Free Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel Page A

opened the Bible on the bar. A certain page had been marked with a yellow sticky note.
    A child’s uneven handwriting sloped downward across the page in blue ink, overlapping the beginning of the Twenty-second Psalm: Stop looking for me. I’m not missing; I do not want to be found. I wish to remain vanishing. I don’t want to go home.—Lilia.
    “Good Lord,” said the detective. He took the Bible from Peter’s hands. “I could find her in ten minutes with something like this. How old did you say she was?”
    “She’s eleven and a half. Been missing a little over four years.”
    “Same age as my daughter. Missing from where?”
    “Middle of nowhere, south of here. Her mother has a house near St.-Jean, not far from the American border. Her father’s an American, so the kid has dual citizenship, and they’d probably crossed the border before the mother even reported her missing. Anyway, the girl’s been missing for years, and the police’ve been useless. Someone recognized them from a poster and they almost caught her in Cincinnati a year ago, but nothing after that. There’s just no trail. She could be anywhere this evening.”
    “This note is recent?”
    “Not particularly. Some religiously inclined traveling salesman found it in his motel room in Toledo three years ago.”
    “Three years ago. So she was eight when she wrote this.” He was still looking at the note, shaking his head. An image flashed through him—a small girl with short blond hair sitting cross-legged on a bed in a motel room, writing carefully in a Bible—and he blinked.
    “At most. She might’ve still been seven. Three years ago was just when the salesman happened to find it. Listen,” Peter said, “I could use your help on this. It’s a solvable case, but she could be anywhere, literally anywhere tonight, I am out of leads, and I’m having a bad month. You know Anya left me. Take a leave of absence from the police force, come work with me on this. The money’s better.”
    “Christ,” he said, “I didn’t know about Anya. I’m sorry.”
    “Well, she always said she was going to. Has it been that long since we’ve spoken?”
    “I guess it’s been a while,” Christopher said.
    “Think about coming to work with me on this. If anyone can find her . . .”
    “I’ll think about it. May I borrow this?”
    “Of course.”
    He left the bar not long afterward. It was August in Montreal, and an airless day had turned to a perfect evening; there was a cool breeze from the distant river and Rue St.-Denis was alight, outdoor cafés spilling their light and voices out into the street, streetlamps shining down through the leaves of the trees that lined the sidewalk, and people everywhere: couples out walking in the twilight, girls with short skirts and multicolored hair and combat boots, young men with berets and goatees smoking cigarettes and walking somewhere quickly, slow-moving hippies with scarves wrapped over their dreadlocks and benevolent expressions, people eating dinner at small round tables on the sidewalk, everyone surreptitiously watching everyone else.
    He walked slowly down the long slope to Rue Ste.-Catherine, in love with the city, the Bible in his shoulder bag. It was a lightweight book, mass-produced on thin paper to be stolen from an American motel room, but he felt the weight. He’d spent his childhood traveling too, and felt a certain empathy on that front, but it seemed to him later that he’d been seduced by her language. I wish to remain vanishing. He knew exactly what she meant. He walked home from the jazz club because the walk took two hours and he wanted to be alone, turning the phrase over and over like a polished stone in his pocket. He told himself as he walked that he was trying to make the decision but realized long before he got home that the decision had already been made.
    His wife was in the kitchen, listening to the radio with the newspaper spread out over the table; she looked up and smiled