Rust on the Chrome: Forty Eight Hours Gone

The fluorescent tube above the intake desk had been flickering for six weeks, and Maren Holloway had counted every one of those days by the stuttering light that washed across Daltrey Reeves' face. The sheriff sat behind his desk in a county uniform that smelled of detergent and old leather, his reading glasses perched on the bridge of a nose that had been broken twice in his twenties and never properly set. He did not look up when she walked in.

The bell above the station door gave a weak chime, copper against brass, and the clock on the wall behind him clicked over to 9:47. Outside, the morning was already pushing past warm into something heavier, the kind of July heat that turned tar soft on the parking lot and made the air above Route 9 waver like bad television.

"Sheriff," Maren said.

"Mm." Reeves turned a page on whatever report lay open beneath his hand. The paper whispered against the desk. His pen tapped twice, a small, impatient percussion. "If this is about the raccoon behind the laundromat again, I told you last week that animal control is on a skeleton crew until September."

"It's not about the raccoon."

He looked up then, finally, his eyes pale and unreadable in the bad light. The glasses came off. He folded them once and laid them beside the inkwell.

"Sit down, Maren."

She did not sit. Her hand rested on the back of the plastic chair, fingers pressing into the cool molded edge, but she remained standing. The chair squeaked faintly under the pressure of her grip. Behind her, the dispatch radio murmured something about a stray dog on Mill Creek Road, and a ceiling fan pushed the warm air around in slow, useless circles.

"Jase is missing," she said.

Reeves leaned back. The springs in his chair gave a single, tired groan. He regarded her the way he regarded weather advisories, with a flat, practiced patience.

"How long," he said.

"Two days."

"Mm-hm." The sheriff's mouth did something complicated, neither quite a frown nor quite a smile. "You called his mother?"

"I went to his mother's house first." Maren kept her voice level. Measured. The way she had once spoken to boardrooms full of men who thought an accountant in a charcoal suit had no authority over their numbers. "Elsie hasn't seen him since Tuesday evening. He was supposed to come by Wednesday to fix the kitchen sink. He never showed."

"And he hasn't called."

"He hasn't called anyone. Not Elsie. Not his brother up at County General. Not me." Maren paused, and the pause was the only thing that betrayed her. "He doesn't do that, Daltrey. Forty-eight hours without a word. He calls his mother every Sunday at six, and if he misses, he calls her back within the hour and apologizes for making her worry."

Reeves exhaled. It was a slow, controlled sound, the kind a man makes when he is deciding how much of his evening he is willing to spend on something that may amount to nothing.

"Maren." He said her name like a period at the end of a sentence. "How many times has Jase Caldwell wandered off in the last five years?"

The fluorescent tube above them gave a sudden, violent stutter, and for a moment the sheriff's face disappeared into shadow. When the light steadied, Maren was still standing, still gripping the chair, and the silence between them had grown teeth.

"Three times," she said. "Once to his sister's place in Columbus after a fight with Elsie about the funeral. Once to that fishing cabin Buck kept out past Black's Hollow. Once to wherever it is he goes when he doesn't want anyone to find him, which lasted a weekend and ended with him calling me from a pay phone in Waverly because his car had a dead battery."

"And every time," Reeves said, "he came back."

"Every time."

"Within forty-eight hours."

"Within forty-eight hours," Maren repeated. "I'm aware of the pattern, Daltrey. I'm the one who has sat across from that man and watched him drink bad coffee and tell me he needed space. I know what Jase looks like when he's running. This isn't that."

The sheriff's pen lay flat on the desk, parallel to the edge, perfectly aligned. Reeves had a thing about alignment. It was one of the few personal details Maren had ever managed to coax out of him in twenty years of acquaintance. She watched him adjust the pen a millimeter to the right, and she understood that he was buying himself time to decide whether he believed her.

"What do you want me to do," he said. It was not a question.

"I want you to do your job."

"My job is a missing persons report when there's reason to believe someone is missing. Right now I've got a grown man who has a documented history of taking off when life gets heavy, and a woman who runs a diner telling me her friend hasn't returned her calls." Reeves spread his hands, palms down on the desk. The gesture was almost gentle, which was worse than if he'd raised his voice. "You understand how that looks on paper."

