Missing Daughter

by Rick Mofina

  “But after what the bank said, don’t you think maybe—”

  “I will not go to him for this. Not for this.”

  “Okay.” Karen surrendered for now.

  She rubbed his shoulder, letting the moment pass.

  Ryan downed his milk before they locked up and went to bed.

  * * *

  Sometime later that night, Tyler woke.

  Thirsty from all the pizza he’d eaten, he dragged himself to the bathroom for a drink of water. Outside Maddie’s bedroom door he froze.

  He heard voices talking in softened tones.

  What’s she doing in the middle of the night? he wondered. Half asleep, he shrugged, got his water, then got back into his bed. She must be playing a video or talking to someone on her phone. She’s always on that thing.

  2

  In the morning Ryan was at the kitchen table scrolling through his tablet, studying state and local financing programs for small businesses.

  Karen glanced at his screen as she poured more coffee into his chipped mug, a Father’s Day gift bearing the words Awesome Dad.

  “How’s it looking?” she asked, reaching for her cup on the counter.

  “Not good.”

  “You should talk to Cole.”

  “Karen.” His voice was cold.

  “You don’t have many options, Ryan.”

  “I will not go to him,” he said, raising his cup to drink and looking at her, suddenly puzzled at why she was wearing her ShopToSave City cashier’s smock. “You’re going to work today? It’s Saturday.”

  “I told you yesterday that I was taking an extra overtime shift.”

  “It got by me, sorry.”

  Karen released a borderline groan. She didn’t want to fight, but she was frustrated that he wouldn’t ask his older brother for help. She closed her eyes for a moment then switched gears.

  “So you’re on chauffeur duty today,” she said. “You’ve got to get Maddie to gymnastics this morning for nine and Tyler to the school for nine thirty. He’s helping build sets for the play.”

  “All right.”

  “I need to get going,” she said.

  Tyler appeared, dressed in jeans and a blue hoodie, with his hair mussed, pulling his face from his phone.

  “Mom, can you make me French toast?”

  “You have to ask your dad, hon. I’m going to work.”

  “But it’s Saturday.”

  “Does anyone hear a word I say?” Karen rolled her eyes, smiling and finishing her coffee.

  “Dad,” Tyler said, “can you make it?”

  “Give me a sec, buddy.” Ryan was back on his tablet checking on a contract bid. “Hey, go wake up your sister, please.”

  “Maddie!” Tyler called, then worked on his phone to text her.

  “Go get her up, Ty,” Ryan told him.

  Tyler pivoted and returned down the hall. Karen was rinsing her coffee cup. “And tell her to put her leotard in the bag with her towel,” she called after him. “If she forgets it again, Dad’s not going to drive home to get it!”

  Tyler returned in seconds.

  “Maddie’s gone.”

  Karen and Ryan ignored him because he was always joking.

  “I’m serious, she’s gone!”

  The unease in his voice seized Ryan’s and Karen’s attention. Their heads snapped to him.

  “Did you get her up already?” Ryan said.

  “No, Dad—she’s not there!”

  Karen hurried down the hall to Maddie’s room. Her bed was empty. Unmade. Karen checked the kids’ bathroom. Nothing. Her stomach tightening, she called Maddie’s name as she searched Tyler’s room, then hers and Ryan’s room, their bathroom and every closet before returning to Maddie’s again, this time to check the closet and under the bed.

  Nothing.

  * * *

  “Oh my God, Ryan!” Karen yelled for him.

  Ryan rushed to Maddie’s room with Tyler where they found Karen running her hands through her hair, worry creasing her face.

  “Her phone’s gone. So are her shoes and hoodie,” Karen said.

  “Did you have a fight with her yesterday?” Ryan asked.

  “No, I mean, it was the usual. I told her she couldn’t date boys, but we didn’t fight and she was sleeping when I checked on her last night.”

  Ryan left to check the doors. They were still locked, bolted and chained from the inside.

  What the hell?

  The house was a ranch-style bungalow. Ryan hurried to the basement, quickly scouring every room, window and storage area in vain. He ran out to the garage and searched there, too. Then he searched their cars.

  Nothing.

  His pulse quickened as he returned to the house. In Maddie’s room, Tyler was on his phone and shaking his head.

  “I called and texted her. She’s not answering—it goes to voice mail.”

  “Did you see or hear anything last night, Ty?” Ryan said.

  Tyler blinked several times as if trying to contain a mistake squirming in his head.

  “Tyler!” his father shouted. “What do you know?”

  “I got up in the night to get some water, and I thought I heard voices in Maddie’s room.”

  “Voices? What? Whose voices?” Ryan said.

  “I don’t know. They were quiet, like whispers.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell us?”

  “Dad.” Tyler’s chin was crumpling. “It was like she was talking to someone on her phone. She does that sometimes. I didn’t think it was a big deal.”

  “Who was she talking to?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “So she took off in the night, then, with a friend?” Karen said.

  “I don’t think that’s what happened,” Ryan said, “because all the doors are still locked from the inside.”

