Free Vanished in the Dunes by Allan Retzky

binge, or a tryst with a secret lover. They make excuses and apologize to the authorities.
    The voice on the other end of Henry’s call is reassuring.
    “If she went to East Hampton for the day by bus, there will likely be a record. We’ll check it out and ask the town police to look for her. Do you happen to have a recent photo?”
    He does. They’d spent a long weekend in Bermuda three months before. He’d placed the camera on a balcony table, set the timer, and then taken a number of shots. He chooses one with her silhouetted against the balcony wall. She wears a new sleeveless pink-and-white dress that shows off her tan. Her short black hair barely grazes her cheek. He uses a scissors to slice away most of his own image and delivers the photo to the appointed address that afternoon.
    He tells the investigator that he thinks her parents might live in or near Vienna, but that they should seek an Austrian address through the hospital since he doesn’t have one and Heidi never spoke of them.
    “No.” As far as he knows she doesn’t have any relatives that live in America.
    And later, “I don’t know if she had relationships with other men.”
    The last question raises an edge of angst. It wasn’t possible that they might think he had anything to do with her disappearance, yet a tiny seed of doubt rises, and makes him tremble. He doesn’t tell them about the message on his cell phone. Not then. He couldn’t admit there could be other men.
    They thank him and ask that he tell them if she turns up. From past experience they expect that would happen within a few weeks at most. In the meanwhile, they will check with the Hampton Jitney and advise East Hampton P.D. to be on the lookout. They’ve done this sort of thing before. Everything they do seems so routine to Henry, yet he lives on the edge for the next several weeks.
    But time does not solve the problem. Eventually he goes back to the police and plays the cell phone message she left. They seem to pass off his original failure to provide the information as jealousy, which it was. He is advised that a detective named Peter Wisdom of the East Hampton Police still has the case file unless for some reason he’d turned it over to the Suffolk County Police Department, which handles major crimes. In this case, at least so far, there is no evidence yet of anything sinister. They tell him that Detective Wisdom has interviewed all the passengers who live in East Hampton who took the same bus as Heidi that morning. They give him Wisdom’s direct number at work.
    He thinks about this for a few more days and then decides to call the Hampton Jitney bus company directly rather than Wisdom. He wants to speak to the same passengers as well as the bus driver, but they deny him access to the lists. They say it’s confidential information. He calls a lawyer he knows from their undergraduate days at Yale. Judah Cohen greets his call with collegial enthusiasm and arranges for an associate to provide him with an insight into the maze of a legal system that has simultaneously become America’s strength and soft spot.
    Several days later he speaks to Detective Wisdom to confirm that he can access the passenger list if he files a Freedom of Information Act request, called a FOIA. Anyone can do it. A citizen can look into reading Nixon’s Watergate notes, the background behind Lyndon Johnson’s Tonkin Gulf Resolution, aged FBI files on a relative or friend sucked into the McCarthy Senate hearings, or possibly even certain CIA communications to President Bush about potential problem weapons in Iraq.
    Wisdom is forthcoming. “We prefer that private citizens not get involved, but to be honest, sometimes you people pick up things we miss. If you find out anything unusual, please let me know. Henryreadily agrees to this and also offers to send Wisdom one of the photos of Heidi in the pink-and-white dress.
    The process is not swift, yet moves along. In ten days he has the list of