2:14 a.m.

The call came in on line six at fourteen minutes after two, and the call taker answered it the way she answered every call, with the address question first, because an address is the one thing you can't do without.

The woman on the other end said she lived in Edgewater, a block off Sheridan, and gave a number and a street, and then she said, "It's my dad. He isn't in his bed."

Her name was Dawn Lindsley. Her father was Paul Backus, eighty-four, six feet tall, white hair, and he had Alzheimer's, two years now, mostly good days. He lived with her. She had gotten up to use the bathroom and seen his door open and the bed empty, and the back door standing wide open, and snow blowing in across the kitchen linoleum.

The call taker typed while Dawn talked. She asked what he was wearing. Dawn went and looked. His old red-and-black plaid coat was gone off the hook, and his fur hat with the earflaps, and his rubber boots. Not his gloves. His gloves were on the table.

The call taker asked if he had ever done this before. Dawn said no. Then she said, "He keeps saying he has to check the line."

"The line?"

"He grew up in Saskatchewan. North of Prince Albert. His father had a trapline, and Dad walked it with him every morning before school. All week he's been telling me he's late. He has to check the line." Her voice cracked on the last word. "I'm sorry. That doesn't help you."

The call taker had worked nights for nine years. She had learned that in winter, old people don't wander. They go somewhere. They go to a house they lived in forty years ago, or a job they retired from, or a bus stop for a bus that stopped running before she was born. They walk with purpose. It's only the place that's gone.

So she typed it in, all of it, even the trapline. You type in everything. You never know who's going to read it.

"You're doing fine," she told Dawn. "I've got cars on the way. Stay on the line with me, okay? Go check the basement for me while we wait."

2:22 a.m.

The heater in Ray Kowalski's car had two settings, off and the surface of the sun, and it was on off, because the knob had come off in Ray's hand at midnight. Fraser didn't seem to notice the cold. Fraser never noticed the cold. Diefenbaker was in the back seat, finishing a jelly doughnut that nobody had given him.

They had spent six hours watching a warehouse on Goose Island in which nothing whatsoever had happened, and Ray was driving Fraser home to the Consulate by way of every red light on the North Side, and thinking about Stella, which was a thing he did when he was tired. He'd been married to her once. Now she was an assistant state's attorney and he was a guy using somebody else's name, because the real Ray Vecchio was off in Las Vegas being somebody else, too. Some nights it seemed like everybody in Chicago was somebody else.

The radio crackled. A dispatcher's voice, calm and flat, sent cars to Edgewater. A missing senior, eighty-four, white male, six foot, red-and-black plaid coat, fur hat with earflaps, rubber boots, no gloves. Alzheimer's. And then, after a little pause, as if she was reading it right off the screen: "Per the caller, subject may be trying to check a trapline."

Fraser sat up very straight.

"No," Ray said.

"Ray."

"No. We're not patrol. We're not even awake."

"He's eighty-four years old, he's without gloves, and it's eleven degrees."

"How do you know it's eleven degrees?"

"Dief's ears," Fraser said.

Ray looked in the rearview mirror. The wolf's ears were folded flat against his head. Ray had never in his life seen a wolf look more like a weather report. He said a word that his mother wouldn't have liked, and he pulled the car around in the middle of Clark Street, and somebody in a cab leaned on his horn the whole length of a block.

In the back seat, beside the wolf, Fraser's father was sitting with his hat on his knees.

"Saskatchewan man," Bob Fraser said, as though they had been in the middle of a conversation. "They don't wander, son. A man from up there goes out to check his line, and a line follows water. Always did. Down along the creek, out to the river and back home the other way. Before the sun's up."

"Yes," Fraser said. "I'd thought of that."

"You thought of it after I said it."

"Who are you talking to?" said Ray.

"Diefenbaker."

Ray looked in the mirror again. The wolf was licking jelly off his nose. The rest of the back seat was empty, and cold, and smelled faintly, for some reason, of pipe tobacco.

2:31 a.m.

There was a squad car in front of the building on Dawn Lindsley's street, and two officers working the alley with flashlights. Ray showed his badge, and they shrugged. A detective at two-thirty in the morning was a detective at two-thirty in the morning. Nobody asked why he had a Mountie with him. In Ray's experience, after the first year, nobody in the Chicago Police Department asked that anymore.

