by Tess Stimson
Let’s not turn this tragedy into a referendum on another woman’s mothering. Instead, we must all hope and pray for Lottie’s safe return.
seven days missing
chapter 20
alex
Marc has set up our campaign headquarters in an empty office space on the neon strip of St Pete Beach, about ten minutes’ drive from the hotel. An anonymous well-wisher came forward after yesterday’s appeal by the president, offering to make it available to us for as long as we need it.
Getting out of my car, I stare at the windows papered with flyers appealing for my daughter’s safe return. Beneath her photograph is an 800 contact number and the words: Have you seen Lottie?
It’s the same picture I gave the police for the Amber alert. I can’t imagine she’s still wearing her pink bridesmaid’s dress. Her hair will be different, too. The fact that the kidnapper went to such trouble to change her appearance is a good sign, Bates tells me. If he’d killed her, he wouldn’t have bothered.
I try not to think of my daughter’s curls, sealed and tagged in an evidence bag.
Inside the office space, folding tables have been set up, equipped with phones and laptops. Marc has organised the hundreds of volunteers who have come forward into a rota to man the new Find Lottie tip line.
Others have been tasked with posting up flyers. Marc has given each of them a map of the St Pete Beach area, with their targeted section highlighted in yellow marker. Grocery stores, pharmacies, nail bars, hair salons. Anywhere there may be eyes. ‘We want her face to be at the forefront of everyone’s mind,’ he says.
I can’t believe how much he’s accomplished in just twenty-four hours. Every lamppost or telegraph pole I passed on my way here had a flyer tacked to it. Our biggest problem has been handling the sheer number of people who want to help.
The press interest has become the firestorm Marc predicted. The hotel has moved my parents and me to their penthouse suite on the top floor, which is accessible only by a private lift, but every time we leave the building we have to run the gauntlet of a growing scrum of journalists shouting questions and shoving cameras in our faces. The manager has been very kind, and the staff are doing their best, but it’s only a matter of time before the situation becomes untenable. Dozens of hotel guests have cancelled their bookings because of the media attention, and I don’t blame them. This can’t go on much longer.
Marc detaches himself from the cluster of people around him when he sees me.
‘What do you think?’ he says, indicating the phone banks lining the sides of the room. ‘Most of the volunteers are local residents, but we’ve got quite a few tourists from back home, too.’
‘It’s incredible,’ I say.
‘A lot of the local churches are doing special services for Lottie tomorrow,’ he says. ‘We thought it’d be good if you attended Sunday Mass at the Catholic cathedral downtown, maybe said a few words afterwards—’
‘Marc, I don’t know. Church isn’t really my thing.’
‘Church matters here, Alex. We need to keep people on your side.’
I’m suddenly assailed by the memory of the last time I was in a church. It was hot then, too. The black dress I’d bought in London was too warm for Sicily, even in October, and I was so hot I thought I’d pass out. Luca’s parents had surrounded his coffin with so many flowers I couldn’t even get close to him, and their cloying scent mingled with the sour smell of sweat from the press of bodies in the tiny family chapel. The dark wooden pews were packed with weeping, black-clothed mourners, dark as crows. Choking clouds of incense swirled around the nave as the priest raised his thurible, the metal censer clinking against its chain. I had to suppress a sudden, violent urge to drag my smart, cosmopolitan husband’s corpse out of his open coffin and away from the medieval superstition and mummery. He didn’t believe in it any more than I did.
Luca was a lousy husband, but an excellent father. Our daughter would never have disappeared on his watch. If he exists in some parallel dimension or afterlife, I hope he is watching over Lottie now.
‘No church,’ I tell Marc. ‘I’ll give a press statement if you think it’s worthwhile, but I can’t do church.’
A volunteer in her mid-fifties interrupts us, grabbing my hand and pressing it between her own. My daughter’s face stares up at me from the cotton T-shirt stretched across her large breasts. ‘Alexa, I just wanted to say how sorry I am,’ she says, as if she knows me. ‘We’re just praying the Lord brings Lottie home safe.’
