by Tim Buckley
I tried not to shout but my voice was getting away from me.
“What made you say to yourself, ‘You know what, Emily, you go ahead, that’ll be fine’. Explain that to me, Em.”
She shook her head and silent tears ran down her face and dropped onto her lap.
“I can’t,” she whispered. “I don’t know why I did it, Wilde. I’m so sorry…”
I closed my eyes and sighed a long, battered sigh. The world had been ripped apart the night Cara disappeared, but even in the days that followed, I clung to the certainty that I had Emily, that we would work our way through this together and that we would find Cara, together. Even in the pictures of our future painted in the shadow of the doubt that loitered in the back of my mind, I had Emily and we would face that life together. But now, even that last comfort had been shattered and I couldn’t recognise the space I inhabited. Everything was strange, foreign, even more than it had been when we’d arrived in Clovelly. The people and places and things, the smell of the air and sounds of the countryside, the chatter of the radio and television, all looked and sounded and felt alien and hostile and removed from me. Without Cara, without Emily, I had nothing. I felt painfully alone.
I picked up her hand from mine and put it back in her lap.
“I need some air,” I said, and I left the house.
22
There’s always so much going on in the world these days, and we have such immediate and unbroken access to so much of it on television or over the internet, that it’s as if our attention span has contracted to cope with the volume of new content that bombards our every day. We don’t have time to linger long on any story, no matter how momentous, before the next headline edges it out of our consciousness. I’ve felt it myself, been ashamed of it, even. When a bombing claims lives, when a natural catastrophe batters a community, when disease or poverty or war lays waste whole regions, I admit that it takes only a few days before it’s been sanitised in my head. What’s worse, we can’t even stay with it long enough to see it through. There was a story a while back about a racist scumbag who followed a pregnant woman out of a supermarket, knocked her to the ground and kicked her in the stomach so viciously that she lost her baby. The guy got away and, for a few days, his CCTV-captured image was front-page copy and all over the news. I remember reading that story with real anger, really violent disgust. A few locals in a room with him for half an hour, I thought, maybe that’d be real justice. But you know what, I don’t even know if they got him. Some other story moved in and I don’t know if he was caught. There was nothing about his victim, how she is, how she has recovered from the ordeal. A passer-by tried to help her but the thug hit him with a metal pipe – I don’t even know if he survived. There’s so much ugliness in the world now we just can’t keep up. Or we don’t want to, maybe, I don’t know…
That’s how it felt to me. For a couple of weeks after Cara disappeared, the village was full of the story. The local newspapers, television and radio covered it in detail, too much detail it sometimes seemed. Conversations in shops or in the pub went sympathetically quiet when we walked in because it was what everybody was talking about. Teachers in school had to reassure kids that there wasn’t some monster on the loose and parents made sure that doors were locked and that their own children were always in sight.
But even in a small town like ours, the airwaves are busy and it didn’t take long for the story to fall off the front page and to be relegated to the end of the newscast. Other topics of conversation took over in the hair salons and nail bars and the kids at school stopped fretting. The posters that we had put up in Clovelly and in the neighbouring towns were covered in the grime of traffic and dust, frayed and tattered by the wind. The local newspapers weren’t interested anymore when we asked them to run with a new angle or with some editorial, just to keep it on the radar. Hits on the web page that we set up tailed off and petered out, it stopped trending on Twitter and Facebook seemed not to like it so much anymore.
I kept calling in on the police station every day but Carter was there less and less frequently. Willis assured me that the case was getting just as much attention as it had from the start and not to read anything into it, Carter was still focused on finding Cara. But despite the reassurances, I had the distinct impression that, since they discovered that Emily had lied to them, they were more interested in investigating her than looking for who had really taken Cara.
It was a Tuesday morning and I was doing my daily check on posts to the website. In the early days, we’d had as many as two or three hundred posts a day from people wishing us well and promising prayers, even offering money to help with the search or to supplement the reward we had offered for information. There were, too, the inevitably vitriolic, nasty messages, targeting us just because we were visible. And there were the equally inevitable false leads from people either delusional, seeking attention or just plain sick. Visitors to the site and the messages they left reflected the spectrum of humanity, from the good to the bad and the downright ugly.
That morning, however, there was something new. An anonymous contributor had posted a photograph, asking if it could possibly be Cara. The picture was taken from some distance and wasn’t sharp, but it could have been her, it was about her shape and size. The poster said they had seen her with a man, who didn’t seem to be in the picture, and that she had seemed “upset”. I stared at the photograph, tried to zoom into it and to enhance the quality, but it was beyond my technical ability. There were no other details, no mention of where the photograph was taken or when, and there were no contact details. There was the picture and nothing else. I grabbed my laptop and tore down to the police station. Carter, as it happened, was there and I showed him the message and the image that had been attached. He sent it off to their technical people in the city and all I could do was go home and wait. I stared at the photo for what felt like hours trying to find any clue that might be hidden within it, but there was nothing. Finally, Carter called.
