by Tim Buckley
After a while, the dangers of the everyday fell into some sort of perspective and I reluctantly came to understand that she was not as fragile as all that. She was, in fact, quite robust and not in need of the cotton wool in which I was ready to wrap her nor the glass case in which I wanted her to live. That was when I started to panic about what the world would throw at her that I might not always be able to fend off. I worried first that she might get sick. The mumps and measles that might befall a kid in Dublin were little in comparison to the diseases that ran rampant in our new home, borne by who knew how many different kinds of spider, snake or bug. I put her on the list for every vaccination that was going and a few that weren’t, until then I worried that I’d filled her tiny body with more deadly disease than she could possibly be expected to withstand. Then I worried about her car seat when we were driving, about the steriliser for her bottles when we were feeding, about her fire-retardant bed clothes when she was sleeping. It was all getting, I have to admit, ridiculous. Emily tried her best to keep me from killing Cara with care and driving myself insane and gradually I calmed, as she put it, the fuck down.
During those early months, I worried about everything, but I never worried that somebody else might hurt her. I don’t know why. Maybe I thought I could protect her from everybody else; maybe I thought she was too beautiful for anybody to want to harm. Either way, it never occurred to me. Until it happened.
I ran back out of the house and jumped on the quad bike, not really sure where I was going but not able to do nothing. Cara couldn’t get out of a locked house and yet she wasn’t in the house, so she had to be out here somewhere. I rode the quad bike round and round the gardens and through the machinery paddocks. I checked all the sheds but they were padlocked and so I rode out into the vineyards and down to the river. The river… With all of the rains that month the river was swollen and fast and my stomach lurched at the thought that she might have gone in. But that was impossible. There was no way she could have made her way that far, in the dark, through a couple of gates and up the steep slope that led to the river bank. Even if she had got out of the house… But she had got out of the house… I took the quad bike out onto the road that ran past the farm gate, turning the handlebars this way and that to light up the ditches on either side. But she wasn’t anywhere to be seen. She was nowhere. She was gone.
I raced the bike back to the house, the screaming engine tearing apart the darkness. When I got back, Sergeant Willis’s squad car was in the yard. I ran into the house, praying to a God I didn’t believe in that it had all been a stupid mistake, that we’d somehow missed her tiny body sleeping under blankets in the crib or that she’d hidden herself away under the stairs or in a cupboard. But just the look on Emily’s face wrenched any and all hope out of my gut.
In my head, the days that followed have a Dali-esque surrealism. Echoes of voices drawl in a deep slow motion, like a video played at the wrong speed. Solid objects in my memory seem to drip off tables and off the walls. The energy has been sucked out of every replayed scene. I know it didn’t feel that way at the time but in my head, everything creeps along at a slowed-down pace, recollections crawl.
The police forensics team was sent down from the city and they combed the whole place for anything that might tell a piece of the tale, but it was like a ghost had been through our house and left no trace. The locals rallied round and worked in gangs to search the lands around the house and even further afield. I watched them on the local news and remembered times I’d seen other people’s agonies on my TV without really giving them a second thought. The police detective suggested that we speak to the press, that exposure in the media might bring forward a witness, and so we did interviews with the local papers and with a journalist from one of the national television channels. My abiding memory is the feeling of uselessness, that there was nothing I could do to make this better. Even speaking to the journalists, when they asked if there was anything I could tell them that might jog somebody’s memory or shed some light, I had nothing. I had to stop myself from making stuff up just to make myself feel less worthless.
I was getting angry, too. Angry that I was doing nothing, but angry also at the insinuations people were starting to make about Emily. The longer time went on without any hard evidence that anybody else had been involved, the more audible the quiet whispering. Even the police seemed to question her story, the story she told them over and over again.
She had come back up from the fields that night when I called her from the house. When I’d gone back to the site, she’d fed Cara and they’d played for a little while. Then she’d bathed Cara to get the day’s grime off her and then she’d put her to bed. She’d gone back downstairs to read but she was exhausted after a tough day and so she’d had a shower and gone to bed. The next thing she remembered was me shouting Cara’s name downstairs.
– What time had she put Cara to bed?
– About seven thirty.
– What time had she gone to bed herself?
– About eight thirty.
– Was she sure she’d locked all the doors?
– Yes, she was sure, she always did, especially if I was away.
– Did she see or hear anything odd that night? A strange car, maybe?
– No.
– Had she seen anybody hanging round during the day?
– No.
– Could she think of anybody who might have done this, who might want to hurt her or her child?
– No.
– Had she been having any problems? With Cara? Kids can be tough, frustrating even, and sometimes it’s easy to lose your temper…
– NO!!!
“I’m sorry, love, I know this is difficult,” the policewoman said, gently, “but we have to ask, you do understand that? There’s nothing else you want to tell me?”
Emily covered her face with her hands and shook her head, sobbing quietly. I held her tighter and kissed her head. It was bad enough that we couldn’t find our child, she didn’t deserve this.
