by Lisa Wingate
“Okay, Trista, I need you to take a breath, calm down, and talk to me. You’re not alone. We are going to do everything we can to bring this girl home safely.” My stomach turns over. I taste the 1 a.m. ham sandwich and the shot of energy drink. “Is she your sister or your daughter?”
“Mm-my girl . . . my little girl . . . ,” she sobs.
The alarm meter ratchets upward inside me. I’m pretty sure I’m talking to a teenage mother with two babies on her hands. “What is her name?”
“Em . . . Emily.”
“And how old is Emily?”
“F-f-four . . . f-five. She just turned f-five.” Trista seems more lucid now, her speech clearer. “We w-were gonna have her birthday par-party this weeken-n-nd. . . .”
I note that she used the word were. I taste the bile again. It’s a bad sign when a parent uses past tense in reference to a missing child.
She breaks down sobbing, and it’s a couple minutes before I can get her to listen to me. I feel the burden of time ticking by, even as I’m sending information through dispatch. I need a description of this girl.
“Trista . . . Trista!” I’m harsh now, like a teacher demanding a student’s attention. “What is Emily’s hair and eye color?”
“B-blonde . . . b-blue.”
“I need to know what Emily was wearing the last time you saw her. Exactly. Everything.”
Instead, she repeats location details. She’s at Cappie’s Quick Mart. She came out to buy cigarettes.
At three in the morning? I wonder and glance at the screen.
The caller’s voice is far away for a moment. I hear her screaming the girl’s name. It echoes against the traffic and a blaring horn. I cringe.
“Trista!” My voice fills the dispatch center, echoes down the hall. “Don’t put down the phone. Don’t hang up. Keep talking to me.”
Carol comes running from the break room. She’s heard me yelling.
I cap the mike, quickly whisper, “Missing juvenile, female, five years old.” My heart is pumping wildly. I point to the dispatch screen.
Then I open the receiver again. “Trista! Trista! What was Emily wearing? I need you to tell me what she was wearing.”
“She’s go-o-one! She’s go-o-one!”
“What was Emily wearing?”
“A . . . tee . . . a tee . . . a T-shirt,” Trista hiccups out finally. “One of W-Wade’s wor-work shirts. He . . . he . . . I-it was his . . . his . . . last . . . c-clean . . . M-maybe she thought sh-she was in troub . . . troubl-l-le . . .”
I note several things at once, send them through dispatch in random bits. There’s a male involved, possibly a domestic dispute, no known location on the male at this time.
“What color was the T-shirt?” If it was a man’s shirt, it was oversize for a five-year-old, probably worn as a nightgown.
“Re-red . . . or blue. I don . . . don’t know. He has . . . he has . . . I d-don’t . . . My babyyyyy. Where’s my babyyyy?”
“I need you to stay focused, Trista.” So much time is passing. How much longer until officers reach her? I glance at the screen. They’re still several miles away. “What else was Emily wearing? Pants? Shoes? Coat?”
“No!” Trista sobs, frustrated with my questions now. “Only the shirt! Only the shirt.”
A chill passes through me. It’s cold at night in central Michigan in mid-October. I picture the little girl wandering along some roadside, shivering, barefoot, her blonde hair tangled around her face, her eyes filled with fear.
And then I hope that’s all it is. I hope she’s wandering somewhere. Alone. Far from the traffic that’s whizzing by in the background.
Beside me, Carol has picked up a headset to listen in on the call. She leans over my shoulder toward the screen as I try to work more information out of Trista, who has collapsed into unintelligible sobs again.
Carol looks my way, squints, shakes her head. Her eyes meet mine, gray eyebrows lowered and drawn together. “The Cappie’s Quick Mart out on Old Collier Road isn’t open late. There’s no highway traffic out there, either. She has to be at the new Super Cappie’s—the one they just opened near the bypass.”
I close my eyes, just for the flash of an instant, feeling sick, then hot, then dazed. Then I’m hit by the white-hot lightning of panic.
I’ve lived in this county all my life. I should’ve realized there wouldn’t be traffic noise by the Cappie’s on Old Collier Road. I should’ve realized she had to be somewhere else. . . .
The phone rings, and at first I’m still in the dispatch center, trying to answer the incoming call through my headset. But it won’t work. It’s just ringing and ringing and ringing.
It’s about to roll over to voice mail when I jerk awake, lift my head off my own kitchen table, and scramble for my cell. The house is quiet, the full light of midmorning pressing through the window now.
A half-dozen thoughts strike me at once. The kids have slipped off, not bothering to wake me as they passed by on their way to the garage. Across the street, the real estate sign has caught the sun like a beacon. My car sits alone in the driveway, meaning that Robert has gone to the cabin in the north woods for the weekend instead of coming home after his business trip. Again.
The phone call is Carol from work.
I want to crawl to the nearest closet, curl into a ball, and cry. But instead, I answer the cell.
“They found something in the ditch a couple miles from the new Cappie’s,” Carol informs me flatly. “An auto supply store T-shirt. Red.”