Words Unsaid

by KG MacGregor

  “Something Kim said.”

  “Your sister”—she poked Anna in the chest—“is a troublemaker. What kind of nonsense is she spouting this time?”

  Anna snickered. “The same nonsense you spouted. I guess that means you’re a troublemaker too…which I already knew, by the way. We were comparing notes on raising teenagers and she said I expect too much of Andy, that I hold him up to myself at that age. Remember saying that?”

  “I do, but it was in the heat of an argument. I’ve had a chance to think about it, and you were right. Or partly right. He deserved a bigger punishment for lying to us.”

  “But was I right to assume that his ambition in life stops at being a car salesman? And more important, did I use my disappointment about that to justify, as he put it, selling the business out from under him? Because if I did, then I didn’t really give him a chance to prove he was capable of running it someday.”

  Lily started to answer but Anna cut her off.

  “And if that’s true, then Kim was right and so were you. I judged Andy against who I was at sixteen, not who he is.”

  “Honey, it’s possible you did. It’s also possible you weren’t wrong. When I think about the blood, sweat and tears you’ve put into running that company—all those sleepless nights you worried about drowning in debt, personnel headaches, the recession—I admit I have trouble seeing Andy deal with all that too. But if he decides his life’s passion is to sell BMWs to the whole world, you and I both know he’ll do it.”

  “You’re not wrong there.” Anna sighed and allowed herself a flicker of a smile that quickly gave way to a look of alarm. “Please don’t let me judge Eleanor that way too.”

  Lily laughed and squeezed her hip. “Something tells me you’ll get the short end of that, Ms. Einstein. Our daughter’s going to run circles around us both.”

  “You got that right. And we won’t have to worry about Georgie at all. At the rate he’s going, he’ll be a playboy tennis pro in Monte Carlo someday.” Her soft smile faded. “Stay on my case, Lily. I want to be a good mom. Whatever it takes, just don’t let me fail my kids. I’d never be able to forgive myself.”

  Anna’s wistful plea swelled her heart with love. “Sweetheart, you’re not going to fail them, I promise.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I just know. I deal with mothers all the time, and the bad ones never think to ask if they’re good mothers.”

  Chapter Ten

  “Keep watching for him, Dad. I’ll try him again,” Anna said, nodding toward the trickle of passengers emerging through the door from customs. The arrivals board showed the flight from LAX landing almost forty minutes ago. She’d texted Andy half a dozen times already with no response, and her call went straight to voice mail again. “I’m starting to think he’s forgotten his phone.”

  “What’s he wearing?”

  “How should I know? He’s sixteen. He dresses himself.”

  Anna darted toward a man who exited wearing a Dodgers cap. “Excuse me, were you on the Alaska Airlines flight from LA?”

  He shook his head. “Sorry, Delta.”

  The Delta flight had landed twenty minutes later.

  “You want me to call Lily, see if she’s heard from him?”

  She shook her head. “Not yet, she’ll just worry. Go ask at the ticket counter if there was a problem in LA. Maybe he got bumped to another flight. Could be he’s in the air and that’s why his phone’s off.”

  When a third call to Serafina also went unanswered, Anna scrolled through the contacts on her phone until she reached a neighbor who promised to send her husband to see if Serafina’s SUV was in the driveway.

  Her rational side assured her there was a simple explanation. The lost phone, the bumped flight. That wasn’t enough to stop traumatic scenarios—the worst imaginable—from seeping into her consciousness. An accident on the freeway. A carjacking. A carbon monoxide leak at the house.

  Suddenly it struck her and she broke into a grin. “Son of a—I’m going to wring his scrawny neck.” Epic paybacks! She spun around, fully expecting to find him peeking around a corner, doubled over with laughter.

  Instead, she saw her father striding toward her, his face grim. “They said he wasn’t on the plane. Never checked in for his flight, never canceled.”

  She shuddered, a wave of panic rising as she began to give credence to her fears. “All right, that’s it. Something’s wrong, Dad. I don’t know what, but I need to get back to LA right now and find out what’s going on. Call Lily and—”

  “I’m coming with you. We’ll call her from the gate.”

