The face behind her shoulder belonged to Brent Dolan. I knew it before the agent had even paused the video again. It was the face on a hundred real estate signs between Gainesville and Buford, a hearty, tanned man in a ball cap and a golf shirt, grinning above the words Dolan Lake Homes. I had sold him gas for fifteen years. I had shaken his hand at the Chamber of Commerce. And he had stood in my marina office four months ago and paid me a deposit for engine work, in twenties, from a roll as thick as a fist.
Agent Whitlock of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation set the phone on my desk. He was a heavy, soft spoken man with reading glasses on a cord. He said, “Mr. Hollis, how well do you know this man?” I said, “Well enough to sell him a boat.” I told him everything I knew, which was less than I wished. Brent Dolan sold lake property to the retired and the rich. He was a charmer. He was a deacon. He had a wife in Cumming and a pair of daughters in college. I had never heard a hard word said about him.
Whitlock took out a pen and wrote on a pad. He said, “Claire Bennett disappeared on Labor Day weekend. She was last seen by her husband boarding a boat at the Gainesville ramp, at the invitation of a friend. The husband has been under suspicion since the second day. He has been questioned eleven times. He has not slept. We have been unable to find her, and we have been unable to find the boat.” He tapped the phone. “Until you called me this morning.”
A woman who whispers a plea into a hidden phone in the dark trusts that someone, somewhere, will take the trouble to look under the floor.
I watched the video a second time, with Whitlock and two other agents, in my small office with the blinds drawn. A woman of forty, kind eyed, whispering into a camera in the dark. She said, in that thin terrified voice, that she had been invited to see a lakefront lot for sale. She said the man who was driving the boat had asked her to bring a signed contract. She said she had understood too late that he did not intend to take her back. And she said that she had overheard him talking by phone about a place in the mountains, a place with no neighbors, and a name that sounded like Tallulah.
It was the only thing she said that gave any direction. But it was enough. The agents spread out a map on my desk. Whitlock pulled up the record of every property that Dolan had listed or owned, and there were forty. Seven of them were north of Clayton, in the valley near Tallulah Gorge. One of those was a cabin, up a gravel spur off a forestry road, held by a shell company that traced back to him. He stood and put on his jacket. He said, “Mr. Hollis, thank you. We will need your boat.”
They took it to the property by trailer that night, under a pair of unmarked trucks. I was not allowed to go. I sat in the marina office until three in the morning, with the radio on and a pot of coffee, and my wife brought me a sandwich I could not eat. At twenty past four, my telephone rang. It was Whitlock. His voice was thick. He said, “Mr. Hollis, we have her. She is alive.” I sat down on the floor of my office and put my head on my knees.
They had found her in a locked room in the cabin, in a sleeping bag, thin and filthy and very much alive. She had been there for four months. Dolan had told her that her husband had abandoned her, that no one was looking, that the world believed she had left. He had fed her twice a day. He had meant, apparently, to move her once the lake froze over and the search had gone cold. He had been arrested at the front door of his own home in Cumming, in his bathrobe, as he was making coffee.
I learned afterward that when the agents came through the door of the cabin, Claire Bennett had looked at them and said, “Did someone find the bag?” Whitlock told me this over the telephone, and I wept. She had hidden the phone in the bilge of the boat in the dark on the first night, in a bag she had grabbed from the locker, and she had trusted a stranger to find it. She had had no way to know whether anyone would ever look. She had simply hoped.
I met her a month later. She came to the marina with her husband, a worn, quiet man named Peter who held her hand the whole time. She was still very thin. She stood on the dock in a blue coat and looked at the water, and then she looked at me, and she took both of my hands in hers. She did not say anything for a long moment. Then she said, “You checked the bilge.” I said I always did. She smiled. It was the first time I saw her smile.
Dolan was convicted in April on seven counts. He is in prison, a man whose face no longer appears on any sign. The boat, which I returned to the sheriff as evidence, was given to me in the end as a gift by the court, and I put it up for sale. A man of Atlanta offered me forty thousand. I turned him down. It sits now at the end of my dock with a plain sign on the bow that reads, Always check the bilge. Peter and Claire come on Sundays, and we take it out onto the water.