"It looks like you're doing your job."

"It looks like I'm chasing a ghost because you can't sleep at night."

The words landed where he had aimed them. Maren felt the small, precise sting of it behind her ribs. She had not slept well. The sheets on her bed at the apartment above the diner had been twisted into knots by three in the morning, and she had given up around four and come downstairs to count the chrome stools and check the locks on the back door.

"He's not a ghost," she said. "He's a man who left his mother's sink half-repaired and his work truck parked at the diner with a broken headlight and a set of keys in the cupholder."

Reeves blinked. Once. Slowly.

"His truck's at the diner?"

"Since Tuesday night. He came in for the meatloaf special. He sat at the counter. He left a tip under the coffee cup, which he never does because he thinks tipping is a scam invented by credit card companies." Maren let go of the chair and crossed her arms. The plastic made a soft squeal as it released. "He ate, he talked to Donut Rat for ten minutes about a generator, and then he said goodnight to me and walked out. That was nine-fifteen on Tuesday. I watched him walk across the lot toward his truck. I watched him get in. I did not watch him drive away because I had a pie in the oven."

"And the truck."

"The truck is still there. Headlight out. Keys in the cupholder. A paperback book on the passenger seat with a library bookmark holding his place."

The sheriff was quiet for a long moment. Outside, a truck rumbled past on the highway, the sound of its gears shifting low and mournful through the open window. The dispatch radio clicked twice and went silent.

"You moved the truck," Reeves said, "or it's been sitting in your lot untouched for two days."

"I moved it into the alley behind the diner so it wouldn't get towed. I touched the steering wheel with my sleeve. I did not open the glove box. I did not go through his things. I am not a fool, Daltrey."

"I never said you were a fool."

"You were about to."

The corner of his mouth twitched. It was not a smile. Reeves did not smile at the station, on principle, as far as Maren could tell. But the twitch was there, brief as a match strike, and gone.

"All right," he said. He picked up his pen. "Tell me about Tuesday. From the beginning. Leave nothing out, even the parts you think don't matter."

Maren drew a breath. The air in the station tasted faintly of old coffee and the lemon floor cleaner the county used in the hallways. She could hear, very faintly, the dispatcher laughing at something in the next room. Somewhere down the corridor, a door closed with a heavy, official sound.

"He came in at eight forty-five," she said. "He always comes in around eight forty-five on Tuesdays. It's the only predictable thing about him. He orders the meatloaf and mashed potatoes and he reads the paper and he watches the traffic on Route 9 through the front window like he's counting cars."

"Why does he count cars?"

"I don't know. He doesn't know either, probably. He just does it." Maren shifted her weight. The chair behind her complained again, and she pulled it out and sat down, finally, the plastic seat warm from the morning sun that had been pressing against the window. "He was quieter than usual. I asked him about his mother and he said she was doing fine, and I asked about the funeral arrangements and he said Wendell was handling it. Then he went back to his paper."

"His brother."

"Half-brother. Wendell Pritchard. Runs a used car lot over in Dalton, but he's been driving up twice a week to help Elsie sort through Buck's things." Maren paused. "That's been hard on Jase. Buck left him the house, and Wendell's been staying there while he fixes it up to sell, and Jase hasn't set foot inside since the reading of the will."

Reeves made a note. The scratch of his pen was surprisingly loud in the quiet room.

"Go on."

"He finished his dinner around nine. He left a twenty under the cup, which is twice what he usually leaves, and he told me the meatloaf was better than usual and I told him the meatloaf was exactly the same recipe I've used for six years and he said that was the point." Maren's throat tightened, just slightly, and she willed it not to show. "He walked out. I watched him cross the lot. I watched him get into the truck. Then the timer went off and I went back to the kitchen."

"And that was the last time."

"That was the last time."

The sheriff set his pen down. He removed his glasses again, this time not to fold them but to press the earpiece against his temple, the way he did when he was thinking hard about something he did not want to commit to paper. The fluorescent tube above them buzzed, a thin, electrical whine that seemed to rise in pitch as the seconds stretched out.

"His mother hasn't filed anything," Reeves said. "His brother hasn't called it in. You're the one sitting in my office."

