Cara is Missing

by Tim Buckley

  “We thought about that, of course we did, but there’s not really enough space,” he said and he couldn’t keep a hint of impatience out of his voice. Or was it bitterness? “You know it was knocked back into one after your mother and father died. With Mam and Seán’s family, there just isn’t room.”

  I raised my eyebrows at my end of the line but I didn’t labour the point.

  “Look, let me think about it. And I’ll have to talk to Emily, obviously.”

  “Yeah, of course. But… I don’t have much time. So if you could, you know…”

  “Yeah, I know, Cathal, I know.”

  Emily was in no doubt – I should tell him where to shove his problems. If he was in such trouble, she said, surely they could all manage to live together in the big old country house? She only knew what I had told her about the house and growing up there and I had to agree with her. They were a close enough family to knuckle down and make it work under the one roof. Besides, she said, I owed them nothing. And that was where I struggled. I owed Cathal and Seán nothing, that was for sure. Their inheritance might well have been bigger if Eoin hadn’t had to look after me all those years, but my father’s land was subsumed into theirs and I gave that up. I had repaid my debt to them if there was even a debt to be repaid and the slate was clean. No, I didn’t struggle with a feeling of encumbrance to them, I struggled with the much greater debt that I will always owe to Eoin. He would have expected me to do the right thing, just as he had done. I struggled because I still remember the tears rolling down his cheeks as the auctioneer in Thurles sold his cattle and broke up his land. I struggled because I still remember him standing at my side at the wake in our front room. I owed nothing to the boys, but I could never repay Eoin for everything he had done for me.

  So, reluctantly, I agreed to lend the money to Cathal. I called Gerry and asked him to draw up a contract and I transferred the money to Cathal’s account. It was a lot of money, and Emily was furious at first when I told her that I’d done it. She calmed down a bit when I explained my reasons and in the end even agreed that it was probably the right thing to do. Anyway, I said, it was a loan, not a gift, and he would pay it back as soon as he could. She pulled on her sceptical hat at that but she let it go. Maybe, she said, it would bring us closer together, help to heal the wounds of the past. I wasn’t sure that it would. I wasn’t even sure that I wanted it to.

  ***

  Nathan had gone back to the lumber suppliers with a counter-offer for the materials we needed to floor the cottage. We’d had to resist the temptation to drop the quality in order to get the price down to where we needed it to be but finally we came up with a proposal whereby we’d pay most of the cost up front with a bonus at the end if they delivered everything we needed on time and to specification. Nathan went to Bunbury to hammer out a deal and he called me later that evening.

  “Hey, Nate,” I said, answering the phone. “Deal done?”

  “Yeah, it’s done,” he said, “but it’ll be bloody undone pretty damn quick if I can’t pay them what we agreed, won’t it?”

  Nate didn’t often get annoyed, he usually kept his cool in the face of whatever was thrown at him, but this time he was pissed.

  “You’ve lost me,” I said, “why would you not pay them?”

  “Because there’s no bloody money, why do you think?!” he shouted as though I was some sort of idiot.

  “Nathan, slow down. What are you talking about, no money?”

  He took a deep breath and tried to be calm but he couldn’t keep the frustration out of his voice for long.

  “The project account. You’ve cleared out the project account. I promised them they’d have the money tomorrow morning so they could start deliveries straightaway. I went to make the transfer tonight but there’s no money in the account. You cleared it out, Wilde! What’s going on?”

  I turned to my laptop and logged on to the online banking application. Sure enough, the project account was down to a couple of hundred dollars. I clicked into the transactions history and there they were, three account transfers in my name, each for a lot of dollars. Transfers that I hadn’t made. I’d left a lot of money in that account so that Nathan could pay for the work on the lighthouse and now it was all as good as gone.

  “Shit, Nathan,” I said, “we’ve been hacked. I didn’t make those transfers. Someone’s hacked the account.”

