“No, I don’t know,” she says. “No!”

“Hello?” Elenor says. “Are you still there?”

I keep my hand over the speaker, but Bailey can hear her through the phone. She can hear her loud-pitched questions. It’s making her even more tense than she is. Her shoulders are seizing. Her hands are reaching for her hair, pulling it tight behind her ears.

I’m not proud of this. But I hang up on Elenor.

Then I turn back to Bailey.

“We need to go there right now,” Bailey says. “I need to go to this bar… to this Never Dry…”

She is already standing up. She is already grabbing her things.

“Bailey,” I say. “I know you’re upset, I know you are. I’m upset too.”

We aren’t saying it yet, not out loud, who we think Katherine Smith may be—who Bailey fears and hopes she is.

“Let’s just talk this through for a second,” I say. “I think our best chance to get to the bottom of all this is to keep going through the class roster. We are at most forty-six men away from getting an answer to who your father used to be.”

“Maybe we are. Maybe we’re not.”

“Bailey…” I say.

She shakes her head. She doesn’t sit back down.

“Let me say this another way,” she says. “I’m going to the bar right now. You can come with me or you can let me go alone.”

She stands there and waits. She doesn’t storm out. She waits to see what I will do. As if there is a choice.

“I go with you, of course,” I say.

Then I stand up. And we walk together toward the door.

The Never Dry

In the cab ride on the way to The Never Dry, Bailey keeps pulling on her bottom lip—almost like a nervous habit she suddenly developed, her eyes darting from side to side, frantic and terrified.

I hear the questions she’s not asking me out loud and I don’t want to push her. I also can’t just sit there and watch her suffer, so I search obsessively on my phone for Katherine “Kate” Smith, for Charlie Smith—for anything I can possibly tell her, any new information I can offer up, in an attempt to soothe her.

But I find way too much. Smith is too common of a last name, even with my subsearches (UT-Austin, Austin native, debate champion). There are hundreds of hits, and images—none for the Katherine who greeted us at the library.

Which is when I have an idea. I plug Andrea Reyes into my search, along with Charlie Smith, and I finally hit on something that may help us.

A Facebook profile for the correct Charlie Smith pops up. He is a 2002 graduate from the University of Texas at Austin with a B.A. in art history, followed by two semesters at the Graduate School of Architecture, and an internship at a landscape architecture firm in downtown Austin.

No work history after that.

No status updates or photographs since 2009.

But it says that his wife is Andrea Reyes.

“There it is,” Bailey says.

She points out the window to a blue door, vines around it. You could almost miss it—THE NEVER DRY written on a small gold plaque. It sits there quietly, kitty-corner to West Sixth Street, a coffee shop on one side, an alley on the other.

We hop out of the taxi and, as I turn to pay the driver, I see that our hotel is visible across Lady Bird Lake. I feel a strange pull, wanting to call this off, head back there.

Then Bailey goes to open the blue door.

And as she does, something happens that has never happened before. Call it maternal instinct. I grab her arm before I know I am grabbing it.

“What the hell?” she says.

“You wait here.”

“What?” she says. “No way.”

I start thinking quickly, the truth not feeling possible to say. What if we walk inside there and see her? This Katherine Smith. What if your father took you away from her? What if she tries to take you from me? And yet, there it is, feeling possible enough that it is the first thing that occurs to me.

“I don’t want you in there,” I say. “They’ll be more likely to answer my questions if you’re not in there too.”

“That’s not good enough, Hannah,” she says.

“Well, how’s this?” I say. “We don’t know whose bar this is. We don’t know who these people are or whether they are dangerous. All we know is that it’s looking more and more like your father may have taken you from here and, knowing him, if he did that there was something he was trying to protect you from. There may have been someone he was trying to protect you from. You cannot go inside there until I find that out.”

She is quiet. She stares at me unhappily, but she stays quiet.

I motion toward the coffee shop next door. It looks quiet, almost empty, after the afternoon rush.

