Her One Mistake

by Heidi Perks

  “Come on, girls,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “Let’s go see where Alice has gone.” I grabbed the girls’ hands and as we ran to the back of the Jungle Run, it crossed my mind I wouldn’t have been worried if it were any of my children. They were prone to hiding from me or wandering off. But Alice? I couldn’t imagine her doing either. There was something so fragile about her that wasn’t like any other child I knew. And there was something so horrific about losing someone else’s child.

  Five feet from the back of the run was the fence that separated the field from the parkland, and in the distance a line of trees partially hid the golf course beyond. I slipped off my shoes and, holding them in one hand, crawled through the Jungle Run, both girls close at my heels.

  I called Alice’s name as we clambered over ramps and crawled through tunnels, looking at every child we passed, hoping to see a flash of her pink frilly skirt.

  “Where could she have gone?” I called out to Jack, who was waiting at the end. He shrugged in response as I inelegantly swung a leg over the final slide and pushed myself down and climbed off. At the bottom I held my hands out to Evie who was giggling behind me, lost in a bubble of excitement that I had crawled through with her.

  “God, this is ridiculous.” I looked around, slipping my shoes back on and turning to the children. “Did she say anything about wanting to go anywhere else? Did she mention the magician, maybe?” I hadn’t seen her come into the tent, but she could have wandered off in the wrong direction and gotten lost. “Surely I would have seen her,” I murmured to no one in particular.

  “Molly, did you actually see her get on this thing?” I asked, my voice rising an octave as I gestured behind us at the inflatable.

  “I think so.”

  “You think so?”

  “Well.” She paused. “I think she came on after me.”

  “But you don’t know for sure?” I said, trying my hardest not to shout.

  Molly shook her head. I went over to the woman who had taken my money and was now talking to another mum about the cake stall. “A little girl came on this with my children,” I interrupted. “About ten minutes ago now, but there’s no sign of her.”

  “Oh?” I doubted she’d noticed which children were getting on and off. She’d barely lifted her head when I’d placed the coins in her outstretched hand. “Sorry, I don’t know,” she said. “What does she look like?”

  “About this high.” My hand hovered at the top of Molly’s head. Alice was tall for her age. “She’s only four, though. She’s wearing a white T-shirt and a pink frilly skirt.”

  The woman shook her head as her friend stared at me blankly. “No, sorry,” she said. “I don’t remember seeing her. I’ll keep a lookout, though.”

  “Oh God.” I felt sick. This couldn’t be happening.

  “What do we do?” Jack looked at me, biting the edge of his thumbnail as he waited for an answer. He wasn’t worried, why would he be? He assumed I’d sort out the problem and then, when we found Alice, we’d move on to the next activity.

  “We start looking for her.” I took hold of the girls’ hands again. “We’ll search the whole field. She has to be here somewhere.” But my pulse raced a little faster as we started walking, Jack close behind us, weaving through the crowds across the field, back toward the car park. And the more time that passed, the quicker it beat.

  We stopped at every stall, looked under trestle tables, between the long legs of the adults, all of us calling Alice’s name with varying degrees of panic. Past Hook-A-Duck and the soccer shoot-out, the lines of dads cheering when one of them missed. The tombola spitting out raffle tickets, the cake stall again. As we passed each one, the grip on my daughters’ hands tightened, my head constantly swiveling around to check Jack was following.

  “Have you seen a little girl?” I stopped just past the cake stall and called out to a mum from Molly’s year who was manning the toy stand. My voice was louder than I’d intended. “Blond hair to here.” I pointed to just below my shoulder. “White T-shirt, pink skirt.”

  Her expression was grim as she shook her head. “Where have you looked?”

  “Everywhere,” I cried out in a tight breath.

  For a moment I couldn’t move. My hands started to tremble, and I didn’t realize how tightly I was gripping on to my girls until Molly yelped as she tried to pull away. I needed to do something, but what? Put out an announcement? Call the police? I’d lost track of how long it had been since I’d seen her. Didn’t every second count in these situations?