  He said nothing for a moment while the enormity of what had happened sunk in.

  “Shit,” he said, almost to himself. “No fucking way?! Shit!!”

  I called the banking helpline but all they could do was freeze the account to safeguard the two hundred and twelve dollars that were still in it. They told me to go to my branch the next morning where they would open an investigation. The only thing they could tell me was that the transfers had been made under my log-in to an account at a bank in the name of Alan Davies. I was searching the name on the internet when Emily came in from doing some shopping and I told her what had happened.

  She slumped into the chair beside me and started to cry. I reached over to take her hand, surprised at just how badly she’d taken the news. To be honest, she had little interest in anything to do with money or bank accounts or bills and it usually washed right over her. But this time it really got to her and, as I sat consoling her and stroking her hair, I thought it was just the accumulation of bad news weighing on her shoulders that had finally caused her to crack.

  “Look,” I said, softly, “don’t worry about it, OK? I’ve read about cases like this where people have been ripped off by someone hacking their online banking accounts and the banks always end up refunding the money. They have to, or the whole thing would fall apart. So I’ll go into the branch tomorrow and explain and we’ll get it sorted, all right? I promise.”

  She nodded and snuffled and I kissed her cheek.

  “Come on,” I said, “let’s get something to eat.”

  We cooked some dinner and ate in a silence I couldn’t breach no matter how much I encouraged her to cheer up or how much transparently false levity I tried to bring to the conversation. Eventually, I gave up and told her to get herself off to bed, that she’d feel better after a good night’s sleep. We’ve had some bad times in that house, times that had turned our world upside down, but that night really was the end of everything that had gone before.

  37

  No more than mine, Emily’s childhood was far from the cosy cliché of bedtime stories and brisk winter family walks with the dog. Hers was a privileged but itinerant existence moving from place to place, never really having friends or a school or a home for more than a couple of years before the next posting. Every new home came with a new language and a new way of life so that it was next to impossible to settle in before being ripped away to start again. The only people she knew were the kids of the other career diplomats who were on the same merry-go-round and knew only the life that she knew, and so that rarefied world became her normal. Eventually she went to a prep school in Paris, from there to boarding school in Switzerland and then to university in Bordeaux, so that she didn’t know even the artificial environment of her own family past the age of eight. When her father retired, her parents moved to the Caribbean island of Saint Barthélemy on his state pension. They rarely came to Europe and didn’t seem too bothered if Emily ever visited them. Their relationship petered out to the odd email, phone calls on birthdays and at Christmas or maybe a Skype when the mood took any of them. I’ve never met them – we married in front of a few close friends in a registry office in Dublin and we only told them afterwards. I spoke to them then on the phone and have never spoken to them since. They have never thought me good enough for their wannabe aristocratic family and I really don’t care.

  That upbringing forced Emily to find a strength that most other children don’t need. She didn’t have the security of her family around her and, whatever the role of teachers and mento
rs and friends, she had to learn to shield herself against whatever life threw at her. So she lived inside a story of her own making and that story became her permanent shell. It was the hard case that protected her in the face of bullying schoolmates or vindictive teachers or cruel boyfriends, the usual trials of a teenage life that most kids can survive because they have their family there to guide them through it. Over time, she embellished the story and her part in it until she almost believed it was the truth.

  But as she got older and everyone else was coming out the other side of growing up, the story started to look haughty and superior, arrogant almost, to other people who thought she was just another rich kid with a deluded sense of her own importance. Few of them took the time to look past it to where the same, slightly nervous little girl was hiding underneath. I was smitten from the first time I saw her behind the counter in that wine shop in Dublin. The story was transparent to me, I just saw an exotic and ethereal and beautiful girl. She was also irreverent and a bit cynical and she made me laugh. She could have said or done anything and I would have grinned a stupid grin and nodded and loved her a little bit more. I don’t really know what it was that she saw in me. My story wasn’t very exciting, but maybe it was more honest than those of the other blokes who were hanging around and buying better wine than me. But to those others, the self-confidence that she had crafted and the determination that she seemed to flaunt as a challenge made her seem prickly and difficult. She spent so long hiding in a persona she created that she didn’t really know who she would be if she came out of it.

