by Ciara Shayee
Laker smiled, cocking his head and opening his arms in invitation. “Do you want to come sit with me? We can watch TV for a little bit ‘til you fall asleep.”
Marley frowned, but she rose slowly to her feet and made her way over, letting him set her on the sofa beside him. She held the bunny with its back to her front, staring up at Laker as he smiled at her and reached for the TV remote. It was only a small screen, but he hoped it would be enough to send her to sleep so she could get some rest and sleep off the hard day she’d had.
“Now, let’s see what we can get, huh?”
Marley stared blankly at him. He chuckled, shaking his head and switching on the TV set. As soon as the screen flashed to life, he was forgotten.
She was riveted by the moving colours and patterns as a smartly dressed woman presented the nightly weather report. Laker couldn’t help but stare at Marley’s face. It seemed ludicrous to him, but after ten minutes of her refusing to look away from the TV set, he was sure she was seeing a television for the first time. She was engrossed. It was like nothing he’d ever seen before. She appeared utterly intrigued, unwilling to look away for even a second.
He’d heard all about kids addicted to their shows—but this was something different.
Pulling his mobile from his pocket, Laker sneakily took a few photos of Marley’s face and the TV, then he sat back and gently touched Marley’s shoulder. It took a minute or so, then she twisted to look up at him. Her eyes were comically wide, alight with the glow of a child learning her new world. He couldn’t help but grin at the sight.
“Shall we try and lay down? Get some sleep?”
It definitely couldn’t be said that Marley was silly, or didn’t understand speech. As soon as the word ‘sleep’ left Laker’s mouth, he saw the first sign of her being a normal five-year-old. She scowled, shooting the TV—which had now segued into a cookery show—a pointed look before peering back up at Laker in entreaty. She may not have verbalised it but her request was clear; she wanted to watch TV. And Laker couldn’t bear to say ‘no’ to a child who had been through the stress and trials she had, so he sighed and decided to bargain with her.
“Tell you what, Little Sweet, you can watch more TV if you lay down and try to sleep. Okay?”
Marley moved right away, shuffling around until she was comfortably resting her head on a pillow against the side of Laker’s leg. She was a tiny little thing so she stretched out within the two thirds left of the sofa beside him, bunny tucked against her chest, eyes firmly trained on the TV set. Laker couldn’t help but laugh quietly to himself, getting as comfortable as possible for a night on the sofa. He’d slept in far worse places while travelling, so it didn’t bother him in the slightest.
And besides, what was a little lost sleep to ensure a sweet, deprived child had as easy a first night of complete freedom as possible?
~ oOo ~
The next morning dawned bright and warm, the sky clear, the air heavier than Reagan and Peter were used to.
It had been over seventy-two hours since Indie and Grace left the ranch house and still, there had been no sign of them. The sighting mentioned the day before had been a false lead, so the agents were back at square one, scouring the wilderness for two likely-terrified young women. The witness had informed them of Indie’s head injury by then, the news of which sent Reagan into a rage that shocked Riley, a man with no children, significant other, or relatives to speak of—therefore no frame of reference for how the man felt. It was like a bullet to the gut for Reagan, who’d been assuming the girls had both been uninjured to have gotten away. Ice slithered through his veins as he imagined his daughter in worse shape than they’d previously thought, without the ability to get the medical attention they suspected she needed.
In the end, it was Laker who managed to calm him with the reminder that both girls were always intelligent beyond their years—if Indie desperately needed treatment, Grace would get it for her, of that he had no doubt. The close bond the duo shared was something Riley’s agents had noticed and passed on, so the possibility of Grace taking Indie to a medical centre of some description was what they were all banking on. With an APB out for the girls’ safe return, Riley was certain somebody would get in contact if either of them turned up.
~ oOo ~
Tense minutes turned into agonising days. Reagan and Peter clung to their only lifeline—hope.