  * * *

  Kim joined Lily at the rail and handed her a bottle of sparkling water dripping with ice slivers. “What do you want to bet they passed each other in the air somewhere over Tijuana? Andy’s going to call from the airport any minute now, probably on some total stranger’s phone because he left his at home. And he’ll say he missed the flight but Serafina helped him book another one.”

  “I’d be so happy if you were right,” Lily said. But it strained credulity to think Serafina wouldn’t have called to let them know. Unless she’d dropped him off and he’d gotten distracted in the airport, missed his flight and had no way of calling her. That’s what she wanted to believe. She looked out from the veranda toward the pool where Hal had engaged the kids in a game of Marco Polo. What she wouldn’t give to be so oblivious right now. “Kim, you wouldn’t believe how hard it is not to be scared to death.”

  “Try not to be scared, sweetie. You’re sure he’s not just yanking your chain? He did promise to pay you back for that refrigerator-running prank. God, I still can’t believe he fell for that.”

  If this was Andy’s idea of payback, then Anna was right about his lack of maturity. Surely he wouldn’t do something so outrageous.

  “Hey, don’t you have one of those trackers on his phone? We have that for our kids…except Jonah keeps turning his off, the little shit.”

  “That’s exactly the problem. We have an app called Find My Family, but Andy disables it. He says he’s old enough not to be watched all the time.”

  “Hal thinks they’re creepy. Of course, that’s because I sent him to the garden store for some potting soil and clocked him two hours at the marina on his boat. As if I needed a phone tracker to tell me that’s where he’d be.”

  Though Lily appreciated Kim’s valiant efforts to distract and reassure, there was no rationalizing Andy’s inexplicable disappearance. “What really scares me is that Serafina’s not picking up our calls either. I could see her playing along with a small prank but not something this serious. She’d know we’d be freaking out. And the odds of both of them losing their phones? I don’t think so. Whatever’s happened, it’s happened to both of them.”

  “Chill! Nothing happened.” Kim wrapped her in a hug. “You’ve already ruled out all the bad shit. No earthquakes, no fires. No hostage takers at the airport. If there’d been an accident on the 405, it would have shown up in the traffic report. I’m telling you, there has to be a simple explanation for all this. Once you find out what it is, you can whip his ass for not calling you.”

  Lily lunged toward her chirping cell phone. “Anna?”

  “We just landed…coming into the gate right now. Any word?”

  “No, and he hasn’t posted anything on social media since that one picture from the party yesterday afternoon. I even got Jonah to check all the accounts we don’t know about.”

  “And Serafina?”

  “Nothing from her on Facebook, but she doesn’t post much anyway. I’m here with Kim, putting you on speaker.”

  “The plan right now,” Anna said, “is that Dad and I clear customs and swing by the ticket counter to see if anyone recognizes him. Maybe somebody will remember putting him on another plane. If they have access to other airlines’ manifests, they can check and see if he rebooked somewhere else.”

  “Good idea. Let me text you the picture from the party. He might still
be wearing that same shirt, the blue and white one.” She scrolled through her phone to find the photo and send it through the message app. Another icon on her home screen caught her eye. “Hold on a sec… Anna, did you check the alarm at home to see what time they left the house?”

  “It never crossed my mind.”

  The app took forever to load, and again to recognize her thumbprint in place of a password.

  Anna got hers loaded first. “Never mind, Lily. I’ve got it. Status is armed.”

  “Scroll down. There’s a history.”

  “Shit.” A rare curse word from Anna, which made it ominous. “It says it was armed at a quarter to seven last night.”

  “Which would mean…”

  “Andy and Serafina never made it home from the festival.”

  Lily sat down before her legs gave way. “Anna, go straight to the police station and file a report. I’m going to the airport right now and catch the next flight home.”

  * * *

  “I’m under the Alaska Airlines sign,” Lily said into her phone. “White shirt and jean jacket. Where are you?”

