by Nancy Rue
The amber light of our wide foyer outlined her wiry figure and her short, untamed white hair. I didn’t have to see her face to know the Soltani eyes were squinted in the same disdain I’d already heard in her voice.
“You waiting for her to come waltzing up the driveway or what?” she said.
“I’m at a loss, Aunt Pete,” I said.
“Come in, at least. You’re letting all the cold air out.”
She pulled the door open the rest of the way, and I was about to follow her in when beams from car lights—white and red and blue—bounced against the house.
“It’s Dad,” Max said. “He brought the cops!”
I was barely able to grab her by the hood of her shirt before she could bound out to meet the Bethany Beach police car that rocked to a stop behind Nick’s black Nissan. Aunt Pete pulled her in the rest of the way. I stood motionless and let the red lights flash in my eyes.
I tried to read Nick’s body language as he got out of the car. He rubbed the back of his head as he waited for a man who seemed to be moving in slow motion. He straightened his tie and strolled toward Nick as if someone’s child were not this very moment missing. The tautness in Nick’s shoulders kept me from taking any comfort in the man’s nonchalance.
An eon later they arrived on the porch. Nick and I exchanged looks that confirmed what we both knew. Neither of us had found a trace of her. But we would. I knew we would.
“This is Detective Ed Malone,” Nick said, nodding toward the officer. Nick’s voice was as tight as his shoulders. “My wife, Serena.”
Ed Malone put out his hand, and I shook it absently. If I’d been asked thirty seconds later to describe him, I couldn’t have. I was still searching Nick’s face for reassurance that wasn’t there.
“He’s going to have us fill out a missing person report,” Nick said.
I shook my head.
“Serena, we have to do this—”
“No, we’ll do it. I just can’t believe this is happening.”
“I know it feels surreal.” Ed Malone’s voice was surprisingly soft and lacked the clipped mid-Atlantic accent that made everyone in Delaware sound as if their jaws were wired shut. “It’s a precaution. Most teenagers that go missing at night show up around dawn.”
“You don’t know our Tristan—”
Nick took my arm, palm damp against my skin, and steered me through the doorway and sharply to the right into the living room. The warm caramels and burnt oranges that usually welcomed me were suddenly jarring and inappropriate.
Max was already there, tucked into a corner of one of the couches, hugging a pillow to her chest. When Nick nodded her out, she glanced at the detective and visibly bit back a complaint. I could hear Aunt Pete calling her from the kitchen, though I was sure Aunt Pete herself would soon be stationed behind a column in the dining room, straining to hear. Part of me wanted to join her, the part that didn’t want to give the detective answers that would make my Tristan officially missing.
I kept telling myself that God was there. He was at that moment taking care of everything. He was …
Ed Malone sat on the edge of a chair and put a folder on the coffee table, running his fingers along its sides as if to tidy the already-straight edges. “Just so you know,” he said, “we already have a team cruising the teen hangouts. Somebody from Search and Rescue will be here shortly. Things are happening while you and I are handling the paperwork.”
I tried to look grateful when I nodded. Nick parked me on the couch with its back to the row of windows that overlooked the ocean. He stood behind me. I groped over my shoulder for his hand, and he grabbed on.
Ed barely got the form out of his folder when Max shouted from the foyer, “There’s a lady here with a dog!” She danced in backward, motioning to a young woman with a bloodhound on a leash. His ears brushed the floor as she followed him in.
This can’t be happening, I thought for the hundredth time.
Ed introduced the woman as Officer Pierce. She nodded without looking at us and spoke as if she were trying to keep all emotion out of her voice. Her seriousness frightened me. “Do you have something of the victim’s?” she said. “A piece of clothing she’s worn recently?”
The victim?
“Right here!” Max pulled a sock out of her pocket. “I just got this out of the hamper. I knew you’d need something.”
“Is that going to be a problem,” Nick said, “since it’s been mixed up with other people’s clothes?”
“No,” Officer Pierce said. “If you folks don’t mind, Duke needs to get a sniff of each of you so he can differentiate the victim’s scent from yours. The victim’s will be the majority smell.”
“Tristan,” Nick said. “Her name is Tristan.”
The officer appeared not to hear him as she commanded Duke to snuffle at Max, who giggled, and at Aunt Pete, who didn’t. Nick was stoic about it, but when the sad-eyed animal with enough skin for another dog came to me, I took his face in my hands and said, “You’ll find her.”
Officer Pierce dropped Tristan’s sock into a pillowcase with a gloved hand. “We’ll take the scent article to the point last seen.”
“Right at the corner of Ocean View and Garfield,” Max said. Aunt Pete shushed her.
“We have a dog going out with the Coast Guard, too, although …” The officer looked at Ed.
“Thanks,” Ed said. He tilted his head toward me. It was shaved—apparently in surrender to advancing baldness—and shone in the lamplight. “Do you have a picture of Tristan?”
Max was once again on the scene with a five-by-seven of Tristan’s sophomore school picture and held it out at the end of a straight arm. The instant Ed Malone took it, Max made one stiff step back and then dove for the couch where she clung to me like a baby koala.
When Officer Pierce had led Duke out, Ed looked at me again.