  “Oh my God!” Karen slumped to the bed.

  “Hold on, there’s a way to find her.” Ryan trotted to the kitchen and began working on his tablet. He went to a folder where he stored key information for the kids’ phones, and applied it to a phone locator app for his daughter’s phone.

  As it worked, he rebuked himself for not monitoring the kids’ phone use as carefully as he’d done when they first got them. He’d become lax.

  An icon flashed, “Maddie’s Phone,” over a blurred map of the city, along with the message: No Location Available. Ryan’s heart sank. He knew that meant her phone was off-line, or had no access to GPS, or Wi-Fi, or something else. But it might come back online, he thought. And it might not. He tried running a quick recovery system update, but it failed and he cursed. That was the extent of his skill with wireless technology.

  Ryan grabbed his phone and hurried back to Maddie’s bedroom, a sickening feeling rising in his stomach as he stood next to Karen.

  “I tried tracking her phone but it didn’t work,” he said.

  “This is bad,” Karen said.

  At a loss, Ryan scrutinized the room and the floor. His eyes narrowed when he detected a faint streak of mud on the carpet, and followed it to a tiny smudge on the wall under the sill. Then he noticed the sliding vinyl window was not fully closed.

  Ryan ran outside to the backyard, his heart thudding in his chest as he wrestled with fear and anger. He’d wanted to install a home security system, a good one with cameras, but he kept putting it off because of the cost. And he was angry, because in a far corner of his mind he wanted to believe that Maddie had just run off in the night with a friend, pulled some sort of tweener stunt. Oh, he’d be pissed at her.

  But I could live with that.

  Now, however, as he felt the cool, dewy grass on his bare feet, icy, dark panic coiled around him, crushing his hope as he stopped in his tracks.

  His six-foot stepladder, the on
e he’d kept behind the garage, was folded shut and flat on the ground under Maddie’s window.

  Someone used it to get to her bedroom.

  He was stabbed with the image of the ladder from the Lindbergh baby kidnapping he recalled from seeing a documentary on the case.

  “Ryan!”

  He turned to see Karen and Tyler rushing to him.

  “We need to call the police!” Karen said.

  In that instant, he looked at Karen in her cashier’s smock, her horror-stricken face. Tyler’s eyes circles of alarm. His stomach lurched as he looked down at his phone. His fingers were numb, and he couldn’t feel them press the three numbers that made it all too real, especially when the emergency dispatcher answered his call.

  “We need police.” Ryan dragged his hand over his face. “Our daughter’s missing. She’s twelve years old. We think she was abducted from her bedroom last night.”

  3

  The first police car arrived within seven minutes of the call.

  No sirens, no flashing lights. Two uniformed officers.

  Ryan and Karen met them at the door.

  A man in his thirties of defensive tackle proportions extended his hand. He was warm, confident and serious. He offered a hint of a smile and turned down the squawking portable radio clipped to his belt.

  “Dalvin Greer and my partner, Eve Porter.”

  Porter appeared to be in her early twenties, fresh-faced with freckles, red hair pulled back in a tight, all-business ponytail.

  “We understand your daughter’s missing,” Greer said.

  Ryan and Karen quickly summarized Maddie’s disappearance. “Somebody used my ladder to climb into her bedroom window and take her,” he concluded. “We need to get everyone looking for her now. We’re wasting time.”

  “Okay, hold on, we’ll get to that,” Greer said. “First we’re going to take a quick look through the house and walk around the property, then we’ll get all your statements separately.”

  “We’ve searched everywhere!” Karen said. “She’s gone!”

  “Ma’am, bear with us, please,” Greer said.

  The officers made a cursory check of the entire house, the property, garage and the family vehicles, using their force-issued camera to video record the rooms. Then they separated the family, quickly arranging for Tyler to wait with the Coopers, the retired couple who lived next door, while the officers talked with his parents.

  In the Lanes’ home, Porter took Ryan to the kitchen and Greer went to the living room with Karen, who clutched her cell phone in case some of the mothers of Maddie’s friends she had called got back with any word.

  “We’re separating you because we don’t want your individual statements tainted,” Greer said, withdrawing his notebook, requesting Karen outline her family’s last twenty-four hours, giving him a time line of events.

  Interrupting to ask questions, Greer seemed to take inventory of her demeanor as she answered.

  “Now,” Greer said, “you say you saw your daughter holding her phone in her hand and that she often fell asleep while gripping it?”

  “Yes, I took it from her and put it on her night table.”

  “And despite your husband’s efforts, you can’t locate her phone or determine the last person she communicated with?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Okay, we’ll have our people pursue tracking her phone. Do you think it’s possible Maddison ran off with a friend and that she lost her phone or its battery died?”

  “No, maybe, I don’t know. Maddie’s never run away,” Karen said.

  “If her phone’s missing, it suggests she may have run away.”

  “She didn’t jump out the window. You saw how high it is. You saw the mud stains, the ladder. The doors were locked from the inside. Someone took her.”

  “Or could she have left with someone, someone she knew?”

  “No, she wouldn’t do something like this. She just wouldn’t.”

