Remember Me, page 22
I took a cup of tea down to his room. His curtains were closed, his wallet and phone on Bert’s chest, his empty bed carefully made. I’d slept in, like a lazy lummox, but he was obviously having a good day.
A quick check reassured me that his orange hiking jacket was gone from the boot room, along with his walking boots. He’d dressed properly for the weather; he wasn’t wandering around the farm in pyjamas and bare feet. He would be at Raewyn’s, most likely. Bacon and coffee. I hoped he wasn’t pouring out confessions about Leah, but I doubted it. He’d seemed sharp before he went to bed, and was always at his best in the morning.
I cleaned the kitchen, paid some bills, took a shower in the ice-cold bathroom. The stone in my shoe kept jabbing my heel, but I ignored it. I was enjoying the peace too much. That’s the awful truth.
As I emerged from the bathroom, rubbing my hair with a towel, the grandmother clock struck the half-hour. Ten thirty. Gyp and Gloria trotted down the corridor to greet me, helicopter tails. That’s when it occurred to me that it was odd, very odd, that Dad hadn’t taken them with him on his outing.
Grabbing my phone from beside my bed, I called Raewyn.
‘Felix?’ She sounded anxious. ‘I’ve not seen him.’
I stood in the silent house with my hair dripping between my shoulder blades. One moment, you can still pretend everything is okay. The next, you know it isn’t.
‘Has he taken his car?’ she asked.
‘No. I keep the key hidden.’
‘Have you checked the well?’
She’d barely spoken the words before I was jumping down the porch steps, pelting into the blue-frost shadow beyond the carport. Drifts of frozen rose petals glistened around the edges of their beds; the lid of the well was encrusted with countless tiny crystals. So much beauty, so much fear. The lid was heavy, designed to deter small children and animals. I heaved it up, dragging it to one side. Then I crouched down on the edge, shining my phone’s torch into the darkness.
No floating corpses. I could have cried with relief.
‘He’s not in the well,’ I told Raewyn, who hadn’t hung up.
She said Ira was with her now, and would begin searching the farm while she looked everywhere between our two houses. She also suggested I call the health centre.
‘I know Felix has no transport,’ she said, ‘but he’s more than capable of walking to town.’
None of his ex-colleagues had seen him today. Pamela came on the line, speaking in that fake-calm voice people use when they’re secretly concerned.
‘I’m just on my way out to home visits,’ she said. ‘I’ll spread the word.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I bet he’s having coffee with some old patient right now.’
‘Hope so.’
The cat was out of the bag. Within half an hour, the whole town knew that Dr Kirkland was missing. Todd phoned to say he was taking his plane up for a bird’s-eye search. Pamela rang back to tell me that people were checking in their sheds and outhouses, as though Dad was a lost cat. Anyone who came across him would bring him home.
They’ll talk to him too, I thought. And if he seems distressed, they’ll ask him what’s wrong. I had to get to him first.
Raewyn set out in her car, checking all the roads between us and town. I saw Ira crisscrossing the farm on his quad bike. He stood up as he drove, looking down into the Arapito ravine. Cattle sometimes missed their footing and fell off those cliffs, often to their deaths. Why not people too?
Gloria and Gyp seemed to know something was wrong, their tails waving at half-speed as we checked the shelter belt, the woolshed, the bus shelter. I splashed knee-deep in the freezing currents of the river, dreading what I might find. Dripping, shivering, I clambered up the hill at the back of Ira’s farm, shouting for my dad at the top of my voice. I hadn’t yelled like this since I was a child—loud and high and panicked. My shouts seemed puny, swallowed by the wind.
In a few hours’ time, it would be dark.
•
‘So you last saw him … when?’ asked the man who answered the police non-emergency number. I could almost hear his pen, hovering over a half-filled report. Tawanui police station was rarely manned these days. The guy I was talking to could be anywhere.
‘Ten o’clock last night,’ I told him. ‘By this morning he was gone.’
The wind was getting up, looking for trouble. I imagined Dad huddled in a ditch, his teeth chattering. Perhaps he was trying to find his way home. Perhaps he didn’t know what ‘home’ meant anymore.
