My mother had been right all along: My sleuthing was of no use whatsoever. I could have been taking Charlotte to the park today, eating ice cream with her on the pier. Getting to know my niece. That would have been more helpful than this, another day of half-assedly pursuing clues that might never have been clues in the first place. A list that meant no more than the scrap of paper it was written on.
And yet. I kept thinking of that bizarre phone call with Michaela Blackwell yesterday afternoon. She’s not Elli. It had to mean something. It had to have some connection to GenFem and my sister’s current situation, didn’t it? The first name on this list had not only known who Elli was, she’d known that she wasn’t herself anymore.
I checked the time—it was only noon. My only shot at salvaging this trip was to wait until the end of the day and come back to see if the owners returned to the house after work. It would mean spending the night in Scottsdale, but perhaps that was better than driving home in this condition anyway. I could feel the previous twenty-four hours starting to weigh me down, a yoke of exhaustion.
I’d noticed a café on my way through town and I headed back in that direction now, driving until I found myself in a small shopping district. The café was wedged between a gallery displaying oil paintings of stoic Native Americans and a boutique selling alligator cowboy boots, as if standing an awkward sentry between the two conflicting narratives. It was a neighborhood place, the sort of café that compensated for its mediocre coffee with live jazz trios on Fridays and community bulletin boards where you might find yourself a local teenage babysitter.
Inside, the air was so cold that it made my teeth hurt. The café was empty except for a pair of bored-looking teenagers ignoring each other as they tapped on their phones. The barista was wearing a sweater. How strange, to live in a climate of such extremes; how hard it must be to find equilibrium.
I ordered a black coffee and took it to a table in the corner. I sat there, nursing the coffee as it revived me, wishing I’d brought a book. How was I going to kill the next six hours?
I pulled out my phone and texted my sister. For God’s sake just let me know you’re not being held hostage. I’m worried. It joined the rest of the texts and photos I’d sent her over the last few days. WTF is going on? And Is today the day you’re going to stop giving us the silent treatment? And You need to stop this. And Please come home. And Do it for Charlotte not for me. All of them had been marked read. None of them had been answered.
I hit Send and then sat there, sipping my coffee, waiting to see if Elli would respond. A few minutes after I sent it, three dots appeared below my message. She was typing. I sat upright, jerked alert. But the dots hung there, and hung, and after a maddeningly long time they finally just disappeared altogether. Maybe she’d changed her mind about responding, or maybe she wasn’t OK and she didn’t want to lie. I was too tired to speculate anymore.
I ferried my coffee cup back to the barista, a paper-clip-thin twentysomething with rhinestones glued along her lash line. “Refill?”
Her pour was haphazard; half the coffee ended up in my saucer. “Sorry,” she said. “Napkins are over there.” She pointed me toward the coffee station.
It was underneath the community bulletin board. As I sopped up the excess coffee, I skimmed the flyers that had been pinned there, wondering if I might find an ad for a GenFem learning center. Punk band needs drummer. And Thai massage $50. And Painting lessons by a proffessional Artist. And that’s when I saw it, on a flyer that was barely visible underneath a postcard for a local real estate agent.
It was Charlotte’s face.
I yanked the real estate agent’s postcard down so I could see it better, to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. But I wasn’t. It was her. Younger—still a baby, really—her hair shorter; but the furrow in her forehead, the unsettling sense that she was watching you and thinking something surprisingly adult—that was unmistakably Charlotte.
MISSING, the flyer read. EMMA GONZALEZ.
I dropped my coffee cup, barely even noticing as the scalding coffee burned the skin of my calf.
* * *
—
The barista was by my side in seconds, wiping off my legs with a damp tea towel. “Fuck,” she said. “Was the coffee too hot? Please don’t sue the café. I’ll get fired.”
I ignored her, preoccupied with the flyer that I’d torn off the bulletin board and was now reading.
MISSING: EMMA GONZALEZ
Last seen: March 13
Hair: Brown
Eyes: Brown
Age: 22 months
Weight: 26 pounds
Circumstances: Emma Gonzalez was last seen on Tuesday, March 9 at 12 p.m. in the garden of her home in the 800 block of Joshua Tree Drive in Scottsdale. Family members in attendance believe that she may have wandered into the desert.
A throb of nausea, dank and pulsing, rose in my stomach.
The barista was still dabbing at my leg with the sodden towel, making noises about ice packs and bandages. I nudged her off. “I’m fine, really. Thank you.”
She stood and noticed the flyer in my hands. “Oh yeah, that. So awful. Poor kid.”
I looked up at her. “You know about this?”
“You don’t?” She blinked at me from underneath those disconcerting rhinestones, a fairy trapped in a coffee-stained apron. “Shit, it was all over the local news.”
“I’m not local.”
She folded the towel in half, and in half again. “So yeah, the grandma is taking care of the little girl, right? They’re out in the garden and the little girl falls asleep in the grass and the grandma goes inside to use the bathroom and when she comes back out a few minutes later, the kid is gone. They think she woke up and wandered off into the desert. Or a mountain lion snatched her.” She twisted the towel in her hands. “Desert’s full of predators. A coyote got my cat last year.”
“They searched for her?”
It was a stupid question and the barista gave me a suitably withering look. “Of course. Big search parties. But, no, nothing. Never found her body.”
Of course they didn’t, I thought. Because there was no body. Because Emma Gonzalez was now Charlotte Hart, living in Santa Barbara. My sister had her. Or rather, she had had her, before she vanished, leaving the missing child in my care.
It made no sense whatsoever.
I thought of something. “Was the family part of a cult?” I asked.
The barista looked taken aback. “A cult?”
“Or, like, a self-improvement group.”
“I mean, who isn’t in a self-improvement group? My parents were into the Landmark Forum. And my brother worships Tim Ferriss like he’s some sort of god.” She paused, gave me a closer look. “Why? Do you recognize the kid, or something?”
I realized I was in danger of drawing suspicion to myself. I shook my head and pinned the flyer back on the board. “No. Just thought she was cute.”
Another customer came in then, and the barista headed back to her counter. I waited until she was distracted at her espresso machine before pulling my phone out of my pocket and snapping a photo of the flyer.
I waited until I was back outside before texting the photo to my sister.
YOU NEED TO CALL ME BACK NOW, I typed.
This time, there were no dots at all.
* * *
—
The drive from Scottsdale back to Santa Barbara flew past as a smear of desolate landscape and radio static. I pounded Starbucks coffee until my head buzzed so loudly that it almost drowned out the questions that were spinning through my brain. Was it possible there was an innocent explanation for why this little girl had disappeared from her Scottsdale home and materialized in my sister’s in Santa Barbara? Could my sister have rescued her? Did Elli somehow not know who she was? Or had my sister absconded with the Gonzalez child? If so, why this child, all the way out in Scottsdale? Were the Gonzalez parents members of GenFem, friends of my sister? And if so, was Emma/Charlotte’s disappearance something that had been engineered by the group—not a disappearance at all, but some sort of smoke screen?