Chapter 10.

10.

That night, I pulled into my driveway around eight o’clock. On my way into the house, I stopped at my mailbox and pulled out the usual junk—a ShopRite circular, an invitation to join AARP, and pleas for money from a host of charities. But when I got inside and tossed the mail onto my kitchen counter, I noticed a white business-size envelope with no return address. My name and address looked like they’d been typed on an old-fashioned manual typewriter with a worn-out ribbon. There was nothing to identify the sender. Just a US flag stamp and a postmark of Hopps Ferry, New Hampshire.

I opened the refrigerator, grabbed a bottle of Coors Light, and sat down to open the envelope. Inside was a sheet of paper with a five-by-seven photograph printed in its center. Printed at home is what I mean, on one of those cheap Inkjets you get for free when you buy a new computer. The colors were dull and washed-out but the image was clear. A man and woman, both young, standing in front of a lake. I almost didn’t recognize my future son-in-law, because Aidan was fifteen pounds heavier in the picture, with an easy, relaxed smile that he never shared at our dinner. It looked like the photographer had caught him telling a funny story. And the woman was completely unfamiliar. She was young, Maggie’s age, dressed in tight denim cutoffs and a black top with a low neckline. She was laughing at something off camera and leaning into Aidan’s side; he had his arm around her waist and a hand on her hip. Scrawled across the bottom of the page was a handwritten message: WHERE IS DAWN TAGGART???

That was it. Four words printed in black Sharpie. I reached back into the envelope, spreading it wide with my fingers, checking to see if it contained anything else.

It didn’t.

I uncapped the beer, took a long pull, and studied the photograph. Up until this moment, I might have had one or two small reservations about Aidan; I’d never really believed his bullshit story about the black eye, and I didn’t like the secrets hiding in his toilet tank. But it’d been easy to give him the benefit of the doubt. I’d put all my faith in my daughter’s good judgment. Maggie was a smart, mature, responsible woman who didn’t need me second-guessing her decisions.

Only now—

WHERE IS DAWN TAGGART???

I gathered Dawn Taggart was the very shapely girl laughing in the photograph. But what was Aidan doing next to her?

And who sent me this picture?

I reached for my phone and called my daughter. Normally all my calls went right to her voice mail, but this night, for whatever reason, she answered.

“Hey, Dad. What’s up?”

“How are you doing, Maggie?”

“Well, it’s three days before the wedding,” she said with a bit of an exasperated tone, as if I should have known better. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. But I just got a weird letter in the mail. Or not a letter, actually. Someone sent me a photo.”

“What kind of photo?”

“It’s a picture of Aidan. He’s standing next to this girl. In front of a lake. And on the bottom somebody wrote ‘Where is Dawn Taggart?’”

There was a long pause—so long, I started to think we’d been disconnected.

“Maggie? Are you still there?”

“What else does it say?”

“That’s it. ‘Where is Dawn Taggart?’ I don’t know who sent it, but the postmark says Hopps Ferry.”

Maggie sighed. “Unbelievable.”

“Who’s Dawn Taggart?”

“Dad, I need you to do something for me. I need you to take the letter and the envelope, take the whole thing, and put them in a plastic bag. Like a Ziploc bag. And bring it to New Hampshire tomorrow. Can you do that for me?”

“Why?”

She took a deep breath. “All right, look. I should have told you this sooner. Because you’ll probably hear about it at the wedding? And it sounds like a big deal? But it’s not a big deal, okay? Because Aidan wasn’t involved. He had nothing to do with this.”

I forced myself to stay quiet. It’s a tactic I learned from my wife, Colleen: she used to say that if you wanted a kid to share things, you couldn’t interrupt them with lots of questions. You had to shut up and let them talk.

“Last year, Aidan dated a girl who went missing. Her name is Dawn Taggart. Back in November, she went for a hike and never came back. And no one knows where she went.”

Maggie said there wasn’t a lot of additional information. Dawn was a lifelong resident of Hopps Ferry and twenty-three years old at the time of her disappearance. Police officers discovered her car in the parking lot of a New Hampshire state forest, next to some public restrooms and a trailhead. Heavy rains had soaked the topsoil, hindering the efforts of the search and rescue teams. No one could determine if Dawn had hiked into the woods or if she simply got inside another vehicle and drove away.