Laker tried valiantly to keep their spirits high, regaling everyone who would listen—including Marley who lapped up his attention with childlike eagerness—with tales of his shenanigans with Archie, Indie, and Grace when they were all younger.
Still, they clung to the knowledge that the girls were out there, possibly only minutes away and closer than they had been in over twelve years. They were eternally thankful for the army of agents scouring the state for them.
Riley found himself pulled in directions he hadn’t previously considered, the discovery of the suspect’s connection to the victims opening up a whole new can of worms. They finally had a motive. Smith had been endlessly jealous of Reagan, and documents were uncovered in his childhood home, Reagan’s name featuring in a number of disturbing doodles. He’d sheepishly admitted that his captaincy of the football team as well as his status as prefect and head boy in his final year had made him popular, which also seemed to have been a trigger for Smith.
Until they found Smith, there was only so much more they could surmise. They’d have to wait until they could talk to the vile man himself.
~ oOo ~
“I’ll go mad if we’re stuck in this place for too much longer,” Peter groaned quietly, gazing out through the small window into the concrete courtyard masquerading as a garden. The men had been moved to a safe house outside Billings, Montana’s largest city, and had slowly been going crazy since the third day after their arrival. FBI agents surrounded the building, with one posted inside, his presence intimidating purely because of his enormous stature and prolonged silence.
Riley left the house with the promise that he’d return immediately if there were any developments, but that was hours ago. He hadn’t been in contact since.
The men were going stir-crazy.
“Did you call the girls?” Reagan asked from a stained beige sofa, hoping to distract himself and Peter. The oppressing silence, both literal and metaphorical, was beginning to get to him.
Peter breathed out a sigh and nodded. “They were going to bed. Mum said to tell you, ‘keep your chin up.’”
“Sounds like Mary, all right,” Reagan mused.
Peter hummed in agreement, his eyes starting to blur with the endless swath of grey in front of them. He turned to face the room instead of the courtyard. It obviously hadn’t been used in a while. The carpet, once purple, was faded and worn almost bare in places. Floral wallpaper made their eyes hurt whenever they looked at it while the matching sofa cushions were torn, dusty, and long-forgotten. On arrival, Riley had apologised for the state of the place, but Ben had picked up attempts to get past his electronic blocks. If the case had been compromised by journalists or the suspect himself there would have been hell to pay, so they’d taken the chance to move Reagan, Peter, Laker, and Marley to a new, safer location that was easier to monitor and guard. It was ensconced in the outskirts of a suburb called Lockwood, roughly ten minutes from the city and easy enough for the numerous agents to blend into.
“Carl-Roman sent a picture for us.” Reagan frowned at his phone a few minutes later, seeing the attachment pop up with a text from Archie which simply read ‘Hurry home all of you, love Champ.’ Peter joined Reagan, the pair sharing a bemused glance before looking at the screen again. When the photo popped up, they found themselves battling chuckles. Carl-Roman’s face took up the entire screen, his cheeks smeared with war paint, lips turned up on one side in a faux-serious expression.
“That kid…” Peter sighed. He missed his little godson something fierce. Though both he and Reagan were trying not to think about it, this was the first time e
ither of them had been away from their homes for longer than a night since the girls went missing. Carl-Roman’s bright, blue-green eyes and silly face made them more homesick than they’d like to admit, the unfamiliarly humid air and tense situation only worsening the feeling.
“He’s sure something.” Reagan’s mind wandered to the boy’s birth, a frenzy in the middle of the night. It was one of the best nights of Reagan’s life, overtaken only by the births of his own two children and his wedding night all those years ago—
Before Reagan could finish his thought, the screeching of tires interrupted. Heavy footsteps and a muffled shout preceded Riley’s entrance. His hair was dishevelled, eyes wide, breaths leaving his body in quick pants.
“We’ve had a sighting.”