“Does your daughter have a cell phone?”
“No,” Nick said.
“What about e-mail?”
“She doesn’t have her own account.”
“Can you give me a verbal description? I know you gave us a picture, but you can provide details the camera misses.”
I nodded and closed my eyes. I could see her. I could practically smell her.
“She has shoulder-length hair about the color of mine,” I said, “and thicker. Hers is thick like her dad’s. Her eyebrows are thick too. No, she just started tweezing them this summer. And her eyes are brown—we all have brown eyes—but hers are bigger than the rest of ours, and expressive, so expressive …”
The words fractured. Ed Malone nodded and scribbled and nodded some more until I could start again.
“She has an olive complexion—you know what I mean by that? And a huge smile, perfect teeth, big teeth. She’s grown into them now, but it used to look like she had more than most people. It’s a shy smile. She’s quiet a lot, like a deer—I always think of her as my doe—”
I flattened my hands over my mouth. My shoulders drew together in the front as I closed in on myself.
“She’s no more than five-five,” I heard Nick say. “Probably weighs 110, something like that.”
“She had her purse with her,” I said. “It was green, and it had her initial on it in blue.”
“What was she wearing?” Ed said.
“Her uniform. Blue T-shirt. Khaki shorts.”
I’d ironed them for her just that afternoon.
“She looked so cute in it,” I said. And then I choked. I had just spoken of my daughter in the past tense.
Somehow the information filtered to me that Ed would file the report and enter it into the local MPR, missing persons reports, and the NCIC, the National Crime Information Center, which covers the entire United States.
I could feel the word crime blanching my face.
“Again, that’s a precaution,” Ed Malone said. “We have no reason to suspect foul play at this point.”
Nick curled his fingers around my wrist and held on. I wa
tched Detective Malone swallow.
“Just in case we’re wrong,” he said, “we’re covering all the bases.” He stood up, and for the first time I noticed that he was taller than Nick and broader in the shoulders, even though Nick himself was six foot and squared off. It registered that I should feel heartened by that show of strength. I wasn’t.
“I’ll walk you out,” Nick said to him.
Ed fixed his eyes again on me. “That was a great description. I’ll know her anywhere.”
All I could do was nod as Nick ushered him toward the front hall. Aunt Pete entered through the dining room with two steaming mugs.
“It’s about time he stopped flapping his lips and went out there and started looking,” she said. She cast a glare toward the porch where Nick and the detective were still talking in muted tones. “Here.” She put the mugs on the table in front of me. “That coffee’s strong enough to walk across the street by itself. You’re going to need it.”
“For what?” Max said.
“You don’t think your mother’s going to sit in this house all night when your sister’s out who knows where.” Aunt Pete pushed one hot mug of mud toward me. “Go on, drink up.”
“Don’t even think about it,” Nick said as he strode across the room. He picked up both mugs and put one of them back in Aunt Pete’s hand. He curled his fingers around the other one as he sat catty-cornered from me on the seat Ed Malone had just vacated. He was back in take-charge mode, as if the detective had passed him the baton.
“Hon,” he said to me, “what I want you to do is try to stay as calm as you can and get some rest.”
“Ha,” Aunt Pete said.
Nick ignored her. “When we find Tristan, and we will, I can guarantee you she’s going to be shaken up—whether it’s from guilt or some kind of near-miss we don’t know—but she’s going to need you to be strong. Am I right?”
I didn’t answer.
“Huh? Am I right?”
“Of course,” I said.
He set the coffee mug on the table and took my face in both hands. They burned against my cheeks.
“The police are doing everything they can. I’m doing everything I can. But we also have to give it to God.”
“He already has it; He has Tristan. I know that.”
“Good girl.” Nick pulled his hands away. “Why don’t you stretch out here on the couch and keep the house phone and the cell phone next to you? Aunt Pete, you take the other couch.”
“What about me?” Max said.
“You need to go to bed, short stuff,” Nick said. “We’ve got it handled. Your sister will be here when you wake up.”
Max didn’t say anything. As Nick turned to me, she pressed herself into the sofa and set her jaw.
“Where are you going?” I said to Nick.
“I’m going to walk the beach some more. They can use another pair of eyes.” He leaned across the arm of the couch and kissed me. “The best thing you can do is pray.”
As he disappeared around the corner, I licked off the anxious, upper-lip sweat he’d left on my mouth. He was as terrified as I was—ocean-deep in the blackest of possibilities.
Chapter Four
That night was like the one I spent in labor with Tristan. Painful spasms of fear gave way to lulls of hopeful waiting. But the respites were just long enough for the sieges to gather force and attack me more brutally each time. The difference was, in the labor room I knew each contraction brought me closer to holding my Tristan in my arms.
During the frightened moments, I charged around the house searching Tristan’s room without a clue to what I was looking for, combing the family calendar in the kitchen five, six, ten times, checking the answering machine in case it had somehow malfunctioned. The chop of the Coast Guard helicopters reminded me that other people were looking too. One minute I wanted to shout “Thank you!” to them. The next I wanted to tell them it was ridiculous—my daughter wasn’t really missing.
