As Anna, Taylor, and I are leaving the beach my phone vibrates.
I pull it out of my pocket and look at it, glance at Anna, then slip it back into my pocket without answering it.
“Who is it?” she asks.
“Someone I called while y’all were asleep,” I said. “I’ll call him back another time.”
“Who?” she says again.
“One of the detectives in Magdalene’s case,” I say. “Roderick Brandt.”
When Anna had woken up and I wasn’t in the room, she had texted me asking where I had gone and what I was doing. When I got back to the room just moments later to find her still in bed and Taylor still asleep, she seemed put out with me. But we had moved past that and had a very nice time at the beach.
“Go ahead and take it,” she says, and for a moment she sounds like her old self. “You’ll be distracted thinking about it and wanting to call him back anyway. So you might as well take it.”
I shake my head. “I won’t. You guys ready for ice cream?”
Across the road in the town square, among the other restaurants, shops, and stores, is a sweet shop and ice cream parlor.
“Ice cream,” Taylor exclaims.
“I’ll take her over to get ice cream,” Anna says. “You take the call. Then we’ll walk back together.”
“You sure?”
She is already leading Taylor away and doesn’t respond.
I withdraw my phone and answer it.
After a brief introduction, Brandt tells me he’s more than happy to share information with me because he doesn’t care who solves it—he just wants to get Magdalene back to Keith and Christopher.
He explains that he and Keith played football together in high school in Fort Walton and that he thinks the world of Keith and Christopher and believes what was done to them by law enforcement and the media after they had lost their daughter was unconscionable.
He tells me how much he’d love it if I could find her, if I could uncover something they overlooked, but he’s very doubtful—because of just how baffling the case is.
“I’m tellin’ you, that little girl just vanished off the face of the earth,” he is saying. “Never seen or even heard of anything like it. It’s like she never existed. I mean, I know she did. I know her parents and her foster parents and the state can produce evidence that she was alive at some point—pictures and records and whatnot, but . . . And I’ll tell you another thing too. There’s no evidence she was abducted either. Like I say, it’s just like she vanished or was never there to begin with.”
Late afternoon is slipping into evening. The sun sits low on the western horizon beyond the Gulf. Sunset at the beach has a quality unlike anywhere else I’ve seen. Light and color and sound are muted. There’s a quiet calm—a serenity aided by the airy quality of the rhythmic rolling of the tide and the unabating breeze blowing off the Gulf.
“What do you mean by no evidence she was abducted?” I ask.
“I mean no evidence whatsoever,” he says. “They woke up to find her gone. But their house wouldn’t have been any different if they had just woken up to find her in her bed. None. We showed up to investigate. But we might as well have showed up to collect for the widows and orphans fund, for all the good we did. There were no signs of a break-in. There were no prints—well, there were hundreds of prints, it’s a bed and breakfast—but there were no prints that meant anything to us. There were no signs of a struggle. All the windows and doors were locked. Security camera footage from the front and back doors showed that no one entered or exited the house during the night. Nothing out of order. Nothing out of place. Just a little girl missing. Gone in the night. And we have no idea how or why or by who. And now it’s nearly a year later and we don’t know any more than we did when we showed up that first morning. Tell you the truth . . . I thought we were going to find her somewhere inside the house. Like JonBenet. You know, something like that. We were walking through, searching—and it’s a big place, so many rooms, so many closets, so many nooks and crannies—and I kept dreading turning the next corner, opening the next door. I was like, I don’t want to find a dead little girl in Toy Story pj’s two days before Christmas.”
“I would think a bed and breakfast was sort of open,” I say. “People coming and going all the time. Easy access for an abductor. On top of which they were having a party, so—”
“You can’t enter the house without your room key,” he says. “They’re very security conscious. They sort of cater to single women coming to vacation here. And that only intensified after they got Magdalene. I thought you were staying there.”
“I am.”
“You didn’t notice how tight the security is? You have to call from that little box out front the first time you arrive so they can let you in. And then from then on you have to use your room key to get back in the house. And they change the codes—you know, reprogram the keys every day so no one can use an old key.”
“We actually arrived with Keith and Christopher from chapel so we just went in with them.”
“Get them to show you the security measures and procedures,” he says. “Or just try to get back in without your room key.”
“I will,” I say. “Thanks. So if no one broke in and—”
I see Anna and Taylor emerging from the ice cream parlor.
“Actually, can I call you back either later tonight or tomorrow?” I ask. “I’ve got to go get my little girl.”
“Yeah, sure. ‘’Cause we haven’t even gotten started good on this thing—including the aspects of the Florida House that might have contributed to the events. Call back when you can. I’m hard to get sometimes. Just leave me a message if I don’t answer and I’ll call you back soon as I can.”
“Thanks,” I say. “I really appreciate your help.”
“You’re the one helping me,” he says. “I just hope you succeed where we failed. I’ve long since given up on a happy ending, but I’d like to see them get an ending at least. Some answers and some justice. They deserve that at least.”
“At the very least,” I say.