by Tess Stimson
It was Olivia.
The timeline from which we have been working, the blue dot at the centre of the circle of possibilities, is not where, or when, we thought it was. Everything must be recalibrated. We must retrace our steps from the very beginning.
Fear shears the thin thread of hope to which I’ve been clinging. I know, I know, Lottie has been abducted. The guilt is a physical sensation, a constant, nauseating drumbeat of pain in my ears: I left my child, and now she is missing. I have failed her in the most basic and fundamental of ways: I couldn’t keep her safe. And my failure is amplified by the appalling revelation that I don’t even know when she was taken. I’ve fallen into the same trap as Paul, blinded by the pink skirts.
When did I last see Lottie for sure? Not just a glimpse of pink taffeta, flitting between the buffet tables or disappearing around corners, but Lottie herself?
I realise, with a chill, that I haven’t seen her with absolute certainty since the wedding ceremony on the beach, when she was sitting on her gilt chair a few rows away from me.
Not an hour and fifteen minutes ago.
Four hours ago.
My child may have been missing for four hours and I didn’t even notice.
Even as I suppress my panic, I fix that snapshot in my mind, knowing it may be the last time I ever saw my daughter alive: Lottie glaring ferociously at the sea, clutching her empty flower basket on her lap, her platinum hair whipped free from its fishtail braid by the breeze.
It’ll be the first question the police ask when they arrive: when did you last see your daughter? And when I tell them this new truth, it will affect every aspect of their investigation.
In any case like this, a disappearance or a murder, the first person under suspicion is always the victim’s nearest and dearest. But when the police learn I lost sight of my child four hours ago, their consideration of me will transition from routine to serious. They’ll waste time delving into my history, my record as a mother, when they should be out there, looking for her.
I’ve failed my daughter twice over.
‘For God’s sake, where are the damn police?’ Zealy exclaims, just as two uniformed officers enter hotel reception.
The adversarial nature of the legal system means that, as a lawyer advocating for some of the most disadvantaged people in the world, I’m used to viewing the police as the enemy. I’ve seen the aftermath of dawn raids: children wrenched from their parents, decent people treated like criminals, property destroyed. But I’ve never been so glad to see a police uniform as I am now.
One of the officers hangs back, talking into the radio at her chest. The other introduces himself. ‘Officer Spencer Graves, ma’am. I understand your daughter is missing?’
‘Someone’s stolen her,’ I say.
‘Did you witness the abduction, ma’am?’
‘No, but we’ve looked everywhere. I know she’s been taken!’
‘How old is your daughter, ma’am?’
‘Three. She’ll be four next February.’
‘We’re wasting time,’ Zealy interjects. ‘You need to send out an alert and set up roadblocks before it’s too late!’
‘Ma’am, we just got to establish some facts,’ Graves says. ‘Is it possible she’s wandered off on her own?’
‘We’d have found her by now,’ I say. ‘Half the hotel staff is out looking for her. We’ve got a hundred wedding guests searching the beach. She’s only three, she couldn’t get very far on her own.’
‘Could she be with another family member?’
My frustration intensifies. Time is not my friend. With every second that passes, whoever has taken my daughter is moving further away, and the area that must be searched, the diameter of possibility, exponentially expands.
‘There’s no other family here. I’m telling you, someone has stolen her!’
‘What about the father, ma’am? Is it possible she’s with him?’
‘He’s dead,’ I say shortly.
‘He was killed in the Genoa bridge collapse last August,’ Zealy says.
‘Sorry to hear that, ma’am.’
One of those random, when-your-number’s-up, pointless deaths. Luca was visiting his parents in Genoa, following his mother’s recent diagnosis with dementia. He just happened to be driving across the Ponte Morandi, the main bridge across the city, when the cables in its southern stays broke. He was one of forty-three people killed that day. His body was crushed beyond recovery, but his beautiful face was unmarked, except for a small, deep cut above his right eye.
When I saw him lying in his coffin before the altar in the same church where we’d married, near his mother’s home village in Sicily, I remember thinking he looked like he was sleeping. Any moment now, he’d open his beautiful eyes and smile at all the fuss he’d caused.
