Do Not Become Alarmed(18)

They followed the footprints through the woods and found a clearing. There was a fresh rectangular disturbance in the ground. The cop tried to keep the women from trooping through his crime scene, but Nora fell to her knees at the edge of the freshly turned dirt, sure that her children were beneath it. She felt on the verge of insanity then, her world dissolving, her skin no longer containing her. Suicide had always seemed a mystery, but now she felt capable of killing herself to follow Marcus and June.

Shovels were brought. Men came, with stern voices. They cordoned everything off with tape. The grave was shallow, and soon they uncovered a body shrouded in a plastic tarp. It was too big to be a child. The police unwrapped it and found a man shot in the forehead.

Nora started shaking uncontrollably. “Who is that?” she cried. “What does that mean?”

Someone put a blanket around her shoulders. She finally got through to Raymond on a police officer’s phone, the conversation confused and urgent. The husbands were on their way. That should have been reassuring. Instead it was terrifying.

News teams came, and she didn’t want to talk to them, but Liv said that someone watching might know something, might have seen the children. Her cousin was stern with her, a little cold. She was keeping it together better than Nora was. So they talked to the cameras, pleading for the children’s return. Afterward Nora had no idea what she’d said.

Then the police quietly separated the parents and started questioning them alone. Nora found herself alone in a squad car with a tall female officer. The car doors were closed. The woman said her name was Detective Rivera. She had short hair, spiked up in front, and good English.

“You do missing persons?” Nora asked her, trying to think what a person said in this situation.

“No,” the detective said. “I usually do sex crimes.”

“Oh, fuck.”

“That’s not why I’m here,” the detective said quickly. “I was available. It’s Christmas week. And I speak English. That’s all.”

“Where are my kids?”

“I don’t know. That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

As they talked, Nora realized she had not been ruled out as a suspect. The other mothers hadn’t, either. Probably the fathers were suspects, too, even though they had been on the golf course all day. Did the detective think they had formed some Satanic cabal? The whole thing felt unreal.

“You think it’s like Murder on the Orient Express?” Nora said. “Like, we all took turns killing them? You understand these are our children?”

“Did you go off alone with the guide?” the detective asked.

Nora froze. She’d forgotten her own actual guilt, for a minute. “Yes,” she said. “We were looking for birds.”

“What birds?”

“We saw a blue-crowned motmot on the trail. I wanted to see a quetzal.”

“By the beach?”

“Yes.”

“You are a bird-watcher?”

“Not really. We don’t have birds in LA like you do here. I mean, there’s a flock of feral parakeets, but that’s not really the same. They’re green and loud. And we have, like, crows, and seagulls. And hawks, and little birds like doves and robins. And pelicans. And there’s an owl I hear at night.” She was talking too fast.

“That sounds like a lot of birds.”

“It’s not,” Nora said. “We don’t have blue-crowned motmots. Or quetzals.”

“What is your occupation?”

“I’m just—a mom. I used to be a teacher.” She always hated that question. Her job was taking care of her family. And now the one time she had slipped, she had been punished like Job. God had sent a lightning bolt to destroy everything she cared about. She shivered.

“You had met Pedro before?” the detective asked.

“No,” Nora said, and she realized that Pedro would be interrogated alone, too. He might be arrested. He had taken them to the beach. He had failed to warn them about the tide, or the crocodiles. They might give him a polygraph. And what would he say? That they’d been looking for blue-crowned motmots? That he had fingered her expertly in the trees but hadn’t meant any harm? Were they recording these interviews? She looked around the car for a camera but didn’t see one. Weren’t interrogations supposed to have cameras?

“How did you meet Pedro?” the detective asked.

“Um—” she said, trying to remember. “We arranged for a shore excursion, on the ship. To go zip-lining. Pedro was the guide who came with the van to pick us up. It was arranged by the ship, through a local company. But then there was an accident. The tire blew out, and someone hit us when we swerved.”

“Did you call the police?”

“I think he did,” Nora said, but she found she couldn’t remember. Pedro had radioed—someone. “It was going to take a long time to get another van, and the road wasn’t safe, so we went to the beach.”

“And you trusted this guide?”

“Well, yes,” Nora said. “We thought all these people had been checked out by the ship. Should we not have trusted them?”

The detective shrugged. “Your children are missing.”

“He should have told us about the tide. He definitely should have told us that. But I don’t think he knew it would happen. And I was with him when it happened.” She stopped.