Switched (13 page)

While Doyle was trying to reach someone to get us a ride back to the café, the restaurant owner offered me a free breakfast and conversation. I was dehydrated and drank an entire carafe of water.

“You must be Felicity,” he said, shaking my hand.

“Felicity?”

“Doyle’s girl. Maisey talked about you, but we’ve never met. I’m happy to see Doyle has found himself a beauty.”

Doyle returned to the table and ordered juice and toast. It turned out he couldn’t get through to anybody at the café. They were probably still sleeping off the party.

“We’ll take a taxi back after we eat,” Doyle told me. He smiled, and I took a sip of my coffee in order to avoid his gaze. My mind was racing. Felicity was Doyle’s girl? Why didn’t he say so before? Why didn’t Maisey tell me?

And above that, there was this thought rolling around my brain: Why wasn’t Doyle worried? If he was romantically involved with Felicity, why wasn’t he concerned about where she was? Why wasn’t he looking for her? And more than that, why did he stop me at every step from investigating her disappearance?

The taxi arrived. I shrugged away from Doyle and sat in the backseat. I couldn’t bear for him to touch me, not with the unanswered questions taking up my attention, not with my doubts about his intentions and affections, or even his culpability.

But Doyle had different ideas. He wanted to touch me, to kiss the side of my neck, to hold my hand and caress my palm with his thumb.

“I’m sorry,” I said to him, pulling away and leaning against the door. “Hungover.”

“Of course. How thoughtless of me.”

When we arrived, Doyle paid the driver with soggy euro bills, and I ran upstairs and took a quick shower. The apartment was quiet, everyone’s bedroom doors closed. It was Monday, and the café was fortunately closed for the day. After my shower, I slipped into my bedroom and locked the door behind me. I fetched Felicity’s diary and I lay on the bed.

***

“Who is this?”

“It’s me.”

“Who? I can’t hear you.”

“It’s me. I have to whisper.”

“Debra?”

“Yes,” I hissed.

“What number is this? I don’t recognize it.”

“I stole this phone from Gunnar,” I said.

“Who’s Gunnar?”

“Listen, Stacy. I don’t have much time,” I said. “Everyone’s still sleeping.”

“I was sleeping, too. It’s the middle of the night.  What’s up? How’s it going? Do you need a return ticket? Hold on, I’m getting on Expedia.”

Oh, boy did I ever need a return ticket. This whole renewal trip was a big bust. Now, I was stuck, half-involved with a maybe kidnapper or worse, and then there was my hair. It would be so easy to let Stacy click a few buttons on her laptop and get me a first class ticket back home. It would be heaven.

In a matter of hours, I could be in Chicago, making an appointment with my hairdresser to dye my hair a color that wasn’t used to flag down emergency services. And I wouldn’t have to deal with Doyle or Bruno or missing girls.

“No, I don’t need a return ticket,” I told Stacy on the phone. “I’m calling about something more important.”

“Oh God. ‘Important’ sounds bad.”

“I may have had sex on the beach.”

“Go on,” she said after a moment. “Should I get chips? I wish I didn’t have a shoot in the morning. I would eat chips.”

“And on a bar. I had sex on a bar.”

“Like a gymnast’s bar?”

“No, like a bar with drinks,” I said. “And peanuts.”

“Peanuts and chips. Yum,” Stacy breathed. “I’m guessing you didn’t have sex by yourself.”

“There was someone else there.”

“No wonder you don’t want a return ticket,” Stacy said.

“And I look like a clown. I had a mishap with temporary hair dye.” My breath hitched, and I choked back a tear.

“That’s rough.”

“And I did it with a kidnapper.”

“Excuse me?” she asked.

“Doyle. The bar and the beach. He might be a kidnapper.”

“I’m online now. There’s a flight in six hours. I’ll get you a ticket.”

“Or a murderer,” I added. “He could be a murderer. The girls are missing, so I don’t know for sure.”

I had locked myself in my room a couple of hours ago and dove into Felicity’s diary.  It was more of the same: cities, restaurants, bathrooms. Then she wrote about finding Mallorca and a job at Doyle’s café. She didn’t reference Doyle or Maisey or anyone else by name, but she gave the café’s bathroom a three out of five stars, and she did mention that she was getting laid every night.

