Girl, Missing

by Sophie McKenzie

  I closed my eyes. Tears prickled at the lids. The only person I wanted to see right now was Jam. If my questioning was over for now, maybe his would be soon.

  The door opened. I jerked upright, hoping it would be him.

  Mum and Dad stood in the doorway.

  My mouth fell open. Dad looked as if he’d aged ten years. As for Mum – her face was grey and she seemed bonier than ever. Her jumper hung limply from her shoulders.

  For a second they just looked at me. And then, somehow, Mum had crossed the room and was beside me, half shaking me, half pulling me into this hug.

  I stood there – stiff and awkward.

  Mum’s tears splashed onto my neck.

  ‘Oh, Lauren, you stupid, stupid . . . Thank God you’re all right.’

  She drew back slightly, her hands still on my shoulders. Her eyes sought out mine – fearful, questioning.

  Dad moved closer but still stood, his arms folded, staring at me. He looked furious.

  Everything had changed. I knew it in that instant. Nothing could ever be the same between us, again.

  ‘Do you have any idea what you’ve done?’ Mum whispered.

  I stared at her. What I’d done?

  ‘I had to know the truth,’ I said.

  Dad gave this low growl. I looked at him again. There were dark rings under his eyes and his cheeks were flat and pale.

  Mum pulled me down onto one of the chairs. ‘We didn’t tell you because we didn’t want you to be hurt,’ she said. ‘We would have told you more when you were ready.’

  She still didn’t get it. She still didn’t realise I knew.

  ‘And just when did you think I would be ready to hear that you’d stolen me away from my real family?’

  Mum looked as if I’d slapped her. ‘What?’

  I stared at her, disgusted. ‘Don’t lie to me, I know about Sonia Holtwood, remem—’

  ‘We didn’t take you from another family.’ Mum’s voice cracked like a whip. ‘We adopted you properly, officially.’

  Hate boiled up in my heart. I loathed her. I loathed them both.

  ‘I know about Sonia stealing me,’ I screamed. ‘I know you did too.’

  Mum’s forehead was creased with frowns. ‘No, Lauren, you’ve got it wrong.’

  I jammed my hands over my ears. I couldn’t bear to listen to any more of her lies. Mum pulled at my arms.

  ‘MJ told us what you said, but you have to believe us, we thought you were Sonia’s child.’

  ‘So why did you pay her loads of money for me?’ I yelled.

  Mum blinked at me, her face now chalk-white.

  ‘Come on,’ I shrieked. ‘You said we’d talk later. Well it is later. And we are talking. So tell me.’

  Mum covered her face with her hands. Dad sat down opposite us. He still hadn’t touched me. Still hadn’t said a word.

  ‘Well, Dad?’ Tears were spilling down my cheeks. ‘You gonna lie to me too?’

  He leaned forward and took Mum’s hands away from her face.

  ‘Lauren needs to know the whole story.’

  Mum gasped. ‘But …’

  Dad shushed her with a squeeze of his hand. He turned to me, his jaw clenched.

  ‘I think it’s time you saw this situation from somebody else’s point of view, Lauren.’

  I glared at him.

  ‘We’ve often told you how much we wanted you. How special you were to us.’ Dad took a deep breath. ‘But there are lots of things you don’t know.’

  He sounded like a different person. His red-cheeked, bumbling self was gone. In its place was this stranger – icy and calm.

  ‘We spent ten years trying to have a baby, Lauren. Eight full IVF cycles and countless other failed attempts. We tried everything. You will never have any idea of what we went through. What your mother went through.’ He paused. ‘In the end she had a breakdown.’

  ‘Dave, no,’ Mum whispered.

  ‘Lauren’s asked for this.’ Dad looked up at me, a horrible, cold look in his eyes. ‘Your mother tried to commit suicide.’

  It was like he’d whacked me in the stomach. I caught my breath. Mum was so organised. So in control of … of everything. How could she ever have tried to kill herself?

  ‘Dave,’ Mum pleaded.

