Rob: 0:00

Hi, I'm Rob, Tale number 67, the Vanishing Brother. When they were kids, catherine was close to her brother, jack. As they got older and moved into adulthood they grew apart. There was no animosity. They talked to each other a couple times a year on the phone, but it was pretty rare that they saw each other. When she was 30 and Jack was 29, she got a call from Jack. They talked for four hours, the longest conversation they'd had in their adult lives.

Rob: 0:44

Jack's life had fallen apart. Him and his wife had divorced. They had no kids, but Jack had to move out of the house and he needed a place to stay. Catherine said okay, and that's how Catherine and Jack came to occupy the same house again. It was nice having him around Less lonely. They'd eat dinner together each night after Catherine got home from work. They'd go hiking or to the movies on the weekends. It was fun.

Rob: 1:11

Jack worked remotely, but with everything that was going on he didn't have enough money to buy a car, so he would either have to borrow Catherine's or she'd have to give him a ride somewhere. He had started taking yoga classes in the evening at a local yoga studio. It was in a strip mall with a pizza place and a taekwondo studio. Jack was going to yoga three nights a week and Catherine did not want to discourage this because it seemed to be bringing him a lot of peace. Sometimes he'd take the car, but usually she would drive him there, drop him off and go to the grocery store or something like that. Usually she'd finish her shopping before the class was over, so she'd bring a book with her and read in the car while she waited.

Rob: 1:54

A few months after Jack started taking classes at the yoga studio, catherine drove him there, dropped him off and then went to the grocery store. All she needed was yogurt, so she grabbed it and headed back to the strip mall parking lot, parked her car and started reading her book. It was a longer wait than normal, but she didn't mind. When the class let out, jack wasn't with them. She thought maybe he was talking to the instructor or something like that. So she waited a while. Then she gave him a call and it rang, but he didn't answer and it went to voicemail. She didn't leave one and decided to wait a little longer. But after about 15 minutes she saw someone at the yoga studio door leaving and locking up. They were now closed for the night she jumped out of her car and ran up and talked to them. It was the studio owner and she said, yeah, that was the last class and everyone's gone.

Rob: 2:44

And Catherine said I dropped my brother off to go to the class, but he didn't come out with everyone else and she said his name's Jack. Do you know him? And she did know him. She said he'd been coming to classes for a while. She really liked him, he was a great student, but he had not been in class that night.

Rob: 3:00

Before Catherine even responded to that piece of information, she got out her phone and called Jack again and it was the same thing. It rang and then went to voicemail. He didn't answer. It was baffling. Catherine had pulled up. She had seen Jack get out of her car. She couldn't remember if she had seen him walk into the studio. But where else could he have gone? The studio owner opened the door back up and let Catherine in and they walked around looking for Jack. There was just the room where you did yoga and there was a men's locker room and a women's locker room and then there was a bathroom and they searched all of those places and he was nowhere to be seen. The studio owner said she had to get home because she had kids, but she gave Catherine her number in case she could help in any way.

Rob: 3:45

Catherine called Jack again. This time she left a frantic voicemail telling him to call her back. She also sent him a text message, but nothing. Catherine did not panic. She just started thinking about all the places her brother might be. And then she did something that she would do at work if she had a problem no-transcript 1. Check the pizza place. 2. Check the taekwondo place. 3. Call the police. 4. Check the gas station across the street. 5. Check the route to the grocery store and check inside the grocery store. 6. Check the house. 7. Search the yoga studio again.

Rob: 4:36

On one of their recent hikes, catherine had asked someone along the trail to take a picture of her and Jack. She pulled it up on her phone and zoomed in on his face and headed to the pizza restaurant. There were two people working in there. She showed both of them the picture of Jack, asked them if they had seen him. They said no. The same thing happened at the Taekwondo studio. The police were not very helpful. They told her, if she had not heard from him by morning, to call them again and they would come talk to her.