Dawn came down the back steps in a parka over her nightgown, holding the cordless phone against her chest. Ray could hear a small voice in it, still talking to her. She had stayed on the line.

Fraser was already crouched at the bottom of the steps. The snow was light and steady, and the boot prints were filling in, but they were there: a long stride, toes pointed straight, one foot set down exactly in front of the other. Not a shuffle. Not a man who was lost.

"He walks well," Fraser said.

"He walked everywhere," said Dawn. "Forty years on the railroad. He walked to work in January when he was seventy."

"Ms. Lindsley, your father's line. When he walked it as a boy. Did it follow a creek?"

She stared at him. Then at the red coat under his parka, and the hat. "To the river," she said. "Down the creek to the river, and back along the ridge. Eleven miles. How did you know that?"

"It's the way a line is laid," Fraser said gently. "Is there something of his that he's worn recently? A scarf, a mitten?"

She ran inside and came back with one of his gloves. Fraser held it down to Dief. The wolf breathed it in for a long moment, the way Ray had once seen a man smell a glass of wine that cost more than his car, and then he put his nose down and went up the alley, east, at a trot.

East was the lake.

"Hell," Ray said, and ran.

The trail went up the alley and across a parking lot and along a side street to Sheridan Road, and at Sheridan it stopped dead at a bus shelter. Dief went around the shelter twice and sat down and looked at Fraser with deep reproach. On the far side of the shelter, the snow was smooth and blue under the streetlight, and nobody had walked in it at all.

"He got on a bus," Ray said.

Fraser bent down and picked something out of the snow inside the shelter. It was a paper bus transfer, crumpled, still dry.

Ray was already on the radio. Dispatch could call the CTA. The CTA could call the garage. The garage could call the driver of whatever bus had come down Sheridan heading south around a quarter to two. It took nine minutes, which Ray spent walking in circles around the bus shelter with his hands jammed in his armpits, and which Fraser spent standing perfectly still, looking south, as if he could see all the way down to the Loop.

The radio came back. The driver remembered him. Big old man, fur hat, polite as anything, no gloves. He'd asked the driver when they would get to the river. The driver had let him off at Michigan Avenue, right by the bridge.

Fraser was already in the car.

2:58 a.m.

Ray took Lake Shore Drive at a speed he would describe later to his lieutenant as reasonable for conditions. The lake was a black nothing on their left. The snow came at the windshield like stars in a science-fiction movie. Fraser had one hand flat on the dashboard and said nothing, which for Fraser was the same as screaming.

The Michigan Avenue bridge was empty, all that steel and stone lit up orange, and the snow coming down slantwise through the lights. Ray pulled up on the bridge with two wheels on the curb. Below them, the river was black and steaming in the middle where it hadn't frozen, and white along the walls where it had.

Dief found the prints at the top of a set of stairs that went down to the boat landing, and they went down. Ray had his flashlight out. At the bottom, the walkway along the river wall was crusted with snow, and the prints went along it, steady, one foot in front of the other.

And then they turned, and went out onto the ice.

Ray swung the flashlight. Fifty feet out along the shelf of ice that clung to the river wall, where it got thinner and grayer toward the open water, an old man in a red-and-black plaid coat was walking, bareheaded now, the fur hat in his hand, steady and unhurried, the way a man walks a path he has walked ten thousand times.

He was walking toward the black water.

"Fraser," Ray said. "Fraser, don't you damn well dare—"

But Fraser had already stepped off the walkway, and the ice under his boot made a long, low sound, like something very large clearing its throat.

To be continued in Part 2.

Author's notes: In real life, the call taker who answers 911 doesn't send the cars herself. She types the call into the computer, and a radio dispatcher sends it out to the district. I squeezed it a little so you could hear the call go out. Everything else about that first scene is how it really goes, right down to sending the caller to check the basement, which gives her something to do with her hands.

If someone you love has Alzheimer's, please talk to your doctor or the Alzheimer's Association about an ID bracelet, and keep a recent photo where you can find it in the dark. I mean it. Do it this week.

Yes, I left you on the ice. Part 2 is coming. Yell at me here: [email protected]

Lake Effect  |  Back to the file room  |  Last updated September 19, 1999