"Yes."

"Why you, Maren?"

She met his eyes. The light in the station was bad, and the bags under his eyes were deeper than they had been in the spring, and the radio in the next room was murmuring again about something on Route 9 that she could not quite hear. She thought of the meatloaf and the twenty-dollar bill and the paperback book with the library bookmark. She thought of Jase's face in the window reflection as he counted cars.

"Because he would have come back by now," she said. "He would have called. Even if he didn't want to talk to his mother, even if he didn't want to talk to Wendell, even if he wanted to disappear for a while and lick his wounds in private, he would have called me. He always calls me."

Reeves studied her for a long moment, and then he pulled a yellow form from the drawer on his left and uncapped a fresh pen.

"All right," he said. "Let's start from the top. Full name, date of birth, and the last place you saw him breathing."

He took the details in his careful, unhurried way. Date of birth. Last known address in town, if any. Vehicle description. A photograph if she had one, and yes, she had one in her phone, the one from Easter, Jase in a button-down with sleeves rolled, holding a plate of her mashed potatoes and grinning at something off-camera. Reeves looked at it longer than necessary, then slid his phone back across the desk.

"Good picture," he said. "I'll get a BOLO out within the hour. I've got to call the state boys, too, since we're past twenty-four hours. You know how this goes."

"I know how it goes."

"Then go home, Maren. I've got work to do."

She stood. She did not fold her napkin, because she had brought no napkin, but her hands wanted something to fold. She watched the sheriff reach for his desk phone, watched him dial the first digit, and then she turned and walked out into the thin November light of the courthouse square.

The Buick sat where she had left it, the engine block ticking as it cooled. She climbed in and did not start it. Instead she sat for a moment with both hands on the wheel, watching a woman across the square wrestle a stroller through the crosswalk, the child inside immune to the wind, mouth open in some private astonishment.

The diner was ten minutes away. Donut Rat's place was seven. The pawnshop on Route 9 was closer still, and it was on the way to everything.

She started the engine.

---

The pawnshop sat in a strip of tired cinder block between a closed laundromat and a place that had once sold satellite dishes and now sold nothing at all. The sign above the door read CASH TODAY in letters that had once been red and were now the faded pink of old brick. Maren had driven past the place a thousand times. She had never gone in.

The bell above the door gave a sound like a small, disapproving bell. The shop smelled of dust and gun oil and something faintly sweet that might have been candy or might have been the carpet. Glass cases stretched the length of the narrow room, full of tools and rings and watches and guitars missing strings. A man behind the counter looked up from a newspaper and did not smile.

"Help you?"

"I'm looking for information about a man who may have come in here in the last two days. Jase Caldwell. Late thirties, about six-one, brown hair. He would have been wearing probably a flannel and probably looked like he hadn't slept."

The man set down his paper. He had a face like a worn catcher's mitt.

"Caldwell," he said. "Caldwell, Caldwell. You with the cops?"

"No. I'm with him."

"With him how?"

She considered the question. "I'm the person who would have heard from him by now."

The man considered her back. He had the patient air of someone who had been asked a great many questions in his life and had learned that most of them did not require a real answer.

"Some guy came in Tuesday," he said. "Bought a duffel bag. Blue, nylon, the kind with the wheels. Paid cash. Didn't try to pawn anything, didn't have a gun to sell. Just wanted the bag."

"Was it him?"

"Could have been. Brown hair, flannel, looked like he slept in it. Didn't give his name. Didn't give me his firstborn either."

"Did he say anything?"

The man rubbed the side of his nose with one knuckle.

"He asked if we had anything smaller. I said we had a backpack. He said the duffel was fine. He said he had some things that didn't fit in a backpack. That's the most he said."

"What kind of things?"

"Didn't ask. Wasn't my business." The man paused, and a different expression moved across his face, something less guarded. "He had a kind of look. You know the kind I mean. Like he'd just decided something. Like he was through deciding."

Maren nodded. She could feel her own heartbeat in the place where her jaw met her throat.

"Thank you," she said.

"Sure thing."

She bought a pack of gum she did not want, because the man had answered her, and people who answered you deserved to be answered back.