‘Thank you,’ I say.
Everyone is watching me, even as they pretend to busy themselves with their phones and stacks of flyers. I’m Ground Zero for this whole carnival, the mother, here, in person. I’m sure many of the volunteers are sincere in their desire to help find my daughter, but there’s a rubbernecking, morbid element, too – a frisson of excitement at being part of a major news story. They’ll go home and tell their friends they met me today.
‘I have to go,’ I tell Marc abruptly.
He offers to come with me, but I’m suddenly desperate to be alone.
Yet once I’m outside, I get in my car with no idea where to go next. I left the hotel because I felt trapped there, too. There are too many people who need my attention; our extended entourage is ballooning, and I’m overwhelmed.
Most of the wedding guests have returned home, but now there are other friends and relatives who have flown over to join the search: my mother’s sister, Aunt Julie; a childhood friend I haven’t seen in fifteen years. I know they only want to help, but the presence of so many people struggling to contain their own distress and grief is exhausting. Harriet was right not to come.
My phone rings. I’ve personalised Lieutenant Bates’ ringtone; hers are the only calls I care about now. I scrabble for it in my bag, and then recklessly empty its contents onto the passenger seat, heedless of the coins and tampons spilling in every direction.
‘We haven’t found her,’ Bates says, putting me out of my misery.
The wild hope dies. Disappointment fills my lungs and makes it hard to breathe. Lottie isn’t dead, I tell myself. They haven’t found a body, either. I have to hang onto that.
‘Alex, I need you to come down to the precinct,’ Bates says.
Something in her tone alerts me. ‘Why?’
‘I’ll explain when you get here—’
‘No. Tell me now.’
‘OK,’ Bates says. ‘Alex, something has come up, and we’d like to ask you a few more questions.’
‘What about?’ I ask, although I already know.
‘Kirkwood Place,’ she says.
chapter 21
quinn
Quinn isn’t happy with the president. His intervention in the Martini case has put the kibosh on any chance she might have had of persuading INN’s editor to let her off the hook on this story. Public interest is off the charts now. Even Quinn has to concede it makes sense to have a senior correspondent covering the story.
The assignment editor has sent one of the new batch of graduate trainees out to Florida to act as her fixer. His job is to do all the scut work, like attending press briefings or chasing down the correct spelling of interviewee names, so Quinn’s free to work the story the way she wants to.
But the kid’s sticking to her like bloody Velcro. She can’t take a shit without him following her to the bathroom. And he nearly took a swig from the contents of her Evian bottle yesterday. She doesn’t mind going toe-to-toe with the News Desk over editorial decisions, but her reputation as a journalist is paramount. Which means there really is water in the damn bottle today.
Timothy – ‘please don’t call me Tim’ – is harmless, Quinn supposes. Despite the ginger hair. And at least he’s figured out where the nearest Starbucks is, which will keep her cameraman, Phil, happy.
The kid returns to their motel room now with a cardboard tray of pumpkin spice lattes and puts it down on the large table where Phil has set up their editing equipment. INN has gone cheap, as usu
al, booking them into the one-star Starlight Inn on the St Pete Beach strip, even though the negative publicity means the Sandy Beach Hotel now has plenty of free rooms.
Quinn shoves her chair back from the editing table. Enforced sobriety is doing nothing to improve her mood. ‘This piece is shit, Phil,’ she snaps. ‘We can’t keep showing GVs of the hotel and the same fucking photo of Lottie.’
‘We don’t have anything new,’ Phil says, cracking the lid of his latte to let the steam escape. ‘All we’ve got today is Alexa arriving at the campaign HQ. We can drop in yesterday’s talking heads from the presser, but otherwise GVs are all we got.’
He doesn’t point out they can’t pad the story with a piece-to-camera, as most correspondents would. She might get away with her jaunty eye-patch reporting from Raqqa, but not on something sensitive like this. Given how huge the story is becoming, she’s surprised INN haven’t big-footed her by sending out a more camera-friendly reporter from London. The bulletin editors are already bitching because they can’t use her for live two-ways.