  “Why don’t you see if they’ll make an announcement?” the mum said as if reading my thoughts. She pointed to the far end of the field. “Mr. Harrison’s usually over there somewhere.”

  I stared back at her, not knowing how to answer. The truth was I didn’t want to. Because as soon as I did, I would be admitting this was serious. I would be admitting I had lost a child. And someone else’s child, at that.

  “Charlotte?” A hand clasped my shoulder and I turned, coming face-to-face with Audrey.

  “Oh God, Aud.” I dropped the girls’ hands and clamped my own over my mouth. “I’ve lost Alice. I can’t find her anywhere.”

  “Okay,” she said calmly, automatically looking about. “Don’t panic. She’s got to be around somewhere.”

  “What do I do? I’ve been around the whole field.” I needed Audrey to fix it in the no-nonsense way she’s so good at.

  “We’ll find someone in charge,” she said. “Maybe they can close down all the exits.” She looked over toward the car park and I followed her gaze. Streams of cars continued to meander in. The fair was getting busier.

  “Who?” There was no one in charge. I’d not once seen the headmaster, Mr. Harrison, with his loudspeaker. He was supposed to be here today. He always attended the fair. But apart from Gail, no one was acting as security or even manning the gates to the car park and the perimeters of the field. Alice could have gotten out in any one of four directions had she wanted to. Is that what she had done at the back of the inflatable? Had she, for whatever reason, climbed over the fence and headed toward the golf course?

  “We’ve lost a little girl,” Audrey called out to anyone who would listen. “We need everyone to look for her.” She turned to me. “Maybe we should call the police.”

  I shook my head as a couple of other mums came up to us. “Are you okay, Charlotte?” one asked. “Who have you lost?”

  “My friend’s daughter,” I cried. My hands pressed the sides of my face, fingers stretching to cover my eyes. “Alice. Her name is Alice. She’s only four. Oh God, this isn’t happening.”

  “It’s okay,” Aud said as she took my arm and eventually pried my hands away. “Everyone can help look. Don’t worry, we’ll find her. How long has it been?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, my heart beating rapidly as I tried to think how long it was since I’d last seen her. “Maybe about twenty minutes.”

  “Twenty minutes?” one of the mums asked.

  “Okay,” Audrey announced. “I’m calling the police.”

  • • •

  THE NEWS OF a missing child spread rapidly. A whisper passed through the crowd, kicking up a burst of activity as everyone looked around them. The threat of danger, an unspoken murmur of excitement that everyone had a role in finding her, no doubt had people wanting to be the one who could call out that she was hiding beneath their stall.I doubted any of them were imagining the worst. Children get lost and it was never long before they were found and the terrified parents gushed their thanks to the person who happened to come across the child.

  In a daze I let Audrey lead us to the edge of the field by the car park, where she had agreed to meet the police.

  I rested my back against the fence, the glare of sunlight pounding down on us. People in front of me were beginning to blur and as my eyes flickered to refocus, a wave of nausea surged through me.

  “Drink some water.” Audrey pressed a bottle into my hand and I took a large
gulp. “And for God’s sake, move into the shade. You look as if you’re about to faint,” she said, nudging me toward a tree. “Alice will turn up,” she went on. “She’s just run off and gotten lost.”

  “I hope you’re right.” After all, nothing awful happened in the sleepy Dorset village of Chiddenford. “But I just don’t think Alice would run off.”

  “All kids do from time to time,” Aud said. “Alice is no different from any other four-year-old.”

  But you don’t know Alice, I thought. Alice is different. Audrey had never taken the time to get to know Alice, most likely because she’d never gotten a word out of her. She’d never really taken the time to get to know Harriet, either.

  “I should call Harriet,” I said as she ushered my children to a patch on the grass where they obediently sat.

  “Talk me through what happened again.”

  “I don’t know what happened. Alice just vanished. She went around the back of the inflatable and never came off it. What do I tell Harriet?” I took another sip from the bottle. “I can’t tell her I’ve lost her daughter, Aud,” I cried.

