Little Secrets(3)

Because it will be okay. Because they’ll find him. Of course they will.

She punches her phone and calls Derek. The minute her husband picks up, she loses it. “Sebastian’s gone.” Her voice is three times louder and a half octave higher than it normally is. “I’ve lost him.”

Derek knows all her volumes, and he knows immediately that she isn’t joking. “What?”

“I can’t find Sebastian!”

“Where are you?” he asks, and she looks around, only to realize she’s migrated again, all the way past the fishermen. She’s now standing near the main entrance under the iconic neon-lit Public Market sign.

“I’m by the pig,” she says, knowing he’ll understand her reference to the popular sculpture.

“Don’t move, I’ll be right there.”

The older lady who’s helping her has turned into three concerned ladies of various ages, along with a man—someone’s husband—who’s been sent to notify security. Derek shows up a couple of minutes later, out of breath because he ran all the way from the other side of the market. He takes one look at his wife, sans Sebastian, and his face freezes. It’s almost as if he expected that everything would be resolved by the time he got there, and that his only job would be to comfort a scared, relieved wife and a scared, crying child, because comforting is something Derek is good at. But there’s no crying kid, and no relieved wife, and he’s momentarily paralyzed as to how to handle it.

“What the hell, Marin?” her husband blurts. “What did you do?”

It’s a poor choice of words that comes out sounding more accusing than he probably meant. His voice jabs, and she winces; she knows that question will haunt her forever.

What did she do? She lost their son, that’s what she did. And she’s prepared to take all the blame and apologize to everyone a thousand times once they find him, because they will find him, they have to find him, and once they do, once he’s back and safe in her arms, she’ll feel like a prize idiot.

She is desperately looking forward to feeling like an idiot.

“He was just here, I let go of his hand to text you, and the next thing I know, he’s gone.” She’s all the way hysterical now, and people aren’t just staring, they’re stopping, offering help, asking for a description of the little boy who’s wandered away from his mother.

Two security guards dressed in dark gray uniforms approach with the helpful husband, who’s already explained that they’re looking for a small boy in a fox sweater.

“Not fox,” Marin snaps angrily, but nobody seems to mind. “Reindeer. It’s a reindeer sweater, brown and white, with black buttons for the eyes—”

“Do you have a picture of your son wearing it?” one of the security guards asks, and it’s all she can do not to shriek at him, because the question is so stupid. One, how many four-year-olds can there be in this market right now with the exact same handknit sweater? And two, of course she has a picture of her son, because it’s her son, and her phone is filled with them.

They take the picture, forward it around.

But they don’t find him.

Ten minutes later, the police show up.

The cops don’t find him, either.

Two hours later, after Seattle PD has combed through all the security footage, she and Derek watch a computer monitor in shock and disbelief as a little boy dressed in a reindeer sweater is shown exiting the market holding the hand of somebody whose face is obscured. They disappear through the doors closest to the underground parking lot, but that doesn’t mean they went to the parking lot. Their son is holding a lollipop in his free hand, and it’s swirly and colorful, the exact same lollipop his mother would have bought for him if she’d had the chance. The person who gave it to him is dressed head to toe in a Santa Claus costume, right down to the black boots, bushy eyebrows, and white beard. The camera angle makes it impossible to get a clear glimpse of the face. Nor is it possible to tell if it’s a man or a woman.

Marin can’t process what she’s looking at, and she asks them to replay it, over and over again, squinting at the monitor as if by doing so she’ll be able to see more than what is actually there. The playback is jerky, staccato, more like a series of grainy stills playing in sequence than a video recording. Each time she sees it, the moment Sebastian disappears from view is terrifying. One second he’s there, his foot crossing over the threshold of the doorway. And then, in the very next frame, he’s gone.

There. Gone. Rewind. There. Gone.

Behind her, Derek paces, speaking in heated tones to the security guards and the police, but she only catches certain words—kidnapped, stolen, AMBER Alert, FBI—above the noise of her own internal screaming. She can’t seem to accept that this really happened. It seems like it’s happening to someone else. It seems like something out of a movie.

Someone dressed as Santa Claus took her son. Deliberately. Purposefully.

While the security footage is black-and-white and fuzzy, it’s clear Sebastian wasn’t coerced. He didn’t seem frightened. His face was just fine, because he had a five-dollar lollipop in one hand and Santa in the other. The ladies working at La Douceur Parisienne checked their computer and confirmed they’d sold seven lollipops that day, but they don’t remember any customers dressed as Santa, and there are no security cameras inside their tiny store. There’s only one CCTV camera across the street from the underground parking garage that Sebastian and his captor are thought to have entered, but because of the angle, the camera only catches a distant side view of the cars exiting the garage; no license plates are visible. Fifty-four vehicles exited in the hour after Sebastian was taken, and the police can’t trace any of them.