The Sun to my Moon

Chapter 5: Worried sick

By early afternoon, Cha Dal-geon had exhausted his list of hospitals and urgent care clinics and was rattling around the Hae-ri's apartment, at a loss as to what to do. He called her three more times on her personal phone, and twice on her office phone, just in case she'd ended up back at work. Finally he hit upon the idea of calling her brother to see if she might have mentioned in passing if she was meeting with someone the previous evening.

He found Go Hae-ri brother's number in the address book in her desk.

"Yeoboseyo, namdongsaeng!" he said by way of greeting.

"Oh Hyungnim! Annyeonghaseyo," Hae-ri's brother said, sounding surprised. "Uh, what can I do for you?"

"Have you heard from Hae-rissi lately?"

"Ne," he said, bemused. "Nuna called me yesterday."

"Jinjja? What time was this?" Dal-geon demanded.

"I dunno, around four-thirty, I guess."

"What did she say?"

"Not much. Just that she was going out of town and not to worry if I didn't hear from her for a few days." A note of tension crept into his voice. "Wae? Is something wrong?"

Dal-geon breathed a sigh of relief. Hwa-sook had been right. Hae-ri hadn't been kidnapped, she'd just gone out of town. "Eopseo, nothing's wrong," he told Hae-ri's brother, not wanting to worry him unnecessarily. Now that he knew Hae-ri had left under her own power, there was no need to put her brother though the worry and anxiety he'd been experiencing for the past twenty-four hours. "I was just trying to reach her and couldn't get hold of her so I thought I'd check and see if you'd heard from her. Did she mention where she was going?"

"Aniyo. Just that she was going out of town."

Dal-geon grilled him for a few more minutes, but it was clear her brother knew nothing else useful about Hae-ri's whereabouts. Finally, he told him to say hi to their mother for him, and said good-bye. He hung up the phone feeling deeply relieved.

That feeling lasted all of about ten minutes before he started second guessing everything he'd learned. Hae-ri's brother had said she had gone out of town, but that didn't explain why she wouldn't have returned his calls. Especially as he'd left her about a half a dozen messages by this point.

By the time two more hours had passed, he'd convinced himself that Hae-ri had been forced at gunpoint to call her brother and tell him that she was leaving town so no one would suspect anything was wrong.

What followed were two of the most wretched days Dal-geon had ever experienced. He stayed at Hae-ri's apartment in the bleak hope that she would turn up eventually, not having the first clue where to look for her and not knowing what else to do.

When she didn't come home Monday night, either, Dal-geon was convinced the worst had happened.

It was a terrible night. He hardly slept, and when he did, he was plagued by dreams of Hae-ri being taken away from him. The time in between dreams was even worse-he was forced to face, in those dark hours, exactly what his life would be if Hae-ri didn't return alive and well. His first thought, of course, was Edward Park. The killer must know by now what Go Hae-ri meant to him. It would be like him to take her from him, to hurt him in this way. But the more he thought about it, the more he was convinced Hwa-sook was right. If Edward Park had taken her, he would have wanted to claim his victory. He would have sent Dal-geon a message, or left his gruesome signature somewhere for Dal-geon to find. Still, there were a lot of killers out there, and Hae-ri had been responsible for putting a lot of them behind bars. Any one of them could have decided to go after her for revenge.