  “You need to try and keep calm,” she said, grabbing my arms and pulling me around so I was facing her. “Breathe slowly. Come on. One, two—” She started counting slowly and I fell into her rhythm. “Alice will be found soon, I know she will, so there’s no point worrying Harriet yet. And besides”—her gaze drifted over my shoulder—“the police are here.”

  I turned to watch the marked car pull up alongside the field. Two uniformed officers got out and, as they walked toward us, the graveness of the situation smacked me once more. It was official. Alice was missing.

  • • •

  OFFICER FIELDING INTRODUCED himself and his female colleague, Officer Shaw. They asked if I needed to sit but I shook my head. I just wanted them to start searching for Alice.

  “Can you tell us what happened, Charlotte?” Officer Fielding asked.

  “The children were excited to go on the Jungle Run,” I said, pointing to the large inflatable. “Well, not my youngest, Evie, she wanted to go on the slide, but the other three went,” I said, though I knew Alice hadn’t been excited.

  “And you saw all three get on?”

  I shook my head. “They ran around the back of it quickly and you can’t actually see the start of the run.”

  “So you didn’t go around and check?” he asked, one eyebrow slightly raised as he peered at me over the thick black rim of his glasses.

  “No.” My chest felt tight. “I assumed they had because they were begging to go on it.”

  The policeman nodded and made a note in his pad. I reached my hand to my throat, scratching at the heat that began to prick my skin. “Obviously now I wish I had,” I went on. “But I didn’t think I needed to because as far as I knew, there was nowhere else for them to go . . .” I trailed off. Of course I wished I had now. I wished to God I’d never let them go on it in the first place.

  “And what did you do next?” he asked, nodding to Officer Shaw, who wandered off and began speaking into her radio.

  “I sat down in the shade with my youngest, Evie. She didn’t want to go on the Jungle Run and I had a headache,” I told him, watching the policewoman and wondering what she was saying and to whom.

  “And could you see this Jungle Run from where you were sitting?”

  “Yes, I had my eye on the end of it the whole time,” I told him, nodding to convey more certainty than I felt.

  “And did you see them at all after they’d run around the back of it?”

  “I—I did,” I faltered. “I saw them coming off and running around again.”

  “All of them?” He looked up from his pad.

  “I saw Jack first,” I said, remembering my son grinning from ear to ear because I’d felt a surge of happiness that he was enjoying himself. “And then Molly.” Her mouth had formed a wide O as she had gone down the slide, her pigtails flying into the air behind her.

  “And Alice?” he asked with a hint of impatience.

  I paused. I’d thought I’d seen her at the time. Or maybe I’d just assumed I had. I couldn’t actually remember her dropping down the slide like the others. “I thought so,” I said, then added, “I can’t say for sure.”

  “So when did you notice Alice definitely wasn’t there?”

  “When my two came off. They said she wasn’t with them and they couldn’t remember if she got on.” I looked over at my children, already dreading the moment the police would want to question them.

  “What about her shoes?” This came from Officer Shaw, who was walking back toward us.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, don’t kids usually take off their shoes to go on these things? Were Alice’s still there?”

  “Oh.” I paused and tried to think. “I don’t know. I didn’t see.” I didn’t even notice my own children taking off their shoes or putting them back on again.

  “You’d better go check,” Officer Fielding said to Shaw, who nodded and walked off briskly in that direction.

  My heart was beating so hard it rang through my ears. I looked over at Audrey and the kids, then back at him. Why wasn’t he promising me she’d be found soon instead of asking me more questions? Now they were about Harriet and Brian, and he needed me to give him their phone numbers.

  I fumbled through my bag and pulled my phone out, scrolling until I found Harriet’s number. There was no point in looking for Brian’s. I’d never had it, but I made a pretense of checking anyway.