  “I see you.” Headlights flickered on Anna’s dark car inching her way.

  Lily tossed her shoulder bag into the back seat and leaned over the console for a quick kiss. It was after ten o’clock, the absolute soonest she could get back to LA from Los Cabos. “Tell me everything. What did the police say? I assume you went to the West LA station on Butler.”

  “Yeah, they took a missing persons report. But without any information on the circumstances, it automatically goes to the juvenile division to investigate as a runaway. That was even after I told them Serafina was missing too.”

  “Those lazy bastards. I hope you told them that was fucking moronic.”

  “Not as well as you would have.” Anna sounded weary, probably more from stress than physical fatigue. “They asked if it was possible Serafina had taken him. You have no idea how close I came to saying yes so they’d get off their asses and do something.”

  “They’d have picked her up and deported her, no questions asked,” Lily snarled. The ICE aggressions forced millions of hardworking immigrants to live in fear on a daily basis—even those like Serafina with resident status. “Jonah said he’d keep an eye on all of Andy’s social media accounts in case he posts something.”

  “How are Georgie and Eleanor handling this?”

  “I can tell they’re worried.” They’d agreed it was best for the twins to stay behind with Kim and Hal for now. “I told them we were going to find Andy as soon as possible so we could come back to finish our vacation. That’s what I have to keep telling myself.”

  Her phone rang from her purse—a call from Kim—but then the Bluetooth in Anna’s car picked it up and put it through the speaker. “Lily?”

  “I just got here. I’m in the car with Anna. What’s up?”

  “Eleanor found something.”

  “Eleanor? She should be in bed by now.”

  “Sorry, that’s what you get for raising a daughter with her own agency. Anyway, she’s been noodling around on Hal’s laptop trying to check some kind of doo-dad stuck up there on her cloud account. Here, you talk to her.”

  “Mom?”

  “What is it, honey?” Lily asked.

  “No, other Mom,” she said. “Remember that STEM class I had with Kylie Redeker, the blogger who showed us how to make a data file from a phone app?”

  Anna shook her head, flustered. “Ellie, unless this has something to do with finding your brother, it’ll have to wait.”

  “I might know where they are. I got some data.”

  Lily’s shoulder banged sharply against the window as Anna whipped the car off West Century Boulevard and into a deserted parking lot. “Ow! What’s she talking about?”

  “She built a data file to capture…you explain it, Ellie. What do you have?”

  “Uncle Hal let me use his laptop and I made a data file for Find My Family.”

  Lily spoke up, “Sweetheart, we tried the phone app already. Andy disabled his and Serafina’s phone is either turned off or the battery’s dead.”

  “But Serafina’s came on a little while ago. See, the file I programmed captures Find My Family locations every sixty seconds in case their phones turned on.”

  “Ellie, that’s brilliant!” Anna said. “God, you’re so smart. You’re saying her phone turned on? Where was it?”

  “It came on for about two minutes, then it went back off. I mapped the coordinates and it looks like it was at the King Taco in Maywood.”

  “Maywood.” Anna closed her eyes as if trying to visualize. “That’s near the river, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, I used to have some clients there. It’s a Latino neighborhood.” This was a huge clue, Lily thought.

  “But why would she be there? And why isn’t she answering her phone?”

  Lily could think of a few reasons, and she didn’t like any of them. “Maybe she ran into someone she knew at the festival.”

  “I took a screenshot of the map on my phone, Ma. I can text it to you.”

  “Yes honey, do that.”

  “It doesn’t make sense, Lily. I can see her leaving the festival with a friend, but she wouldn’t overnight somewhere without Andy. And to not put him on the plane? It isn’t like her.”

  Lily had to agree. Her phone dinged with the arrival of Eleanor’s screenshot. “I got it, sweetie. Thanks.”

  “You should go to sleep now,” Anna told Eleanor. “My genius daughter. We’ll call tomorrow. It’s all going to be okay.”

  The image wasn’t as helpful as Lily would have liked. King Taco was labeled on the map, but the star marking the location of Serafina’s phone overlapped also with nearby homes.

