Lisbon — It’s been more than three weeks since Ashley Long saw her fiancé, Patrick McCarthy, walking from their home on the edge of Lisbon toward Jewett City.

When he headed out that evening, about 5 p.m. on Jan. 18, it was unusual that he didn’t say goodbye, she said, but not unusual that he left. Without a functioning car, he often walked to get around. A lover of the outdoors, he also often walked for the sake of walking.

She didn’t know it’d be the last she would hear of the 32-year-old she has been dating for about five years.

In the weeks since McCarthy’s disappearance, Long and various area residents have searched the region’s heavily wooded and watered terrain.

According to Pam Patalano, a Jewett City resident and business owner who has devoted much of her time to helping Long, she and the others have placed posters of McCarthy in Griswold, Lisbon, Norwich, Plainfield and Putnam. They’ve knocked on doors, looked around old factories, checked campsites and the shores of nearby rivers, scoured miles of railroad tracks and walked several forest trails.

Not long after McCarthy went missing, Long created a map to show areas they could search. After each fruitless search, she would highlight the area they had searched.

Almost no highlighter-free spaces remain.

“I have no answers,” she said, adding that even McCarthy’s friends haven’t heard from him. “When I go to Wal-Mart, I have to drag him out because so many people stop to talk to him. It doesn’t make sense.”

Long and Patalano did get a lead the morning after McCarthy left. After learning a neighbor had seen McCarthy stumbling around near a Dwyer Street residence that night, limping and apparently disoriented, they went there the next morning. According to them, they found work gloves, a bottle of ginger ale from Long’s house and McCarthy’s Jan. 14 hospital bracelet “neatly lined up” outside the home on Jan. 19. The bracelet, Long said, was fully intact.

When they first went to the Dwyer Street home, Long and Patalano said, the cellar door wasn’t open, but a window was broken and they could see an empty duffle bag from Long’s home in the basement. By the time state police showed up, Long said, the door had been busted.

According to Long, when police showed up, they told her to take McCarthy’s things home rather than collecting them for evidence. State police, citing the ongoing investigation, wouldn’t say anything specific about the investigation.

Long figures state police are doing their part to help find her fiancé, but she’s frustrated they don’t keep in touch.

According to state police spokesperson Trooper First Class Kelly Grant, state police have searched areas McCarthy was known to frequent. They consider him a “missing person” and further are trying to ping the phone he had in his possession — a phone belonging to his parents — should it still be on.

According to Patalano, the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection also has been involved. She said searchers at one point approached rangers at the Pachaug State Forest Headquarters, and they agreed to drag the Quinebaug River nearest to McCarthy’s home.

That search, again, turned up nothing.

Years ago, McCarthy had several knee surgeries in quick succession, Long said. Like others in his position, he became addicted to the drugs prescribed by his doctors.

When the pills to which he was addicted became costly on the street, friends pointed him to heroin.

Long said McCarthy got caught up with the wrong friends and began using heroin for a period of time. But when McCarthy learned in November 2014 that Long was pregnant with their son, Maddox — now almost 2 — he immediately worked to get into a methadone clinic.

A document from Hartford Dispensary in Norwich shows each of McCarthy’s urine screenings from Nov. 28, 2014, to Oct. 19, 2016, was clean.

In that document, issued Dec. 1, 2016, licensed drug and alcohol counselor Andrew Lautenberger wrote, “I do not have any concerns for Mr. McCarthy at this time as he is in satisfactory standing.”

Long is not surprised McCarthy managed to successfully stay on methadone so long. He was so committed to Maddox, she said, that he had been sleeping with Maddox in their bed each night while she slept on the couch.

The dispensary document is addressed to the courthouse in Norwich, likely in connection with a pending case in which state police at Troop E charged McCarthy with third-degree assault and risk of injury to a minor.

A state Department of Children and Families document The Day received shows the agency substantiated allegations that McCarthy physically abused the involved minor. McCarthy was due in Norwich Superior Court Feb. 10.

Long said McCarthy early last month decided he wanted to be done with methadone, a treatment that, while effective, required him to get to a clinic each day.

Like many others, McCarthy apparently underestimated the addictive quality of methadone and quit too quickly. When his withdrawal symptoms overwhelmed him on Jan. 14, Long said, he checked in to the hospital. Doctors there gave him eight tablets of Klonopin, a drug that eases the symptoms of withdrawal but also can cause dizziness and other disorienting symptoms.

Long said she knows McCarthy reached out to a former dealer of his sometime between Jan. 14 and Jan. 18, when he disappeared. But McCarthy was trying to get Xanax to ease his symptoms, she said, nothing else.

Long doesn’t believe McCarthy fell back into old habits. Instead she’s convinced someone came across his path Jan. 18 and something bad happened.

“There are so many assumptions and rumors," Long said. "But in our five years together, he has never, ever not come home. Nothing would stop him from coming home, unless it’s out of his control.”

l.boyle@theday.com