Prologue
Wednesday August 16th, 2023
When I was thirteen I had a best friend called Milton Harvey, whose father went out for cigarettes one day and never came home. That isn’t a euphemism for a deadbeat dad bailing on his family: it literally happened that way.
Just after eight o’ clock one Sunday evening in August 1986, Jeffrey Harvey announced that he was going to the 24-hour ARCO to buy a pack of Marlboro Reds. He got up out of his armchair, kissed his wife on the cheek, walked out the front door and was never seen again.
In the days that followed his disappearance, a clip from the ARCO’s external security camera was played dozens of times on dozens of news broadcasts: a five-second loop of grainy footage that showed Mr Harvey walking across the garage forecourt and entering the store about a quarter of an hour after leaving his house. But the clerk on the evening shift didn’t remember serving him. And – even weirder – Mr Harvey didn’t show up on any CCTV inside.
Milton and I didn’t became friends until the winter after it happened, when my own father got a teaching job at Fernwood High and I joined the local elementary. Our teacher partnered us up on my first day and we bonded instantly over our mutual obsessions for Buck Rogers and BMX.
Whenever we hang out, engaged in our favourite pursuits of imaginary space-based adventures and tearing around on our bikes, Milton would talk about his ‘Pa’ constantly, obsessing over the smallest details of his disappearance; the whys and the what-ifs. The way Milton told it, his parents were blissfully happy. Jeffrey Harvey was a respected businessman (he ran a local construction outfit); he was supportive of his wife’s committees and his son’s schooling; he was mild-mannered, not a big drinker. His departure didn’t make sense to anyone who knew him, least of all Milton’s mother. For weeks after that fateful Sunday, Donna Harvey spent her evenings standing at the living room window, watching for her husband’s return, her sobs fogging the glass. There was an extensive missing persons investigation, a TV appeal, a neighbourhood vigil, a six-month-anniversary march down Main Street (my own family participated in that one), but the cold, hard fact was this: Milton’s Pa was gone.
It’s taken me nearly four decades to work out what happened to him.
Dr Brewer says I’m living on borrowed time. I won’t survive another three-year-wait for the homeless man.
When I do go to my grave, it has to be in the knowledge that I solved this thing.
For Milton.
Tomorrow is my last chance to bring Mr Harvey home.
