I looked at the water, hypnotized almost as it coursed around the rocks. Everything was serene.

“Best check out the other side, huh?” Dad said, touching my arm. We crossed the road and leaned up against the opposite railing.

There wasn’t a body in the creek. And if someone did jump off this bridge, there wasn’t enough depth, or force, to move one farther downstream. If someone took his life jumping off this bridge, he’d be found.

“I just want to get a good look underneath,” I said. It wasn’t possible to see everything that was under the bridge while standing on it.

“You want me to come?” Dad asked.

“Just stay here.”

I ran to the end, then cut around and worked my way down the embankment. It didn’t take more than a moment, and once there all I found were a few empty beer cans and some McDonald’s wrappers.

Anything?” Dad shouted.

“No,” I said, and climbed back up to the road.

The thing was, a person would probably survive a jump off this bridge, unless they plunged headfirst.

“This is a good thing, right?” said Dad. “Isn’t it?”

I said nothing.

“You know what else I was thinking?” Dad said. “She didn’t leave any note. If she was going to do something to herself, she’d have left a note, don’t you think?”

I didn’t know what to think.

“If I was gonna kill myself, I’d leave a note,” he said. “That’s what people do. They want to say goodbye somehow.”

“I don’t think people always do that,” I said. “Only in the movies.”

Dad shrugged. “Maybe there were some other people she wanted to see before she did anything too rash.”

“Like who?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Like, maybe her own family.”

“She doesn’t have any family. At least not any that she talks to anymore.”

Dad knew Jan was estranged from her parents, but it must have slipped his mind. If he’d thought about it a moment, he would’ve recalled that it was never an issue whose folks we spent every Christmas with.

“Maybe that’s where she went,” Dad said. “Could be she felt she needed to look them up after all these years and make some sort of peace with them. Tell them what she thinks of them, something like that.”

I stood on the bridge, looking off into the woods.

“Say that again?” I said.

“She could be trying to find her family. You know, after all these years, she wants to clear the air or something. Give them a piece of her mind.”

I walked over and surprised him with a pat on the shoulder. “That’s not a bad idea,” I said.

“I’m not just good-looking,” Dad said.

Ernie Bertram was sitting on the front porch of his Stonywood Drive home, nursing a long-necked bottle of beer, when the black car pulled up at the curb. The owner of Bertram’s Heating and Cooling knew an unmarked police cruiser when he saw one. The tiny hubcaps, the absence of chrome. An overweight man in a white business shirt with tie askew got out of the cruiser. He stood, then reached back into the car for his jacket, which he pulled on as he walked up the driveway. The man glanced at Bertram’s van, then looked up to the porch.

“Mr. Bertram?” he said.

Bertram stood up and set his beer on the wide railing. “What can I do for you?” He was about to add “Officer,” but considering that this man wasn’t wearing a uniform, he wasn’t sure that was appropriate.

“Detective Duckworth, Promise Falls police,” he said, mounting the steps. “Hope I’m not disturbing you.”

Bertram pointed to a wicker chair. “Just finished dinner. Have a seat.”

Duckworth did. “Get ya a beer?” Bertram asked, grabbing his own from the railing and sitting back down. Duckworth noticed that the man had unbuttoned the top of his pants and let his zipper down an inch. A little post-dinner pressure release.

“Thanks, but no,” he said. “I need to ask you a couple of questions.”

Bertram’s eyebrows went up. “Sure.”

“Jan Harwood works for you, isn’t that right?”

“That’s right,” he said.

“I don’t suppose you’ve heard from her today?”

“Nope. It’s Saturday. Won’t be talking to her till Monday morning.”

The front door eased open. A short, wide woman in blue stretch pants said, “You got company, Ern?”

“This is Detective…”

“Duckworth,” he said.

“Detective Duckworth is with the police, Irene. He can’t have beer but maybe you could have a lemonade or something?”

“I’ve got some apple pie left over,” Irene Bertram said.

Detective Duckworth considered. “I probably could be persuaded to have a slice,” he said.

“With ice cream? It’s just vanilla,” she said.

“Sure,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind that at all.”

Irene retreated and the door closed. Ernie Bertram said, “It’s just a frozen one you heat up in the oven, but it tastes like it was homemade.”

“Sounds good to me,” Duckworth said.

“So what’s this about Jan?”

“She’s missing,” the detective said.

“Missing? Whaddya mean by missing?”

“She hasn’t been seen since about midday, when she was with her husband and son at Five Mountains.”

“Son of a bitch,” Ernie said. “What’s happened to her?”

“Well,” said Duckworth, “if we knew that, we’d probably have a better chance of finding her.”

“Missing,” he said, more to himself than to Duckworth. “That’s a hell of a thing.”

“When’s the last time you talked to her?” Duckworth asked.

“That’d be Thursday,” he said.

“Not yesterday?”

“No, she took Friday off. She’s been taking a few days off here and there the last couple of weeks.”

“Why’s that?”

Ernie Bertram shrugged. “Because she could. She had some time built up, so she asked if she could take an occasional day, instead of everything all at once.”

“So they weren’t sick days,” Duckworth said.

“No. And it was okay with me because it’s been a fairly quiet summer. Which is actually not that okay. Haven’t sold an air conditioner in two weeks, although it is getting late in the season. You sell them mostly in the spring or early summer, when it starts getting hot. But with this recession, homeowners aren’t willing to put down a couple thousand or whatever for a new unit. Paying the mortgage is hard enough, so they’re getting as much out of their old ones as they can. And the last few days haven’t been that scorching, so there hasn’t been that much to do repair-wise.”

“Uh-huh,” said Duckworth.

The door opened. Irene Bertram presented Barry Duckworth with a slab of pie that had a scoop of ice cream next to it the size of a softball.

“Oh my,” he said.

“Jan’s missing,” Ernie said to his wife.

“Missing?” she said, plunking herself down in a third chair.

“Yup,” Ernie said. “Gone.”

“Gone where?”

“She was up at that new roller-coaster park and disappeared.” He zeroed in on Duckworth. “She get thrown off one of the coasters?”

“No, nothing like that,” he said.

“Because those things, they’re not safe,” Bertram said.

Duckworth put a forkful of apple pie into his mouth, then quickly followed it with some ice cream so he could let the flavors mingle. “This is amazing,” he said.

“I made it myself,” Irene said.

“I already told him,” Ernie said.

“You bastard,” she said.

“How would you describe Ms. Harwood’s mood the last few weeks?” the detective asked Ernie Bertram.

“Her mood?”

Duckworth, his mouth full of a second bite of pie, nodded.

“Fine, I guess. What do you mean, her mood?”

“Did she seem different? Maybe a bit down, troubled?”

Bertram took another drag on his beer. “I don’t think so. Although I’m on the road a lot. I’m not in the office much. The girls could be turning tricks out of there and I wouldn’t know it.”

“Ernie!” said Irene, punching him in the shoulder.

“That was just a joke,” he said to Duckworth. “They’re fine women who work for me.”