Cara is Missing

by Tim Buckley

  I went to the travel site we always used for holidays and searched for hotels in Sydney – two hundred and forty two. The café she’d been to that morning and the ATM were both downtown, near Circular Quay and near the botanic gardens. It made sense that she might stay around there, so I narrowed down the search to The Rocks and the Central Business District. Just fewer than a hundred. I made a coffee, started at ‘A’ and asked to speak to Emily. I knew she might not use her married name, so I tried her maiden name too but after twenty-odd calls, I still hadn’t found her. I called all that afternoon and evening and by the time it got dark I’d called thirty-three hotels. It was hopeless. For all I knew, she might have left instructions at the desk not to take any calls. I was looking for a needle in a haystack made of needles.

  I went to the kitchen and started to make another coffee, then said “Fuck it” and took a beer out of the fridge. The phone rang and I grabbed it.

  “Emily?” I said.

  “Wilde? You OK?” It was Bobby. Karl had told her about me calling and it seemed odd to her so she’d put two and two together and got close to the right answer.

  “Honestly? Not really. Emily’s gone, Bobby. She’s just upped and left, said nothing, just left a note.”

  “Shit. Sorry, Wilde. Want me to come over?”

  “No, thanks, Bob. I’m going to have a beer and go to bed. I’ve tracked her down to Sydney and I’m calling hotels there. But I’m starting to think it’s pointless. I don’t know what name she’s checked in under, I don’t know if she’s told them not to take any calls. I don’t even know for sure that’s where she is, all I know is that she used her card there today. I want to just jump on the next flight to Sydney, but she could have taken a plane to Timbuktu for all I know.”

  “Jeez, mate, tough break. Anything I can do?”

  “Thanks, but I don’t think so. I’m just going to have to wait it out, I guess, hope she comes back soon. But she’s messed up, Bobby, she’s really messed up. I’m afraid she’ll do something daft.”

  “Have you reported her missing?”

  I sighed.

  “No. Not yet. I just know the cops’ll jump straight to the wrong conclusion if I tell them she’s run off. Anyway, she’s not really ‘missing’, is she? I mean, she’s packed a bag and taken her stuff. There’s no point reporting her ‘missing’ if she’s just left of her own accord. I’ll give it a couple of days then… maybe. I don’t know. What a fucking fiasco.”

  “Look, I’ll come over tomorrow. Maybe we can take half the hotels each, be quicker at least?”

  “OK, thanks, Bobby. See you tomorrow.”

  27

  The first time I heard of David Napier was when Bill McLeod’s fishing boat went down off Solomon’s Rock. The boat worked out of Blantyre, a fishing port with a small fleet about an hour down the coast. McLeod had two sons and a daughter and one of the boys was on the boat with him that day. Napier was a journalist with the Perth office of one of the nationals and he was assigned to the story. He was a rookie and nobody thought there was much to it other than human interest and how the community would come to terms with the grief that comes after tragedy. While he was researching the story, however, Napier stumbled across an email that McLeod had sent to his Fisheries Union representative. In it, he alleged that Maritime Harvest Inc., a huge industrial fisheries conglomerate, was breaching fishing regulations off the west coast by using illegal longlines and that they were hiding the problem by faking paperwork. Napier might have been a rookie but he knew the rancid whiff of a scandal. What’s more, he had enough naïve idealism to believe that he really could right a wrong, no matter how big the wrongdoer.

  His report uncovered the scandal and it became something of a cause célèbre, firing emotions in fishing communities up and down the west coast. Celebrities from show business and sport joined locals and environmentalists to picket the company’s factories and blockade their trawlers. When Bill McLeod’s boat was lifted from the ocean floor, the police forensics team found traces of an explosive and they opened a criminal investigation. Two Maritime Harvest executives and a trawlerman were found guilty of murder and the unassuming Napier became something of a reluctant local hero. I hadn’t heard much more about him after that. I knew the face but I hadn’t seen it for a while, and that’s why it took me a moment to recognise him when he turned up at our door.

  “Mr Wilde, is it?” he said, putting his laptop bag down on the step and reaching out a hand. “I’m David Napier, I’m a reporter with the Observer.”

  “Yeah, hi. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m sorry to turn up unannounced, Mr Wilde. You see, I heard about your daughter. I’m so sorry for what’s happened. I have a little girl myself and I can only imagine what you and your wife have been going through. But I think that, maybe, I can help.”

  Apart from the usual crackpots, traffic to the website we’d created had pretty much dried up and the discovery of the tyre tracks up at the empty plot seemed to have led nowhere. Carter was in town less and less and Willis, even if he’d wanted to, had neither the resources nor the experience to run a kidnapping investigation. I felt like I was scrabbling my way out of a hole while everybody else was tipping more dirt in on top of me. Napier had done some good work on the McLeod case and he was well known in the area, and coverage in the national press was just what we needed. There was certainly nothing to lose so I invited him in and offered him a coffee. We swapped small talk while the coffee machine buzzed in the kitchen and when it finally pinged I went back to pour.

