No work history after that.
No status updates or photographs since 2009.
But it says that his wife is Andrea Reyes.
“There it is,” Bailey says.
She points out the window to a blue door, vines around it. You could almost miss it—THE NEVER DRY written on a small gold plaque. It sits there quietly, kitty-corner to West Sixth Street, a coffee shop on one side, an alley on the other.
We h
op out of the taxi and, as I turn to pay the driver, I see that our hotel is visible across Lady Bird Lake. I feel a strange pull, wanting to call this off, head back there.
Then Bailey goes to open the blue door.
And as she does, something happens that has never happened before. Call it maternal instinct. I grab her arm before I know I am grabbing it.
“What the hell?” she says.
“You wait here.”
“What?” she says. “No way.”
I start thinking quickly, the truth not feeling possible to say. What if we walk inside there and see her? This Katherine Smith. What if your father took you away from her? What if she tries to take you from me? And yet, there it is, feeling possible enough that it is the first thing that occurs to me.
“I don’t want you in there,” I say. “They’ll be more likely to answer my questions if you’re not in there too.”
“That’s not good enough, Hannah,” she says.
“Well, how’s this?” I say. “We don’t know whose bar this is. We don’t know who these people are or whether they are dangerous. All we know is that it’s looking more and more like your father may have taken you from here and, knowing him, if he did that there was something he was trying to protect you from. There may have been someone he was trying to protect you from. You cannot go inside there until I find that out.”
She is quiet. She stares at me unhappily, but she stays quiet.
I motion toward the coffee shop next door. It looks quiet, almost empty, after the afternoon rush.
“Just go sit inside and get yourself a piece of pie, okay?”
“I literally couldn’t want a piece of pie less,” she says.
“Then get a cup of coffee and keep working on Professor Cookman’s roster. See if you can pull anyone else up on a search. We still have a long way to go.”
“I don’t like this plan,” she says.
I pull the roster out of my messenger bag. I hold it out for her. “I’ll come and get you when it’s all clear in there.”
“Clear of what? Why don’t you just say it?” she asks. “Why don’t you say who you think is inside?”
“Probably for the same reason you’re not ready to say it, Bailey.”
This gets through to her. She nods her agreement.
Then she takes the roster out of my hand and turns toward the coffee shop. “Don’t take too long, okay?” she says.
Then she opens the door to the coffee shop, a whoosh of purple as she heads inside.
I breathe a sigh of relief. And I open the blue door to The Never Dry. There is a winding staircase, which I take upstairs to a candlelit hallway and a second blue door, which is also unlocked.
I open that door and enter a small cocktail lounge. An empty cocktail lounge. There are maple rafters and a dark mahogany bar, velvety love seats surrounding small bar tables. It doesn’t feel like a college town bar. The hidden doorway, the intimate room. It feels more like a speakeasy—guarded, sexy, private.