Page 73 of Little Secrets
However, there was no vehicle that witnesses could place Sebastian in. There was no identity, no description for the abductor other than the Santa Claus costume. The authorities have to believe that there’s sufficient information about the disappearance of the child in order for an AMBER Alert to be able to assist in finding the child. It’s decided on a case-by-case basis, and Sebastian’s case didn’t qualify.
There were other things they could do, however. The security footage from Pike Place Market was circulated across the country. Anybody with a TV would have seen Sebastian’s picture on the news in the days that followed his kidnapping. His Missing Child poster was retweeted and shared on Twitter and Facebook nearly a million times combined. The idea that “Santa” kidnapped a child three days before Christmas was titillating, and it made the story go viral in a matter of hours. The evening of the abduction, Derek and Marin were filmed outside their home by local news stations, begging the public for any information about their son. By the end of the week, they were on CNN, pleading for his safe return.
The lack of information about her son’s disappearance was both mind-boggling and frustrating. Early on, Marin overheard one of the police officers say to another, “Either the kidnapper planned this meticulously, or the sonofabitch got ridiculously lucky… There’s no way to know.”
It was easy to assume that Sebastian and his abductor had entered the underground parking garage, based on the exit that was chosen by the abductor. But there was no specific evidence to confirm that. They could have walked to a side street and gotten into a car, a truck, or a van. They could have been picked up by someone. Or they could have gone into the parking garage and been one of the fifty-four cars to exit the underground lot within the next hour. The angle of the only working security camera, across the street, made it impossible to catch license plate numbers on those vehicles.
Derek used his connections to get as much coverage as possible. So did Marin. A wealthy, prominent Seattle couple whose child was abducted in broad daylight? The police assumed ransom. But ransom demands usually happen within the first twenty-four hours, forty-eight at the most. Neither Derek nor Marin was contacted. There were no notes left on the doorstep, no texts, no strange phone calls from unknown numbers.
The five-dollar lollipop was what had convinced Marin that the kidnapper knew Sebastian. At the time, it had seemed like such a specific thing to give to him, and only seven lollipops were sold at La Douceur Parisienne that day. But five out of the seven sold were paid for by debit or credit cards, and those customers had been tracked down. They all checked out. The last two were paid for in cash, and the ladies working at the candy store said they remembered that customer clearly, a grandmother who’d bought matching lollipops for her twin granddaughters.
In any case, La Douceur Parisienne lollipops were oversize, colorful, and probably a magnet for any child under the age of ten. The lollipop could have been purchased anytime in advance and stuffed into a coat pocket or a shopping tote, ready to be used as bait when the perfect moment arrived. As part of the investigation, every single person in Marin’s and Derek’s lives who knew Sebastian was interviewed. All the vendors at the market that day were questioned. Nobody seemed to know anything.
Sebastian just vanished. Without a trace. And sixteen months later, Marin still has no answers.
A long time ago, there was this movie that scared the shit out of her. She was still in high school, and a bunch of them were hanging out one Saturday night. Someone brought over a VHS tape of the movieThe Vanishing, a thriller starring Jeff Bridges and Kiefer Sutherland. During a brief stop at a gas station while on a road trip, Jeff Bridges (Barney) kidnaps Kiefer Sutherland’s girlfriend, Diane (played by a very young Sandra Bullock).
Fast-forward a few years, and Kiefer’s character, Jeff, still doesn’t know what happened to his missing girlfriend. He’s become obsessed with finding out, almost to the point of going mad. Nancy Travis plays his new love interest (Rita), and together they eventually figure out that this Barney guy was at the gas station the day Diane disappeared, and certainly knows something. They confront him, and ultimately Barney says to Jeff, “If you want to know what happened to her, you have to go through the same things…”
Jeff agrees, and willingly drinks something that knocks him out cold the way Diane was knocked out. He wakes up inside a wooden crate buried in the woods. It takes him a few seconds to realize that he’s trapped, and that he will die like Diane did, suffocating to death in a tiny coffin in the dark with nobody to hear him scream and nobody knowing what happened to him.
It was a creepy, entertaining movie that gave Marin nightmares for a week afterward.
She’s Jeff now. And if Santa appeared on her doorstep, offering her definitive answers about her child along with a cup of spiked tea guaranteed to knock her out, she’d down that sucker in a heartbeat. She would swallow every drop.
Because anything is better than this.
A missing child is an open, infected wound. Some days you can take a painkiller and slap a Band-Aid on it and maybe manage your day, but it’s never not there, it’s never not festering, and the slightest poke can cause it to start gushing all over again.
Marin’s still lying down, and she needs to get up and start moving. She looks over to Derek’s side of the bed. It’s empty, but the indent in the pillow from where his head had rested the night before is still there, reminding her that he left for Portland earlier this morning. It was a last-minute decision made before they went to sleep, to soothe some squirrelly investors.
“It’s only for the day,” he’d told her, and immediately she’d thought,McKenzie. “There’s an eight a.m. flight, so I’ll be out of the house by six. And I’ll be home in time for dinner. Want to come with? I’ll be stuck in meetings all day, and I’ll have to take the investors out to lunch, but you could join us, then get some shopping in. No sales tax in Oregon, remember.”
She chuckled. “That’s a five a.m. wake-up call. I’d rather sleep in and pay the sales tax.”
His quick invite made Marin feel better, though. How long would it be before she doesn’t wonder what Derek is really doing when he’s not with her? How long before McKenzie Li disappears from their marriage completely?
She’s about to sit up when her phone rings. She checks the number, picks up.
“Still in bed?” Sal asks.
“Yeah.”
“What are you wearing?”
“Shut up, perv.”
A laugh. “How was the funeral?”
She supposes she should ask herself why she’d told her friend, and not her husband, about Frances’s son, but it’s too early for that levelof emotional deep-diving. “It was sad, obviously,” she says, getting out of bed and padding to the bathroom. “But Frances seemed… all right. Better, even.”
“What do you mean, better?”
Marin looks at herself in the vanity mirror, running a hand through her tangled hair. “Relieved, I think,” she says. “That she has answers. That she can grieve him, and bury him, and try to move on. She has closure, finally.”
A short pause on the other end. “I don’t know what to say to that,” Sal finally says. “I mean, I’m glad for her, but at the same time, it’s…”
“Yeah.”