“Just go sit inside and get yourself a piece of pie, okay?”

“I literally couldn’t want a piece of pie less,” she says.

“Then get a cup of coffee and keep working on Professor Cookman’s roster. See if you can pull anyone else up on a search. We still have a long way to go.”

“I don’t like this plan,” she says.

I pull the roster out of my messenger bag. I hold it out for her. “I’ll come and get you when it’s all clear in there.”

“Clear of what? Why don’t you just say it?” she asks. “Why don’t you say who you think is inside?”

“Probably for the same reason you’re not ready to say it, Bailey.”

This gets through to her. She nods her agreement.

Then she takes the roster out of my hand and turns toward the coffee shop. “Don’t take too long, okay?” she says.

Then she opens the door to the coffee shop, a whoosh of purple as she heads inside.

I breathe a sigh of relief. And I open the blue door to The Never Dry. There is a winding staircase, which I take upstairs to a candlelit hallway and a second blue door, which is also unlocked.

I open that door and enter a small cocktail lounge. An empty cocktail lounge. There are maple rafters and a dark mahogany bar, velvety love seats surrounding small bar tables. It doesn’t feel like a college town bar. The hidden doorway, the intimate room. It feels more like a speakeasy—guarded, sexy, private.

No one is standing behind the bar. The only indication that anyone is even there is the lit tea candles on the cocktail tables, Billie Holiday playing on an old record player.

I walk up to the bar, taking in the shelves behind it. They’re filled with dark liquors, boozy bitters—and there is one shelf devoted to framed photographs in thick, silver frames, a few framed newspaper clippings. Kate Smith appears in several, often with the same lanky, dark-haired guy. Not Owen. Someone besides Owen. There are several photographs of the dark-haired guy alone as well. I lean over the bar to try and make out what one of the newspaper clippings says. It includes a photograph of Kate dressed in a gown, the lanky guy dressed in a tuxedo. An older couple bookends him. I start to read through the names beneath the photograph. Meredith Smith, Kate Smith. Charlie Smith…

Then I hear footsteps. “Hey, there.”

I turn around to see Charlie Smith. The lanky guy from the photographs. He’s wearing a crisp button-down shirt and holding a case of champagne. He looks older than in the fancy framed photographs. Less lanky. His dark hair is now graying, his skin weathered, but it’s definitely him. Whoever he is to Bailey. Whoever Bailey is to Kate.

“We’re not open just yet,” he says. “We don’t usually start serving until closer to six…”

I point back from the direction I came. “I’m sorry about that, the door was unlocked,” I say. “I didn’t mean to just let myself in.”

“Not a problem, you can have a seat at the bar and take a look at the cocktail menu,” he says. “I just have a couple more things to take care of.”

“Sounds great,” I say.

He puts the champagne on the bar and offers a kind smile. I force a smile back. It isn’t easy being around this stranger who has the same coloring as Bailey—and his smile, when he points it at me, is hers too, complete with her same uptick, the same dimple shining through.

I hop up onto a stool as he moves behind the bar and starts unpacking the champagne.

“Can I ask you a quick question? I’m new to Austin and I think I got a bit turned around. I’m looking for the campus. Can I walk from here?”

“Sure, if you have forty-five minutes or so. Probably easier to just hop in an Uber if you’re in any kind of rush,” he says. “Where are you headed to exactly?”

I think of his bio, of what I just pulled up about him. “The School of Architecture,” I say.

“Really?” he says.

I’m not a good actress, so trying to look casual while telling this lie is a stretch. It pays off though. He’s interested suddenly, just like I hoped he would be. Charlie Smith: late thirties, almost architect, married to Andrea Reyes. Married to Andrea at a wedding Bailey and Owen attended.

“I took some classes at the School of Architecture, once upon a time,” he says.

“Small world,” I say. I look around to stop my heart from racing, to center myself. “Did you design this place? It’s gorgeous.”