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chapter 09
alex
The panic doesn’t strike immediately. I make another circuit of the courtyard, checking every inch. Once I’m certain Lottie isn’t there, I go back into the hotel and search all the public areas leading from the lobby, including the dining room – always Lottie’s first port of call – and toilets. I go upstairs and check she hasn’t returned to our room, although she doesn’t have a keycard, so she wouldn’t be able to get in. She is nowhere to be seen.
I’m suddenly very sober.
‘Think,’ I tell myself out loud. ‘Don’t panic.’
Lottie is not in the courtyard. She’s not sitting outside our room, or in any of the public areas of the hotel. She’d never have gone to the beach without me, and even if she had, the hotel staff manning the gate are under specific instructions not to allow children to leave on their own. That leaves only one logical option: she must have gone off to play with one of the other bridesmaids in their room.
Actually, it leaves two options, but I refuse to put the second on the table.
I return to the reception desk and ask the helpful girl behind it for the room numbers of the four other bridesmaids.
‘I can’t give you those,’ she says, ‘but I can call them, if you’d like?’
Lottie is not in any of the other families’ rooms.
It’s twenty minutes now since I came back from the beach; twenty-three or twenty-four minutes since Zealy and Paul saw Lottie. I imagine that pinprick of certainty –she was headed back towards the ice-cream station with some of the other kids– as the glowing blue dot in the centre of a circle. With every second that passes, the radius of possibility widens.
How far can a three-year-old go in five minutes? In ten? In twenty?
What if she’s not alone?
I can’t ignore the second option any longer. I run back to the courtyard, consumed by fear. She’s hiding, I tell myself. She must be hiding.
I know she’s not here, but I check again: under the tables and behind large concrete bougainvillea planters, not caring that I’m starting to attract attention. I feel dizzy, as if I have vertigo. My eyes ache and my throat is dry. I know, already, that my search has somehow shifted.
This will be the moment I come back to, again and again. The decisions I make now, whether I go down to the beach, even though I’m sure she’s not there, or out into the car park in front of the hotel in case she slipped past the doorman; whether I draft other guests to help in the search, risking chaos or confusion, or keep looking by myself. What I do next will be something I live with forever.
‘You still haven’t found her?’ Zealy asks, as I make my third circuit of the buffet tables.
‘She can’t have got far,’ I repeat.
Except that’s not true any more. In half an hour, Lottie can walk a mile. And that’s assuming she’s moving under her own steam. I picture a hand clamping over her mouth, a strong arm scooping her up, and struggle not to vomit.
Zealy hitches up her ridiculous pink skirts and strides overto the DJ managing the music. A moment later, Elton John falls quiet, and people turn in surprise.
‘Listen up, everybody,’ Zealy says, clapping her hands for attention. ‘We seem to have lost one of our little bridesmaids. There’s no need to worry, but if everyone could help us track her down, we’d all be grateful.’
She strikes just the right note of contained concern. As wedding guests start to look about them, Zealy marshals a couple of hotel staff and sends them down onto the beach, just in case.
Part of me is sure that in a few minutes, when Lottie has been discovered hiding behind a rack of postcards or fast asleep in the lobby, I’m going to wish Zealy hadn’t raised the alarm prematurely. Lottie’s just gone upstairs looking for our room and got lost. She’s probably stuck in the lift, or sitting on the stairs, waiting for someone to find her.
‘She’d never go near the sea,’ I tell Zealy. ‘I don’t want to waste time looking for her there.’
‘She might if she thought that’s where you were.’
If she saw me leave with Ian.
The beach is the only place I haven’t looked. Zealy and I run down there now, and I’m not even pretending to be calm any longer.
I yell Lottie’s name, shouting myself hoarse, as we turn and run in opposite directions. The sand, which seemed so beautiful just hours ago, is now a treacherous bog serving only to slow me down. It’s like one of those hideous nightmares in which you try to run but find yourself trapped in quicksand, your limbs moving in slow motion as a faceless pursuer hunts you down.
The sound of the sea is louder in the darkness. I shine the torch from my phone between the sunloungers, in case Lottie is hiding there, too afraid to move. She must be so scared. Forall her bravura, she is still a three-year-old child alone in the dark.
I don’t know how far down the beach I should go. Panic clutches my heart. Suppose this is the wrong direction? Suppose I am moving further away from Lottie, instead of closer?