  The shell was cracked when we moved to Australia and what happened after that caused it finally to shatter and fall away. Emily had found a comfort in who she was but that was based on where she was. When she told me that evening in Dublin that we needed to get away, to search out excitement somewhere else, she didn’t ever think that she would have to invent herself all over again. But the confidence that she had manufactured at home didn’t travel and, once the novelty of Clovelly had dimmed, she was suddenly naked again. The Emily I know now is not the Emily I fell in love with. The irony is that I would probably have fallen even more headlong for the Emily I know today. Coming here changed her. No, that’s not right, it didn’t change her. Rather, it uncovered a softness in her that had been hidden before under the facade of her story and the bluster of her ambition. As long as whatever she was striving for remained just out of reach, she could maintain a reckless commitment to chasing after it. If she failed, there was no shame because it had never been that close. Dreams are sometimes best left unrealised because they don’t always turn out the way you thought they would. I had a tutor at university who used to joke that we should never go after our potential. Leave it alone, he would say, leave it in that box in the attic with the old photographs. It will only let you down. And that, in a way, is what happened to Emily. The money we won and the move here meant she could realise the dream to make her own wine, the thing she wanted to do most in the world. But, when all of the other obstacles were taken away and when the only barrier was her own ability, suddenly any hitch or bump in the road seemed all the more disastrous. The fly that brought such heartache that Christmas was in the other farms too, but they dealt with it as they had dealt with all of the problems that beset the growers every year. She had never learned to deal with those problems and so she took every problem as her own personal failure and she took every failure to heart.

  If the vagaries of winemaking took some of the wind from her sails, Cara was the reef on which she was finally wrecked. Up to then, even after the upheaval of the move and the challenges of the vineyard, Emily was still a force to be reckoned with. A couple of months into her pregnancy, she had started to feel listless and weak. We were both worried that something might be wrong and so we went up to see her doctor at the maternity hospital in Perth. They kept her in for a couple of days to do some tests although I’m pretty sure they recognised a case of first-pregnancy jitters when they saw it. There was a young girl there at the time, she was only a child, maybe sixteen or seventeen. No father-to-be ever came to visit and none of her family ever made an appearance either. She seemed always to be trying to fade into the walls, to avoid being noticed. Emily saw her one afternoon sobbing in the garden where mothers-to-be were encouraged to walk when their babies seemed reluctant to appear. She sat her down on a bench and asked her what was wrong. One of the matrons on the girl’s ward had, it seemed, decided that the girl was a lower class of expectant mother and had been rude to her, horribly rude to her. I can still see a furious and pregnant Emily waddling up the corridor to the matron’s office and berating the woman for having the nerve to presume that she had any right to judge. She pounded on the woman’s desk and stamped her feet like a child having a tantrum for failing to do the one thing that it was her job to do, to look after the frightened girl who was her patient. The matron, who was no shrinking violet herself, sat open-mouthed and speechless as Emily hauled herself away, dressing gown flying in her wake, like some maternity ward superhero.

  But that was before and Emily wasn’t ready for what came next. She wasn’t ready for Cara, wasn’t ready to be a mother. She set about it as she would have any task, with research and process and metrics. She did a great job, making sure that Cara had everything she needed, but she never thought so. She never gave herself credit for being a mother because she always fell short of what she expected from herself. Worst of all, she never thought she loved Cara enough. She hadn’t wanted to be pregnant, she wasn’t ready to have a child, and she could never get over the guilt of that. She loved Cara and she would have done anything for her, in her own way – but she never felt she deserved what she hadn’t really wanted.