“So how does Aidan factor in?”

“He doesn’t. That’s what I’m saying. The police cleared him immediately. The day Dawn disappeared, Aidan was two hundred miles away. In Boston. But Dawn’s mother blames him, anyway.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s psycho! He barely knew the girl.”

“You just said they dated.”

“Once! They had one date. They never got serious.”

I looked at the photograph on the table. Aidan had an arm around Dawn’s waist, and he was resting his hand on her hip. They seemed comfortable with each other, like a boyfriend and girlfriend who had moved past the awkward preliminaries of early courtship.

“So who sent this to me?”

“Dawn’s mother, most likely. She’s already harassing the Gardners, so now it’s your turn. That’s why you need to bring it with you tomorrow. It’s evidence the Gardners can give to the lawyers.”

“There’s lawyers involved?”

“Of course, Dad. This whole thing’s just a ploy for money. Dawn’s mother wants the Gardners to pay her to go away.”

“She said that? She actually asked for money?”

“Not yet. But the lawyers say it’s her endgame. Trust me, Dad, if you saw this woman, you’d understand. She’s drunk all the time; she spends the whole day in her nightgown. And she wears this horrible orange pancake makeup. Like the people you see on Dr. Phil .”

“Who?”

“The talk show? With all the crazies fighting onstage? This woman would fit right in. She lives in a forest. In a trailer.”

It’s a funny thing about Maggie: I think she often forgets that I grew up in a trailer myself, that many of my friends grew up in trailers, and our parents were nothing like the crazies you see on reality TV shows. Most of our neighbors were decent hardworking people who lived modestly and paid their bills on time.

“The point is,” Maggie said, “all she cares about is money. So you need to bring the photo and give it to Errol, okay?”

“Sure,” I told her. I didn’t ask too many questions because I wanted to sound supportive. If people were taking sides, I didn’t want to end up on the wrong one. “How’s Aidan dealing with this?”

“It’s hard for him. The whole family feels terrible. They even hired their own private investigator. To find Dawn and put this whole thing to rest. But guess what? The detective thinks Dawn ran away on purpose. To get away from her mother. He says every year, six hundred thousand people go missing in the United States and a lot of them don’t want to be found. He thinks Dawn’s probably a waitress in Las Vegas. Or Key West. A million miles from home but perfectly safe.”

She spoke with tremendous confidence, as if this was the definitive version of events—a theory I should accept as fact. But I still remembered how it felt to be young and in love, and how passion blinded me to my wife’s worst flaws. For example, I always used to brag about Colleen’s ability to finish sentences that I’d started—but after we married, it just felt like she was interrupting me all the time. So I worried that Maggie might not be seeing her fiancé clearly, but of course I didn’t want to contradict her, so I kept these concerns to myself.

After the phone call, I went to my computer, opened Google, and searched for “Dawn Taggart” plus “New Hampshire.” I found a small article in something called the Hopps Ferry Messenger detailing her disappearance more or less as Maggie described it. Dawn’s Toyota Corolla was recovered from a parking lot in a state forest, but her whereabouts remained unknown. There was no mention of Aidan Gardner in the newspaper article—or anywhere else on the internet, as far as I could tell.

So I put the photograph and the envelope in a Ziploc bag, per my daughter’s instructions. Then I carried the bag up to my bedroom and put it in my suitcase. I was so excited for the trip, I’d already packed most of my things. My black oxford shoes were polished to a shine, my tuxedo was sealed in a garment bag, and I’d even bought new swim trunks because Maggie said the lake had a beach. I was excited to get to New Hampshire and meet my new in-laws. I was excited to walk my daughter down the aisle, to make champagne toasts and dance with the bride. I wanted to celebrate her marriage and wish the newlyweds a happily ever after. So I willed myself to accept Maggie’s explanation of Dawn Taggart, and I ignored the quiet voice in my brain saying something felt wrong.