‘Sure he’s not in the house?’ asked the police officer. ‘You’d be amazed how often people turn out to be fast asleep in a cupboard. You got a cellar? Attic? Check those places first. Under all the beds.’
‘I’ve searched every inch of this house.’
‘Car?’
‘Still here.’
‘Could he have used public transport?’
This guy really wasn’t a local.
‘There is no public transport in Tawanui. Hardly even a taxi. We’re not on an InterCity bus route.’
He was maddeningly upbeat. ‘Seventy-five-year-old with dementia, on foot. He’s likely to be within a kilometre of his home. They generally are. Have you spoken to your neighbours?’
‘I have,’ I said. ‘They’re searching too.’
Someone would be round to my place, he assured me. It could be a while, though. Several officers were caught up in a serious incident in Hastings. In the meantime, they’d be asking patrol cars to keep an eye out for a man of Dad’s description. Elderly, white hair, dark orange jacket.
‘Nine times out of ten,’ he said cheerfully, ‘it’s a false alarm. They pitch up, safe and sound.’
•
That day seems blurred, when I look back on it.
I had a message from Nathan, asking what date was Mum’s birthday. He also asked how I was doing, and I couldn’t lie. I told him his granddad was missing, that it would be dark by about five, and that I was expecting sub-zero temperatures overnight.
He replied within seconds, bless him. Want me to book a flight to NZ?
Definitely not! I answered, though at that moment I’d have given my right arm to teleport him into Dad’s kitchen. I’ve called the police. I want you to carry on with your adventures.
I couldn’t put it off any longer. I had to contact my siblings. Nathan was in touch with his Kiwi cousins, so the social media drums would soon be beating. Eddie and Rhonda were on holiday in Fiji, and to my intense relief he didn’t answer his phone; Carmen reacted exactly as I’d known she would.
‘You haven’t seen him since when? For God’s sake, Emily! Do I need to get myself down there?’
She spoke to someone else, her voice muffled, as if she had one hand over the phone. ‘My dad … yes, he has Alzheimer’s. I can’t drop everything. Well, actually we don’t know he’s okay, do we?’
‘The entire town’s out looking for him,’ I assured her. ‘I’ve called the police. You can’t help. Stay put.’
‘I knew this was going to happen,’ she moaned. ‘Why, oh why, wouldn’t he go into St Patrick’s?’
•
They seemed all wrong for the kitchen, somehow, with their heavy shoes, their bulky stab-proof vests and radios: a silent young man, not much older than Nathan, and a calm woman, perhaps in her thirties, who introduced herself as Sergeant Jodie Palmer.
‘So you’ve checked with friends and neighbours?’ she asked.
‘Everyone.’
She glanced into the pantry, as though expecting to spot a retired doctor perched among the tins. She had a very straight fringe, hair scraped into a ponytail.
‘Does he often go out on his own?’
‘He often walks his dogs, or goes to visit our neighbour. I’ve never lost him before.’
‘Did he have access to cash? Credit cards? Could he have decided to take a little holiday, maybe staying in a hotel or with a friend?’
‘No. I mean yes, it’s theoretically possible, but it’s just not what he’d do.’
At her suggestion, I went online to check his bank accounts. He’d spent nothing in weeks. All the outgoing transactions were mine, shopping or paying bills. He might have a bit of cash, but that would be all.
She asked about the most obvious dangers: gullies, wells, hazardous bodies of water. There’s something ominous about that expression, body of water. I had a sickening image of Dad, face down in the swirling eddies of the river, old-man’s hair floating like a halo of pale waterweed.
‘My neighbour has searched his farm, including the dams,’ I said. ‘I’ve already looked in the nearest parts of the Arapito stream, and the well in our garden.’
Jodie had obviously received training on how to talk to the families of lost elderly relatives.
‘Sometimes, when a person who’s confused wanders off, they’ve been talking about a place they used to live or work. Maybe his childhood home? Office? A wife’s grave, that kind of thing? The advice we give is to start by checking those places.’