I couldn’t tear my eyes from his broken parents, hollowed out with grief. To lose a child. It is beyond imagining.
‘Please,’ I beg. ‘Lottie hasn’t wandered off or got lost. Someone’s taken her.’
Graves gives me a searching stare and then rejoins the female officer. I watch them confer for a few minutes, my agitation escalating. It’s clear they think I’m overreacting. Another hysterical mother convinced her daughter has been kidnapped, when the child has just fallen asleep in a corner somewhere. The rational part of my brain doesn’t blame them: ninety-nine times out of a hundred they’d be right.
The female officer’s radio crackles and she goes back outside.
‘I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about,’ Graves says, returning to me. ‘These cases, most every kid turns up safe and sound. But your daughter’s pretty young. It’s kinda late for her to be out on her own, so we’re gonna call in back-up from the CAC.’
She’s three, I want to scream. She’s too young to be on her own whether it’s late or not!
I suppress the urge to tear the hotel apart with my bare hands, to run back out to the beach and turn over every grain of sand. I have to wait, wait, for the slow wheels of procedure to turn.
Zealy refuses to leave me, but I insist Paul goes back out and keeps searching with the others. Every pair of eyes matters. I can’t shake the fear we’re doing everything wrong. This is the time I will look back on, the crucial minutes when I had the chance to save my daughter but instead let her slip through my fingers.
It’s close to midnight when two new detectives arrive. They throw acronyms at me and then, when Zealy demands clarity, explain longhand that they’re from the Crimes Against Children division of the Investigative Operations Bureau at the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office. Once again, they’re a male/female pairing, but this time, a fortysomething woman is the ranking officer, a Lieutenant Bamby Bates. It’s a ridiculous name, a stripper’s name, but she looks shrewd and efficient, with sharp black eyes that miss nothing, and I feel someone is finally taking me seriously.
‘We’re issuing an Amber alert,’ she tells me. ‘We’ve notified the FDLE – the Florida Department of Law Enforcement,’ she adds. ‘It should go out within minutes.’
‘What’s an Amber alert?’ I ask.
‘It means Lottie’s details will go out to the media,’ she says. ‘They’ll be broadcast on radio and TV, and via text message alert. They’ll also be up on the interstate electronic gantry system. This isn’t Portugal,’ she adds. ‘Lottie isn’t going to disappear through the cracks here.’
She knows my child’s name. She knows what happened to Madeleine McCann, and where. She’s telling me she’s experienced and well-informed; she knows what she’s doing. Her department won’t trample vital clues into the ground or let the trail go cold.
‘Do you got a recent photo of Lottie on your cell?’ the lieutenant asks. ‘We can embed it in the Amber alert.’
I pull up the picture Zealy texted me this afternoon, the one I made my screensaver, and forward it to Bates. Lottie is wearing the pink dress she was last seen in and glaring at the camera with her customary ferocity, her unruly blonde hair already escap
ing from its French plait. It’s not a flattering photo, but it’s Lottie, the very essence of her.
‘What about the media?’ I ask. ‘Should I do an appeal?’
‘We’re not there yet,’ Bates says. ‘I know this is real hard, Alexa, but you gotta trust me. I’m going to find your daughter.’
Nothing is comforting. Nothing makes me feel any less frantic. But I recognise that this woman is Lottie’s lifeline, and she knows what she’s doing.
‘You’re not going to be able to sleep,’ Bates says, her voice softening. ‘And I know you want to be out there, looking. But you have to let us do our job.’
There is a sudden commotion from the courtyard. Marc’s elderly father, Eric, is rushing towards us as fast as he can manage. He’s holding something, but I can’t see what it is until he’s almost upon us.
A small, pink shoe.
chapter 11
quinn
It takes Quinn a few moments to realise she hasn’t been buried alive. Her nose is pressed up against a splintery wooden board, but so too is her left cheek, and, as far as she’s aware, convention dictates some kind of pillow when you’re laid to your eternal rest.
