Page 34 of Stolen


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five days missing

chapter 18

alex

At sunrise on the fifth full day since Lottie’s disappearance, I go down to the beach where I last saw my daughter. The police tape has finally been removed, the wedding arch dismantled and the gilt chairs stacked and put away. It’s as though the last traces of my daughter are being deliberately erased.

Despite all the police activity, the helicopters and divers and searchers on the ground, despite the Amber alert and the press appeal, it feels as if I’m the only one still looking for Lottie. The rest of the world already wants to move on.

I walk along the shoreline, scanning the sand in front of me, as if looking for clues. I’m not sure what I expect to find: the missing pink ballet shoe, a ribbon from her hair, some message scrawled in the sand that only I can decipher?

There isn’t a minute in the day when I don’t go back to the moment I last saw my girl, cradling the image like fine china in my mind’s eye. Lottie sits on her chair, her head turned away from me. Her hair escapes from her plait, an unearthly, silvery nimbus around her head. Her plump arms are crossed over her chest.

With each return to the memory, there is a sharper clarity, a new detail summoned from my subconscious: a lengthening shadow falling across the sand behind my daughter, a blackskimmer flying over the shallows, looking for fish. Lottie swings her legs and I think – no, I’m sure – that she’s already kicked off her pink shoes. She’s perched on the edge of the gilt chair, which is too high for her, so she can dig her bare toes into the sand. Another minute, and she’ll slide off her seat.

Except IknowI couldn’t see her feet from where I was sitting, four rows behind her. The angle of sight from my chair afforded me a partial glimpse of my daughter from the shoulders up, nothing more. Sifting through my memories may prove as futile as my search along the sand.

Bates now seems convinced we’re dealing with a stranger abduction, but Iknowmy daughter would never have gone with someone she didn’t trust. If the ‘thin man’ Catherine saw is connected to Lottie’s disappearance, he wasn’t working alone. Someone Lottie knew persuaded her to leave the beach and led her to him. Someone with whom she felt safe.

It was Lieutenant Bates who first pointed this out, but she’s now pivoted away from her own theory.

Because of the hair.

They couldn’t be sure it was Lottie’s, Bates said, when she handed it to me. They hadn’t had time to run the DNA tests. But the tangled hanks of hair in the bag were the same white-blonde as my daughter’s, the same length and texture. The ends were blunt where they’d been hacked from her head.

I only just made it to the bathroom in time. I vomited into the lavatory until there was nothing left but bile, consumed by the thought of the terror my daughter must have felt. Be feeling.

If the lieutenant’s intention was to make me emotional and sympathetic for the TV appeal, it backfired. The difference between the British and American response to crisis, I suppose. I’ve seen footage of myself at the press conference, which took place just ten minutes later. It is clear to me I was in shock,barely able to function. I read Bates’ prepared script like an automaton. But to anyone watching, I must’ve looked like I didn’t care.

This isn’t a popularity contest: my child is missing and it shouldn’t matter whether I’mliked. But if people are suspicious of me, if they think I had something to do with my daughter’s disappearance, they won’t be out there, looking for her.

It’s as if Lottie has vanished into thin air. Despite dozens of reported sightings all over Florida, not one has turned into a definitive lead. Forensic teams have combed every inch of the motel room where her hair was found, but they’re looking for a needle in a haystack. There are hundreds of fingerprints from previous guests they have to rule out, even supposing the kidnapper was careless enough to leave his own. Unless he’s been caught before, they won’t be on the police database anyway.

Five days since my baby was stolen from me, and the police are no closer to finding her than when they started.

I reach the end of the beach, where it gives way to a wide drainage culvert, and turn back. The crenellated, primrose-yellow hotel rises like a tiered cake against another azure Florida sky. It’s a little cooler today, less humid, and a soft breeze lifts the hair on the nape of my neck. A perfect, bucket-and-spade beach day.

Lottie’s photo has been on the front page of newspapers across Florida and at home in the UK, and the local TV stations have been running her disappearance as their top story for days. But the media is already starting to lose interest. We’ve had virtually no uptake from national networks, which means if Lottie’s been taken out of Florida, no one’s looking for her. I know Bates and Lorenz think she’s dead. Even my parents are trying to prepare me for the worst.

But Lottie is alive. My daughter isalive. She’s tenacious,determined, ferocious. She couldn’t be extinguished without creating a disturbance, a rent in the fabric of the world that I would feel. We’re not looking in the right places, that’s all.

Somewhere, buried in the back alleys and dark hallways of my memories, is the key to all of this.

I just have to find it.

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