This story is reconstructed based on FBI records.
The hinge pin was seized solid, and I had WD-40 running down my wrist when my phone buzzed against the porch tile in Alder Junction. I almost let it go to voicemail. Mrs. Teague's storm door had been dragging on her threshold for a week, and I'd promised her I'd have it swinging free by noon.
"Dovell Corliss," I said, phone wedged between my ear and shoulder, screwdriver still in my hand.
It was a woman from Cypress Lantern Hospitality, Ellis's employer, asking in a careful customer-service voice whether my brother was ill. He hadn't come in. He hadn't called. It wasn't like him, she said, and I agreed before I'd even finished hearing the sentence, because it wasn't.
I told Mrs. Teague I'd come back for the door. She said it could wait, and something in my face must have told her it should. I was in my truck on Lantern Palm Road inside of four minutes, business magnets still crooked on the door panel, heading for Ellis's apartment on the south side of Bellwether.
His car wasn't in its spot. I knocked anyway, long enough that a neighbor opened her own door to watch me do it. I called his cell from the hallway. It rang through to nothing, no voicemail picked up, like the phone itself had gone quiet along with him.
I called our mother next. I kept my voice even because panicking her wouldn't find Ellis, it would only mean I had two people to manage instead of one problem to solve. She asked if I'd checked with his friends. I said I was about to. I wasn't about to do anything except stand in that hallway and feel the day tilt sideways.
Ellis was twenty-four, steady in his own stubborn way, the kind of man who paid his electric bill three days early so he'd never have to think about it again. He wanted out from under other people's schedules eventually, a shop of his own maybe, something that was his. He was not a man who skipped work without a word.
By the time I'd called his two closest friends, both of whom hadn't heard from him either, it was past three and Mrs. Teague's door was still hanging open on its bad hinge a mile and a half away. I thought about her waiting lunch. I thought about the loan payment due on the business account that made every missed job cost twice.
I went to the Bellwether Police Department instead. The officer at the intake desk was patient with me in the particular way people are patient with someone they've already decided is overreacting. Grown men go quiet for a day, he said. I told him Ellis didn't do that, not ever, and my own voice cracked on the word ever in a way that surprised me more than it seemed to surprise him.
He took the report anyway. Name, age, last known contact, vehicle description. I gave him everything I had, which felt like both too much and nowhere near enough, a life reduced to a form with boxes too small for the handwriting.
I didn't go back for the door that day, or the next. Wade called twice asking if I needed him to run my tools over to Mrs. Teague's so I wouldn't lose the job entirely. I told him I'd handle it. I didn't handle it. For the first time since we'd started the company together, I let a paid job sit unfinished, and some part of me understood, even then, standing in my dark kitchen with the phone warm against my ear, that it wouldn't be the last time.