Out on the Cutting Edge

She said it wasn't a very good play and her part was small anyway. She said we should wait until she was in something decent."

They had last heard from her in late June. She had sounded fine.

She'd said something about possibly getting out of the city for the summer, but she hadn't gone into detail. When a couple of weeks passed without word from her, they called her and kept getting her answering machine.

"She was hardly ever home. She said her room was tiny and dark and depressing, so she didn't spend much time in it. When I saw it the other day I could understand why. I didn't actually see her room, I just saw the building and the front hall, but I could understand. People pay high prices inNew York to live in places that anywhere else would be torn down."

Because she was rarely in, they did not ordinarily call her. Instead, they had a system. She would call every second or third Sunday, placing a person-to-person call for herself. They would tell the operator that Paula Hoeldtke was not at home, and then they would call her back station-to-station.

"It wasn't really cheating them," he said, "because it cost the same as if she called us station-to-station, but this way it was on our phone bill instead of hers. And as a result she wasn't in a hurry to get off the phone, so actually the telephone company came out ahead, too."

But she didn't call, nor did she respond to the messages on her machine. Toward the end of July, Hoeldtke and his wife and the youngest daughter gassed up one of the Subarus and took a trip, driving up into the Dakotas to spend a week riding horses at a ranch and seeing the Badlands and Mount Rushmore. It was mid-August when they got back, and when they tried Paula they didn't get her machine. Instead they got a recording informing them that her phone had been temporarily disconnected.

"If she went away for the summer," he said, "she might have had the phone turned off to save money.

But would she go away without letting anybody know? It wasn't like her. She might do something on the spur of the moment, but she would get in touch with you and let you know about it. She was responsible."

But not too responsible. You couldn't set your watch by her.

Sometimes, during the three years since she'd graduated fromBallState , she'd gone more than two or three weeks between phone calls. So it was possible she'd gone somewhere during the summer and had been too preoccupied to get in touch. It was possible she'd tried to call while her parents were mounted on horses, or hiking along trails inWindCaveNational Park .

"Ten days ago was her mother's birthday," Warren Hoeldtke said.

"And she didn't call."

"And that was something she wouldn't have missed?"

"Never. She wouldn't have forgotten and she wouldn't have missed calling. And if she did miss she would have called the next day."

He hadn't known what to do. He called the police inNew York and got nowhere, predictably enough.

He went to theMuncie office of a national detective agency. An investigator from theirNew York office visited her last known residence and established that she was no longer living there. If he cared to give them a substantial retainer, they would be glad to pursue the matter.

"I thought, what did they do for my money? Go to the place where she lived and find out she wasn't there? I could do that myself. So I got on a plane and came here."

He'd gone to the rooming house where Paula had lived. She had moved out sometime in early July, leaving no forwarding address. The telephone company had refused to tell him anything beyond what he already knew, that the telephone in question had been disconnected.

He'd gone to the restaurant where she'd worked and found out that she'd left that job back in April.

"She may even had told us that," he said. "She must have worked six or seven places since she got toNew York , and I don't know if she mentioned every time she changed jobs. She would leave because the tips weren't good, or she didn't get along with somebody, or because they wouldn't let her take off when she had an audition. So she could have left the last job and gone to work somewhere else without telling us, or she could have told us and it didn't register."

He couldn't think what else to do on his own, so he'd gone to the police. There he was told that in the first place it wasn't really a police matter, that she had evidently moved without informing her parents and that, as an adult, she had every legal right to do so. They told him, too, that he had waited too long, that she had disappeared almost three months ago and whatever trail she'd left was a cold one by now.

If he wanted to pursue the matter further, the police officer told him, he'd be well advised to engage a private investigator. Department regulations prohibited his recommending a particular investigator.

However, the officer said, it was probably all right for him to say what he himself would do if he happened to find himself in Mr.