  “Anna, I don’t know what to make of this. It’s Serafina’s phone, but is it Serafina? I can’t think of any reason she’d be in Maywood.”

  “Maybe her phone was stolen.” Anna sat behind the wheel with her arms folded, in no apparent hurry to turn back onto the boulevard. “Maybe we should go back to the police station and show them this map. Not that I expect them to actually do anything, but they ought to add it to the report at least.”

  “Screw the Butler station. We need to go straight to LAPD headquarters.” Her mind suddenly raced with a raft of frightening possibilities that could explain Andy and Serafina’s disappearance. “I’m thinking we’ve got a sixteen-year-old kid who’s never run off on his own before and a nanny who’d never go off script without calling us. And now they’ve both been missing for twenty-eight hours. This is definitely not a wait and see.”

  “Agreed.”

  Anna shoved her car in gear and roared out of the lot, turning toward the freeway that would take them downtown. “You know people at the station there, right? You can call in a favor.”

  “Tony can help if we need him,” Lily said, thinking of her former boss at the Braxton Street Legal Aid Clinic. She’d visited the jail enough to know how such favors worked. “For now I vote we go down there and shake a few trees until a detective falls out.”

  * * *

  The last place Anna ever expected to find herself on a Sunday night was at LAPD’s Metro Detention Center. Yet here she was, in a waiting area that smelled of myriad bodily fluids, watching the fruits of a seedy weekend in LA parade by. Delirious drunks, bloodied brawlers, agitated addicts. Some on their way to booking, others dumped outdoors into the rain. None of it seemed to faze Lily.

  “I guess you’ve seen all this before,” Anna murmured, keeping her voice low so as not to draw attention.

  “And then some. At least no one’s vomited since we got here.”

  “That’s good. Because when they start to vomit, so do I.”

  They’d been waiting more than an hour, since Lily had insisted on speaking to a detective. Apparently, all their detectives were out detecting.

  “Are you sure they’re going to send someone down for us? Looks to me like it’s the troublemakers who get all the attent
ion around here.”

  Lily squeezed her knee. “Relax, babe. I know how to make trouble too. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.” She’d found a power outlet and was charging her phone as she scrolled through Twitter feeds from news outlets in case there was a clue she’d missed. “Weekends are always hellacious. Why don’t you check that vending machine over there, fetch us a bottle of water.”

  As Anna tentatively crossed the waiting area, the elevator opened to a tall, powerfully built Black woman with a burgundy pixie cut and lipstick to match. She wore a crisp blue shirt and gray slacks, with a detective’s shield affixed to her belt. Her eyes lit upon Anna and she smiled. “Are you Judge Kaklis?”

  “That’s me,” Lily said, springing to her feet to join them. “Lilian Kaklis, and this is my wife, Anna. We’re looking for information on our son Andy.”

  “And our housekeeper, Serafina Casillas,” Anna added. “They went to the Los Amigos Festival last night in Hollenbeck Park and no one’s heard from them since. I filed a report this afternoon at the station in West LA.”

  “Yes, I’ve read your report. I’m Detective Tawna Cooper,” she said, handing each of them a business card as she shook their hands. “Captain Shively assigned me this case. I take it he’s a friend of yours?”

  “A friend of hers,” Anna said, nodding toward Lily as she gently freed her hand from the detective’s crushing grip.

  “Andrew Shively and I go way back,” Lily said, ostensibly to impress upon the detective that she was well-connected in the department. As if being a Superior Court judge wasn’t enough to command Cooper’s full attention.

  “Let’s go upstairs and talk this over, see if we can find your boy.”

  Making mindless small talk, they rode in a secure elevator to an upper floor and followed the detective down an interior hallway with a flickering fluorescent light. Cooper led them into a small impersonal office she likely shared with others. On the desk was a phone and a computer monitor, and an open blue folder with Anna’s form on top.

  “All right, first things first,” Detective Cooper said as she cleared her throat. “Is Andres’s father in the picture?”