“Look,” I said, trying to keep my cool, “we’ve been through this a thousand times. Shouldn’t you be… I don’t know? Doing something else? Anything else?”
The detective put away her notebook and stood up, looking at me with a mixture of pity and pique.
“We’re doing everything we can, Mr Wilde,” she said. “Just let us get on with it, OK?”
I had to bite my tongue. These people were our best chance of getting Cara back, however it looked from where I was sitting.
“Just one other thing,” said the detective to Emily, her tone softening again. “If somebody has taken her, it’s possible that they would have taken clothes to put on her. Do you know if there are any clothes missing?”
I went up to her wardrobe and flicked through the clothes on the shelves and in the drawers. I couldn’t be sure what was missing or in the laundry, so I went down to the utility room to look in the basket. There was nothing missing that I could see so I went back to the kitchen where the detective was sitting with Emily. That’s when I noticed that her jacket was missing from the hook at the front door. It took a moment to register too that her boots were gone from the mat.
“Her jacket, it’s gone. And her boots, too,” I said to the detective, taking Emily’s hand as I said it. For some reason, it brought the whole sickening episode to life, the fact that whoever had taken her had lifted her jacket from the hook, had maybe put her boots on at the front door. What had just been a nightmare from which we were still hoping to wake was made starkly tangible by the things that they had touched. I found a photograph of Cara in her jacket and boots from a couple of weeks before, up at the lighthouse. We’d bought her own little plastic hammer and she was following Robbie around, tapping on everything that he pointed to. The detective took the picture and added it to her folder.
And so the days dragged past. We spent them out driving around
in the vain, pointless hope that… what? She’d be sitting by the side of the road, waiting for us? That someone would flag us down to tell us they’d seen her, safe and well, playing in the field or in a playground. We made hundreds of copies of her picture and posted it on lampposts in Clovelly and in all of the towns around. We stopped people in the streets and in shops to show them her photograph, to ask if they’d seen her. Most people had seen the story on the news, they knew our faces from the television and the papers. Most of them looked at us with pity, put friendly hands on our shoulders, told us they were praying for us or rooting for us or just thinking about us. They told us it would all be OK, they were sure it would. But their voices were not. We called all of the hospitals again, even though they were all aware of the story, even though the police had been in touch with all of them, even though we’d done the same thing a few days before. A devout non-believer, Emily went to the church and prayed, as much to escape from the world for a little while as in the hope of any divine intervention.
As the days went by, even we knew in our hearts that she hadn’t wandered off on her own, that she hadn’t negotiated the locked door and gone out into the night. In truth, we always knew. If we hadn’t found her by now, she must have been taken. Somebody must be hiding her. That thought made me even angrier and more desperate. The thought of her with somebody else, frightened and confused and alone, made me want to cut my own skin. I swore that I would kill whoever had taken her, I’d rip them to pieces and burn what was left. I couldn’t bear to go to the lighthouse so Nathan was holding that fort. Emily’s vines went untended but for Karl’s efforts but none of that seemed to matter. Nothing really seemed to matter.
It was early morning a few days later and we were sitting having breakfast in the kitchen, the door out on to the stoop open and the house full of the noises of outside. We sat in silence, drinking coffee and picking at the breakfast Emily had made. We’d eaten only scraps in the days that had followed that night, and I was living on caffeine. We were exhausted from the tautness of the tension and lack of sleep. We lay awake in bed at night until one of us got up to do something, anything. Read a book, potter around the internet for news of Cara, check our messages. Again. We had run out of things to say to each other, and run out of the will to try, so we just sat in silence. If we had no new ideas for where she might be or where to find her, there was nothing worth saying. Nothing else mattered.
Then, from outside, there was the sound of gravel crunching and a car engine. I jumped up and went to the door, my heart sprang when I saw the police car. They’d found her, it was all over. Surely.
“G’day, Mr Wilde,” said the detective. He was a grizzly old cop from the city, Carter was his name. He had moved there from Sydney a few years before to retire, but his wife had left him and the thought of an empty retirement didn’t do much for him. So he continued to work and he probably would until they marched him out the door. “Is this a good time?”
“Of course, come on in. Have you found something?”
He came in and Emily poured him a coffee. He made himself comfortable and took a long mouthful. He was in no hurry, it seemed, to get to the point.
“What is it, Detective?” I said, running out of patience.
“You know that plot of land where they’re building, about a kilometre down the road, going away from town?”
I nodded. Some people from the city had bought it for a holiday home. The builders had cleared the site and broken the ground to start work when the owners ran out of money. There was some legal wrangling and the whole thing was tied up in the courts, so the site had lain empty for as long as we’d been in town.
“Well,” Carter went on, “have you guys ever seen any cars up there? Ever seen anybody parked on the site?”
I looked at Emily, she shook her head. I tried to think but we didn’t often go past the house, there was never any need to go out that far. I’d never seen anything out there, that I could remember.
“I don’t think so. Isn’t it closed off?” I said. “There’s a big fence around it, no?”