  ‘So, we agreed, no more IVF. But after a while your mother seemed stronger and, as we both still wanted a child, we decided to try adoption. Of course, with a history of mental illness it was impossible to get local adoption agencies to even consider us. So we started looking further afield. We called agencies all over the world. Tried everywhere from China to Canada. Your mother got more and more depressed and I got more and more scared that … that she might …’

  Dad gazed deep into my eyes.

  I looked away.

  ‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘one day we got a call from Marchfield. Taylor Tarsen. He’d heard on the grapevine we’d been looking everywhere for a child. He was sympathetic. But he said we would have to bend a few rules to get what we wanted.’

  My heart thumped.

  ‘Tarsen told us there was a young woman, Sonia Holtwood, with a little girl. The adoption would be straightforward. But there was a catch. The woman wanted more than the normal expenses that get paid by adoptive parents to birth parents. In short, she wanted to sell you. For a lot of money.’

  At last. He’d admitted it. Rage surged through me.

  ‘So you bought me,’ I spat. ‘Like a car. Like a “thing”.’ My hands were clenched so tightly the nails were digging into my palms. ‘How did it work? Wads of cash in a brown envelope, or something?’

  Dad blinked at me.

  ‘Oh no, of course,’ I said, sarcastically. ‘I forgot. You’re an accountant. That must have made it easier.’

  ‘Please, Lauren,’ Mum sobbed. ‘Maybe giving Sonia all that money was wrong …’ Her face crumpled.

  ‘You think?’

  Dad’s fist smashed down onto the chair arm beside him. ‘How dare you speak to us like this,’ he shouted, ‘as if you can sit in judgement on us. You have no sodding idea of what we went through. How we agonised over what we were doing. We paid that money because we wanted a child so badly. We would never have done it if Sonia had been a good mother. If she’d wanted you. If she’d shown the slightest bit of interest in anything except how much cash she could screw out of us.’ He stopped, his breath heavy and uneven. ‘We’re not the villains here.’

  ‘We thought we were rescuing you from her.’ Mum took my hand. ‘And you rescued us too. Having you made me strong again. Strong enough to try IVF one last time. That’s why I always say Rory is such a miracle. But you were my first miracle. You’ll always be our daughter, Lauren. Always.’

  Mum’s whole face was contorted, pleading with me to understand. I closed my eyes, letting what they had just said sink in. They hadn’t known I was a stolen child. That was what they were telling me. They’d only paid Sonia money for me because they wanted to save me and because … because … I opened my eyes and stared at Mum. I was suddenly aware of how little she was. How fragile. Somewhere, underneath the anger, I felt a fluttering of pity for her, for both of them.

  ‘I’ve worked long hours in a job I hate for eleven years to pay back the money we borrowed,’ Dad said, bitterly.

  My anger rose again, swamping the pity. ‘I didn’t ask you to do that.’

  Dad sighed. ‘No. You didn’t, but—’

  ‘You have to understand, we’re frightened, Lauren.’ Mum squeezed my hand. ‘We broke the law. We didn’t think we were hurting anyone else. But we still broke the law.’

  A sharp rap on the door. MJ walked in. ‘Sorry to interrupt,’ she said. ‘But there’re some practical issues we need to discuss.’

  I drew my hand out of Mum’s and sat up. Mum tensed beside me.

  MJ stood in the corner of the room, her hands behind her back. ‘So far we have no evidence that Sonia Holtwood isn’t your biological mother, Lauren. But if she did kidnap you when you were three, that
sure gives her a motive for trying to organise your permanent disappearance now. We’ve got your file from the Marchfield Adoption Agency – the one you say wasn’t there when you broke in. We’re checking out all the details. But that’s going to take a bit of time. And the Purditts are, naturally, all stirred up to know one way or the other.’

  I glanced at Mum’s hand on the seat beside me. She was gripping it so hard her knuckles were white.

  MJ cleared her throat. ‘There is something that can speed things up and tell us whether or not you’re their daughter in just a few hours.’ She paused. ‘A DNA test.’

  23

  Night fears

  The DNA test took less than a minute. The same nurse who’d checked me over when we arrived at the police station put a swab – like a cotton bud – in my mouth and swiped it against the inside of my cheek. She said the results would be ready first thing tomorrow.

  I couldn’t believe so much rested on something so quick and easy to do.

