Blood and Sand

by Michael Lister

  “Up until then,” he is saying as he turns the large-handled screwdriver clockwise, “we weren’t sure we could make a living doing this, but it finally looked as if we would. We had each other. We had Magdalene—the family we always wanted. We had the business of our dreams. And suddenly one by one, like Christmas miracle after Christmas miracle, our families—the family members who hadn’t already—began to accept us. I think it mainly had to do with Magdalene. Her adoption had just been finalized and she was really and truly ours, and I don’t think my dad and Chris’s mom—the biggest holdouts—wanted to miss out on being a part of the life of the only grandchild they were ever going to get. Chris and I are both only children, so . . . And I’m not saying everyone was completely accepting or loving toward us, just that the overt hostility was mostly gone, which in and of itself was a kind of miracle.”

  He pauses, takes a breath, finishes tightening the long wood screw he is driving, the muscles in his forearm twisting under a gleaming sheen of sweat as he bears down on the final few turns. He then wipes his brow on both of his short sleeves and starts on the next screw.

  Keith and Christopher’s home and bed and breakfast is on the very back street of Sandcastle. In front of it are all the homes and business and community buildings that make up the small, private community. Behind it, stretching for thousands of acres, is a dense pine scrub flatland forest, reaching back to Highway 98 and beyond.

  “After several years of not being invited to Christmas at our families’ places, we were suddenly the guests of honor and Magdalene had piles of presents under both trees. And it wasn’t just our families. Certain old friends who had shunned us suddenly started getting back in touch. A few of our neighbors began to act more, well, neighborly. Even the social worker, adoption agent, and the foster family that had Magdalene before we did seemed to warm to us some. It was a real tipping point for us, and it probably would’ve happened anyway, but the fact that it was around Christmas made it seem more . . .”

  “Christmas miracle-y?” I offer.

  He gives me a quick smile and then the sadness returns to his face. “Yeah,” he says. “Exactly.” He shakes his head and frowns. “I shoulda known somethin’ was up. There were too many good things happening. I shoulda been expecting it, had my guard up waiting for it, but I’d been lulled into some sort of dream state by all the lights and yule tide bullshit. I let my guard down and . . . just like that she was gone.”

  “Can you take me through exactly how it happened?” I ask.

  He nods.

  “Every year we have a big winter solstice Christmas party at our place,” he says. “It’s like the founders of Sandcastle—the heart and soul of the place. The people you met at lunch today plus few others. We always do it on the twenty-second of December no matter when the solstice actually falls. This place is a ghost town by then. We do it here and give everyone a room. People party until they pass out and someone helps them up to their rooms. Everyone spends the night.”

  I recall a snippet from glancing at the casebook.

  On December 22, 2017, in the hours between midnight and approximately nine in the morning the next day, Magdalene Dacosta disappeared in the night, never to be seen again. She vanished from her bedroom in the residence in the back of the bed and breakfast her dads, Keith and Christopher Dacosta, operate together in the quaint seaside town of Sandcastle. The master-planned community of Sandcastle is located on scenic Highway 30A, North Florida’s premiere vacation destination for wealthy families determined to avoid the more seedy sections of this region that many refer to as the Redneck Riviera.

  “How long have you been having the party?” I ask.

  “That was our seventh year,” he says. “It will be our last if we don’t get her back.”

  “How many people in total attend?”

  “It’s very small and exclusive,” he says. “We really do limit it to our close friends who run this place. Maybe four more than who you met today.”

  “And you don’t have any guests staying here during it?” I ask.

  “Usually, yeah,” he says. “We make a point not to. But last year we had one guest whose flight got canceled. We explained the situation to him. Told him it’d be a loud, long night, but he said he was just going to put in ear plugs and go to bed. He had an early flight the next morning. And that’s what he did. We didn’t see him at all during the party and by the time we got up the next morning, he was already gone.”

  “Is his name and information and info for everyone else who was at the party in the binder y’all gave me?”

  He nods. “Yes. Everything. His name is Hal Raphael. The police looked at him hard—like all of us. But our security cameras show him leaving alone. The shuttle driver said he was by himself that morning and airport security footage showed him arriving alone and on time and boarding the plane by himself.”

  I think about that for a moment. “So he was the only person in the house that night you didn’t know,” I say.

  “Everyone else was a close friend, or at least close in the community or coworker sense,” he says. “We had known all of them for years before that night and have continued to be close to them since.”

  “Did anyone’s behavior change in any noticeable way after that night?” I ask.

  “Yeah, all of ours did,” he said. “We lost our little girl. They lost her too. She was like the community’s child. And then at one time or another we were all suspected of the most unimaginable things—from murdering her and trying to cover it up to selling her to an international pedophile ring. It changed us all—and forever.”

  I nod and give him a sympathetic expression. “I understand that, and I’m so very sorry,” I say. “But I meant did anyone start acting out of character—stop doing things they did before, start doing anything that seemed bizarre based on who they had been before?”

