Little Secrets(12)
There’s a pause, and Marin watches three dots flicker across her phone screen while Sadie formulates a response. The other woman won’t ask questions, she never does, but she can probably sense Marin is worried. Sadie doesn’t just run Marin’s salons—she’s also a close friend. Finally, her reply comes in, and it’s sweet and brief, as Marin knew it would be.
Understood. Here if you need anything. xo
She doesn’t know what she would have done without Sadie.
When the FBI told them a month after Sebastian went missing that the search for their son would always be considered “ongoing,” but that in the immediate, there were no new leads to pursue (fancy speak for “we’re putting this on the back burner”), it was like losing her child all over again.
And Marin didn’t handle it well. At all.
When she was discharged from the hospital a week later, the first thing she did was call the private investigator. She’d had Vanessa Castro’s card for a while; a couple of weeks, at least. Castro had left her business card in the plastic bowl by the front desk of the downtown salon, having come in for a pedicure some time earlier. Every month, the salons do a drawing for a free service, but Vanessa Castro’s card wasn’t a winner. Marin only saw it because her sleeve had caught the edge of the bowl and knocked it over, causing all the cards to spill onto the floor.
Nothing about the PI’s business card was particularly interesting—Isaac & Castro was written in plain blue letters across the middle, and below it, Vanessa Castro, Private Investigator in smaller type—but out of the two dozen cards splayed out on the tile, it was the only one that landed faceup. Maybe it was the only one she needed to see. The universe is funny that way.
Sebastian had been missing for two weeks by that time. Marin pocketed the card, and later, after she was released from psychiatric hold, she called.
Castro and her business partner are both ex-Seattle PD. She specializes in finding missing children, and she’s made a name for herself because she looks in places the police won’t, or can’t. She’s unconventional, a bit of a renegade. Classy on the surface, she’s unafraid to get her hands dirty. She’s also ridiculously expensive. When they first met, she told Marin to call her Vanessa, but that didn’t feel right—they weren’t girlfriends and it wasn’t Sunday brunch.
Marin hired the woman to find her son. She couldn’t live with the thought that nobody was looking for him. Someone always has to be looking.
Whether the person who took Sebastian was someone who actually knew him was a bone of contention between Marin and the police—and later, the FBI. They found no evidence to suggest that the person was a friend or acquaintance of the family, and cited statistics for stranger abductions as being “small, but significant.” The Santa costume, they believed, denoted the person’s intent to steal a child—possibly any child, from a place that was crowded, busy, and congested—because there is no bigger representative of Christmas for small children than Santa Claus. Even a child who doesn’t automatically trust adults might be lured by the red suit and white beard. As for the lollipop, she and Sebastian hadn’t been far from the candy store. If someone had been plotting to kidnap him, he (or she) might have overheard their conversation.
Marin disagreed. While she can admit that Sebastian is an outgoing child by nature—and quite trusting of adults in general—he would never have allowed himself to be led away from her without so much as a backward glance. And how did “Santa” even know that Sebastian liked that specific lollipop? Marin’s watched the grainy footage a thousand times. She knows her son better than any person on earth. He loved Santa, but he found the actual presence of Santa Claus intimidating. He would have looked to Marin for reassurance that it was all right for him to go.
Unless it was someone he knew.
But everyone in their personal lives was interviewed. Everyone. And every alibi was checked. All of them. For the past year, Castro has been repeating all the work the FBI did, and then some.
At their last status meeting a month ago, Marin asked Castro to widen the search and look into Derek’s employees, and hers, along with all her clients. Derek’s company hosts a holiday party in early December for the families of his employees, and Marin does something similar in the summer with her Customer Appreciation Barbecue. Anyone attending those parties would have met Sebastian. Marin wanted background checks done on all of them, so Castro began with the employees who were closest with Derek and Marin.
She pauses. What if it was Sadie who took Sebastian? What if that’s what the private investigator is going to tell her?
It’s the first time the thought has crossed her mind, and Marin barks a laugh into the quiet kitchen. Ridiculous. Of course it isn’t Sadie. Besides, the woman just had a baby of her own. Why would she want Marin’s?
Marin prepares her coffee, pouring it into a tumbler featuring the salon logo etched down the side. They sell the extra-large rose-gold-tinted tumblers at all three locations for sixty-five dollars, an outrageous price for what amounts to a coffee mug, but the clients buy them regularly for themselves and as gifts for other people. Sometimes Marin puts wine in hers. But not today.
She gets into her car, wondering if she should call Derek in Portland to let him know about the possibility of bad news. Despite the emotional distance between them, she wouldn’t mind hearing his voice right now, always so reassuring and practical. He would certainly remind her that Vanessa Castro is a former cop and professional private investigator who would have said something immediately if she had definitive news about Sebastian, who would never make her wait for a face-to-face appointment.