“It’s not great news, Mr Wilde, to be honest,” he said. “The techs have had a look but they can’t enhance the image and there’s no way we can identify it as Cara. They had no luck either pinpointing where the message came from.”
“But surely there must have been a source IP address, or something?” I said, unable to believe that this wasn’t a real lead, a lead worth following up. “There must be a trail, surely?”
“Apparently not, Mr Wilde. I’m no expert in these things, but the boys have followed it as far as they could and they’ve come up empty. There was one thing – they managed to enhance a logo in the top corner of the image. It’s a shopping mall in a little place called Mitchelstown in South Australia, down the coast from Adelaide. We asked the local police to send a couple of uniforms over to canvas the place, but so far they’ve come up with nothing. They had a look at the security tapes but they’re really poor quality, apparently, you can see bugger all on them.”
“What shopping mall?” I said, pulling out my notepad and a pen.
“East Shore Mall, it’s called. I’m not too hopeful of getting any hits on that photo, but I’ll let you know.”
I hung up the phone, booted up my laptop and booked a flight to Adelaide.
23
Mitchelstown is about an hour’s drive from the airport in Adelaide, a small holiday town popular with the surf crowd and retirees. It’s made up mostly of caravan parks, campsites and fast food shops, as well as the apparently mandatory sex shop and poker machines arcade that you’ll find in every small Australian town. With a couple of surf shops and schools for the surfers and a parched, patchy bowling green for the seniors, Mitchelstown is a bizarre mix of potting sheds and pot.
I didn’t really have a plan, so when I got there I headed straight for the shopping mall. It wasn’t hard to find and I parked the car, then sat there looking at the shoppers walking in and out of the centre. I didn’t know what to do next. In the m
ovies, the hero always seems to know what to do. He pulls up in the car and strides purposefully for wherever it is he’s going. I wasn’t feeling very heroic and I had no script and no real idea. So I took a couple of photographs of Cara from my bag and made my way inside.
East Shore Mall looked like something from the Aussie soaps I watched as a kid. Most of whatever had covered the floor had been worn away and the exposed underlay was black and tacky underfoot. A lot of the units were empty and those that were trading had drab, old signage and tired facades. The few potted trees in the main concourse had shed their leaves and leaned wearily against the walls. A grinning orange whale lined with red neon hung over the escalator, I recognised the logo from the photograph posted to the website. Tinny muzak on a short loop piped through scratchy old speakers and even the shoppers looked like bored extras from a low-budget television production. It was just before the start of the holiday season and so there weren’t really that many of them around. I looked around me, took a deep breath and set off.
To start with, the only people I approached with the photographs were young couples or mothers with pushchairs. Without ever thinking it, I suppose that I considered them more likely to empathise. More likely, too, to know what I was talking about than the pensioners I saw shuffling round and who, I must have thought, were trying to remember what they had come here for and were unlikely to remember seeing Cara. Most of the people I asked were sympathetic – I suppose you don’t ask that question if you haven’t lost her and who is not going to be sympathetic when faced with that? Some were suspicious, maybe they thought I was a divorced father trying to break a custody order? Some of them couldn’t be bothered and some were in too much of a hurry. But they were all a little bit uncomfortable, too. I went into the shops and asked the staff on the floor or behind the tills, but they were mostly too busy to help me. I’d been asking around for fifteen or twenty minutes when I felt a tap on my shoulder.
“Watcha doin’ there, mate?”
I turned to find a barrel-chested security guard staring down at me from his six-foot-odd vantage point over my head.
“I’m looking for someone,” I said, showing him the photograph. “She’s missing and I got a tip that she might have been seen here.”
He looked at the photograph but he seemed unmoved.
“Got a permit?” he asked.
“Do I need a permit? Really? To ask people if they’ve seen her?”
“Yeah. You need a permit from the building manager. You don’t have one?”
I shook my head and he shrugged.
“Then I’m sorry, mate,” he said, “you can’t be bothering the customers.”
I shook my head and sighed, then showed him the photograph again.
“Have you seen her? It looked like she was on that escalator over there, under the big whale logo?”
He took the photograph and looked at it for a moment, then shook his head.
“Sorry, mate. We get thousands of kids through here.”
“I guess so, but I thought someone might recognise her, somebody might have noticed her.”
“Your little one, is she?”
I nodded and he softened suddenly.
“I’m really sorry, mate,” he said, putting a huge hand on my shoulder. “You tried the police?”
I nodded and he thought for a moment.
“OK,” he said, quietly, looking around him, “just keep it low-key, don’t make any trouble and I’ll turn a blind eye, all right? But if anybody complains, I’ll have to chuck you out. Got that?”
“Thanks, man,” I said, “I owe you one.”
He winked at me and I got back to work. But still nobody had seen Cara. I showed the photograph to a couple of guys in business suits having a coffee, to some kids watching a video in a television shop window, to three workmen who’d come over from the unit they were fitting out to get a sandwich for lunch. Around school’s out time, the place filled up with kids in uniforms and backpacks, but none of them had seen her either. And by the time they were getting ready to close up, there was just me and a couple of the cleaning staff left, but they hadn’t seen the little girl in the picture.
