Leaving Time: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

best investigator.
    Almost every online search engine to find missing people costs money and requires a credit card, neither of which I had. But I did manage to find a how-to book,
So You Want to Be a PI?
, at a church rummage sale, and I spent several days memorizing the information in one chapter: “Finding Those Who Are Lost.”
    According to the book, there are three types of Missing People:
    1. People who are not really missing but have lives and friends that don’t include you. Old boyfriends and the college roommate you lost touch with—they’re in this category.
    2. People who are not really missing but don’t want to be found. Deadbeat dads and mob witnesses, for example.
    3. Everyone else. Like runaways and the kids on milk cartons who are stolen away by psychos in white vans with no windows.
    The whole reason PIs can find someone is that lots of people know exactly where the Missing Person is. You just aren’t one of them. You need to find someone who
is
.
    People who disappear have their reasons. They might have committed insurance fraud or be hiding from the cops. They might have decided to start over. They might be up to their eyeballs in debt. They might have a secret they want no one to find out. According to
So You Want to Be a PI?
, the first question you need to ask yourself is: Does this person want to be found?
    I have to admit, I don’t know if I want to hear the answer to that. If my mother walked away willingly, then maybe all it would take is knowing I’m still searching—knowing that, after a decade, I haven’t forgotten her—to make her come back to me. I sometimes think it would be easier for me to learn that my mother died ten years ago than to hear that she lived and chose not to return.
    The book said that finding those who are lost is like doing a word jumble. You have all the clues, and you’re trying to unscramble them to make an address. Data collection is the weapon of the private investigator, and facts are your friends. Name, birth date, social security number. Schools attended. Military service dates, employment history, known friends and relatives. The farther you cast your net, the more likely you are to catch someone who has had a conversation with the Missing Person about where he wished they could go on vacation, or what his dream job might be.
    What do you do with these facts? Well, you start by using them to rule things out. The very first Web search I did, at age eleven, was to go to the Social Security Death Index database and search its index for my mother’s name.
    She was not listed as deceased, but that doesn’t tell me enough. She could be alive, or she could be living under a different identity. She could be dead and unidentified, a Jane Doe.
    She was not on Facebook or Twitter, or Classmates.com, or the alumni network of Vassar, her college. Then again, my mother was always so absorbed in her work and her elephants, I don’t imagine she would have had much time for those distractions.
    There were 367 Alice Metcalfs in online phone directories. I called two or three a week, so my grandmother wouldn’t freak out when she saw the long-distance charges on the phone bill. I left a lot of messages. There was one very sweet old lady in Montana who wanted to pray for my mom, and another woman who worked as a producer at an L.A. news station who promised to bring the story to her boss as a human-interest piece, but none of the people I called were my mother.
    The book had other suggestions, too: searching prison databases, trademark applications, even the genealogy records of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. When I tried those, I didn’t get any results. When I Googled “Alice Metcalf,” I got too many—more than 1.6 million. So I narrowed it down by searching for “Alice Kingston Metcalf Elephant Grief,” and got a listing of all her scholarly research, most of it done prior to 2004.
    On the sixteenth page of the Google search, however, was an