  I described Alice’s pink frilly skirt with its little birds embroidered around the hem that I’d seen her wear so often. It was getting shorter against her growing legs, but it was obviously one of her favorites. I told him she had a plain white T-shirt and white ankle socks and light blue shoes with Velcro straps. The shoes had tiny stars pinpricked into a pattern on the toes. I was relieved I could so accurately remember what she was wearing.

  I told him Alice was roughly the same height as Molly, with blond, wavy hair that comes to just below her shoulders. She didn’t have any clips in it and wasn’t wearing a hairband. I scrolled through the photos on my phone to see if I had any of her, but I didn’t, and even though the image of Alice was as clear in my head as if she were standing right next to me, I wasn’t sure how well I’d managed to get it across.

  “We need to be out there looking,” I said. “She could be anywhere by now.”

  “Don’t worry, there are officers out there,” Officer Fielding said. “Where are the parents?”

  “Her mum is taking a class at a hotel.” I couldn’t tell him which one. There are a number of small hotels scattered along the coast, and I’d never thought to ask Harriet.

  “And Dad?”

  “Fishing. He goes every Saturday morning.”

  “Do you know where?”

  I shook my head. Fishing was as much as I knew.

  “Okay.” He beckoned to Officer Shaw, who was returning. “We need to get hold of the parents. Find anything?”

  She shook her head as she reached us. “No shoes, and the woman manning it says none have been left behind.”

  Officer Fielding looked at me blankly. He didn’t have to tell me what he was thinking: the mood was heavy with the sense of my incompetency. “So, very possibly she didn’t get on in the first place,” he said.

  • • •

  I JOINED AUDREY and my children while Officer Shaw tried to call Harriet. I stared at the woman’s back as she paced away from us, straining to hear if the call had connected, imagining my friend on the other end listening to the officer tell her that her daughter was missing.

  “You’re shaking,” Audrey said. “Sit down. I’ll go and get you another bottle of water.”

  I shook my head. “No, don’t go anywhere.” A ball of bile lodged in my throat and I desperately didn’t want Audrey leaving me.

  “Alice is going to be fine. You know that, don’t you? They’re going to find her.”

  “But
what if they don’t?” I cried. “What if it’s the same guy who took little Mason last year? And if we don’t find her, and we don’t know what’s happened . . . Jesus!” I sobbed, feeling Audrey’s arms catch me as my legs buckled. She pulled me into a hug. “I couldn’t live with that. I couldn’t live with myself if she never comes back.”

  “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t do that. She will be found. This has nothing to do with what happened to Mason. Alice just wandered off and got lost. No one’s taken her, for God’s sake. If that happened, someone here would have seen something.”

  “We can’t get hold of the mum,” Officer Fielding said as he walked back. “I need to ask some more questions, if you don’t mind, I’d like you to come over to this Jungle Run with me, if that’s okay?”

  While Audrey stayed with the children, I followed the officer across the field. He wanted to know more about Alice’s family—asking me again if Harriet and Brian were still together, which I confirmed they were. Did any grandparents live nearby? I told him they didn’t and the questions stopped when we reached the Jungle Run, where a couple of policemen were hovering around the back.

  “There’s no gap or gate in the fence,” one said, walking to meet us. “The other side of the trees is the golf course and the parking lot to the golf club, which is pretty busy.”

  “Any CCTV?”

  “That’s being checked out.”

  “Good.” Officer Fielding nodded, looking around. The crowds had clustered into small groups huddled by stalls, those nearby watching the commotion around the inflatable with undisguised interest. “She could have slipped off in any direction,” he murmured.

  Alice wouldn’t do that, I wanted to say, but I held my breath as I waited for him to decide what to do next. She wasn’t the type of child to just slip off. But if I was right, then I couldn’t think about what that meant.

  HARRIET

  Harriet drove home, wondering if she’d done the right thing. She hadn’t told anyone she was leaving the class, but as soon as she’d walked into the fresh air of the parking lot she was relieved to be out of the hotel. After a twenty-minute journey home, she could plug in her phone again.