  “Beautiful place you’ve got, Mr Wilde,” he said. He was standing at the French windows looking out over the vines.

  “You can call me Wilde,” I said, handing him a coffee, “that’s what everyone calls me.”

  He smiled.

  “That might take me a while to get used to!”

  We sat down at the table and he took out a notebook.

  “So what do you want to know? There’s not much that isn’t out there already,” I said.

  “So look, Mr… sorry, Wilde!… I’ve been following the case of your little girl’s disappearance and I’m not after a news story. As you say, the facts are out there and, as far as I can tell, nothing much has changed. I’m interested in the human angle – how something like this changes your life. I want to talk about how you carry on, what you hope for, what you do every day and how every day is affected by what’s happened.”

  He paused as though waiting for me to respond but I said nothing.

  “And a big piece in the weekend supplement would mean a lot of exposure,” he said, “her picture on the website and in the paper all over the country. I don’t have to tell you how kids pull on people’s heart strings. If they can help, they will.”

  I nodded. We needed the publicity, that was without question, but I was loath to let an outsider into our chaotic and dysfunctional lives. I didn’t even know where Emily was and yet I was supposed to present a picture to the world that would stoke their pity, get them on our side? But how could I turn down the opportunity to get her face out there again, to remind the world that my little girl was missing? There wasn’t really a decision to make.

  I nodded again.

  “OK,” I said. “What do you need to know?”

  “Well, I’ve read the reports obviously, but I’d like it hear it in your own words. What can you tell me about the night Cara disappeared?”

  What indeed. That I was in the pub and my wife had popped out leaving our child alone in an unlocked house? Sometimes you subconsciously mould the truth to shine a warmer light on things you’ve done. You don’t even notice that you’re doing it, maybe because in your own head it’s become the truth. So you were only doing sixty kilometres per hour when the accident happened, or you definitely checked that the heater was unplugged before you went out or you couldn’t possibly have damaged the garden fence, you only hop
ped over to get your kid’s football. And you believe it because it’s become the truth.

  But I didn’t believe it was true. I just told the story I needed to tell.

  “I’ve had a team working on a lighthouse up at Cape Moonlight,” I said, “and I was up there while we were fitting new glass into the light casing. I always take Cara up to the lighthouse but we were running late and she was getting tired. She was a bit under the weather too and she had a bit of a cough, so I’d brought her home and she was in the house with Emily. At some point during the evening, Cara disappeared from the house. Someone got into the house and took her. Emily was in bed – she goes to bed early – and when I got home, Cara was gone.”

  I suppose I didn’t lie, none of that was a lie. But I left out big chunks of the truth. He asked me more about that night – how did the intruder get into the house? How come Emily didn’t hear Cara cry out? It’s such an isolated spot, would a car not have woken Emily?

  “Emily works hard, sleeps like the dead,” I said. That, at least, was true.

  “And what happened when you got home from the lighthouse?”

  I shrugged.

  “Everything went crazy. I saw that Cara was gone, so I took out the quad bike and drove around looking for her.”

  “The quad bike? Not the jeep?”

  “The quad bike could cover the terrain better, especially down by the river.”

  And the jeep was in town where I’d left it because I’d had too many beers to drive it home. I didn’t say.

  “And what time was that?”

  Careful now.

  “I don’t know, ten… ten thirty?”

  He frowned.

  “I’d have thought that that evening’s events, the timeline, would be stamped hard on your memory, Mr… I mean, Wilde? You must have gone over it again and again?”

  “For sure. No it was ten thirty, just before.”

  “So it was dark then? Late to be working on the lighthouse, no?”

  “Like I say, we were running late and we had to get the glass in. The generator had run out of diesel so I’d gone up to Bill McCreery’s gas station with a jerry can so that we could power up the arc-lights. Everything went wrong that night, we were way behind schedule and we just had to stay until it was done.”

  He looked at me and said nothing for a moment, then smiled.

  “I understand, got it.”

  He scribbled in his notepad and I stood up.

  “More coffee?” I said.

  “Sure, that’d be great.”

  I walked over to the kitchen and he followed me, standing by the window and putting his notepad on the worktop.

  “I read in the news reports at the time that you thought whoever took her might have taken a jacket and a pair of boots, a pink jacket and boots with fairy-tale princesses, I think?”

  “Yes, they were usually at the front door but they were gone.”

  “Do you have another photograph of her in that jacket? It might help to print a different picture, people will have got used to the first one. It’s amazing how people stop seeing what they’re used to seeing”

  “Sure, I have a few others, I’ll get one for you.”

  “And what have you been doing, you know, since she disappeared? I guess this must be taking up a lot of your lives right now?”