‘He’s from Leeds, in England. Mum’s alive and well, but long divorced from him. He was a doctor at the Tawanui Health Centre, and that was his second home for forty years, but they’ve not seen him at all today.’
She looked thoughtful, peering out of the window at the gathering dusk.
‘D’you think he might have tried to walk there? Long way on foot.’
‘About thirteen kilometres,’ I said. ‘We thought of that. My neighbour—Raewyn—has been driving around all afternoon, but she’s had no luck. He’s still fit, the distance probably wouldn’t be a problem, but the dementia might be.’
‘Okay.’ Jodie took a swift glance at her watch, chewing her lower lip. ‘We’ll head out that way too.’
I saw them to their car. Jodie said she’d start pulling levers to bring in LandSAR, the land-based search and rescue volunteers. As she opened her door, she paused. ‘You’ve checked the garden shed, obviously?’
‘About five times.’
‘Can you think of anything—anything at all—that he’s been mentioning or obsessing about? A while ago, we ran a major search for a lady with dementia. Turned out she’d managed to board an InterCity bus to Auckland! She was going to see her mother. She’d been talking about it: I’m going to see Mum. I’ll take the bus. But her mum had been dead forty years.’
‘That’s really sad,’ I said. ‘Poor lady.’
‘Mm. What about your dad? Sure there wasn’t anything like that on his mind?’
Leah. Leah was on his mind.
I tried to look mystified and baffled, holding out my hands to show that I had nothing. ‘He’s been his normal self,’ I said.
I watched their tail-lights on the drive; saw Jodie turn right and begin to crawl along Arapito Road.
A wife’s grave, that kind of thing. Start by checking those places.
How about the scene of a murder?
•
I was beginning to regret my decision to try to navigate Biddulph Road alone, late at night, in a car that wasn’t designed for off-road adventures. The unsealed track was littered with potholes, slips and fallen branches. Trees and undergrowth reached out from both sides, clawing at the aerial, scratching the doors. I was heading right to the edge of the map, and beyond were dragons. No light, no dwellings, no phone signal. Break down, run off the road, I’d be on my own.
My headlights made ghost-tunnels through the pitch-dark, teeming with a trillion insects, as the track began to wind steeply uphill. On and on, creeping around hairpin bends, ready to brake if Dad suddenly stepped out in front of me. Wooden bridges rattled. I stopped on each, wound down my windows and shone my flashlight into swollen streams gushing down rocky gullies. My imagination was in overdrive. I had a ghastly sensation that someone was sitting in the back seat behind me. I kept checking over my shoulder.
The call had gone out on social media and radio news that evening: Have you seen Felix Kirkland? They used a photo I took with my phone: Dad, standing among his roses. Jodie Palmer had been in touch to let me know they’d checked with bus and taxi companies and drawn a blank. The local volunteers were on board, and a coordinated search was to begin first thing tomorrow morning.
Raewyn had offered to wait in our house in case Dad reappeared. Ira was driving around farms and lifestyle blocks, asking people to look in their outbuildings. He and I had agreed to meet up at the petrol station later.
Biddulph Road ended in nothingness. I cut the engine, then my headlights. Silence. Even the wind was holding its breath. As my eyes began to adjust, I opened my door and climbed out. I had a vivid image of Leah doing the same thing, in this same place. A bar of chocolate in her pocket, turquoise beanie on her head.
See you on Friday.
Perhaps he was waiting for her here. Perhaps she was strangled—or bludgeoned, or knifed, or shot—right where I was standing.
No … no. That didn’t work. She wrote her log the following morning. Saturday. She was definitely in the bivvy then, alive and well. Perhaps they’d spent the night together. He might have ambushed her somewhere up there—easy to hide a body, and almost no chance of any forensic evidence being discovered. Did she know what was coming, in the end? Did she beg, did she fight for her life?
‘Dad?’ I whispered.
Darkness crouched over me, pressing its thumbs into my eyes. I swear the hair really did stand up on the back of my neck. I flicked on my flashlight, directing its beam in a long arc into the deepest shadows. Nothing but trees. Millions and millions of trees, all of them watching me.