‘We need footage of the kid at the bloody wedding,’ Quinn says. ‘Christ! This is the twenty-first fucking century. Every bastard with a phone thinks he’s Stephen Spielberg. How can we still not have pictures of her?’
Phil knows better than to respond. She’s made the same complaint every day since they got here.
Timothy doesn’t.
‘Wouldn’t it be bad taste to use them, anyway?’ he says. ‘I mean, they might be the last pictures of her alive. It seems a bit … tabloid.’
‘No, we wouldn’t want to lodge those images in anyone’s mind,’ Quinn says sarcastically. ‘Just in case they remembered something.’
‘Don’t be a bitch,’ Phil says.
Quinn drops back into her chair. ‘Jesus! Fine. Fine! Give me fifteen seconds of Alexa Martini arriving at the campaign offices,’ she says. ‘Then go to yesterday’s presser with the hair in the evidence bag. Tim, how far into the conference is that?’
He leafs through his notebook. ‘Five minutes twenty-one.’
She feels like Rumpelstiltskin, weaving gold from straw. Somehow she pulls together a two-minute piece for the lunchtime bulletin, stitching together soundbites from the lieutenant and Marc Chapman, who seems to be Alexa Martini’s de facto spokesman, along with reheated general footage from the preceding few days. This story is next to impossible to illustrate with pictures. The police investigation is all happening behind closed doors. Until the kid is found, alive or dead, all Quinn’s got are talking heads and filler.
She watches as Phil lays down the soundbite from Marc. The most frustrating part of all this is that’s she’s got one hell of a story in her back pocket, and she can’t use it. Sian Chapman’s revelations are dynamite, but Quinn simply doesn’t have enough to go public with it yet.
Quinn hasn’t liked Alexa Martini from the start. She has no problem with ambitious, successful women; she respects anyone who’s carved out her place in the world. What she has no time for are women who want to have it all, and then expect allowances to be made.
She’s lost count of the times she’s had to cover for mothers taking time off for their kids’ braces to be fitted or to attend school sports days. And why is it the single women who always have to work Christmas Eve? If a woman wants the baby and the job, fine. But she should compete on a level playing field. Raising the next generation of taxpayers doesn’t confer special status, as one of her former colleagues once insisted. Quinn isn’t going to be around long enough to collect her pension anyway.
Marnie says Quinn sees all mothers as the enemy: baby-making factories who’ve let the side of feminism down. Maybe there’s a grain of truth in that. But it’s not fair on the kids, either. Women have no business having children if they’re just going to dump them in a boarding school before they turn eight. The nursery and the boardroom don’t mix. Some women shouldn’t have children, it’s as simple as that.
This isn’t about you, Marnie said yesterday. And just because Alexa Martini doesn’t wear her heart on her sleeve, it doesn’t mean she doesn’t feel things deeply. The woman’s daughter is missing!
Except that’s just it: Quinn isn’t convinced Lottie Martini is missing at all.
Eleven years ago, she covered the disappearance of a nine-year-old girl in West Yorkshire. Twenty-four days later, the mother, Karen Matthews, was arrested for conspiring with a family friend to kidnap her own daughter. For more than three weeks, Matthews had played the tearful victim, pleading for the release of her ‘beautiful princess daughter’, who, it turned out, had been drugged and hidden in the base of a divan bed at her friend’s flat the whole time.
So no, Quinn doesn’t feel bad for being cynical and suspicious. It’s what she’s paid for.
She grabs the bag slung over the back of her chair. ‘Enough of this crap,’ she says. ‘We need to start holding some feet to the fire. Tim, I want you to drive over to the sheriff’s office and make some new friends. I don’t care what you have to do. Sleep with the chief if necessary. But I want to know every single thing that’s happening over there, down to what Bates has in her sandwiches.’