  “All of my life. And Emily’s,” I said. “We have websites and we track people’s comments, although ninety-nine per cent of them are crackpots or scam artists. We’ve been around all of the local towns, posting flyers and showing her picture to people. We try to get the press to keep the story alive, try to make sure that the police are still doing everything they can. Every day, it’s the first thing you do when you wake up and the last thing you do before you go to bed. It’s just everything.”

  “And you’ve been down to South Australia, I understand?”

  “Er, yes,” I said, taken aback although I should have realised he’d have done his research. “To a little place called Mitchelstown. We got a lead on the website but it turned out just to be a little girl who looked a bit like Cara. It wasn’t her.”

  “Did Emily go down there with you?”

  “No,” I shook my head slowly, “no she didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because… we felt it was important that one of us always be here.”

  I poured more coffee and we talked until the pot was dry. How had I found the reaction of local people? Did I think it would have been easier in my own country, where I was a local?

  I told him that people had rallied around us, that we’d been grateful for their help and that we didn’t know what we’d have done without them. The usual trite bullshit that people say in our position, meaningless and cookie-cutter.

  “But people have their own problems,” I said, “you can’t expect them to give all their time to every crisis, nobody can do that.”

  “So life has pretty much returned to normal, you think?”

  “I guess so. That’s just the way it is, I suppose.”

  “Everyone’s got their own troubles to worry about, eh?”

  He flicked back through the notepad and tapped his top lip with the end of his pen.

  “And how is Emily doing? Is she going to be home, by the way? I’d love to talk to her today if I could?”

  Careful, again.

  “Er, not today, I’m afraid. She’s gone to stay with some friends, she just needs a bit of time away from it all. Not that she can ever get away from it all, but some time away from here will do her good, I think.”

  Would she be away for long, he asked and where was she? We had no family here in Australia, do we have close friends that she could go to? How did we know them and had they come here to be with us during these tough times? It would be good to talk to some locals, he said, to get a local’s perspective.

  I picked my way through the minefield of my own making, trying not to tread on the lies I’d already planted. I told him I’d rather not give their names without talking to them first, said I was sure he’d understand that their privacy had to be respected too.

  “Of course, Wilde, of course,” he said, nodding his reassurance. “I get that. But if you could ask them if maybe they’d be prepared to talk to me, it’d really help?”

  He flicked again through his notes, swirling what was left of the cold coffee round the bottom of his mug.

  “So how has Emily been doing since all of this happened?”

  “She’s as good as she can be,” I said. “It’s been hard for her, brutal, really.”

  “I guess she must feel guilty?”

  I bristled.

  “Guilty?” I said, a little too quickly and a fraction too loud. “Why would she blame herself?”

  “Just that she was in the house? I mean, even when there’s nothing you could have done, it must be hard not to blame yourself? Not to wish you’d done something different?”

  I calmed down and tried to brush it off. Of course she blamed herself, of course I did, of course we wished we’d done things differently. But we were trying not to waste our energy with that, trying to focus on what we could do now.

  “And when do you think I can talk to her, to Emily I mean?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure when she’ll be back,” I said, “I want her to take as much time as she can, as she needs.” I paused. “But I’ll ask her when I talk to her. Later. Tonight.”

  “That’d be great. I mean, even if she’s not here, I could call her and we could talk over the phone?”

  “Like I say, I’ll ask her.”

  “Great. That’d be great. Look, I know I’ve taken up a lot of your time and I know you have things to do, important things. But there’s just one other thing I wanted to talk to you about and then I’ll let you go and we can maybe catch up again in a couple of days?”


  “Sure. What else can I tell you?”

  “About your background really. Not being a local, I’d like to tell people about you, about who you are and where you come from.”

  So we talked about my past. About my parents, about my childhood, about Eoin. We talked about my work and my writing, and we talked about how I met Emily. I told him how we loved to travel and how we’d decided to move to Australia to pursue Emily’s dream of owning a vineyard.

  “Your writing must pay pretty well,” he joked, “vineyards around here don’t come cheap!”

  “We’d saved up,” I said, skipping past where the money had really come from. “We’d both worked hard and squirrelled away savings so that we could chase the dream. We were lucky, I guess, to be in a position to do that.”

  “Lucky indeed,” he said, scribbling in his pad. “Lucky indeed.”

  He flicked through his notes one more time and put away his notepad and pen.

  “Look, Wilde, I really appreciate your time. This has been great and it’s a powerful story, people will be really touched by it, I think. Let me know as soon as you can when I can talk to Emily and I’ll maybe swing by again so we can tie up loose ends. We should be able to get it into this weekend’s supplement, with a bit of luck.”

  I pulled out a few photographs of Cara in the pink jacket and gave them to him, then we walked to the door. Outside, he stood back to look up at the house, shaking his head.

  “Shit, Wilde – excuse my language – but it just makes you think, doesn’t it? If they can get at a child in a house like this, in the dead of night with a mother asleep in her bed, is any of us safe?”