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Case three.
Cole. Forty at the time. Canadian Forces, two tours, signals. Rental car found at the Lake Louise trailhead in October four years ago with the keys left on the front tire. No note. No activity on his accounts since. Mother, Marian, seventy-one, Moose Jaw. She calls the Gone to Ground tip line on the first of every month and leaves the same message: This is Marian, about my son. I'm still here.
I have her interview on my hard drive. Forty-three minutes. She talks about his handwriting. About how he used to fall asleep on the floor beside the radiator when he was small, curled up like a dog. About the photo she keeps on the fridge of him at nine, holding up a pickerel almost as long as his arm. I've listened to it more times than I've listened to anything in my life.
I look at him across the table. The beard. The grey. The scar that wasn't in the photo. The eyes that were.
He watches my face do all of that and doesn't look away.
"You've got my file," he says.
"I've got your mother."
His jaw goes tight.
"She calls every month." My voice is shaking. "The first of every month, Cole. For four years. She says, I'm still here."
"Don't."
"She doesn’t think you’re dead."
He stands. The chair scrapes. For one second I remember very clearly that I'm alone in a cabin in the woods with a man twice my size who walked my walls at night, who doesn't exist on paper. Then he goes past me without a word into the back room and shuts the door, and I sit with my hands around a cold mug and my pulse hammering in my ears.
I make myself stand. I make myself look.
His cabin is exactly what I'd have guessed and nothing like it. One room and a radio room off the back, everything squared and put away. A single mug on the drying rack. A single chair at the table. He's been sitting on the stool by the stove all week so I could have it. I hadn't noticed until now.
Topographical maps cover every wall, with routes marked in red pencil. Evacuation routes. Rescue routes. Long, careful lines drawn by a man who thinks about how people get off mountains. Three books. A stove that draws perfectly.
No photographs. Not one.
I think about the nine-year-old with the pickerel, and my throat closes.
I'm still standing there when the door opens.
He doesn't come out all the way. He stops in the frame with one hand on the wood. His eyes are red at the rims.
"I gave you my name," he says. His voice is rough. "I could've kept it. You'd never have known."
"I know."
"I wanted you to have it. Not the file." He swallows. "Me."
I cross the room before I decide to. I stop close enough to feel the heat coming off him.
"I'm not going to pretend I didn't read it," I say. "I'm not going to pretend I don't know who's waiting for you."
"I know."
"But I'm not going anywhere."
His face breaks. Quietly, from underneath, his mouth first, then his eyes.
"Say it again," he says.
"Cole."
His hand comes up. It's shaking, which undoes me more than anything he's said. He cups my jaw, and his thumb finds my cheekbone, rough and careful.
