Look Closely - Laura Caldwell [33]
They’d been in Charleston, Matt said, at his cousin’s wedding. Caroline was quiet, but she got that way sometimes. She’d gone to the bathroom inside the mansion, and she never came back. He went looking for her. At the hotel, he found a note from Caroline saying she was fine, but she needed a break and she would be in touch. But she hadn’t called. It had been two weeks.
If only, I thought, if only I’d looked for her a few weeks ago. I could have talked to her. Maybe she wouldn’t have taken off.
“Why would she have left like that?” I asked.
“I thought maybe you could tell me,” Matt said.
“Me? What could I tell you when I haven’t seen Caroline since I was seven?”
“You’re in contact with your father, aren’t you?”
I felt defensiveness and apprehension roll up my spine. “Yes,” I said cautiously.
“Well, maybe you should see if he knows something.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” But of course, I had an idea. Caroline’s letters implied that she’d had some contact with our father, but I had chosen to believe that such contact had drifted off after a while, that what my father told me was true—Caroline and Dan didn’t want to be part of the family anymore.
I heard Matt breathing on the other end.
I pushed my chair back and stood up. The sunlight was slanting through the open French doors now, right into the room. It was too bright.
“Look, I can’t talk about this,” Matt said, “I want to leave the line open. I mean we’ve got call waiting and all that, but I can’t take any chances. So unless you can help me out, I’ve got to go.” He paused. “It’s just that I miss her so much.”
It was the tenderness in that last sentence that made me sit down again. Caroline was missing. I couldn’t simply turn my back and head out for lunch as if I hadn’t learned anything, as if I hadn’t done all this to learn everything.
“What if I come there?” It was out of my mouth as soon as I had the thought.
“You’d do that?” He sounded hopeful.
I calculated the beginning of my week in my head. If the arbitrators had their decision tomorrow, I might be able to leave for Portland in the afternoon, and if the decision wasn’t ready until Tuesday, maybe I could leave that day.
“I have some work to take care of,” I said. “I’m near Chicago right now, but I’ll get a flight out in the next day or two. I’ll be there.”
Ty knocked on my door at 5:00 p.m., just as he said he would. He wore khaki shorts and a navy-blue sweater with a white T-shirt peeking out at the neck. He seemed to have even more freckles around his eyes, as if he had been in the sun.
“Hi,” he said. He stood in the doorway, seeming like he didn’t own the place and he needed to be invited in. “How’re you feeling?”
“Better than this morning. I’m really, really sorry I was such an ass.”
He grinned as though he might make fun of me for my drunken state, but he only said, “You weren’t. Ready for dinner?”
“One second. I just need to throw some things in my purse.”
I walked to the desk and began collecting my wallet, my compact, my cell phone.
“What did you do today?” Ty asked.
“Oh, not much.” I would tell him eventually. I would tell him what I’d learned, but right now, my siblings’ letters were too vivid and raw.
I hadn’t stopped thinking about Caroline all afternoon. Had she run away? Or had she disappeared against her will? And what did my father know about it?
I had picked up the phone at least five times, wanting to call my dad. I knew that on a Sunday afternoon, the one day he didn’t work, he would be in his home in Manhasset, reading his three Sunday papers and drinking coffee from a pot in the middle of the kitchen table. He would spend hours like that, absorbing everything he read, making notes on a small yellow legal pad by his side whenever he came across something that could affect one of his cases. I knew he would be happy to hear from me, that he would ask me about the arbitration, and he would hear in my voice that something was wrong. I would have to ask him then what he knew about Caroline, about my mother’s death.
And so I’d put the phone gently back on the cradle,