The Mysteries Read Online Free PDF Page B

dedication to it makes it seem more of a vocation, or an obsession, than ordinary work.
    My calling is to look for missing persons, and you don't have to look very deep to figure out the reason why. My first case was my father.
    He disappeared when I was nine years old. In my childhood imagination, the disappearance of Joe Pauluk was on a par with the great unsolved mysteries of all time, like whatever happened to Benjamin Bathurst, Owen Parfitt, or the crew of the
Mary Celeste;
but in reality he was just another guy who didn't come home from work one day.
    When my mother called the service station where he worked as a mechanic, to find out why he was so late, they said he'd called in sick the day before. She discovered shortly that he'd cleared out their joint checking account, and emptied the joint savings account that was supposed to be our college fund. Luckily, she had her own private savings account, earmarked for emergencies, as that was exactly what our daily life had suddenly become.
    A few weeks later, Dad's car was traced to a dealer in Chicago, who had bought it from a man matching my father's description. At that point, the police said there was nothing they could do. If my father had decided to sell his car and move to another state without telling anyone, that was his right. My mother couldn't even sue him for desertion or child support because they weren't married.
    He could have left her anytime, as my mother's mother liked to point out.
    “Yes, Ma, I know. Of course he could have left me—we both knew that. He didn't need the state's permission to move out. That's just it: Why sneak away like that when he didn't have to? Why steal money from his own kids?” Dropping her voice still lower (my ear was already pressed hard against the door; now, I held my breath in order to hear) Mom confided into the phone, “Ma, I think he must be in some kind of trouble. I think maybe he
had
to go on the run. I just wish he would have told me . . .”
    My father didn't gamble, take drugs, or drink to excess. He had few debts, which were budgeted for. He had no obvious enemies, and his friends (such as they were) had no idea where he'd gone, or why. My mother always claimed that they had been getting along just fine, and, as far as I knew, that was true. They argued sometimes, but who didn't? There was none of that constant, strained tension in our house, that invisible poison in the atmosphere that reveals an unbearable unhappiness. So why did he leave? And why leave like that?
    He must have had to leave. It was the only thing that made sense. Some great outside force compelled him.
    Sometimes I thought he'd been carried off to oblivion by a mysterious, incomprehensible power, like the Tennessee farmer, vanished into nothingness, that I'd read about in
Great Unsolved Mysteries of the World
. But although the weirdness attracted me in a story about someone else, closer to home it was just too scary. Mysteries should always have a solution. Despite the fantasy that haunted my childhood, in which I saw my dad wink out of existence before my own eyes, I needed to believe there was a rational explanation for what had happened to him. I'd been raised by my parents to be a skeptical humanist, and I already knew from television how easily people could be misled.
    My father had never spent a lot of time with me—dads didn't, as a rule, back then—and as far as the outside world was concerned he was just an ordinary guy, but to me he was a hero. As a regular viewer of TV shows like
Get Smart!
and
The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
(and too young to realize they weren't meant to be taken seriously), I found it entirely reasonable that my dad could be a secret agent, his job at the service station a cover like the dry cleaners that hid the entrance to U.N.C.L.E. HQ. He wasn't allowed to tell us, of course, but he had a mission to save the world. The thought of it made me glow with pride.
    A secret government agency had the money, the