Once I’d pulled myself together, Mom and Dad and I sat down at the kitchen table to talk things out. Ethan was in the living room, having a heated discussion with the various vehicles he owned from the Cars cartoon movie.

“Maybe she’s just gone to think things over,” Dad said. “You know how women can be sometimes. They get a bee in their bonnet and have to go sort things out for a while. I’m sure she’ll be getting in touch any minute now.”

Mom reached out a hand and placed it over mine. “Maybe if we put our heads together, we can think about where she might have gone.”

“I’ve been doing that,” I said. “She wasn’t home, she didn’t come here. I don’t know where to begin.”

“What about her friends?” Mom asked, but even as she asked it she must have known what my answer would be.

“She doesn’t really have any close ones,” I said. “She’s never been a joiner. She probably talks more to Leanne at the office than anyone else, and she doesn’t even like her.”

Ethan walked in, ran a toy car across the table, going “Vroom!”

“Ethan,” I said, “scoot.” He did two laps of the kitchen, “vrooming” the whole time, then returned to the living room.

“We should call her anyway,” Mom said, and I agreed that was a good idea. I didn’t know her number, so Mom grabbed the book and opened it to the K’s.

She found a listing for an L. Kowalski and I dialed as she called out the number to me.

Two rings and then, “Yep?”

“Lyall?”

“Yep.”

“Dave Harwood here. Jan’s husband.”

“Yeah, sure, Dave. How’s it going?”

I dodged the question. “Is Leanne there?”

“She must be out shopping,” he said. He sounded hungover. “And taking her time getting back. Anything I can help you with?”

Did I want to get into it with him, about Jan’s disappearance? There was nothing in Lyall’s voice to suggest he had even an inkling anything was wrong, but he must have found it odd that I’d be calling for his wife.

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll try her later.”

“What’s this about?”

“I wanted to bounce a gift idea off her, something for Jan.”

“Okay,” he said, satisfied. “I’ll tell her you called.”

Everyone was quiet for a moment after I hung up the phone. Then Dad said, very matter-of-factly and just a little too loud, “I just can’t believe she’d kill herself.”

“For God’s sake, Don, keep your voice down,” Mom hissed at him. “Ethan’s just in the other room.”

It wasn’t likely Ethan would have heard over all the car noises he was making.

“Sorry,” Dad said anyway. He had a habit of talking louder than he had to, and it had nothing to do with hearing loss. He heard everything fine, but always assumed no one else was ever really listening. With Mom, it was often the case. “But still, she doesn’t seem the type to have done it.”

“The last couple of weeks, though,” I said, “this change came over her.”

Mom used her hand to wipe away a tear running down her cheek. “I know what your father is saying, though. I just didn’t see any signs.”

“Before a couple of weeks ago, I hadn’t either,” I said. “But I’m guessing they must have been there and I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Tell me again what she said to you at the restaurant,” Mom said.

I took a moment. It was hard to say these things out loud without getting choked up. “She said something along the lines of I’d be happy if she was gone. That Ethan and I would be better off. Why would she say something like that?”

“She wasn’t in her right mind,” Dad said. “Any fool can tell that. For the life of me, I can’t figure what she’d be unhappy about. She’s got a good husband, a wonderful boy, you’ve got a nice house, you both got good jobs. What’s the problem? I’m telling you, I just don’t get it.”

Mom sighed, looked at me. Her face said, Pay no attention to him. She turned to Dad and said, “Just because you’ve got a man and a roof over your head doesn’t mean your life is perfect.”

He made a face. “What are you getting at?”

Mom shook her head and looked at me. “I didn’t think he’d get that one.” It was her attempt to lighten the mood.

“I was only making a point,” Dad said. He frowned, stared down at the table. It was then that I noticed his eyes were welling up with tears.

“Dad,” I said, clutching his hand.

He pulled it away, got up from the table, and walked out of the kitchen.

“He doesn’t want to show how upset he is,” Mom said. “Any time you have problems, it tears him apart.”

I wanted to get up and go after him, but Mom held on to my hand. “He’ll be back in a minute. Give him a second to pull himself together.”

In the other room, I heard him say to Ethan, “Hey, kiddo. Did I show you the train catalogues I picked up?”

Ethan said, “I’m watching TV.”

“How much does Ethan know?” Mom asked me.

“Not much. He knows his mother hasn’t come home, and he knows the police are looking for her. He thought that meant she’d robbed a bank or something, but I told him she hadn’t done anything like that.”

Mom smiled in spite of everything, but only for a moment.

Something had been niggling at me. “There’s somewhere I have to go,” I said.

“What? Where?”

“That bridge.”

“Bridge?”

“The one Jan talked about jumping from. I mentioned to the police that they should check bridges near the park, and I think they did, but the one she told me about, it’s up that road that goes to Miller’s Garden Center, west of town.”

“I know the one.”

“The police won’t have checked it. I never mentioned it specifically.”

“David,” Mom said, “call the police and let them check.”

“I don’t know how soon they’ll get to it. I have to do something now. You’ll watch Ethan?”

“Of course. Take your father.”

“No, that’s okay.”

“Take him,” she said. “It will make him feel like he’s doing something, too.”

I nodded. “Hey, Dad,” I called into the living room. He came back, composed. “Take a ride with me.”

“Where we goin’?”

“I’ll explain on the way.”

We took my car, which made Dad fidgety. He’d never been a good passenger. If he wasn’t behind the wheel, he figured there was a pretty good chance we were going to die.

“You got a red up there,” he said.

“I see it, Dad,” I said, taking my foot off the gas as we approached the light. It turned green before we got there, and I tromped on it.

“You get bad mileage that way,” Dad said. “Hitting the accelerator hard, then hitting the brake instead of slowing down gradual. That’s what sucks up the gas.”

“You’ve said.”

He glanced over at me. “Sorry.”

I gave him a smile. “It’s okay.”

“How you holding up?”

“Not so good,” I said.

“You can’t give up hope,” he said. “It’s way too early for that.”

“I know,” I said.

“So you know just where this bridge is?”

“Pretty sure,” I said. We were out of Promise Falls now, heading west. Only a couple of miles out I found the county road I was looking for. Two-lane, paved. The road went through a variety of topography. There was wide-open farmland, then dense woods, followed by more farmland. The bridge spanned a creek that flowed through a heavily treed area.

“Up ahead,” I said.

It wasn’t much of a bridge. Maybe fifty or sixty feet across, asphalt over cement, with three-foot-high concrete railings along the sides. I pulled the car as far onto the shoulder as I could this side of the bridge and killed the ignition.

It was quiet out there except for the sound of the water running under the bridge. We got out of the car and walked to the center of it, Dad staying close to me.

I went to the west side first and looked down. It wasn’t more than twenty feet down, not much of a drop, really. The creek was shallow here, rocks cropping up above the surface. It probably wasn’t much more than a foot deep any place under the bridge. A summer or two back, when we hadn’t had any rain for weeks, this creek bed was dry for a spell.