“There was, but it got battered in the winds a while back. Big section of it’s just lying on the ground now.”
“And?” I said, willing him to get on with it. “Why do you ask?”
“This is great coffee, couldn’t trouble you for another one, could I?”
Emily got up to refill his mug, and I waited for her to come back.
“Thanks, love,” he said, when she handed him the mug, taking another mouthful.
“Detective Carter, what’s the significance of the plot?” I said, and I could feel my cheeks getting flushed with frustration.
“Sorry, Mr Wilde, yeah… Well, there aren’t many tracks on the soil up there on account of the work they did levelling it before they stopped working on it, mainly just heavy machinery tracks, diggers and the like. But one of our boys noticed some other, newer-looking tracks. Look like they might be from a four-by-four or a truck. You definitely haven’t seen anything down there? Or even passing by your place?”
I tried to think had we seen or heard anything on the road in the days before, but I could think of nothing.
“No, I don’t think so, no. You think it might be whoever took Cara?”
“It’s hard to say, Mr Wilde, so don’t get too excited. But it’s a lead we’ll have to follow up. The tracks are pretty distinctive, we’ll talk to the tyre suppliers and see if we can’t come up with a list of people who’ve bought them. Like I say, don’t get too excited. It’s a long shot. But I’ll keep you in the loop if we find anything.”
He finished his coffee and got up from the armchair with a groan.
“Thanks for the coffee,” he said. “And listen, don’t go sticking your nose in up there, OK? There’s a few crime scene boys having a look around so just leave them to it.”
As soon as he was gone, we jumped in the jeep and raced up to the plot. Sergeant Willis’s car was there, with another unmarked car, and a couple of crime scene detectives were taking a cast of the tyre tracks, taking photographs of the site and generally sniffing around.
When he saw us, Willis came over to the re-erected fence, which was draped in police tape warning off trespassers.
“You’ve been talking to Carter, I take it,” he said.
I nodded.
“Don’t worry,” I said, “we’re not going to get in your way. What do you think? Is it a real lead?”
He shrugged.
“Don’t get many cars out here, but I guess you’d know that. It’s a bit out of the way. Could be a couple of kids looking for a bit of privacy, I suppose, but there’s just the one set of tracks. If this was a lovers’ spot, you’d expect to see more. And the tracks are quite unusual. But look, we’ll follow it up and who knows…”
Emily and I watched them for a few minutes, then turned reluctantly and walked back to the car.
“I don’t remember the last time I heard a car passing the house,” Emily said in an excited whisper, “do you?”
I shook my head.
“It must be them,” she said. “It must be. It’s just too much of a coincidence, isn’t it? Don’t you think?”
We got to the jeep and climbed in.
“I suppose so. I just don’t think we can assume anything,” I said. I was battling against getting too buoyant but it was the first real piece of evidence we’d had and the first time I’d had a surge of hope founded in anything concrete. I brought my forehead gently to hers and closed my eyes.
“But yes, it might be,” I said. “It might be.”
18
I first met Brendan at a writers’ fair in Dublin. I’d gone along to yet another event more in the hope than the expectation that I might find an agent to take a look at my bright and shiny and newly completed manuscript. In the way of these things, I’d been looking for representation for almost a year and I was sta
rting to feel a bit disenchanted by the whole thing. The early-days excitement of a foray into the world of publishing had gradually fizzled out and I was out of money and ideas. Worst of all, I was facing the grim prospect of getting a real job if I wanted to continue eating and to continue living with a roof over me and walls around me.
Brendan was and is a big deal in Dublin literary circles. He was way out of my league and so I had no illusions of even trying to talk to him. I knew him by reputation, of course, but we moved in very different worlds and so I’d never met him. To be honest, I didn’t even know what he looked like. Instead, I had a few names in my pocket of new, young agents who, I’d heard, were looking for their own break, looking for protégés who might forge their reputations. And so I searched out the names on my list and made my pitch; but even as they offered words of advice and encouragement, I could see their eyes flitting over my shoulder and around the room, searching out the writers whose names were on the lists in their pockets. Mine, clearly, was not and so, after being let down gently for the fifth time, I rolled up the manuscript, picked up my jacket from the rack at the door and wandered out.
The fair was being held at a plush hotel in the city centre and, walking through the lobby, I could see into the bar with its dark wood panelling and mosaic-tiled floor, stained glass and a busy log fire crackling in the corner. I figured the least I deserved was a couple of pints before I had to brave the wind and the rain and the bus home. The bar was quiet for a Saturday evening. These were the days just after the bottom fell out of Dublin and there weren’t many weekend shoppers out abusing their credit cards in the local upmarket stores. It was still a bit early for the evening crowd to be in for their first drinks of the night. The television in the corner was showing the rugby and there was an empty table under it and beside the fire. So I pulled up a chair, tossed the manuscript on the table like the oversized beermat it seemed destined to be, and settled myself in with a pint of stout and a packet of crisps.