---

The motel was the kind of place that did not bother with stars. It sat back from the road behind a stand of cottonwoods that had gone the color of an old bruise, and the sign out front had three of its letters lit and the rest dark. OFFICE. VACANCY. The lot was mostly empty, a few pickups and a sedan with an out-of-state plate caked with road dust. Maren parked near the ice machine and sat for a moment, watching a woman in a smock come out of room six and drag a trash bag across the asphalt.

The office was small and smelled of bleach and coffee that had burned itself into the carpet years ago. A man in a polo shirt sat behind the desk reading a racing form. He was younger than she had expected. He had a small silver earring and a smile that came up easy and went away quick.

"Can I help you?"

"I'm looking for information about a guest. C. Holloway. I was told he may have rented here."

The man tilted his head. "Ma'am, I can't really give out information about guests."

"I understand. I'm not the police. I'm a friend. He's missing."

The smile, when it returned, was smaller and more careful. "Missing how?"

"Missing like his family can't find him and his friends can't find him and I am sitting here asking you for help because I don't know what else to do."

The man looked at her for a long moment. He had the face of someone who had not been in this town long enough to know whose side to take. Then he reached under the counter and produced a register.

"Holloway," he said, running one finger down a page. "Checked in Tuesday around four. Paid cash for two nights. Did not check out."

"Is the room still occupied?"

"That's the thing. The key's still on the rack. So either he left it, or he's been gone."

She felt the floor of her stomach drop a step.

"Could I see the room?"

"I can let you look through the window, ma'am. I can't open it."

Room fourteen was around the side, end unit. The curtains were drawn. Maren walked to the window and cupped her hands against the glass, and the office man, after a pause, followed her with a flashlight.

The room was not empty. The bed was made in a way that suggested someone had tried to make it and not quite finished, the corners tucked but the pillows unsmacked. A duffel bag sat on the luggage rack, blue nylon, the zipper half-open. The bathroom door stood ajar, and she could see a sliver of white towel hanging out of the rack. A paperback lay facedown on the nightstand, the spine cracked, the library bookmark gone.

"He took the books," she said.

"Ma'am?"

"Nothing. Sorry."

She straightened. The office man was watching her with an expression she could not quite read, somewhere between curiosity and the start of concern.

"Is there a message he left? A note? Anything at the front desk?"

"Nothing came in for him. Nobody came asking for him. He was a quiet guest. I'm sorry."

"Thank you," she said. "You've been kind."

He nodded, and she walked back around the building and sat in her car for a long moment with both hands on the wheel again, because that seemed to be where her hands wanted to be. The duffel bag in the room was Jase's. The book was Jase's. The towel was the kind of towel Jase would have folded before he left, except he had not left. He had left the bag and not the bag. He had left in pieces.

She did not go in. She could not have explained why, exactly, except that some rooms were not to be entered without the sheriff, and she had decided, somewhere in the last twenty-four hours, that she was going to do this one thing right.

She started the engine and drove the three blocks to Donut Rat's.

---

The laundromat was closed. Behind it sat the storage unit Donut Rat had been allowed to convert into something almost like a home, with a porch light strung along the awning and a rag rug on the concrete and a hand-painted sign that read NO SOLICITORS and, underneath, in smaller letters, NO EVANGELISTS EITHER.

He was outside, sitting in a plastic lawn chair with a mug balanced on his knee, and he was watching the last of the daylight drain out of the sky as if it owed him money.

"Evening, Maren."

"Evening, Rat."

He gestured at the chair beside him with the mug. She sat. The chair was colder than she had expected.

"I need to ask you about Jase," she said.

"I figured."

"When did you see him last?"

"Sunday. Early. Before the sun got up, even, and I am not a man who generally sees the sun get up."

"What did he say?"

Donut Rat took a sip from his mug. It steamed, faintly, and smelled like the kind of instant coffee that believed in nothing.

"He said the breakfast sandwiches were the best part of his week. Which is a sad thing for a grown man to say, and I told him so, and he laughed and said yes, it was."

"He came in for breakfast?"

"He came in for breakfast every Sunday he was in town. Stole the hot sauce. Complained about his brother. You know how it is."

She did not know, exactly, but she nodded.

"Was he carrying anything when he came in? A bag? Anything he might have left behind?"