Rob: 5:07

The guy working at the gas station across the street from the strip mall. He said he recognized Jack but he wasn't sure if he had seen him that night. He said it was 50-50. Catherine asked if he could look at his security camera footage and he said the cameras were broken. The route to the grocery store was dark and she didn't see anybody. But she wasn't confident. She would have seen anyone if they had been walking down the side of the road. When she got to the grocery store it had already closed. Back at the house the door was still locked and there were no signs that Jack had been in there since they'd left.

Rob: 5:41

Catherine called the owner of the yoga studio and explained the current situation. She was hoping to convince her to drive up and open the yoga studio again so that she could give it a more detailed look studio again, so that she could give it a more detailed look and to her surprise the studio owner told her where a key was hidden so that Catherine could go in there and walk around and look on her own. The key was taped under a flower pot so if you picked it up you wouldn't see it on the ground. You had to unstick it from the bottom of this flower pot. Catherine grabbed it and went back into the yoga studio. Again, it was a small space. She checked the yoga room again, the men's locker room, the women's locker room, the bathroom. There really wasn't anywhere for anyone to be.

Rob: 6:26

And by this time Catherine was tired, she was upset. She sat on the bench in the ladies' locker room. She didn't cry, but she held her face in her hands for a little bit and then she got out her phone and called Jack. Again it started ringing, but this time, when it was ringing she could hear a phone vibrating somewhere in the building. She walked out of the locker room. She couldn't hear the vibrating anymore, so she knew it was somewhere in the women's locker room. The phone went to voicemail. She called again. The vibrating was actually coming from above her in the ceiling, and she just instinctively called out Jack's name really loudly. She heard the weak, muffled cry of a person above her.

Rob: 7:10

Catherine scrambled, looking for a door to an upstairs she didn't know existed. There wasn't one. There wasn't an attic or anything like that. She walked out of the back door of the building and there was a ladder on the side of the building to climb up on the roof. On the roof there was like this hatch that was there to give someone access to the heating and air system. And when she opened this hatch she could look down into the area above the ceiling and she immediately saw two feet hanging out of an air duct Jack's feet. She jumped down and she said Jack, and he said I'm stuck. And she was able to get some leverage and pull him out and he was coughing and crying and he kept saying he thought he was going to die. She got him some water and in all the chaos and the movement, two phones fell out of his pocket and Catherine picked them up. Neither of them were Jack's phone and he just gave her a look like we'll talk about this later, get me out of here.

Rob: 8:07

Then, when they got to her car, he had several other phones in his pocket, including his own. He was so jammed into that air vent he couldn't reach his phone. He was shaken up but he was fine. He kept drinking water and Catherine said Tell me what happened. And that's when he broke down and told the truth. He lost his job and while he was taking these yoga classes he noticed that none of the lockers had locks on them and people would put their phones in there during class, including him. He was putting his phone in there during class and that gave him an idea for how to make some quick cash by stealing and selling these phones these phones.

Rob: 8:51

He had started leaving class to go to the bathroom, but he would actually dip down to the locker room. He would grab a phone out of a locker and then there was an air conditioning vent and he had unscrewed the screws so he could really quickly take the cover off, put a stolen phone in there and then put the vent cover back on really quickly, with plans to come back later and get them out. But there was never an opportunity to return and get them. So he started trying to think of other ways to retrieve them, and that's when he found the access point from the roof and he was careful with how many phones he had taken. Like he didn't take every phone, he took one here and there, but it had become a topic of discussion at the studio that people's phones were getting stolen and that freaked Jack out. So he was desperate to get them out of there.

Rob: 9:36

When Catherine had driven Jack up to the yoga studio that night and dropped him off. She had no idea that was his big night. While the class was going on he was going to climb up onto the roof, climb down into the duct and get the phones that he had put in there through that vent. But he got stuck, and who knows if he would have been found in time if it weren't for his sister. What if she hadn't sat there and made that list? It could have been awful. Jack returned the phones and never went back to the yoga studio. He eventually got a new job and moved out of Catherine's house. She still views those months when Jack lived with her as some of the best times they've ever had. They've since grown apart again and don't speak very much. Rob Tells Tales is produced by me, rob Tiffin. Our theme music is by Mitchell Hardage. Thank you.