  It was those two failures, as she saw them, that changed her. They took away her confidence in everything that she believed in and took away her reference points. That certainty had been her fortress, the place from where she could take on the world. Exposed suddenly to the world outside her own little fairy tale, she was unsettled and weakened. Doubts crept in where before there was only certainty and Emily was lost and fragile and vulnerable. I should have seen it coming. I should have known that it was only a matter of time until someone saw that weakness and preyed upon it.

  38

  I got up the next morning and, while the coffee was brewing, I checked the online banking site in the vain hope that some technical glitch or administrative error had been resolved and the money was nestling safely in our account again. It wasn’t, of course, and so I would have to go into the branch and sort the whole mess out. I knew it shouldn’t be a problem. I hadn’t made the transfers and the onus of proof in these cases was always on the bank and so, while it might cost a bit of time, we’d get it sorted. The only problem was that we needed the money to pay the suppliers and so I’d have to transfer more funds into the project account. I could do that from the branch.

  I was packing my laptop bag with statements and correspondence that I thought I might need for the conversation with the bank when Emily came down. She looked terrible, drawn and pale and as though she hadn’t slept.

  “Hey, Em,” I said, kissing her forehead and pulling her head into my chest, “why don’t you go back to bed, eh? You look shattered. I’m going in to the bank now, we can go for a coffee when I get back, yeah?”

  She pulled back from me and looked up into my eyes; hers were red and bloodshot.

  “Wait,” she said in a whisper that I could hardly hear, “I need to tell you something. Sit down, please.”

  “What is it, Em, you’re scaring me a bit.” I tried to force a smile but she was actually a bit scary.

  She took a deep breath, and a tear rolled down her cheek.

  “It was me,” she whispered. “The money, it was me.”

  I didn’t know what she was talking about.

  “What money?”

  “The money from the lighthouse account, the transfers. I did it.”


  It was so outlandish that I still needed a couple of beats before the truth dawned on me but when it did, it punched me full in the face.

  “What? What are you talking about? What did you do?” My voice was rising in spite of me. “Emily! What have you done?!”

  She looked at me and I thought for a moment she might turn tail and run out of the room. But she didn’t. She stayed and told me exactly what she had done.

  “When you called me,” she said, quietly and without looking at me, “from Mitchelstown, and when you told me that it wasn’t her, that the girl in the picture wasn’t Cara, I was so… I was devastated.” She shook her head slowly. “That might have been the worst day, the worst since the day she disappeared. I know it was stupid, but I had convinced myself that it was her, that it would be the lead that took us to her. I had no doubt. And so, when you called me and told me that it wasn’t her, I was… I really wanted to kill myself, you know? Really. I couldn’t see past the blackness of where we were and there was no light ahead, none.”

  She paused, fidgeting with her wedding ring, twisting it round and round on her finger.

  “It was while you were away, there was a call. From a man. He said that he worked with families that had lost children and that he could help us to find her.”

  There were always calls. Every week, we had calls from nutcases and conmen promising that they would get her back, that they would help us to find her. My heart sank. We had never fallen for any of them, but…

  “That’s why I left, why I went to Sydney,” she went on, “to meet him.”

  He was Alan Davies, the name on our bank statement, and he had claimed to be able to find a lost child by scouring the universe for their energy. Their energy, he said, was unique to them and was like a beacon. He could see it shining from wherever he was, wherever they were. He told Emily that he had been ill, that chronic migraines had dulled his gift so that he couldn’t see the light. He just needed to get some money to get the treatment that would clear the headaches and clear his vision so that he could find Cara. If he could just get the money… He was both a nutcase and a conman, and I couldn’t believe that Emily had fallen for it, that she could have been so stupid. Looking back now, though, and knowing how weak and fragile she was, it probably wouldn’t have taken the best conman in the world to sell her a story. She was drowning in the darkness and all she could see was that she had lost Cara, she had lost our baby.