‘Actually, it’s Timothy—’
Quinn is already halfway towards the door. ‘Find out if they’re looking at anyone other than this “thin man”. My money says they’re pinning it on him because they haven’t got any other suspects. Have they even managed to connect him to the motel where they found the girl’s hair? And I don’t want the usual bullshit about promising leads, blah blah. Are they looking for a body? Is Alexa Martini involved, or not?’
‘What do you want me to do?’ Phil asks.
‘Do you know how many kids are currently missing in Florida?’ Quinn says abruptly.
He doesn’t seem surprised by the non-sequitur. He’s worked with her long enough to know how her mind works. He notices Timothy googling the question, and gently takes the phone out of the kid’s hands.
‘Three hundred and forty-five,’ Quinn says. ‘Three hundred and forty-five missing kids in Florida alone. We’re not talking runaways or family abductions—’
‘What’s your point, Quinn?’
‘If you were the mother of one of those Florida kids, how would you be feeling right now?’
This is why Quinn is so damn good at what she does. She’s never afraid to punch the bruise.
‘I don’t get it,’ Timothy says.
‘Your president takes the time to appeal for the return of a white British child visiting the US on a luxury foreign holiday, but your kid, your Hispanic or Black kid, doesn’t get a mention,’ Quinn says. ‘America can afford to let a few hundred low-income kids slip through the cracks. Who’s going to notice? But don’t mess with our tourist industry. Don’t lose any white kids.’
‘But this has nothing to do with race,’ Timothy says.
‘It’s America,’ says Quinn. ‘Everything here has to do with race.’
chapter 22
alex
Kirkwood Place. I knew it’d catch up to me, sooner or later.
If we could just go back to a time when we were spiteful and judgemental, but only behind one another’s backs. If we could stop scolding each other in public, accept that for some women it’s possible to love your spouse more than your child, acknowledge there are those of us whose lives are not completed by a baby, but ruined by it.
If there was space for women like me, would that have made a difference?
Before our divorce, Luca was the one who took Lottie to daycare. I had to be at work by seven-thirty and the Montessori nursery Luca had insisted on was twenty minutes in the opposite direction. Luca set his own hours and often worked from home, so it made sense for him to be the one to drop her off. And he liked taking her. If he wanted to sit in traffic singing ‘Baby Shark’ every morning, he was welcome to it.
I was singularly unsuited to be anyone’s mother, let alone the mother of a child like Lottie. She erupted from my womb angry and indignant, as if she’
d absorbed my ambiguity towards parenthood like nutrients through her umbilical cord. For Luca, it was love at first sight the moment he saw her, but for me it was always more complicated. There was the urge to protect her, of course; the biological pull to nurture, a hormonal surge that tugged my nipples with silver fishhooks every time she cried. But side by side with that was a lingering sense that with every feed I was diminishing, dissolving, like a bar of soap.
I never minded that Luca was the person Lottie turned to when she needed her nose wiped, or to whom she raised her outstretched arms to be carried when she was tired. She was growing up in a household where a woman held down a complex, difficult, important job, and a man cooked homemade ravioli and took her for swimming lessons. I couldn’t think of a better example to set her.
Two or three times a year, Luca had to visit the family’s coffee plantation in Brazil, since his mother’s dementia and father’s failing health made it impossible for them to travel. Normally, when he was away, an experienced childminder called Rachel helped out with Lottie.
But when Lottie was about sixteen months old, Luca had to make an unscheduled trip to Rio at the last minute, because of some production problems at the plantation. Rachel was away on a cruise around the Norwegian fjords with her sister, and Mum was still recovering from surgery after her second brush with cancer.
So I was left, quite literally, holding the baby.
At the time, I had a number of complex cases on my desk. But with no one else able to look after Lottie, I had no choice but to make the best of it.
I juggled my schedule so that I could drop her off at nursery on the dot of seven, and arranged to leave the office early for three days until Rachel got back, so that I’d be there in time to collect her at six.