With those words, everything seemed to fade away. Laker appeared from the kitchen where he’d been making a coffee, and Reagan and Peter jumped to their feet. “They were spotted this morning on gas station surveillance footage just outside of Lewistown.”
A snap of his fingers later and Ben had opened a map on his laptop, moving it to the coffee-ring stained end table. The group leaned over it, their eyes following the line Ben drew by inputting the coordinates Riley rattled off. The line went from the safe house they stood in to a tiny speck they soon realised was the gas station. It wasn’t far. Not far at all.
“I’ve got agents headed there now.” Riley’s eyes moved between Laker, Reagan, and Peter. “It won’t be long, guys. They’re close, but you need to prepare yourselves. They aren’t going to look the same as they did when you last saw them. They’re very different now, as you saw in my surveillance images. They won’t look the same, sound the same, act the same…they’ve been through more than I can even imagine. We don’t even know the half of it, and you all need to be ready for that.”
The next words were ones he hated to even think, let alone say to the fathers and childhood friend of the girls. Nevertheless, it was his duty to prepare them. “We don’t know exactly how they’ve been treated during their time here, we don’t know what they’ve been told. We can guess, but that’s it. Do you understand? Their reactions to you may not be the ones you want or expect.”
It took a few moments for the men to read between the lines, but when it did, they reacted visibly. The thought of their girls’ faces drawn into displeased or frightened expressions cut them to the core as their hearts broke and their eyes prickled with hot tears. It had been a long time since Reagan or Peter had been embarrassed to cry in front of people. It was a widespread notion that men shouldn’t cry, but when you’d been dealt one Earth-shattering loss after the other, what else could you give? Until Indie was wrapped in Reagan’s arms and Grace was in Peter’s, neither man would be whole again. To think their precious daughters might not be as heart-wrenchingly happy to see them as they would be caused more pain than they knew what to deal with.
The past few days had been a rollercoaster of ups and downs—of discovering secret children, living with the agony of not knowing whether Indie and Grace were alive or dead, of finding them halfway around the world, and of having the acute awareness tingling within their spines that their long-lost daughters were just miles away.
So close, yet so far.
Two excruciating hours passed without word from Riley’s agents out in the field. Reagan paced restlessly around the house while Peter showered and Laker introduced Marley to the wonderful world of cartoons. One of the agents had rustled up an old DVD player from somewhere and some DVDs of cartoons from Laker’s childhood. As soon as he’d put them on she’d been engrossed, crouched in front of the TV on folded knees, bunny squashed against her belly, eyes glued to the characters.
It was during an episode of the latter that Laker managed to catch her first smile on camera. She’d been watching intently, as usual, and he’d just walked into the room on his phone when he heard her huff. Looking up, he was surprised to find that the huff was an almost-silent laugh, her hands up covering her mouth as she shook a little. The characters were, doing something she deemed funny, and when she realised Laker had entered the room, her hands dropped but left her smile behind for just enough seconds that he managed to switch from his emails to his camera to catch it.
Of course, Reagan had been gutted to miss it, but he’d already had Laker send him the photo and it was now his screensaver alongside a photo of Carl-Roman and baby Chase.
By the time the sun set on their fourth day in Montana, they were fed up of waiting.
Reagan emerged from his shower, heading to the courtyard where Peter sat on an old, fold-up camping chair. A lone bird circled overhead, the faint breeze ruffling Reagan’s damp strawberry-blond curls. For the first time, he was aware of the grey sprinkled through the hair at his temples, the streaks in the strands atop his head. Lines had etched themselves into his face seemingly overnight, though in reality they’d been there for more than a few years. Reagan had begun to let his shaving regime go, so he now wore the beginnings of an impressive moustache, something he’d always sworn not to like. The once-vibrant blue-green eyes his wife had fallen in love with had been dimmed by year after year of disappointing nothing, by the passing birthdays, Fathers Days when only one ‘Dad’ card sat on the mantle instead of two—though, in recent years, it had been joined by ‘Pawpaw’ cards from the boys. Twelve Christmases had come and gone without the delicious scent of freshly baked gingerbread or the bright pink garlands Indie had always insisted on making and stringing to go on every available surface.
