Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 105, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 640 & 641, March 1995

“Thirty-six. Thirty-seven soon,” he added and instantly regretted it, for she said, “My son’s age exactly. He would have been thirty-seven next month. I saw you sitting there, and I said, he’s Mark’s age. That’s what Mark would have looked like. That’s what Mark would look like sitting in Bologna at the Cafe Visconti.”

“Your son... died?”

“I don’t know. I think now that he is dead, but I don’t know for a certainty.” Her expression momentarily turned vague and distracted, and Michael began to fear eccentricity, mental disturbance, all the anguish of emotional illness.

“I’m very sorry,” he said. He would wait a minute, he thought, then call the waiter and ask for his check. He was glad now that he had his briefcase and could use the excuse of a meeting.

“I didn’t believe it for a long time,” she said in a reflective tone. “There are days when I don’t believe it yet. I can understand those MIA families, I really can. Until you have something to bury, you don’t believe. It doesn’t seem real, does it? Someone is young and alive without a problem in the world and then — he’s gone.”

“An auto accident?” Michael asked.

She shrugged her shoulders and something about the gesture made him think that she must once have been attractive, desirable. “I don’t think it could have been an auto accident. Those are reported. No, he disappeared years ago on a cross-country trip. He’d been camping out, hitching from one town to the next. It was the thing to do then, backpack, hitchhike, ‘see the world.’ Perhaps you did the same yourself.”

Michael nodded before he could stop himself. “I traveled around a bit after my senior year.”

“You’d have been seventeen,” she said very definitely. “You might have been at the same campsites. It’s a small world. When I travel, I meet so many people...” The waiter appeared with a coaster, a napkin, a little bottle beaded with condensation, and a glass garnished with a slice of lime; he laid them out smartly and was gone with a flourish. “...who might have known Mark,” she resumed without a break, “who might have seen him, who were the right age or in the right place. Over the long run, that has become comforting.”

“There was an investigation, of course...”

“No ‘of course’ about it,” she said sharply. “It was strictly after a fashion. You know that was also the time for running away, dropping out. It was hard to convince the authorities that Mark would never just have disappeared.”

“You did not accept that.”

“Never.”

“I suppose you searched, yourself...”

“Searched, hired detectives, put up posters, leafleted the entire area. It was in northern Arizona — not a very populous place. I don’t think I left anything undone. That’s a bad thought, the thought of having left something undone. I still wake up sometimes at night, sit up in bed with my heart pounding, thinking, ‘I’ve forgotten something. What was it I was supposed to do? Where was it I was supposed to go?’ But I haven’t forgotten anything.” She took a sip of her mineral water and looked around the cafe and then back at Michael. It was impossible to see her eyes behind the sunglasses. “I can assure you I’ve followed every lead, every clue.”

“I’m sure you have,” Michael said. He put his hand on his briefcase, ready to get up, ready to leave.

“Twenty years,” she said. “A lifetime. It’s been a very curious life. But you’d have a different perspective. Twenty years ago, you’d have been seventeen, and twenty years later my son would have looked like you.”

“It’s a very sad story,” Michael said and shifted forward in his seat. He looked around with his hand half raised, but the alert and efficient waiters were all inside.

“There was a grove of aspens,” she said, and as soon as she spoke, Michael felt the shift of some inner tide. “There was a small lake, too. When I first went there, the aspens were turning; I remember little pale gold leaves shivering in the wind and, behind them, mountains the color of lead.”

“But you said he ‘disappeared,’ ” Michael said. “No one was to blame, was there? There was no suspicion, no evidence? You’ve said as much...”

She studied her glass for a moment. “There was evidence,” she said, “if you looked hard enough. What was hard was to convince the authorities to do something. To convince them that Mark would never have...”

“It’s hard to be sure sometimes,” Michael said abruptly. “It’s hard to know what anyone will do in a given situation.”

“But some people you just know,” she said. “In extraordinary circumstances, yes, that’s true. In extraordinary circumstances, who knows what we would do. I look at those poor Bosnians and Romanians sitting in the arcades...”

“Some of them are professionals,” Michael said. He prided himself on knowing a scam when he saw one. “They’re refugees today, Gypsies tomorrow, pickpockets the day after.”

“They look miserable enough,” she said, “wherever they come from. That is a drawback to Bologna.”

“As an ‘important secondary destination’?”