‘Dad?’ I croaked again. ‘You here?’
The silence exploded with the rasping growl of a possum—guttural, seething, almost on top of me. My wildly swinging light picked out two pairs of glowing eyes in the foliage above my head. I can’t remember when I’ve moved so fast. I was back in the car, spinning the wheel in my desperation to turn around, mud flying as I sped away down the track.
•
Ira laughed when he heard how a pair of small creatures put me to rout.
‘Creepy, aren’t they?’ he said. ‘They look cute, but they sound like devils.’
It was getting on for midnight. The petrol station was closed. Still, its dimly lit forecourt felt positively jolly compared to the menacing void at the far end of Biddulph Road. I shone my torch into the drive-through carwash while Ira nipped around the side of the building to check the outdoor toilet.
‘Dripping tap,’ he said, walking back. ‘The floor’s a lake. No Doc Kirkland. He’s probably bedded down in some nice warm barn.’
‘You should go home and get some sleep,’ I told him.
‘So should you.’
But neither of us made any move to leave. We leaned on the cooling bonnet of Dad’s car, under the blue light of the fuel price sign, and tried to think of new places to search. Eventually we lapsed into exhausted silence, listening to the wistful cries of a morepork. She sounded very close, perhaps hunting in the trees alongside the road.
‘How’s it going with the hot vet?’ I asked.
‘Terrifying, actually.’ Ira hesitated before adding, ‘She is planning on moving in with me.’
I swung around to peer at his blue-lit face. ‘That’s so great! But you and her, and two little boys, all in your tiny shack?’
‘She wants to move a house onto the site where mine is now. She reckons it’s a world-beating location.’
‘You never tell me anything!’ I pretended to punch him on the arm. ‘How can I not have known this? When are you going to tell Raewyn? When do I get to meet Cathy?’
‘Steady on.’
I shut up and let him do the talking. ‘It’s early days,’ he said. ‘Don’t want to get Mum’s hopes up if it isn’t going to happen.’ But they’d already found a house to relocate; they’d even got a quote for hauling it onto the site and connecting it up to plumbing and electricity. This was astonishing, wonderful news—a hope-coloured splash of light in the sea of darkness.
‘I decided not to do that test,’ said Ira. ‘For the Huntington’s gene.’
‘What made you change your mind?’
‘I had a long talk with the genetic counsellor. She helped me to think really clearly about why I’d be taking it, and how I’d react if I got a positive result. I’ve got to be honest with myself—I don’t think I’d handle it very well at all. I won’t have kids of my own, so there’s no chance of passing it on. And we’re all going to die one day, aren’t we? Leah got tested and she was free of Huntington’s, but her card was still marked.’
‘True,’ I murmured, thinking about Dad and Leah, wishing I could tell Ira everything I’d discovered.
‘Every human being has a use-by date,’ Ira was saying. ‘Cathy understands that reality. Sean might not make very old bones, because he has Down’s syndrome. And her husband was just biking home from work when a truck took him out.’
‘That’s terrible.’
‘It is. But first, there’s life! The clinic people said I’m showing no red flags at all. No early signs. I’m older than any of my relatives when they first noticed symptoms. So it’s looking hopeful. I’m just going to assume I’d test negative. I’m going to take my chances, and get on and … well. Live. Just live.’
I couldn’t resist hugging him. Suddenly I felt swamped by joy for my friend, by fear for Dad. I was burbling all kinds of tearful nonsense about how lucky Cathy was, and how I hoped she damned well knew it or she’d have me to answer to.
‘C’mon,’ said Ira, awkwardly patting my arm. ‘We’d better grab a couple of hours’ sleep, if we can.’
I was getting into my car when the morepork began to call again. The little owl could see by starlight; she would be able to hear every sound, even the rustle of her insect prey in the leaf litter beneath the trees. The night was her world. I wondered whether she knew where Dad was now.
Perhaps Ira was having similar thoughts. He stood still, his head tilted, listening to the owl.
‘We’ll find him tomorrow,’ he said. ‘We’ll bring him home.’
