“I understand,” I said.
He paused as though considering his words. “You really are going to try to find out what happened to him, aren’t you?”
I held his gaze. “Yeah, Anton. I am.”
He nodded and started to say something, but the waitress walked over and set a glass with a dark liquid in front of him.
“Hey, Anton,” she said with a warm smile. “I figured you’d want your usual Coke. Want your usual lunch too?”
“You know it,” he said with a smile.
“One club sandwich with chips coming right up.” She turned to me, confusion clouding her eyes. I’m sure she was trying to figure out why I was eating lunch with a man a good decade younger than me. “Have you figured out what you want?”
“Do you have a chef’s salad? If so, I’ll take one of those with ranch dressing.”
“Sure.” She gave Anton a flirty look before heading to the kitchen, but if he noticed he didn’t let on.
I got back to business. “Your mother said your father was supposed to go to your basketball game the day he disappeared.”
He nodded and took a sip of his water. “He never missed a game. Like never missed a game. Even if he was sick. When he didn’t show that night, I knew something was wrong. He’d told me that he was meeting someone out at Sunny Point before the game, so when it was over, instead of celebrating with the team, I headed out there to see if he’d had car trouble or something.”
Hugo had planned to meet the investor at Sunny Point? No one else I’d spoken to had seemed to know that.
“Did you try to call your dad?”
“I did, but it went straight to voicemail, which wasn’t that uncommon. Cell service was spotty out there, which was one of his many, many issues with the place.”
“Did you find anything when you went out to the property?” I asked.
He shook his head. “His car wasn’t there, but I was pretty sure he’d been there. The property had a few asphalt roads, but most of it was either trees or cleared land. He kept a utility vehicle in a shed at the end of the paved road. I checked the shed, and it was inside, but the wheels were muddy, like he’d driven around the property.”
“Could it have been old mud? Maybe from driving it another day?”
He shook his head. “We’d had it out the weekend before and the wheels were clean. Plus, it wasn’t dried mud. It was fresh.”
“Did you tell the sheriff about the wheels?”
He rubbed the back of his neck and made a reluctant face. After dropping his hand and resting it on top of the table, he said, “My mother insisted that I speak to the police as little as possible. So the answer is no, I didn’t tell them about any of this.”
I stared at him in shock. “Why wouldn’t she want you to tell them?”
“She said it didn’t matter. That they already knew he had a business meeting. It wouldn’t help them to know about muddy tires. Or that he’d even been out there at all.”
“The sheriff’s investigator I spoke to said they knew he had a meeting, but they didn’t seem to know who it was with or where. They didn’t even know if the meeting had actually taken place.”
His eyes widened and he looked sick. “You’re saying if I’d told them what I knew, they might have been able to find my dad?”
“I don’t know,” I said, hoping to ease his guilt. “It might have, but there’s every chance it might not have.”
If possible, he looked even more stricken. “Oh. God. It could have made all the difference.”
“It could have helped,” I conceded. “We don’t know for certain, but it definitely gives me a new angle to look into.” I held his gaze. “And I promise, I will look into it.”
“Okay.” He looked slightly appeased.
“Do you happen to know who he was meeting?”
“No. He didn’t give me a name, but I know he’d been talking to someone with a company called something lark.”