When the lulls came, I went down the wooden walkway, past the pool, to the deck jutting out over the sand, and breathed to the night, “Father, please.” Until another spasm seized me and I ran to look at the bottom of the pool or tore down the steps to the cabana.
“What the devil are you doing, Serena?” Aunt Pete said when she caught me lifting the lid of the window seat in the pool house and peering at a pile of towels.
I didn’t point out that it made no less sense than her leaning over the deck railing calling out Tristan’s name.
“It’s not like Sissy’s a puppy,” Max said at my elbow. “She knows her way home.”
My throat thickened again. Max had announced to us six months earlier that she was no longer going to refer to Tristan as Sissy, the version of Sister she had lisped from the age of eighteen months as she toddled everywhere after Tristan. I had the feeling Max would call Tristan the Queen of the World right now if she would just walk through the front door.
Around two in the morning, Max conked out in the Papasan chair in the family room, curled into a ball. I covered her with a throw and let her sleep. Aunt Pete succumbed a little after four, sitting straight up on the wicker love seat on the side porch, nose snorting in the air, lips puffing it back out.
I went into another panic spasm, but I had no place left to search. I put a cushion behind Aunt Pete’s head and headed for the beach.
The fog that chilled the air didn’t make me any colder than I already was. Even though I’d long since changed into a set of Nick’s sweats, I was still shivering from the inside out. Pulling my hands up into the sleeves, I picked my way down the stone steps that led between the dunes to “our” beach. I never liked calling it that. “No one can own the sand or the ocean,” I always told my girls.
I sank down at the base of one of the dunes now and plucked at a feathery tuft of beach grass. I’d said it recently, maybe just the week before when someone had come along during the night and wrecked a sandcastle Max had spent an entire morning on. She was fuming.
“How come people even come down here?” Max said, hands on her negligible hips. “Don’t they know this is a private beach?”
Before I could open my mouth, she rolled her eyes at me. “Go ahead and say it, Mom.”
I grinned at her from under the beach umbrella. “We can’t own the sand or the ocean.”
Beside me on the blanket, Tristan looked at me over the tops of her sunglasses. “No, we can’t,” she said. “But I think sometimes it owns us.”
“What?” Max said.
“I don’t know. Never mind,” Tristan said. She rolled over on her stomach, and I went to work on her back with sunscreen.
Now I squeezed my eyes shut, but the thought came anyway, and I whispered it into the fog. “I hope it doesn’t own you now, Tristan. I pray it doesn’t.”
The panic tried to grip me again, and I dug my hands into the grass. There was no way Tristan went into that water last night. No way she had even ventured down onto the beach.
Not of her own accord.
The back of my throat constricted, and I knew I was going to throw up. I flung myself down on all fours and retched almost nothing into the sand. When I rocked back, I was holding two hands full of beach grass, roots and all.
American beach grass, it was called. Signs all along the beach asked people not to walk on the grass so it would stay protected.
“What grass?” I’d heard more than one tourist say as he dragged his folded beach chairs over it.
That was the point. American beach grass was dying in large patches from Massachusetts to Virginia, while scientists continued to search for the reason. It was vital that they find it, because the plant was an important dune stabilizer. The grass was delicate, but its root systems helped hold down the shifting sands of the dunes so they could do their job of stopping erosion. I was always careful to leave the dunes in their contemplative solitude and sometimes even prayed over the soft patches of green when I left the beach. And here I was with two fistfuls I’d pulled rig
ht out of the ground.
I pushed the plants back into the holes and tamped the sand around them. It was like tucking my girls into their beds.
The fog was lifting a little, letting a thin gray light pass under it. A gull landed near the water’s edge, just ten feet from me, and stamped his feet as if he were impatient with the lack of breakfast. Another swooped to join him, and they complained together.
Farther down the beach toward the boardwalk, I could barely make out the first of the fishermen casting into the water, planting their poles in the sand, and setting their, battery-operated lanterns atop their coolers to wait. How could they go about their daily rounds when a huge piece of mine was missing? There was nothing daily about this day, this Friday morning after the night my daughter hadn’t come home. I turned toward the house.
I couldn’t wrap my mind around what was happening. Tristan was ten, Max’s age, before she would spend the night at anyone else’s house. At least three times before that I had been called to pick her up at slumber parties where she’d been struck with a sudden, mysterious illness or had awakened crying from a bad dream. She always confessed to me in the car that she really just missed us and wanted to come home. As a toddler, she’d never been one to wander away from me in a store, unlike Max, who practically had to be kept on a leash even now.
I took the porch steps two at a time in another rush of must-do-something. Nick was just climbing out of the Nissan when I reached the top. In the moments before he saw me, he didn’t look like my Nick.
I always thought of him as smooth. Not in the social, schmoozing sense. His person was smooth. He wore his on-the-verge-of-black hair trimmed close to his head, the hint of a black beard contouring his dark olive skin. His dark eyes, his straight nose, even his marvelous twitchy line of a mouth—none of it disturbed the seamlessness. From the moment I’d met him, I’d found him sexy in an understated way. It still made me catch my breath when he lifted just one side of his mouth and sent me a wink softer than a kiss.