Maybe Samantha had woken up and somehow managed to climb out of her crib, then when she couldn’t find her mother, opened the door and wandered down the hall.
Caroline ran out of the bedroom and flung open the door to their suite. She raced down the long corridor, screaming: “Samantha! Samantha, baby, where are you?”
Doors along the corridor opened, people warily poking their heads out, asking what was wrong.
“Have you seen my baby?” Caroline demanded of each curious face. Was it possible Samantha had made her way to the elevators and managed to press the call button? Could she have stepped inside and somehow reached one of the lower buttons? Had she proceeded unnoticed across the lobby and out into the night? Could she, right now, at this very second, be out there in the dark, stumbling blindly on her chubby little legs, toward the ocean? “Where are you, baby?” Caroline cried. “Where are you?”
And then Hunter was beside her, Michelle balanced precariously on the inside of his arm. He wrapped his other arm around his sobbing wife and led her back to their suite. Then he called the front desk, told them his child was missing, and instructed them to call the police.
“But where can she be?” Caroline asked over and over again. “You just checked on her half an hour ago.”
“She was sound asleep,” Hunter assured her, repeating the same thing to the hotel manager when he arrived twenty minutes later, having been roused from his bed at home.
“You left your children alone in the room?” the portly, middle-aged Mexican man asked, not even attempting to mask his disapproval. “We offer a babysitting service…”
“The sitter never showed up,” Hunter said.
The hotel manager lifted his cell phone to his ear, muttered something into it in Spanish.
“We checked on them every half hour,” Hunter told him.
“We never should have left them alone,” Caroline said.
“Our records show that the request for a sitter was canceled,” the manager stated, lowering his cell phone to his lap.
“Obviously a mix-up,” Hunter said. “We never canceled.”
“We never should have left them,” Caroline said again.
“Where are the police?” Hunter asked. “We’re wasting precious time.”
“They are coming,” the manager said. “They have to come from Tijuana…”
“Shit.” Hunter jumped to his feet. They were gathered in the living room. Michelle had fallen asleep on the sofa, her head in her mother’s lap.
“I assure you we are doing all we can in the meantime. We have every available staff member searching the premises.”
“Someone’s taken her,” Caroline wailed softly. “Someone’s taken my baby.”
“Can we go over this once again?” the manager asked. “To make sure I understand and can help with the police investigation.”
“It’s our anniversary,” Hunter began, his voice low and steady, despite having already told the manager everything they could about the evening. “We’d arranged for a sitter, the same thing we’ve done every night since we got here a week ago, but she didn’t show, and our friends were downstairs in the restaurant waiting, so we thought…”
“You thought,” Caroline interrupted.
Hunter continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “…that since the restaurant was right downstairs…It’s right under our window, for God’s sake…We thought it would be safe…”
“You thought,” Caroline said again.
“We checked on them every half hour.”
“The last time you checked was when?”
Hunter glanced at his watch. “About an hour ago now.”
“Oh, God,” Caroline said.
“If she’s anywhere in the hotel,” the manager said, “we’ll find her.”
“And if she’s not, if someone took her,” Caroline said, trying to muzzle her growing hysteria so as not to wake Michelle, “she could be anywhere by now.”
“Who would take her?” the manager asked. “How would they have gotten inside the room? You said the door was locked when you got home.”
“I don’t know how,” Caroline said, looking to her husband for an answer.
“You lost your keycard,” Hunter said.
Caroline tried not to hear the hint of accusation in his voice.
“When was this?” the manager asked.
“This afternoon. At the pool. I dropped my purse. Everything fell out. I didn’t realize I’d lost the damn thing until I got back upstairs…”
“This wasn’t the first time you lost one,” Hunter said.
“That’s right. I lost one earlier in the week,” Caroline confirmed, her voice shaky. “Oh, God—you think someone might have picked it up and used it to steal my baby?”
“Can you think of anyone who might have done this?” the manager asked, the same question the police asked when they finally arrived almost half an hour later.