As evening slipped into night, light blue sky turning to inky navy, the sun made way for a blanket of stars as the group of men convened in the living room with Marley content to eat in front of the TV—nobody wanted to be the mean one to pull her away from it, not just yet when it made her so happy—though nobody really touched their meal. An old stuffed owl stared from a shelf as the clock ticked, its ominous beat loud once the guards returned to their stations around the house.
Riley left to join his team in the city, so Reagan and Peter found themselves at a loss for something to do. Laker eventually persuaded Marley to lay on the sofa beside him where she fell asleep with her bunny, one hand wrapped in the loose material of the tracksuit bottoms he wore.
The minutes trickled by in slow motion, the deceivingly loud ticking of the clock heralding every new second they were away from Indie and Grace.
~ oOo ~
Meanwhile, somewhere near Lewistown…
“You’ve got to eat something, Indie,” Grace urged. She extended her hand further towards Indie, the plastic bowl of fruit salad turning her stomach even when she simply turned her head to eye it.
Ever since they’d returned to the hotel after dropping Marley off, she’d been mute. Unable or unwilling to make any sound other than the retching that accompanied the many bouts of sickness she’d been experiencing at all hours of the days and nights.
Grace barely managed to get water into her, ushering Indie into the shower each morning, but that was about the extent of her activity. Her body unmoving, Indie’s haunted gaze followed Grace as she moved around, keeping the old curtains tightly closed, water and a bucket close by. Grace was just about keeping her fear at a distance, crying silently into her pillow once she thought Indie was asleep.
Little did she know, Indie heard everything. She’d slept in fits and starts ever since being knocked unconscious days before. Each time sleep crept up on her, terror shoved it away again. Her heart sped up as her muscles ached. And with the phantom feel of Smith’s fingers around her neck, Indie couldn’t let her guard down. Not even for a second.
The traumatised young woman was stuck in limbo—unable to help Grace the way she wanted to, unable to help herself, and unable to help her daughter. It had seemed like the only option, the only way she could make her safe. But being unable to hold Marley, to sing her to sleep or do her hair exactly the way the little girl liked it, was killing her.
While Grace cried herself to sleep each night, Indie sent apol
ogy after heartfelt apology to their families, hating that by running they’d put their dads and siblings in danger. In the heat of the moment all she’d been able to think of was that they’d never have another chance to leave. He’d never let them. Worry had come later, every sound similar to booted footsteps making her alternately relieved and petrified.
If he’s looking for us, he’s not looking for Marley or hurting our family in England. She made it her mantra between bouts of debilitating nausea and body-numbing fear. Hour after hour of sitting in the dingy motel room gave both girls time to think. Talk of a plan to try and end Smith’s tyranny was on hold. Neither girl was strong enough to think about it just yet.
Grace’s thoughts were clouded with nerves, worry for Indie, and fear of what would come next. She didn’t know where to go from there, what to do, or how to help Indie overcome this depression she’d spiralled into.
And Indie…she failed to keep hold of any thought but Marley’s face for longer than a second or two, everything swept away in a flood of endless unknowns. A flood that she’d started but had no control over.
~ oOo ~
At just after ten a.m. on day four at the motel, Indie moved.
She stood absent-mindedly, almost in a trance, and shuffled from the bed to the bathroom for the first time without prompting or Grace’s body as support. Grace’s stunned but proud eyes followed her staggered steps.
The sun had risen hours before, bright in the blue sky with wispy, cotton-ball clouds drifting aimlessly around it. A stray mongrel could be heard, his muffled bark audible through the thin walls of the aged motel. As Grace heard the tell-tale sounds of Indie using the toilet and switching on the shower, she smiled to herself and fought back tears.