  The FBI let Mum and Dad take me back to the Evanport Hotel. I knew Jam and his mum were here too. I kept asking to see Jam, but Mum made me stay in her and Dad’s hotel room. After a while, Rory and Aunt Bea turned up. Aunt Bea’s my dad’s sister. She’d flown out to help look after Rory when I went missing. I used to get on with her quite well. But right now she kept looking at me as if I’d just crawled out from under a rock.

  The tension in the room was terrible. Mum was pretending that we hadn’t had our conversation. That I didn’t know she’d tried to top herself years back. She marched around, folding clothes that were already folded, wiping surfaces that had already been cleaned by the chambermaid, and talking about nothing.

  Rory was whiny and aggressive. Not surprising, I suppose. He had, after all, missed his entire trip to the Legends of the Lost Empire ride at Fantasma. I tried to say sorry to him for messing up his holiday, but he stuck his fingers in his ears and pretended he couldn’t hear me.

  Dad just mooched moodily round the room, hunched over like a bear.

  All I wanted was to see Jam.

  At last Aunt Bea and Dad took Rory off for an ice cream, leaving Mum and me on our own. A few minutes later Mum went to the bathroom. As soon as she’d shut the door, I picked up the phone by the bed and asked reception to put me through to Jam Caldwell.

  ‘Password please?’ the receptionist drawled.

  ‘Password?’ I frowned.

  The receptionist made a clicking sound with her tongue. ‘Yes ma’am. I’m sorry but I’m not authorised to connect you or tell you the room number without you giving me the password.’

  I stared at the phone, but before I could say anything else, Mum’s hand reached over my shoulder and pressed down on the dialtone button.

  I spun round. ‘What’s going on, Mum?’

  ‘We don’t want you seeing him.’

  ‘What … ?’ I stared at her, completely bewildered. ‘Why? He’s my best friend. None of this is his fault.’

  ‘He encouraged you to run away from us.’

  This was so unfair, I lost my temper on the spot.

  ‘He came with me to help me. He actually tried to talk me out of going to find Sonia Holtwood.’

  ‘It’s not just that,’ Mum said. The bony ridges of her cheekbones flushed pink. ‘You were on your own with him for several nights. We need to talk about … about the implications of that.’

  ‘What?’ She couldn’t be serious.

  But she was.

  It came down to this – I might have travelled across three states, been kidnapped and left for dead in an icy wood, and discovered I’d been stolen and sold as a three-year-old, but all Mum was interested in was what I’d got up to with Jam.

  It was so ridiculous that I laughed. ‘For the seven millionth time, he’s not my boyfriend.’

  Mum pursed her lips. It was clear she didn’t believe me.

  ‘But, Mum, he’s my friend.’ Fear snaked down my spine as what she was saying sank in. I couldn’t survive without Jam. No way. My voice rose in panic. ‘You can’t stop me from seeing him.’

  ‘We can and we will,’ Mum snapped.

  And that – as far as she was concerned – was that.

  After Rory and I had been moved into our own room, I spent the rest of the day wandering miserably around the hotel. I hoped I’d bump into Jam or Carla, but I didn’t. When it got dark I came up and sat looking out of the window at the lights twinkling along the marina.

  Mum ordered food for me and Rory to eat in the room, then she and Dad went downstairs to the hotel restaurant. They didn’t even ask if I wanted to go with them.

  Mum just said: ‘Tomorrow’s a big day. Dad and I need to talk.’

  I picked at my food, trying to ignore the endless cartoons playing on the TV in our room. Too many thoughts were crowding in on me – all the stuff about Mum and Dad being desperate for a baby, whether Sonia Holtwood had been caught yet, and, of course, what it would mean if I really was Martha Lauren Purditt.

  I’d only ever thought about it as a kind of fantasy before. An alternative life which I could make up to suit my mood. Now I’d met the Purditts I was painfully aware that there was a whole family reality behind my fantasy. A family reality I was not at all sure I wanted to face.

  I tried to distract myself by playing I Spy with Rory, but he lost interest after one round and went back to his cartoons.

  Mum came in at about ten o’clock, threw a wobbly that Rory still had the telly on, wiped tomato ketchup off his face and left again.

