Page 5 of The Woman with the Handcuffs

Not on the seat, the steering wheel, or in the cupholder, or in white sheets of the bunk in back.

That was good, I had to remind myself even as my heartbeat hammered and my belly sloshed around.

It was a familiar sensation ever since I got that awful call a few weeks ago, telling me that my father’s rig was found empty on the side of the road… and that he was missing.

Missing.

It didn’t even make sense.

How could a six-four, two-hundred-fifty-pound giant of a man just… disappear? How could no one have seen him?

The cops had all kinds of questions for me at the time. About my father’s mental health, about a potential drug problem.

And what could I say other than the fact that he had always been the most even-tempered man I’d ever met? That he was borderline jolly most of the time? That he would have the occasional beer, sure, but his only vice was a massive insulated mug he filled with coffee several times a day so he could travel long distances without getting tired.

They asked about the last time I saw him. Which was three weeks ago. But I talked to him nearly every day. On the actual phone. Because my father claimed his “mitts” were “too meaty” to hit the letter keys to text me.

When he didn’t call me the night he went missing, I hadn’t been overly concerned about it. Sometimes, he got really deep in conversations on his CB radio. And I knew he recently discovered someone who spent a few hours every night telling elaborate, creepy stories that he found fascinating.

“This guy should be making millions of dollars writing books,” he’d told me on one of our calls, after breaking down all the major plot points of the previous story.

It didn’t raise a red flag if he missed one call. I only would have noticed if it was two in a row, because that never happened.

“Thick as thieves, that’s what we are.” He said that to me my entire childhood. But especially after my mom passed away in a car wreck when he’d been on the road, and he’d needed to start taking me with him on his trips.

It was about then that he’d bought his own tractor—with the money from the house he’d sold, I imagined—so he didn’t have to make me experience endless fleabag roadside motels all across the country.

“There’s things that go on in them places that a young lady has no business knowing about.”

I didn’t understand at the time. Any more than I understood that the half-naked ladies at the truck stops with the heavy makeup, teetering on their heels, weren’t just pretty ladies who had to stop for fuel or a soda.

So he’d invested in a fancy tractor that had a bed in the bunk area, as well as a bed over top of the cab. That was where I called home for many, many nights for a lot of years. He’d hung up rechargeable twinkle lights and a pretty pink curtain so I “had the privacy a young lady needs.”

I’d always been a daddy’s girl. But from that moment on, we’d been inseparable. I mean, what other choice did we have?

It was in this tractor that I learned CB lingo, that I saw just about every state in the union, where I discovered a love of books—both audio and e-book, since there was nowhere to store physical ones—and where I’d learned to do my online schoolwork that was often supplemented with stories from the men and women truckers who had experience in wars, knew a lot about history, or had a love for literature.

I still kept a CB radio in my apartment to keep in touch with a few very special truckers I’d basically “known” my entire life, though I’d never actually met them face to face.

I knew this place my father still called home like the back of my hand.

I could tell you without looking what was in the mini-fridge in the back: two zero-sugar sodas, an emergency energy drink, a clamshell full of carrots, celery, and peppers with some sort of dip in the center that came from a convenience store—“Because I’m trying to get healthy,”—and a bulk-size plastic jug of chocolate-covered almonds—“Because a man’s gotta live a little too.”

There was a picture of little me, sun-faded, on the underside of his visor. Next to it was a picture of my mom.

There would be a baseball bat behind his seat (“You gotta be prepared!”) as well as a ball and mitt (“Because you don’t want the law thinking you were being premeditated”).

The gel cushion on his driver’s seat was new, the strange little grid sliding under my butt as I reached over toward the glovebox. He’d complained about his sciatica bothering him on and off. I guess he’d invested in the cushion to try to make it better.

I pulled his little zipper pouch out and opened it up. Inside, I found all of his receipts. Not the ones for fuel—since he’d been given a fuel card a long time back. Though I remembered there being receipts overflowing the glovebox when I’d been little. But these were receipts for food he’d gotten, any clothes or personal car items he’d bought. He never threw a receipt away until it was too faded to read.

I zipped that back up and shoved it into my bag.

I dug in every cubby, dug under the seats, shook out all the clothes, and even rifled around in his toiletries.

Nothing.

There was nothing.