She rolls onto her back and stares up at the underside of a porch roof. Losing her right eye last year has thrown off her spatial awareness, but even she can see the roof is canted away from the building at a precarious angle. She meant to tell Marnie to get it fixed the last time she woke up on her ex-girlfriend’s front stoop.
It’s not yet dawn; early morning October mist drifts across the grey fields of stubble surrounding the farmhouse. Quinn runs a tongue around her remaining teeth. Her mouth feels like the bottom of a bat cave. She hates falling asleep without flossing, even though at this point it’s akin to repainting the railings on the Titanic.
Her phone vibrates in her back pocket, but she ignores it. It’ll be the News Desk, and she has no intention of interrupting her hangover to schlep back to Washington. They can get one of the junior correspondents to follow whatever chum the president has just thrown in the water.
The screen door opens. ‘Jeez,’ Marnie says. ‘Again?’
Quinn struggles to sit up, pushing against her functioning arm. ‘You need to get your porch roof fixed.’
‘What the fuck you doing here, Quinn?’
‘Selling Girl Scout cookies?’
Marnie pulls Quinn to her feet. ‘I’m not kidding around. This has got to stop.’ She doesn’t invite Quinn in, but she doesn’t shut the door in her face, either. Quinn follows her into the warm kitchen, feeling like a stray cat let into the house after a night on the tiles.
‘You can’t keep getting wasted and driving out here,’ Marnie says, pushing a cup of coffee across the counter towards her. ‘You’re gonna end up in a ditch. And I gotta tell you, you look like crap.’
Quinn would smile if she could, but she’s lost most of the muscles on the right side of her face. ‘That ship has sailed,’ she says, without a trace of self-pity.
She demanded one of the nurses bring her a mirror just three days after the IED exploded beneath her Jeep in Syria. She couldn’t actually tell the woman what she wanted, of course: her jaw was still wired shut. She’d had to write it with her left hand on the pad they’d given her. One silver lining to all this: it’s her right arm that’s paralysed, and she’s a leftie.
Her desire to see what she looked like wasn’t provoked by vanity: she’s a television reporter. Viewers may not expect their war correspondents to be pretty blonde auto-cuties, but they don’t want to be put off their dinner, either.
Senior management at INN said all the right things when they medevacked her home, promising to keep her job open and to pay for private medical care and one-on-one rehabilitation, but Quinn knew as soon as she looked in the mirror her career was fucked.
And she was the lucky one: her cameraman, fixer and translator had all been killed in the roadside bomb, along with the two US troops accompanying them. Quinn ‘just’ lost an eye, her right lower jaw, and ninety percent of the use of her right arm. The plastic surgeons patched her up pretty well, but there was no way INN would ever let her on prime time TV again.
Instead, they had the company shrink sign her off the reporters’ roster with PTSD, and offered her a job they didn’t expect her to take, as Washington Bureau Chief. In theory, it was a promotion.
She’s aware she’s become a cliché: the embittered journalist looking for redemption and a way back into the premier league, but she’s not going to be the one to blink first. Their standoff has lasted fifteen months so far. INN sends her on bottom-feeding stories that never make it out of the graveyard bulletins. Quinn returns just enough of their calls to stop them being able to fire her.
Marnie folds her arms and watches Quinn sip her coffee. ‘You coulda caught your death. It was down in the thirties last night.’
‘Alcohol doesn’t freeze. Slit my wrists and I’ll bleed pure bourbon.’
‘Not funny, Quinn.’
Even with sleep in her eyes and pillow-creased cheeks, Marnie is still the most beautiful woman Quinn has ever seen, with a torch of red hair and delicate Celtic bone structure. They met nine months ago at a petrol station in rural Maryland; Quinn had been struggling one-armed to change a flat tyre when Marnie had stopped to help.
Conversation had led to dinner; dinner to bed.
The other woman hadn’t been put off by Quinn’s disfiguring injuries. What put an end to their relationship, after just over six months together, was Quinn’s inability to stay sober for longer than eight hours at a stretch.