  I pretended to be asleep.

  As the night wore on, my thoughts became darker, more insistent. When I turned away from one, another pushed its way into my head. I found myself imagining how Mum had tried to kill herself. Then it was Sonia Holtwood – I saw her in my mind’s eye waiting and watching outside the hotel room door. In the end I had to get up and go out into the corridor to prove to myself she wasn’t there.

  Get a grip, Lauren.

  As I lay down again in bed I caught sight of my suitcase, standing forlornly in the corner. Mum had brought it with her from Boston Airport. Waves of guilt washed over me as I remembered how haggard she and Dad had looked when they’d seen me earlier.

  I shuddered. Suppose Mum’d got so distraught not knowing what’d happened to me that she’d tried to kill herself again?

  I turned over and plumped up my pillow. Where was Jam? I missed him so badly. He was the only person I knew who let me be completely myself. Though what had he said? That I was the most self-obssessed person he’d ever met?

  Maybe I was. Maybe it was true.

  I slept for a while, then woke up as it was getting light. I lay on my back, listening to Rory snuffling like a piglet in the next bed.

  I tried not to think about what being the Purditt’s daughter would mean. They would want to see me again, which was fine – I was curious about them, too. But it wasn’t going to be easy.

  Suppose they wanted to call me Martha?

  Suppose they expected me to call them Mum and Dad?

  There was a gentle rap at the door. I sat up and looked across the room. Another rap, slightly louder this time.

  I scrambled out of bed and padded across the thick, hotel carpet. Rory was still breathing deep, snorty, breaths. I stood at the door and listened. My heart raced. Had I imagined it?

  ‘Lauren,’ whispered a low voice. ‘It’s me.’

  24

  DNA

  Jam.

  I pulled open the door. He was dressed. Green T-shirt and jeans. His eyes looked almost gold in the dim light of the hotel corridor. I felt this weird jolt in my stomach. His face was so cute. Why hadn’t I noticed before? The slope of his nose. The little knot in his eyebrow. The smooth curve of his lips.

  ‘They won’t let me see you,’ Jam looked furtively up and down the corridor. ‘I had to give the receptionist this big sob-story just to get your room number.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. I could feel my face reddening. This was Jam, for goodness�
�� sake. My best friend. But suddenly I had no idea what to say to him.

  Jam didn’t seem to notice how awkward I was being. He was frowning down at the floor, as if he was trying to make up his mind about something. ‘Lauren,’ he said. His voice was low, husky. It sent a shiver down my spine. ‘D’you remember me saying there was something I wanted to ask you?’

  I stepped closer to him. So close I could see each individual eyelash around his eyes. My heart was beating fast. He looked up. And then I saw it. I saw what he wanted to ask me. I saw what everyone else had been seeing for months.

  ‘Yes?’ My breath caught in my throat.

  Jam was looking at me, moving nearer. Nearer.

  I closed my eyes as his lips pressed – warm and soft – against my mouth. I felt this fizzing in the pit of my stomach and – and yes, I know it’s a major cliché – my knees went all weak, like they wouldn’t hold me up.

  I drew back and opened my eyes.

  Jam smiled at me.

  My insides melted like lipstick on a radiator.

  ‘Ugh. Are you kissing?’ I jumped. Rory was standing less than a metre away from us, inside the room, his snubby nose wrinkled in distaste.

  Voices echoed in the distance. Then footsteps. Louder and louder, stampeding towards us.

  In seconds the corridor was full of people. Jam was still smiling, gorgeously, at me. As if he hadn’t even noticed anyone else was here.

  ‘Good, Lauren you’re awake.’ MJ Johnson strode over, forcing me to tear my eyes away from Jam.

  ‘Get inside the room, please.’

  Her voice was strained. Urgent. I looked round at the other agents, behind her. They were carrying guns in their hands.

  ‘What is it?’ I said.

  MJ ignored me. She tried to spin Jam away from the door. ‘Back to your room, buddy.’

  For a split-second I thought maybe she’d seen us kissing. But immediately I knew that would hardly explain the other agents and the guns.

  ‘What’s happening?’ I said.

  Jam was still standing in the corridor.

  ‘Move,’ MJ barked at him.