Collecting Cooper by Paul Cleave

the seats are comfortable enough to fall asleep in. There’s a huge bouncy castle set up in the parking lot, with dozens of laughing children jumping in or around it, a couple of clowns making balloon animals, and a few barbecues endlessly cooking hot dogs that nobody seems to be eating, all of it covered by large sun sails set up to make shade. Parents are standing around and chatting while keeping an eye on their kids, the occasional calm down, Billy or a don’t sit on her, Judy coming from them.
    I find a parking space and head inside and spend two minutes looking at cell phones before deciding on a cheap model, figuring any extra features won’t do me any good with the luck I have when it comes to keeping a cell phone in one piece. The guy behind the counter has earrings in each ear and a small one in his left nostril and to be honest I just don’t get the point. He tries to sell me an expensive plan to make the phone cheaper and I have to turn him down four times before he lets it go. He puts in a new SIM card and lets me know my phone will take about an hour to connect to the network. I use some of the cash Donovan Green gave me. Somehow I manage to leave my wallet on the counter, and don’t realize it until the guy who sold me the phone catches up with me in the parking lot and hands it over in what looks like a reverse mugging. I try to offer him some money as a reward, and he waves it away and tells me that’s not why he returned it, that doing the right thing isabout doing the right thing, not about getting something out of it.
    From the mall I hit a thin flow of traffic, which gets even thinner the closer I get to the care home. The driveway leading up to it has been paved since the last time I was here. The trees on each side of it are drooping in the heat. The building is gray brick and about forty years old and doesn’t have the kind of appeal to make you think you could live here. The grounds are scenic, there are five hectares of them, beautiful enough to be on postcards. I step through the doors into an air-conditioned foyer and nothing in here has changed and I figure nothing ever will, including the nurses. Nurse Hamilton greets me with a small hug and tells me it’s good to see me and I think she means it. She’s been looking after my wife for three years, and before my jail sentence I would try to come out here every day. I’ve seen Nurse Hamilton hundreds of times and there’s nothing I know about her other than the fact that she’s a woman and a nurse and never wears any perfume and is at that timeless age where you can’t tell whether somebody is fifty or sixty or seventy. She follows me to Bridget’s room and updates me—but there isn’t much to update. Bridget has gotten four months older and nothing else. She’s sitting in a chair looking out over the grounds where a gardener without a shirt is riding a lawn mower, cutting stripes into the lawn. She has a slight tan, so before the heat wave struck somebody was wheeling her outside to sit in the sun for small periods at a time. I hold Bridget’s hand and it’s as warm as it was the last time I held it, and I spend an hour with her. In the room are photos of our daughter.
    “I’ve missed you,” I tell her, and I hope that she’s missed me when the reality is she doesn’t even know I’ve been gone and doesn’t even know I’m here now. My wife is a sponge that absorbs the words but can’t do anything with them. “And I’m sorry,” I add.
    I check the cell phone on the way back into town and it’s connected to the network. I punch in Schroder’s number and the line is clear.
    “What can you tell me about Emma Green?” I ask.
    “The girl from the accident? Why would you ask that, Tate?”
    “You didn’t tell me she’s missing.”
    “It’s not my case, and as it stands we don’t know that she’s missing.”
    “Yeah you do. She’s been gone almost two days and that makes her missing, only you’re hoping she’s