Quinn reaches for the pitcher of coffee on the hotplate, wrapping her bad hand around her mug as she refills it. She’s learned the hard way that adding the non-visual signal, from the sense of touch, helps her brain judge distance and location more accurately.
‘How long this time?’ Marnie asks.
‘What day is it now?’
‘Sunday.’
Quinn has many faults, but telling the truth and shaming the devil is hardwired into her DNA. ‘Three days,’ she says.
‘Goddamn it, Quinn. You wanna screw up your life, be my guest. But I don’t want a ringside seat.’
Quinn was a screw-up long before the IED. She suffered a one-two knockout punch when she was seven and her parents divorced, and then fought not to have custody. Forced to spend her childhood shuttling between homes in London and Scotland, in neither of which she was welcome, she didn’t grieve much when they died from cancer while she was at college, within six months of each other. She specialises in rooting out all that’s dark and ugly in human nature, because it’s what she knows.
Her phone buzzes again.
‘Take it,’ Marnie says.
Quinn suppresses her craving for a slug of Eagle Rare from the hip flask inside her jacket and swipes right on the call from the News Desk.
twelve hours missing
chapter 12
alex
I keep trying to explain my daughter’s fear of the sea to Lieutenant Bates, but no one will listen to me.
‘She’d never go near the ocean,’ I say, again and again.
Marc’s father shows us the section of shoreline where he discovered Lottie’s shoe floating at the water’s edge. It’s clear the police want this to be a drowning rather than an abduction. Florida is a tourist hotspot, after all: its economy depends on its reputation for fun-filled, family-friendly vacations. It took years for Praia da Luz to recover from the damage to its image caused by the McCann case. A drowning would be a tragedy, yes, but only for me.
There are searchlights all along the beach now, rendering it as bright as day. Forensic integrity matters less than locating Lottie but, apart from that single pink shoe, nothing else is found.
I know Bates wants me to keep out of their way and stay at the hotel, but I can’t sit still. As dawn breaks, Zealy, Marc and I resume our search together, covering every inch of the tiny barrier island.
In addition to the main hotel, the c
omplex also comprises a dozen separate holiday villas and staff accommodation, and a nine-hole golf course. We jump over low walls and rake through scrubby undergrowth, looking in drains and ditches, and beneath the bridge that connects the island to St Pete Beach. It’s eerily quiet: most of the other wedding guests have gone to bed, and the police searchers have moved to the mainland. We’re completely alone. It feels as if no one is looking for Lottie. Just me, and my two dearest friends.
Someone suddenly calls my name from the bridge. I glance up and find myself staring at a man holding a long-lensed camera.
‘Fuck off!’ Zealy yells.
I put a restraining hand on her arm. ‘Don’t. We may need the press.’
Lieutenant Bates is waiting for me when we return to the hotel. ‘We want you to speak to the media,’ she says, with perfect timing.
We are here already: the point she told me just a few hours ago she didn’t want to reach. Any last crumb of hope that this is a false alarm, a near miss, vanishes.
Bates correctly interprets my silence as acquiescence. I would stand on my head and spit pound coins if I thought it would bring Lottie home.
‘We’ve spoken to the local networks,’ Bates says. ‘We’ll do the appeal at six tonight, to catch their evening shows. Don’t worry about what you’re gonna say. We’ll help you with that.’
‘She’s in no state to face the media,’ Marc says.
‘I know it’s tough, but the sooner we get this story out there, the better.’
‘You don’t need Alex for that.’
‘An appeal from the mother always gets traction,’ Bates says.
We both know what she really means. The media don’t just want a photograph, or a stiff-necked detective appealing for information. That’s not going to get them the clicks and likes and shares and tweets they’re after. They want tears and pain. They want me.
‘What are you going to do in the meantime?’ Zealy demands.
‘I promise you, we’re throwing everything at this,’ Bates says. ‘We’ve got a lot of people out there looking for her. We’re pulling CCTV from tolls and gas stations. And I’ve got a team putting a timeline of the reception together: where everyone was during the evening, and when. It’ll help us figure who could have seen something. Folks oftentimes don’t realise the significance till later.’
