I went to the office the next morning before Grant had his coffee finished and told him I wasn't leaving until I'd seen the original email, header and all, not another printout, not a summary, the actual message as it existed on whatever server it had come from.
He opened his laptop without much fight left in him, which surprised me, and pulled up his personal account. The email was there, sender address a string of numbers and letters that meant nothing, subject line just "thought you should know." I read it over his shoulder, slowly, twice.
It said what the printout had said, word for word, nothing more. A man at a diner off Route 3 in Concord, maybe mid-forties, something about the eyes and the set of the jaw that reminded the sender of the photo in the paper. No route. No County Road 18. No mention of a service track, a crossing, or any direction of travel at all.
"Where did the route come from, then," I said. "Because the brochure doesn't say 'somebody thinks they saw a man in a diner.' It says 'recent sighting consistent with the original search area,' and that's not in this email anywhere."
Grant didn't answer right away, and I let the silence sit there until it became its own kind of answer. Finally he said, "I wrote that part."
"You wrote it."
"I connected it. The email came in, and I thought, if somebody's seeing him now, in this general part of the state, then it tracks with the hypothesis you gave the search coordinator back then, the hiking direction, the service road. I didn't make up the sighting. I just, I put the two things next to each other and it looked like a line pointing somewhere."
"Grant, Concord is seventy miles from that service track. There is no line. There's a stranger's impression of a face in a diner, and there's a twenty-year-old guess I made under pressure during an active search, and you took a marker and drew a connection between them because the connection was good for business."
"I didn't think of it that way."
"I believe you didn't think of it that way, which is exactly the problem. You wanted it to be true enough that you stopped checking whether it actually was."
He closed the laptop slowly, like closing it might undo the last five minutes, and said, "So there's nothing. No evidence, no route, no reason to believe any of it."
"There's an unverified claim from a stranger about a resemblance, which might be worth passing to Northlake Missing Persons for whatever it's worth to them, and there's a theory I offered in 2004 that was never anything but a guess. Neither one of those is a road map, and neither one of those belongs on a laminated card with my old title printed under it like a signature."
Grant sat with that for a long moment, long enough that I thought, for the first time since this whole thing started, he might actually be hearing it instead of waiting for me to finish so he could explain it away again. Then he said, quietly, "The weekend package still ends with the walk Monday morning. Della's not canceling."
"Then I'll cancel the school's part," I said. "The bus, my name, the promise we made those passengers. I can't make your personal decision for you, Grant. But you don't get to leave mine printed on a brochure while you decide."