“Any luck?” the security guard asked me, as he unlocked the main door to let me out.
“No,” I shook my head, “but thanks. I appreciate you letting me do that.”
“Sure,” he said, “and I hope you find her, mate.”
“Me too,” I said, and headed out into the dusk.
***
Most of the places around town were closed for the off-season, gearing up for the holidays, and so I ended up in the hotel bar with a pie and a pint of pale ale. It had been a frustrating day, and a long one, and I was shattered. There were rugby highlights on the TV and I watched them while I ate, smiling to myself when it made me think of Brendan in the Shelbourne all that time ago. So much had happened since then that I could hardly fit it all in my head. The me then, sitting in the bar after the rejections at the book fair, would surely find my story of what had happened since an implausible work of fiction.
I finished my beer and paid the bill and I was heading back to my room when a bloke standing with a couple of other men at the bar broke away and came over to me.
“Sorry, mate,” he said, “but were you in the East Shore Mall today? Looking for a kid?”
“I was, yes.”
He worked, he told me, in the sports shop in the centre and he’d been with a customer when I’d come in and showed the picture to the staff there, so he didn’t have time to have a good look. But afterwards, in a quiet moment, something had occurred to him.
“She was so little,” he said, “that’s why I remember her. Her dad brought her in to get a rash vest because she was going to have a body-boarding lesson.”
“Where?” I asked him, scarcely able to believe that I might be on the right track, that this was a lead that might finally bear fruit. “Where did she have the lesson?”
“Tony’s place, he has a surf school in front of the Palm Tree Caravan Park. He has a hut there on the beach, you can’t miss it.”
***
I didn’t sleep much that night. I called Emily but I didn’t tell her about the little surfing girl, it wasn’t fair to get her hopes up like that and this was probably still a long shot. I was up next morning long before my alarm and I went for a run along the beach as the sun came up. I passed Tony’s surf shack, still closed up, but there was nothing to say what time he’d be opening up. So I got back to the hotel, showered and brought a coffee back down to the beach to wait for Tony.
It was grey and cool and there were spots of rain on the wind. I ambled up and down the shoreline, kicking stones into the water, alone on the beach. I thought about the times Cara and I had played on the beach below the lighthouse, building sandcastles and collecting shells that we would put to our ears to listen to other oceans, far away. She would sit with every shell and run the tip of her finger over one side, smooth as her rosy cheeks, and then the other, rough like stone. She could lose herself so completely in the wonder of it all that a parade of princesses could go by unnoticed. She had always loved the ocean, and it took long negotiations to convince her to leave the beach so that we could go back up to the lighthouse or go home. She would be happy at the ocean, it would be familiar and safe, even. But she would wonder where I was, why had I left her alone, when was I coming to take her home? She would be frightened and confused. The thought wound my guts into a tight knot.
I stayed there for an hour or more, nobody else around and no sign of Tony. It occurred to me that he might not open up on a day like today, but his hut didn’t look like he’d gone away or that his season hadn’t yet started. I was peering in through the window when a voice behind me called out.
“Hey, buddy, what can I do for you?”
He was a tall, lean man in his late twenties, early thirties maybe
, browned by long days in the sun. His long blonde hair was straggled and knotted and his smile was warm.
“Tony?” I asked.
“That’s me. Unless I owe you money!”
“No,” I smiled back, “nothing like that! I’m looking for a little girl, for my daughter.”
I told him the story, told him about the anonymous message on the website and the photograph from the East Shore Mall.
“I was there yesterday,” I said, showing him the photograph, “asking around. A guy from the sports shop thought he might have seen her, thought someone might have brought her into the shop to get some stuff for a lesson with you.”
He looked at the picture and stroked his stubbled jaw.
“I do remember a little one,” he said, nodding, “a couple of weeks back. I remember because she was really too little for a lesson. I don’t really remember the dad – I mean, the bloke she was with. And I don’t think I met a mother. For sure, I don’t remember thinking anything was out of place… I mean, I’d have gone straight to the cops if I’d thought anything like that was going on.” He took the photograph and squinted at it. “But, I’ll be honest, mate,” he said, “I really couldn’t tell you if that’s her.”
Then something occurred to him. Handing the photograph back to me, he took out his keys and unlocked the shack, then reached up for something on a shelf over the door. It was an old shoebox full of photographs of different people standing with Tony and his surfboard, taken on the beach in front of the shack. He had to flick through them a couple of times, but then he found what he was looking for.
“Yeah,” he said, looking at it again before passing it to me, “that’s her, that’s the little one.”
He might as well have punched me in the gut. She was beautiful, the little girl with the cheeky smile staring up at Tony. She was beautiful, but she wasn’t Cara. I grabbed the box from him and started rifling through the photographs. He didn’t try to stop me, just stood and watched me.