  “I’m telling you. We all did.”

  “Okay. Go back to that night if you will,” I say. “Please keep taking me through it.”

  “Early in the evening we had our usual candlelight solstice service in the chapel,” he says. “Then we came back over here for the party. While Chris finished a few last things for the party, I gave Magdalene a quick bath and put her in her new Toy Story pajamas. They were an early Christmas present I’m so glad we gave her. She was so adorable in them. So huggable. I took her in to see Chris in the kitchen where she got a special treat for being such a sweet girl—a virgin version of the solstice punch—and then we both hugged her like a thousand times and I put her to bed. She was so tired. She would’ve gone to sleep sooner, but we kept her up loving and doting on her. The moment I stopped talking to her and hugging her she fell fast asleep. And for a while I just stood there watching her, then Chris joined me, and we were like pinching ourselves we had gotten so lucky. She was . . . just perfect. The most amazing gift of our lives. I don’t know what happened to her or who did it. I have no idea what her life has been like since she was taken from us or if she’s had a life at all. But up until the moment she was abducted, she was a loved and adored and well-cared-for little girl.”

  From everything I’ve read and seen and heard already, I truly believe that was the case.

  “We stood there with our arms around each other watching her longer than we should have,” he says. “Until the moment the first guest arrived. So she was in her room asleep before anyone arrived. None of the guests even saw her that night. The party started. We had a baby monitor set up in the kitchen so we could listen for her and we checked on her in person throughout the night. She was always sleeping soundly. Eventually we crashed. I’m not sure what the last time we checked on her was. It was reported that it was around midnight but it had to be a lot later than that. When we got up the next morning and stumbled to her room . . . she was . . . gone. All our guests were still in the house and it was locked up tight. And later we checked our security camera footage—we have a camera at the front door and one at the back. No one came to the house
or left it—including Magdalene—the entire night. We were suddenly sober and wide awake and began searching the house and then the yard and area around it. And eventually the entire town. We were panicked and distraught and devastated. The police came. Took over. But we didn’t stop our search. We didn’t stop anything we were doing and neither did our friends. Eventually there were scent dogs and a helicopter and what seemed like a million cops. Roadblocks were set up. An Amber Alert sent out. But . . . nothing we tried . . . did any . . . Our little girl was really and truly gone and we weren’t getting her back. And that was something I knew from the very beginning. I’d never say anything like that to Chris—haven’t said it to anyone until this moment—but it’s something I’ve known since I eased her bedroom door open that morning and saw she was gone.”

  Day 30

  Day 30

  I wouldn’t still be here if it weren’t for the incredible love and support of my family and friends. That sounds like such a bullshit cliché thing to say, but it’s the absolute truth.

  Clarence and Sarah Samuelson bring us food from their restaurant every single day—and they stay long enough to make sure we eat some of it. Keith and I aren’t cooking and wouldn’t be—and we wouldn’t even be eating if it weren’t for Sarah and Clarence. They’ve known heartbreak and tragedy and they know how to help those dealing with it.

  My fitness friend Rake Sabin comes by a few times a week and forces me to go for a walk or a bike ride with him. I go kicking and screaming all the way but always feel better when I get back.

  My bookish friend Wren brings me the best books on grief and loss and even books on missing children and how to deal with law enforcement agencies.

  Derinda, Keith’s mom, who has always been super supportive, has kicked into overdrive. She’s truly amazing—the kind of mother every gay son should be lucky enough to have. Our adoption agent Demi Gonzalez and Magdalene’s foster parents Brent and Charis Tremblay have organized a search team for Magdalene, and Derinda hasn’t missed a single outing.

  Vic Frankford, our friend who owns the grocery store in town, brings by bags of food and household items at least twice a week.

  There are others too—friends and family who help us in big and small ways.

  And there are the strangers. We have received kindnesses beyond what I am able to describe from strangers. Cards, messages, emails, donations, care packages from people we will never even meet. It’s staggering. And it gives me a hope for humanity that Keith says I am foolish to have.

  7

  As Anna, Taylor, and I are leaving the beach my phone vibrates.

  I pull it out of my pocket and look at it, glance at Anna, then slip it back into my pocket without answering it.

  “Who is it?” she asks.

  “Someone I called while y’all were asleep,” I said. “I’ll call him back another time.”

  “Who?” she says again.

  “One of the detectives in Magdalene’s case,” I say. “Roderick Brandt.”

  When Anna had woken up and I wasn’t in the room, she had texted me asking where I had gone and what I was doing. When I got back to the room just moments later to find her still in bed and Taylor still asleep, she seemed put out with me. But we had moved past that and had a very nice time at the beach.

  “Go ahead and take it,” she says, and for a moment she sounds like her old self. “You’ll be distracted thinking about it and wanting to call him back anyway. So you might as well take it.”

  I shake my head. “I won’t. You guys ready for ice cream?”

  Across the road in the town square, among the other restaurants, shops, and stores, is a sweet shop and ice cream parlor.