Donut Rat considered this for a moment, his face doing the thing it did when he was sorting through a great pile of remembered detail.

"He had a backpack. Green. Old. The strap was held on with a bread tie." He paused. "He left the apron."

"The apron."

"Yeah. Hung it back on the hook when he was done and said, 'Thanks, Rat. I owe you one.' And then he walked out. I figured he was coming back."

Maren looked at the open door of the storage unit. From where she sat she could see a corner of the stove, the stack of mismatched plates, and the apron in question, faded orange, hanging from a nail just inside the doorframe.

"Can I take it?"

"You can have it. He left it for you. He didn't say so, but he left it for you."

She rose and crossed the concrete and unhooked the apron from the nail. The fabric was thin from washing and stiff in places from years of grease, and the smell of it was onions and coffee and the particular warmth of a kitchen where the same hands had worked for hours.

She folded it once and put it over her arm.

"Thank you, Rat."

"You going to find him?"

"I'm going to try."

He nodded slowly, as if trying was a thing he understood. The porch light buzzed. Somewhere behind the laundromat, a screen door banged twice and then was still.

"You want a coffee before you go?"

"No. Thank you."

"Then drive safe. And Maren."

She paused at the edge of the light.

"If he calls me, I'll tell him you're looking."

She nodded, and walked back to her car in the dark, carrying the apron like a thing she was not yet ready to set down.

The night air had turned sharp by the time Maren Holloway reached the Camaro. Cold pressed through her jacket at the shoulders and down along her spine. She could smell the first suggestion of frost in the wind, that mineral bite that came when autumn tipped over into something else. Her breath made a small cloud in the beam of the parking lot light.

The Camaro sat where she had left it, dull paint and cracked vinyl waiting patiently. She unlocked the door with the key, not the fob, because the fob had died somewhere around the second year of ownership and she had never gotten around to replacing the battery. The door opened with a creak that had become familiar. She set the folded apron on the passenger seat, smoothing the stiff fabric once with her palm before she pulled the door shut again.

The dome light buzzed on. She sat for a moment in the thin yellow glow, listening to the engine tick as it cooled, listening to the far-off sound of a truck on the highway. The lot was empty. The laundromat had gone dark behind her. Even Donut Rat had retreated into his converted storage unit, and she could see the faint seam of light beneath his door if she turned and looked.

She did not turn. She started the car instead, and the engine turned over with the rough authority of an old thing that still believed in its purpose, and she pulled out of the lot and turned south on Route 9 toward the diner.

She did not want to go back to the diner. She wanted to drive until the gas ran out or the road ran out or the night ran out, whichever came first, and she wanted to keep the apron folded on the seat beside her and not think about what it meant that he had left it for her, that he had walked out of Donut Rat's place with the deliberate gait of a man who intended to come back and then had not come back. She wanted, briefly and without admitting it even to herself, to find him so that she could tell him off in the particular tone she reserved for men who did not answer their phones. That tone had a register all its own: sardonic, clipped, edged with the faint disappointment of someone who had been let down before and intended to survive the disappointment without falling apart.

She kept her hands steady on the wheel. The highway unspooled in the headlights, black and pale by turns, and she let the Camaro find its own pace.

When she reached the diner she parked at the back, in her usual spot, and sat for a moment with the engine off. The lot was dark. The neon sign over the door was off because she had turned it off when she left, and the building looked like nothing so much as a long, low ship at rest, windows dark, chrome dulled, waiting for morning. She could see, through the back door's small window, a thin line of light. She had left the kitchen light on. She always left the kitchen light on.

She went inside.

The kitchen smelled faintly of bleach and coffee. The pie case was closed. The chairs were up on the tables. She walked through the quiet room without turning on more lights, and she set the apron on the counter by the register, smoothing it once, and she stood there for a moment looking at the folded orange rectangle as if it were a document she had not yet decided how to file.

She could not call him. She had tried, twice, on the drive over. Both times the call had rung four times and then gone to a voicemail that was not his voice, that was some automated thing from his carrier announcing that the customer she had reached was not available, and she had hung up before the beep and driven the rest of the way in silence.

