Free The White Road-CP-4 by John Connolly Page B

active love life.
    “How can I help you, Mr. Blythe?” I asked, my tone betraying the fact that right now helping him was pretty low down on my list of priorities.
    His hands were deep in the pockets of his trousers, his short-sleeved shirt tucked tightly into the elastic waistband. His pants were shucked up high over what remained of his paunch, making his legs look too long for his body. We had spoken little since I had agreed to look into the circumstances of his daughter’s disappearance. Instead, I dealt mostly with his wife. I had gone back over the police reports, begun to speak again to those who had seen Cassie in the days before she disappeared, and retraced her movements in those final days; but too much time had elapsed for those who recalled her to remember anything new. In some cases, they had trouble remembering anything at all. I had come up with nothing remarkable so far, but I had declined the offer of a retainer similar to that enjoyed for so long by Sundquist. I told the Blythes that I would bill them for my time, nothing more. Yet if Irv Blythe wasn’t openly hostile toward me, he still left me with the sense that he would have preferred it if I had not become involved in the investigation. I was not sure how the events of the previous day would affect our relationship. As it turned out, it was Blythe who brought them up.
    “Yesterday, at the house…” he began, then stopped.
    I waited.
    “My wife thinks I owe you an apology.” His face was very red.
    “What do you think?”
    He was nothing if not blunt.
    “I think I wanted to believe Sundquist and that man he brought with him. I resented you for taking away the hope they brought with them.”
    “It was false hope, Mr. Blythe.”
    “Mr. Parker, until now we’ve had no hope at all.”
    He removed his hands from his pockets and started to dig at the skin in the center of his palms, hoping to locate the source of his pain there and remove it like a splinter. I noticed half-healed sores on the back of his hands and the exposed patches of his scalp, where he had torn at himself in his hurt and frustration.
    It was time to clear the air between us.
    “I get the sense that you don’t like me very much,” I said.
    His right hand stopped digging and flailed loosely at the air, as if he were trying to grasp his feelings toward me, to snatch them from the air so he could display them on his wrinkled, gouged palm instead of being forced to put them into words.
    “It’s not that,” he began. “I’m sure that you’re very good at what you do. It’s just that I know about you. I’ve read the newspaper reports. I know that you solve difficult cases, that you’ve found out the truth about people who’ve been missing for years, longer even than Cassie. The trouble is, Mr. Parker, that those people are usually dead when you find them.” The final words came out in a rush, and left him with a tremble in his voice. “I want my daughter back alive.”
    “And you think that hiring me is like an admission that she’s gone forever?”
    “Something like that.”
    Irv Blythe’s words seemed to open wounds inside me that, like his own exposed sores, were only half healed. There were those whom I had failed to save, that was true, and there were others who were long gone before I had even begun to understand the nature of what had been visited upon them. But I had made an accommodation with my past, a recognition that although I had failed to protect individuals, had even failed to protect my own wife and child, I was not entirely responsible for what had happened to them. Susan and Jennifer had been taken by another, and even had I sat with them twenty-four hours a day for ninety-nine days, he would have waited until the hundredth day for me to turn my back briefly before he came for them at last. Now I spanned two worlds, the worlds of the living and the dead, and to both I tried to bring some measure of peace. It was all that I could do in