bottle and discovered she had crushed a shallow dent into its side.
She smoothed the plastic with her thumb.
The door opened twenty minutes later.
Her mother stood in the doorway.
Diana had put on her good wool coat crookedly. One button was through the wrong hole. Her hair was damp at the temples, and she carried the brown handbag Sarah had given her two Christmases ago.
She looked smaller than she had the previous Sunday, when they ate spaghetti in Diana’s kitchen and argued about whether Sarah should take a second job.