She thought about Daltrey. She thought about calling Daltrey and telling him to put out a BOLO on a green pickup with a cracked taillight, and she did not call, because she did not know what she would tell him yet, did not know what the question was, did not know whether this was the kind of missing that required a sheriff or the kind that required a friend. She did not know which she wanted.

She went upstairs. Her apartment over the diner was small and warm, with a bedroom and a kitchen and a window that looked out over Route 9. She did not turn on the overhead light. She turned on the lamp by the bed and sat on the edge of the mattress and looked at her hands.

Her hands were steady. That was something.

She thought about the last time she had seen him, in the diner, two nights ago. He had been sitting at the counter with a cup of coffee going cold in front of him, and she had been pretending to wipe down the case, and he had been pretending to look at the newspaper, and neither of them had been able to say the thing that needed saying because they did not have the language for it. He had a way of holding a paper cup in both hands, even when the cup was empty, as if the holding itself were a kind of anchor. She had watched his hands. She had watched the way his thumb moved against the cardboard, slow and absent, the way a person touches a thing they are not sure they still have the right to touch.

She had wanted, then, to ask him to stay. She had not asked.

She got up and went to the window. Route 9 was empty in both directions, the way it got empty after midnight, the way it had been empty her whole life, the way it would go on being empty long after she was gone. A cat crossed the road three houses down, unhurried, in possession of whatever it was that cats possessed and she did not.

She went back downstairs. She made a cup of coffee for herself even though it was past midnight and she would regret it in the morning. She drank it standing at the counter, looking at the apron.

She did not open it. She did not search it. She understood, with the same instinct that had kept her grandmother's books balanced and her own ledgers honest for thirty years, that there were things in the apron she was not yet ready to find, and that finding them would change the shape of what she was carrying, and that she would rather carry the folded shape a little longer before she let it open.

She washed her cup. She turned off the kitchen light. She went back upstairs and sat on the edge of the bed and did not sleep.

In the morning she would drive back to his place. She would look again. She would call Daltrey and ask, in a voice that was steady and dry, if anyone had seen a green pickup with a cracked taillight heading east or west or nowhere in particular. She would ask Donut Rat if he had heard anything in the night. She would drive the back roads between the diner and the Caldwell place in the slow, deliberate way of a person who was not quite ready to admit she was looking, and she would not find him, and she would come back to the diner at noon and unlock the door and put on her own apron and serve the people who came in and not say a word about any of it.

But that was the morning.

Now it was the small hours, and she was awake in them, and the apron was folded on the counter below, and the diner was quiet around her in the way that only empty rooms at two in the morning are quiet, the kind of quiet that has weight to it, that sits on the chest, that requires a person to breathe slowly and deliberately and on purpose.

She did not know, then, that in two days she would sit in her car in the parking lot of his place and look at the glovebox of his Camaro and find, tucked beneath a registration card and a tire-pressure gauge and a pencil worn down to a stub, a small black notebook with his handwriting on the first page, and that she would open it, and that the first line she would read would be the word carcinoma, and that the word would do the thing that words do when they land in a life unexpectedly, which is to change the shape of everything that came before it and everything that comes after.

She did not know that yet. She could not have known it. She knew only that he had been gone forty-eight hours, and that the apron smelled of onions and coffee, and that the night was cold, and that somewhere between here and wherever he had gone, a green pickup with a cracked taillight was either still moving or had stopped, and that she would not know which until she knew.

She turned off the lamp. She lay back on the bed. She did not close her eyes.

Somewhere outside, a dog barked once and was quiet. Somewhere farther off, on the highway, a truck shifted gears and the sound rose and fell and was gone. The cat, if it was still crossing, had finished crossing. The diner settled around her like a held breath.

She would find him. Or she would not find him. Either way, the morning would come, and the coffee would be poured, and the door would be unlocked, and the regulars would come in at their usual times and sit at their usual stools and ask after Jase in the casual way that people ask after people in small towns, the way that means both very little and very much, and she would answer them in the steady voice she had practiced in the mirror at sixteen and perfected by thirty, and she would hold the answer in her mouth like a coin she was not yet ready to spend.

She lay still. The ceiling above her was dark. The building ticked and cooled around her.

The night went on, and she was in it, awake.