I was angry, so I decided the hell with him.” A sad smile curved the corners of her lips. “But, well, he’s my father so I decided I should try to mend this breach between us. I called him—and called him—and I just couldn’t reach him,” she said with a note of desperation. “After a couple of days, I started to get this uneasy feeling that something was wrong so I went to his house. And he wasn’t there,” she cried, trying her best to keep her voice in check.
“Maybe your father did go on that vacation,” Kenzie suggested.
But Connie shook her head from side to side. “My father’s a very detail-oriented person. If he ever did decide to go on a vacation, he’d notify the post office to have them hold back mail delivery. Or, at the very least, he’d have his neighbor pick up his mail for him.”
She looked at Kenzie with fresh tears in her eyes. “His mailbox is one of those large models—he used to get packages with kits in them,” she explained. “Anyway, there was so much mail in the mailbox, it was overflowing. There’s mail on his lawn, Kenzie,” Connie cried, as if the sight of that mail had literally caused her pain. “So much mail that it’s noticeable from the street.” She let out another shaky breath before she could continue. “Anyway, that’s when my father’s neighbor called me.”
“Your father’s neighbor had your number?” Kenzie asked.
Connie nodded. “I gave Mr. Moore my cell number right after my mother died so he could call me in case my dad did...something stupid or got too sick to call or... You have to understand, my father wasn’t himself after my mother died...” Her voice trailed off. And then she sat up a little straighter, her eyes holding Kenzie’s prisoner. “Something’s happened to him, Kenzie. I just know it.”
“Not necessarily,” Kenzie told her in a very calm voice. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, Connie. You have to think positive,” she advised the other woman. She kept her voice even, almost cheerful. “This could all be a just a misunderstanding or he just needed some time to himself, or—”
“Or he could be lying in some alley, bleeding or dead,” Connie cried, interrupting Kenzie. “Tossed aside like so much garbage.”
“You don’t know that for a fact, Connie, and until you have reason to believe that’s the case, I want you to focus on positive thoughts,” Kenzie instructed, keeping her voice just stern enough to get the other woman’s attention.
Connie covered her face with her hands, crying again. “I should have never yelled at him,” she said, her voice hitching, “never told him that he was acting like an old man when he had so much of life to live still in front of him.”
“Sometimes fathers need to be yelled at,” Kenzie told the other woman with sympathy.
Connie raised her head, her eyes pleading for some sort of reassurance. “Have you ever yelled at yours?” she asked.
Kenzie laughed. “More times than I could even begin to count,” she told Connie.
It wasn’t true. At least she hadn’t yelled at her father in years, but that wasn’t what this woman needed to hear right now. She needed to be able to assuage her conscience in order to think clearly, so Kenzie told her what she wanted to hear.
Connie nodded, sniffling and once again struggling to get control of herself. “Then you’ll look for my father?” she asked hopefully.
Kenzie nodded. “You just need to fill out this paperwork and we can get started on our end.”
Kenzie opened up the large drawer to her right and took out a folder that was filled with official-looking forms. Beneath the folder she had another file folder filled with forms that were already filled out.
Those she had already input into the system over the last couple of years. Some of the people on those forms had been found, but there were still a great many who hadn’t. Those people bothered Kenzie more than she could possibly say. Not because they represented opened cases that counted against her, but because they represented people who hadn’t been reunited with their loved ones. People who might never be reunited with their distraught loved ones.
She didn’t know what she would do if she ever found herself in that set of circumstances. Which was why, her Uncle Brian had told her when he’d assigned her to this department, she was the right person for the job.
* * *
Connie broke down and cried twice during what should have been a relatively short process of filling out the form.
The second time, Kenzie kindly suggested, “Do you want to go outside and clear your head?”
But Connie bit her lower lip and shook her head, refusing the offer. “No, I want to finish filling out the form. And then I want to help you find my father.”
She could relate to that, Kenzie thought. But even so, she had to turn Connie down. She smiled patiently at the woman. “I’m afraid that it doesn’t quite work that way.”
Connie looked at her, confused. “How does it work? I don’t mean to sound belligerent,” Connie apologized. “I thought I could help, because I know all his habits. But I just want to know how you find someone.”
“A lot of ways,” Kenzie answered matter-of-factly. “We talk to people at your dad’s place of work, to his neighbors, find out if he had a club he liked to frequent more than others—”
Connie cut her off quickly, shaking her head. “He didn’t.”
“All right,” Kenzie said, continuing. “A favorite restaurant, then—”
Again Connie shook her head. “My father didn’t like fancy food and he didn’t believe in throwing his money away by having someone else cook for him when he could do a better job of it himself.”
“How about his friends?” Kenzie asked. “Did he have anyone he was close to?” she asked, already doing a mental sketch of a man who had become a loner in his later years.
Connie shook her head just as Kenzie had expected her to. “My father stopped seeing his friends once Mom had died and after a while, his friends stopped trying to get him to come out.” She sighed again. “I guess they all just gave up on him—like I did.”
“It’s not your fault,” Kenzie underscored. “And I’d still like to have a list of his friends,” she told Connie. “One or two of those friends might not have given up trying to get him to come out of his shell,” she said to the other woman.
Connie looked almost wounded. “You mean the way I gave up?”
Part of her job, the way Kenzie saw it, was to comfort the grieving. Guilt was a heavy burden to bear. Kenzie did her best to help Connie cope.
“You had your own life to live, your own grief to deal with over the death of your mother,” Kenzie insisted. “And you didn’t give up on your dad. You just gave him a time-out so he could try to deal with the situation on his own.”
Connie sighed. “When you say it that way, it doesn’t sound so bad,” she told Kenzie, a trace of gratitude in her voice.
“And it’s not,” Kenzie told her firmly. “Sometimes you can’t drag a horse to water, you have to let him see the water and then clear
