The November project 2020, part 10

- And who are you then? Frank asked.    - Alba Sanchez, I’ve worked here for about a year. I started at the same time as uni last year, I major in criminology.    - Oh, you’re interested in crime?    He smirked.    - Well… yeah, as long as I can distance myself to them. If anything were to happen to my friends or family it wouldn’t be interesting, just traumatizing.    - I can see that. Hopefully it’ll never happen. Anyway, Peter, Alba, I’m gonna need to ask you and the guests here some questions. I suppose you guys have a pretty good idea of who the regulars are here?    - I think she has a better idea than I do, Peter said.    - Oh like you’re not here just as much as me, if not even more? Jesus Christ… but alright, our most frequent visitors are… I would say Lisen, she’s in the corner over there, but she never takes walks, her legs can’t take her that far. The Wieselgren couple often come by, but they normally take walks early in the day, so I don’t know… you can ask if they’ve seen something though. Then we have… who else do we got? Jeanette and Katerina come in here a lot, and they like to jog! Often early evenings. Have they been here today, Peter? Or yesterday?    - Jeanette and Katerina… those are the ones with the stroller, right?    - Katerina has one, yes.    - I don’t think I’ve seen them neither today nor yesterday, but I believe they were here on Friday?    - That’s good, since it was Friday he went missing, said Frank. At which time were they here?    - At six I think…    - But wait, I said, I met his girlfriend yesterday. She said Adam worked until seven, that if he went out to jog as usual he didn’t get here until like an hour later. And seven is when we close. Jeanette and Katerina always tend to come in after they’ve run, never before. They must have missed each other. Actually, Frank, you know what! Check in with the football club. The older kids have the later practice hours, if anyone has seen anything here during Friday night, it’s them.    - I shall do that. What about you two, by the way? Are you guys never here after closing time?    - It happens, said Peter, but not this Friday. I had the closing shift and went home straight after.    - I was here…, I said. At like half past seven. Me and a friend were gonna take the yellow track, but when we were on top of the hill we heard this terrible cry, we thought there was a murderer or maybe a bear loose in the woods, so we ran right back home.    - And you didn’t meet anyone?    I shook my head. – No one.    - What kind of cry was it? Possibly his?    - No, this was a woman’s. It was heart-wrecking, sounded like she’d found a dead child or something, I swear.    - Interesting… but alright, understood. I’ll ask the people in here if they’ve seen anything, who knows, maybe he wasn’t even here this Friday, maybe he went somewhere else after work instead. But we’ll start looking here.    - Yeah his girlfriend said she’d called everyone they knew and that he wasn’t with them so…    - Sometimes people go missing to places you never expect, miss Sanchez. Sometimes partners keep secrets from one another. Trust me, I know. Adam might have had a contact the girlfriend knew nothing about. We don’t know that, at least not yet.    Outside the hut we could hear shouting in megaphones, people were divided into groups, given safety vests even though the sun wouldn’t set for hours. I wondered if this was a normal amount of participants for this kind of occasion, or if Adam was especially loved? It felt like they wouldn’t have to be out for too long with this size of a crowd, at least. The hours were ticking. Peter went home, but Vera, who seemed to have calmed herself down, if only for the moment, stayed behind and talked with worried customers. Sat with them at the tables, laid her hand over theirs. The tempo was slower than it had been for many days.    - What do you think might have happened? I asked Amir.    - He’s probably dead.    - What, really? You think?    - I mean, I think you need to assume the worst. Then you can only get happier.    - You mean you’ll get pleasantly surprised, that it can only get better?    - Yes, exactly. I’ve seen too much shit in my life already, how they took my father, my uncle, my cousins… you need to always stay prepared for the worst, that the risk is there, but still, you need to have hope. My sister, she was gone for a while on the journey here. We didn’t know if she was on the same train as us, she was gone when we got off. I thought about all sorts of horrible things that could have happened, but never wanted to stop believing that she would come back. And she did! She made it!    - How wonderful!    - So maybe this man is alive. But it might as well have gone the other way. I wouldn’t be surprised. Over four hours passed before the searchers were back and the parking lot started to empty out. Frank came back into the hall, looked if possible even more grim than before. Adam had been found. Well at least, Adam’s body.