Two days in, I'd stopped answering the shop line and started answering only calls I recognized, which was how I knew it was the investigator the second my phone lit up at 7:40 in the morning. He didn't waste time on pleasantries. They'd found Ellis's car.
Not at his apartment. At another complex, he said, maybe a mile off, parked in a regular spot like it belonged there. No sign of Ellis. He gave me the address and told me, not unkindly, that I couldn't go past the tape, that it was an active scene and my presence wouldn't help them or him.
I went anyway, because I needed to see the shape of the place even if I couldn't touch it. I stood at the public edge of the lot with my arms crossed against the January chill that passes for cold in Florida, watching people in windbreakers move around a car I'd ridden in a hundred times, now roped off like evidence of something none of us had a name for yet.
A woman walking her dog asked if I was all right. I said my brother's car was there. She looked at it, looked at me, and didn't know what to say either, which I appreciated more than any comfort she might have forced out.
When they finally let the tape come down enough that I could see the car's full length, it looked wrong in a way I couldn't explain to the officer who asked me to confirm the plate. Ordinary. Locked, I was told. No damage. As though it had simply been driven here and left, patient, waiting for someone who wasn't coming back for it.
A friend had dropped me at the lot on her way to work; I'd accepted the ride without arranging anything afterward. When the officer said there was nothing more he could show me, I started walking toward Ellis's apartment. I wanted to feel the distance instead of hearing it described. It was a little under a mile by the road, less if you cut through the side street behind the second complex. At each entrance I stopped, looking for somewhere a person could turn without being noticed, then caught myself pretending I knew which direction anyone had gone. The walk took nineteen minutes. I watched the clock as if the number would mean something once I had it.
It didn't. A mile is nothing. A mile is a walk you'd take for exercise, a distance a man could cover in the time it takes to boil water. And yet between that parking lot and his apartment door, Ellis had gone somewhere the distance couldn't explain, and no one, not the investigator, not the dog walker, not me, could say where.
I called Wade from the curb outside Ellis's apartment building. My truck was still at home, and I couldn't make myself arrange another ride with someone who would ask what I'd learned. Wade asked only where to find me. When he pulled up, I stayed on the curb until he leaned across and opened the passenger door. There was a box of Mrs. Teague's replacement hardware on the seat. He moved it behind him without comment, and I climbed in.
"Go," he said, when I told him I needed to keep looking, keep calling, keep doing anything other than install doors. "I'll cover the board. Go."
I want to say I resisted, that I insisted on pulling my weight, but I didn't. I let him take the week's calls, let him explain to Mrs. Teague why her hinge was still broken, let him be the steady one while I became someone I didn't recognize, a woman standing in parking lots memorizing the exact distance between a car and an empty home, as if the number nineteen minutes might someday answer a question no one yet knew how to ask.