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held her forehead late at night. Hefetched her medicines and kissed her cheek and held her shivering body and made her feel loved.
     
    She had looked Broome in the eye and told him all this because she wanted him to stay with the case, to not dismiss her husband as a runaway, to get personally involved, to find her soul mate because she simply could not live without him.
     
    Seventeen years later, despite learning some hard truths, Broome was still here. And the whereabouts of Sarah’s husband and soul mate was still very much a mystery.
     
    Broome looked up at her now. “That’s good,” he said, hearing the babble in his own voice. “I mean, about your sister’s visiting. I know you like when your sister visits.”
     
    “Yeah, it’s awesome,” Sarah said, a voice flat enough to slip under a door crack. “Broome?”
     
    “Yes?”
     
    “You’re giving me small talk.”
     
    Broome looked down at his hands. “I was just trying to be nice.”
     
    “No. See, you don’t do just being nice, Broome. And you never do small talk.”
     
    “Good point.”
     
    “So?”
     
    Despite all the trappings—bright yellow paint, fresh-cut flowers—all Broome could see was the decay. The years of not knowing had devastated the family. The kids had some hard years. Susie had two DUIs. Brandon had a drug bust. Broome had helped both of them get out of trouble. The house still looked as though their father had disappeared yesterday—frozen in time, waiting for his return.
     
    Sarah’s eyes widened a little as if struck by a painful realization. “Did you find… ?”
     
    “No.”
     
    “What then?”
     
    “It may be nothing,” Broome said.
     
    “But?”
     
    Broome sat resting his forearms on his thighs, his head in his hands. He took a deep breath and looked into the pained eyes. “Another local man vanished. You may have seen it on the news. His name is Carlton Flynn.”
     
    Sarah looked confused. “When you say vanished—”
     
    “Just like…” He stopped. “One moment Carlton Flynn was living his life, the next—poof—he was gone. Totally vanished.”
     
    Sarah tried to process what he was saying. “But… like you told me from the start. People do vanish, right?”
     
    Broome nodded.
     
    “Sometimes of their own volition,” Sarah continued. “Sometimes not. But it happens.”
     
    “Yes.”
     
    “So seventeen years after my husband vanishes, another man, this Carlton Flynn, goes missing. I don’t see the connection.”
     
    “There might be none,” Broome agreed.
     
    She moved closer to him. “But?”
     
    “But it’s why I missed the anniversary.”
     
    “What does that mean?”
     
    Broome didn’t know how much to say. He didn’t know how much he even knew for sure yet. He was working on a theory, one that gnawed at his belly and kept him up at night, but right now that was all it was.
     
    “The day Carlton Flynn vanished,” he said.
     
    “What about it?”
     
    “It’s why I wasn’t here. He vanished on the anniversary. February eighteenth—exactly seventeen years to the day after your husband vanished.”
     
    Sarah seemed stunned for a moment. “Seventeen years to the day.”
     
    “Yes.”
     
    “What does that mean? Seventeen years. It might just be a coincidence. If it was five or ten or twenty years. But seventeen?”
     
    He said nothing, letting her work on it herself for a few moments.
     
    Sarah said, “So I assume, what, you checked for more missing people? To see if there was a pattern?”
     
    “I did.”
     
    “And?”
     
    “Those were the only two we know for certain who disappeared on a February eighteenth—your husband and Carlton Flynn.”
     
    “We know for certain?” she repeated.
     
    Broome let loose a deep breath. “Last year, on March fourteenth, another local man, Stephen Clarkson, was reported missing. Three years earlier, on February twenty-seventh, another was also reported missing.”
     
    “Neither was