I ran up the road and woke my landlord, who admitted he had seen Janice lugging a suitcase past his window “the other day” and that Kaitlin had been ill, but in all the fuss about the monument the details had escaped him. He let me use his phone (I had become a phone beggar) and I reached Doctor Dexter, who filled me in on the details of Kaitlin’s infection and her trip to Bangkok.

Bangkok. And I couldn’t call Bangkok from Colin’s phone; that was a toll call, he pointed out, and wasn’t I already behind on the rent?

I hiked to the Phat Duc, Hitch’s alleged bait and tackle shop.

Hitch had problems of his own — he still harbored faint hopes of tracking down the lost Daimler — but he told me I could crash in the Duc’s back room (on a bale of moist sinsemilla, I imagined) and use the shop’s phone all I wanted; we’d settle up later.

It took me until dawn to establish that Janice and Kaitlin had already left the country.

I don’t blame her.

Not that I wasn’t angry. I was angry for the next six months. But when I tried to justify the anger to myself, my own excuses seemed flimsy and inadequate.

I had, after all, brought her to Thailand when her explicit preference had been to stay in the U.S. and finish her postdoc. I had kept her there when my own contracts lapsed, and I had effectively forced her into a poverty-level existence (as Americans of those years understood poverty, anyway) while I played out a scenario of rebellion and retreat that had more to do with unresolved post-adolescent angst than with anything substantial. I had exposed Kaitlin to the dangers of an expatriate lifestyle (which I preferred to think of as “broadening her horizons”), and in the end I had been absent and unavailable when my daughter’s life was threatened.