My Father’s Old Watch Stopped at the Exact Time He Disappeared.

The hands of my father’s watch had read 11:42 for twenty years. That was roughly the time, the police report said, that his truck was last seen leaving the Route 9 gas station on the night he disappeared.

My mother kept the watch in a dish on her dresser. When she died in August, it came to me with the house and the boxes of paperwork.

In October, on what would have been his sixty-fifth birthday, I finally took it to a repair shop.

Inside the case

The jeweler was an older man named Mr. Abernathy, who worked with a loupe pushed up on his forehead. He opened the back of the watch, frowned, and turned it toward me.

“This didn’t stop on its own,” he said. “Somebody pulled the crown out to set it, and pushed this in to keep it from running.”

Tucked against the movement was a tiny square of folded paper, wedged so it blocked the balance wheel. He lifted it out with tweezers and handed it to me.

It was the corner of a receipt, soft with age. On one side was a printed time stamp: 11:42 PM, from the same gas station on Route 9. On the other side, in my father’s handwriting, were five words: Ask Carol about the farm.

Carol

Carol was my mother’s younger sister. She lived two hours away and had sent a card every Christmas for twenty years, always signed the same way: Thinking of you both.

When I showed her the paper, she sat down at her kitchen table and didn’t speak for almost a minute.

“He didn’t run away,” she said finally. “Your mother asked him to leave. There was money trouble, and a man he owed. He stopped at the station to call me because I had a place out in the country where he could stay until it was safe. He was going to come back for you.”

“Why didn’t he?”

Carol went to a drawer and came back with a bundle of envelopes tied with string. They were letters, one every year, addressed to me in care of her. Every one had been returned to her unopened, stamped in my mother’s handwriting: Not at this address.

The last letter

The most recent envelope was postmarked eleven months ago, from a town in Oregon. It had a return address.

I wound my father’s watch that night for the first time in twenty years. It started ticking right away, as if it had only been waiting for someone to ask the right question.

I have the address written on a card in my wallet. My flight leaves on Thursday.