Sowell Bay Police

Sowell Bay Police enter the story through the investigation of Erik Sullivan’s disappearance, arriving at the Sullivan home the morning after he fails to return from his late-night shift at the ferry ticket booth. Their work gives institutional form to Tova Sullivan’s uncertainty, but the accounts they gather do not resolve what happened to her son.

The Report and Initial Inquiries

The investigation begins after Tova Sullivan and Will Sullivan report that Erik has not come home. The police arrive early the following day, while the green leotard Tova had worn the previous afternoon still lies over a chair in the otherwise tidy living room. She remembers staring at it as the detectives spoke, unable to accept that Erik might truly be missing and imagining instead that he had gone to a friend’s house or fallen asleep on someone’s sofa.

Tova is questioned repeatedly about where Erik might have been. She can only say that he was probably with friends, as he often was; at eighteen, he had a busy social life whose details she had stopped tracking. The gap between her confidence that he was a good, dependable son and her inability to account for his whereabouts becomes part of the case’s emotional burden. After his disappearance is confirmed, he is declared dead, but the investigation leaves Tova without an answer about his final night.

Interviews with Erik’s Former Girlfriends

Police speak at length with several young women who had once been close to Erik, not as suspects but as possible sources of information about his plans. Ashley Barrington, whom Erik had taken to the Sowell Bay High School homecoming dance the previous autumn, was away on a family cruise the night he disappeared. Jenny-Lynn Mason, his prom date that spring, had gone to a social gathering in Seattle and stayed overnight with a friend. Neither could say what Erik had been doing.

Tova identifies Stephanie Lee as a classmate who had visited the house several times that spring for study dates. Stephanie says she was home asleep that night; a detective initially questions the account, but the police eventually determine it is true. She, too, has no information that explains Erik’s absence. The interviews establish that the police follow up on the relationships Tova knows about, while leaving the central question open: whether someone close to Erik knew more than the investigation could establish.

Limits of the Investigation in the Narrative

The police inquiry depends on the memories and schedules of people who knew Erik. The novel sets that human record beside the sea, where a very different trace of the missing young man survives. Marcellus recalls finding, as a juvenile, a circular ring and a copied key among scattered human remnants beneath rocks on the seafloor; he believes they belonged to the person Tova mourns. The account does not describe the police discovering these objects. Instead, it places the reader in possession of a clue beyond the witnesses’ recollections, underscoring how much of Erik’s fate remains outside the investigation’s grasp.

The agency is also invoked, more lightly, in a conversation about Will Sullivan’s habit of taking pens from restaurants and bank counters. Tova thanks Ethan Mack for not calling the authorities over the pens, while Ethan recalls having looked the other way when Will took one from the deli. No police report is made; the exchange uses the prospect of official intervention as a joke, a small contrast to the grave, unresolved investigation into Erik.