chapter one
JULY 2013—THREE MONTHS
On the day her life began to unravel, Jill Lassiter smeared sunscreen on her three-year-old daughter’s soft skin and drove her, as promised, to the park.
It was a hot afternoon, and she held Sophia’s hand as they crossed the road, leaning a little so her daughter’s small arm wouldn’t have to stretch too far.
While they walked Sophia chattered about the swings, about her plastic ring with the pink “jewel,” about a small terrier being walked. The older woman holding the leash smiled at Sophia’s cry of delight, but Jill’s mind was elsewhere and she didn’t really hear what her daughter said, pretending to listen with small sounds of interest.
Afterward, she’d feel guilty about this. What kind of mother didn’t pay attention to her own child? Except she’d been thinking about two bar mitzvahs and a wedding she had to shoot, and attempting to mentally coordinate schedules so she and her business partner, Tania, could juggle them all.
“Let go, let go!” Sophia tugged to get free, and Jill released her hand, raising her camera as she watched her daughter run across the grass and struggle onto a swing. She was small for her age, but intent on doing everything herself. Jill offered a push and Sophia gravely accepted one, but didn’t want her mother’s help after that.
Jill stood to the side and snapped photos, watching her daughter’s baby-fine blonde hair lifting as she swung forward and back. She had no premonition, no sense of imminent disaster.
There were few people at the playground on such a hot day. Even in the shade it was warm. Sweat darkened the hair near Sophia’s temples, beaded slightly on her upper lip. Her cheeks were pink, but she didn’t look as if she were getting sunburned. Jill could feel the damp against her own neck and lifted her dark hair for a moment to catch a breeze. She thought they would stay just a little longer.
When Sophia ran toward the slide, she didn’t think to stop her. It was a safe, modern playground, with padding under everything, so that a child would have to work to skin a knee or scrape an elbow. She started to follow, but the crying of another child distracted her. Jill saw a mother struggling to support a howling infant in one arm while helping a little boy onto a swing with the other. The boy caught Jill’s attention. She stared at him, caught by the familiar ache in her chest because he had dark hair and looked about the right age.
The baby’s wailing and the other mother’s obvious distress snapped her out of it. “Here, let me help.” She walked back to them, quickly giving the little boy the boost he needed.
“Oh, thank you,” the mother said above the cries of the infant. “She’s so hungry. Would you mind handing me that bag?” She nodded toward a large tote on the ground near her as she settled down on a park bench to nurse.
Jill set the bag down before hurrying after her own child. Helping the other mother had taken less than a minute. Two minutes at most. When she couldn’t spot Sophia’s blonde head bobbing above the brightly colored plastic she wasn’t alarmed. Not yet.
She rushed toward the slide, using her free hand to shade her eyes. The slide wasn’t like the old-fashioned ones, the single metal structures that burned the backs of your legs in the summer and had metal steps that were slippery when it rained. This was all plastic—a slide and a fort with tunnels and a climbing wall, and she thought Sophia was somewhere in that obstacle course. Only she wasn’t.
Jill kept looking for that small blonde head, raising her voice when she called her name: “Sophia?” She expected to hear her daughter’s high-pitched voice, to see her pop up, a question visible in her pale blue eyes. Except she didn’t.
In that gap between Jill’s first call and the frantic search that followed, there was a moment of such awful stillness that the only sound she heard was the startled catch of her own breath.
Other adults joined in her hunt, the woman with the two children, a man out jogging, an elderly couple walking, their voices joining hers until she could hear Sophia’s name echoing through the park. She called David at work, babbling when he got on the line so that he had to say, “Slow down, slow down, I don’t understand.”
She didn’t know who called the police, but they came before her husband, arriving in a screaming squad car. There were two of them, one short, one tall, both male, one white, one black, but beyond that she couldn’t focus. She looked past them, constantly scanning the same territory over and over again. Swings, slide, wide empty field, the woods surrounding it all. Sophia had been standing right there and now she was gone.
“Does she have a history of wandering off?”
“Is she friendly with strangers?”
“Could a family member have taken her?”
She answered their questions, nervously checking her watch as they followed the route that Jill had taken through the playground.
“Did you pass anybody on your way here?”
“Who else was at the playground?”
They asked to see her camera and she handed it to them, showing them how to scroll back through the photos she’d taken. Her husband arrived, his car screeching to a halt behind the police cruiser. David came across the field faster than she’d ever seen him run, tie flying, short blond hair in disarray, his face flushed. “Where is she? Have you found her?”
The police spread out to search. David retraced her route at a run before coming back to Jill with his hands on his head in disbelief.
A second police car arrived, then a third. Onlookers gathered on the fringes of the park. A female police officer placed a hand on Jill’s arm, a touch that was supposed to be kind, but only unnerved her.
The police spoke quickly to one another and into radios, voices clipped and dispassionate, discussing doing a wider search of the wooded areas of the park and cordoning off all entrances and exits. Twenty minutes passed, then forty.
At the moment of despair, at the moment when fear overcame the guilt and Jill’s body started to shake, Sophia suddenly appeared, standing in the shelter of some trees across the road from the park. She was more than fifty feet away, but Jill spotted her all the same, her small blonde head and white dress a beacon in all that green.
Jill pushed past the police officer and ran toward her daughter, calling to her with hiccupping cries. Her legs were leaden; she couldn’t move fast enough. She was too scared not to scare her child, too, grabbing her with such intensity that her daughter started to cry.
Copyright © 2016 by Rebecca Drake