  “Ice cream,” Taylor exclaims.

  “I’ll take her over to get ice cream,” Anna says. “You take the call. Then we’ll walk back together.”

  “You sure?”

  She is already leading Taylor away and doesn’t respond.

  I withdraw my phone and answer it.

  After a brief introduction, Brandt tells me he’s more than happy to share information with me because he doesn’t care who solves it—he just wants to get Magdalene back to Keith and Christopher.

  He explains that he and Keith played football together in high school in Fort Walton and that he thinks the world of Keith and Christopher and believes what was done to them by law enforcement and the media after they had lost their daughter was unconscionable.

  He tells me how much he’d love it if I could find her, if I could uncover something they overlooked, but he’s very doubtful—because of just how baffling the case is.

  “I’m tellin’ you, that little girl just vanished off the face of the earth,” he is saying. “Never seen or even heard of anything like it. It’s like she never existed. I mean, I know she did. I know her parents and her foster parents and the state can produce evidence that she was alive at some point—pictures and records and whatnot, but . . . And I’ll tell you another thing too. There’s no evidence she was abducted either. Like I say, it’s just like she vanished or was never there to begin with.”

  Late afternoon is slipping into evening. The sun sits low on the western horizon beyond the Gulf. Sunset at the beach has a quality unlike anywhere else I’ve seen. Light and color and sound are muted. There’s a quiet calm—a serenity aided by the airy quality of the rhythmic rolling of the tide and the unabating breeze blowing off the Gulf.

  “What do you mean by no evidence she was abducted?” I ask.

  “I mean no evidence whatsoever,” he says. “They woke up to find her gone. But their house wouldn’t have been any different if they had just woken up to find her in her bed. None. We showed up to investigate. But we might as well have showed up to collect for the widows and orphans fund, for all the good we did. There were no signs of a break-in. There were no prints—well, there were hundreds of prints, it’s a bed and breakfast—but there were no prints that meant anything to us. There were no signs of a struggle. All the windows and doors were locked. Security camera footage from the front and back doors showed that no one entered or exited the house during the night. Nothing out of order. Nothing out of place. Just a little girl missing. Gone in the night. And we have no idea how or why or by who. And now it’s nearly a year later and we don’t know any more than we did when we showed up that first morning. Tell you the truth . . . I thought we were going to find her somewhere inside the house. Like JonBenet. You know, something like that. We were walking through, searching—and it’s a big place, so many rooms, so many closets, so many nooks and crannies—and I kept dreading turning the next corner, opening the next door. I was like, I don’t want to find a dead little girl in Toy Story pj’s two days before Christmas.”

  “I would think a bed and breakfast was sort of open,” I say. “People coming and going all the time. Easy access for an abductor. On top of which they were having a party, so—”

  “You can’t enter the house without your room key,” he says. “They’re very security conscious. They sort of cater to single women coming to vacation here. And that only intensified after they got Magdalene. I thought you were staying there.”

  “I am.”

  “You didn’t notice how tight the security is? You have to call from that little box out front the first time you arrive so they can let you in. And then from then on you have to use your room key to get back in the house. And they change the codes—you know, reprogram the keys every day so no one can use an old key.”

  “We actually arrived with Keith and Christopher from chapel so we just went in with them.”

  “Get them to show you the security measures and procedures,” he says. “Or just try to get back in without your room key.”

  “I will,” I say. “Thanks. So if no one broke in and—”

  I see Anna and Taylor emerging from the ice cream parlor.

  “Actually, can I call you back either later tonight or tomorrow?” I ask. “I’ve got to go get my little girl.”

  “Yeah,
sure. ‘’Cause we haven’t even gotten started good on this thing—including the aspects of the Florida House that might have contributed to the events. Call back when you can. I’m hard to get sometimes. Just leave me a message if I don’t answer and I’ll call you back soon as I can.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “I really appreciate your help.”

  “You’re the one helping me,” he says. “I just hope you succeed where we failed. I’ve long since given up on a happy ending, but I’d like to see them get an ending at least. Some answers and some justice. They deserve that at least.”

  “At the very least,” I say.

  Day 32

  Day 32

  I never thought it would go on this long. No matter what happened I thought we would at least know by now. Whether dead or alive, I thought we’d have her back by now.

  Next to not having her, not knowing where she is or what happened to her is the worst. It’s the losing of a child that breaks you—not just your heart, but your being—but it’s the not knowing that makes you mad.

  I know I’m going insane but I also know that there’s nothing I can do about it. I can see it happening—almost as if it’s happening to someone else—but I can’t stop it.

  With every day and hour and minute and second that slowly passes by, I’m faced with the cold, cruel certainty that we’re never going to know what happened.

  8

  For all my concerns and suspicions about Anna, I know something is really wrong when she and Taylor step out of the ice cream parlor with a treat for each of them and nothing for me.

  I had thought it odd when she hadn’t asked if I wanted anything, but I figured she was just going to get my usual.