  “But wouldn’t she have cried out if she saw a stranger climbing into her room?”

  “We don’t know what happened. Tyler heard voices. Maybe a stranger got in quietly while she was asleep then threatened her? Or gagged her, or stole her phone.” Karen’s voice was breaking. “Oh God, I don’t know!”

  “Okay, I understand,” Greer said. “Have you had any arguments with your daughter recently?”

  “We disagreed about her dating boys. Beyond that nothing serious.”

  “Did she date boys?”

  “No, she wasn’t allowed, not at her age.”

  “What about any recent instances of people following her, calling her, harassing her? Anything that sticks out in your mind?”

  Karen shook her head. “No.”

  “What about people Maddison texts or talks to? Is it possible she’s been communicating with strangers or older people online?”

  “We set controls on the kids’ phones and computers. They can only talk to people they know.”

  “Yes, but kids can usually figure ways around the rules. And they can be pretty good at keeping secrets.”

  Karen’s knuckles whitened around the balled tissue she was gripping. As Greer continued his questions, she touched her fist to her mouth in anguish.

  This isn’t happening. I’m not really sitting on my sofa with armed police officers describing what Maddie was wearing the last time I saw her. The last time! Oh God, I’m having a nightmare and I’m going to wake up. I have to wake up—

  “Mrs. Lane?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I said we need the most recent picture you have of Maddison to go with her description so we can circulate it as soon as possible.”

  Karen began swiping through her phone as tears splashed on the screen, coming to a beautiful photo of Maddie with a mile-wide grin, her eyes bright, snuggling Ice Baby, her stuffed polar bear.

  “I took this one of her yesterday.”

  * * *

  Ryan’s patience with Porter was slipping away. She looked to be straight out of the academy and couldn’t be much older than a high school senior, he thought.

  We’re losing time here.

  As Porter reviewed her notes, he leaned back against the kitchen counter, arms folded across his chest, his cell phone in one hand, their cordless landline in the other. He examined them constantly, praying that Maddie would respond to their calls and texts.

  Now, standing there, barefoot, still in his sweatpants, a Buffalo Sabres T-shirt, unshaven, hair uncombed, watching Porter flip through pages, Ryan fought to keep calm as she went over her notes again.

  “To be clear, Mr. Lane, you and your wife got home about midnight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then your sitter, Crystal Hedrick, left and you both went to bed at approximately twelve fifteen, after Mrs. Lane checked in on the children?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you suspected that Crystal secretly had her boyfriend visit after the children went to bed, contravening your rules about visitors?”

  “It was a feeling I’d had, yes. And I smelled a faint odor like marijuana in the house.”

  “But Crystal denied having a visitor, and you have nothing to support your suspicion?”

  “Yes. It had been a long day. We were tired.”

  “And during the night you didn’t hear Maddison cry out for help?”

  “No.”

  “And you don’t believe her bedroom window was locked?”

  “No. Karen let Maddie keep it open a crack for fresh air. You saw there’s a screen, but it slides open like the window.”

  “And you didn’t hear or see anything to indicate a stranger was in Maddison’s room?”

  “That’s not correct. I told you Tyler heard voices.”

  “I understand that, sir, and we’ll interview Tyl
er. But with respect to you, you didn’t hear or see anything to indicate a stranger was in the house, say, the floor creaking, a door or window opening or closing, voices, other sounds or smells?”

  “No.”

  “And you suspect an intruder used your ladder to gain entry to Maddison’s unlocked window?”

  “Yes. I keep that ladder behind the garage, and I found it on the ground under Maddie’s window. I didn’t move it. Karen and Tyler didn’t move it. We’ve been over this, dammit! Shouldn’t you guys be looking for her, getting search parties together with helicopters and dogs, Amber Alerts, door knocking, calling the FBI—isn’t that what you should be doing?”

  “Yes, sir, we’ll look into all that as soon as we talk to your son and take care of a few matters.”

  Ryan’s and Porter’s attention shot to the living room.

  Karen’s phone was ringing.

  4

  The call to Karen’s phone was the first since Maddie’s disappearance.

  Ryan and Porter rushed to the living room, joining Karen and Greer, who’d held up his hand cautioning Karen to hold off answering as he pulled out his phone and set it to record.

  “Would you agree to put yours on Speaker for us, Karen?”

  “Yes, I will.”

  Her phone rang a second time and she checked the caller.

  “It’s my work,” she said, pressing the answer key then placing her phone on the coffee table next to Greer’s and leaning forward. “Hello?”

  “Karen, Bill at the store. You’re late.”

  At a loss for words, Karen started shaking her head. “I can’t come in today, Bill, I—” Her voice trembled as if the magnitude of what she was dealing with crushed down on her.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “It’s my daughter, Maddie.”

  “What is it?”

  “She’s gone, Bill. Someone took her from her bed in the night.”

  A long silence passed.

  “Are you serious, Karen? I mean, jeez, really?”

  “I’ve got police officers in my house right now! We need to search for her!”

  A tense moment passed.