Sure enough, the diary ended with her writing about India. There was information about plane ticket prices and a big smiley face with
2 euros a day
written where the mouth should go. Felicity was very keen on the cheap cost of living in India. It was obviously her next destination, and Doyle was right that she probably would have just taken off without even saying goodbye. Felicity was a free spirit, and life for her was just a big adventure.

But adventure or not, Felicity wouldn’t have gone to India without her passport, clothes, and birth control. There was also the little matter of the piece of paper that fell out of the back of her diary. Drawn on Bruno Perrier’s letterhead was a doodle of his yacht, a girl with piercings that had to be Felicity, and a muscle-bound bald man. Doyle.

“He might not have worked alone,” I told Stacy. “A tycoon could have helped him.”

“I’m sensing some PTSD from the wedding incident. Are you feeling all right?”

“No!”

“Okay. But you don’t want a ticket home. So what can I do to help you, Debra?”

“I’m going to find these girls. I’m going to find out what happened to them, and I need you tell me if I’m doing the right thing,” I said. “Am I?”

“No!”

“I have the day off, and I’m going to spend it searching for them.”

“Famous last words,” said Stacy.

“I’m going to start with the police station. Does Mallorca have a police station? Never mind, I’ll figure it out.”

“Isn’t this how The Texas Chainsaw Massacre began? I’m getting a horror movie vibe.”

I felt a surge of relief that came with my new sense of purpose. It felt good to be proactive instead of letting life just happen to me. “Thank you so much, Stacy. I don’t know what I would do without you.”

I hung up and slipped into Gunnar’s room to return his phone. The apartment was still quiet except for the sound of gentle snoring. I could have used some sleep, too. It had been a crazy night: drug runners, swimming to safety, throwing up on a peacock. Doyle.

I was worn out, but nevertheless, I was doped up on adrenalin. It felt like Felicity was calling out to me, asking me to find her, and even if that meant discovering Doyle was guilty of something, so be it.

It turned out that the police station was within walking distance from the café. It was small with four officers working at desks, and a couple of kids sleeping it off on chairs just inside the front door. The office was bright and airy, and there was a definite laid-back atmosphere. Friendly.

“Hola,” I called out, and one of the officers got up from his desk and approached me with a big smile. “I was wondering if you could help me.”

He couldn’t. He didn’t speak a word of English, and neither did any of the other policemen. I tried pantomime and raising my voice, as if they could understand me better if I yelled. In essence, I tried every Ugly American trick in the book.

“Telefono?” I asked, finally.

They were more than happy to let me use their phone, and they even looked up Nataniel’s phone number for me. Luckily, he answered on the second ring. He assured me he would be at the station within a half hour. I might have given him the impression that it was a matter of life or death.

It wasn’t a total lie. Finding the missing girls could have been a matter of life or death.

“Debra, I am so happy to see that you are in good health,” he said when he arrived. Actually, I was sitting down with the cops for the best paella I had ever tasted. They had insisted that I share lunch with them, which turned out to be a five course meal brought in by a lovely grandmother with a carload of homemade food.

“Nataniel, thank you so much for coming,” I said. “Would you like some wine?” I held out a glass for him. I was abstaining, limiting myself to water, as I was nursing a terrible hangover. Nataniel sat next to me. He looked confused, wondering I’m sure what eating lunch had to do with a life or death situation. But he wasn’t angry. Instead, he was his normal kind self.

I explained that I needed him to act as my interpreter, and he readily accepted. “Please tell them I’m looking for a missing girl.”

Nataniel translated, and the policemen nodded. “Maria,” one of them said, looking genuinely concerned.

“They say she’s been gone for a month,” Nataniel said. “One says she ran away, but two others think she is probably dead, killed maybe by a boyfriend or a drunk tourist she dated.”

I thought back to the desperate man with the fliers, looking for his daughter, Maria.  “Do they have a suspect? Her boyfriend?” I asked.

“Her father says she did not have a boyfriend. She was going to be a sister.”

“A sister?”

“Yes, in the church,” explained Nataniel.

A nun. Maria was going to be a nun, which was not exactly like party girl Felicity.

Felicity. I had gotten distracted with the other missing girl.

“I was actually asking about another missing girl,” I said.

“They say there are many missing girls,” Nataniel explained.

We finished our lunch, and they cleared off the table, replacing the food with six files for Nataniel and me to study. Six young women, aged seventeen to twenty-nine, all missing in the past year. They were all local women from around the island, and their disappearances could be explained away by saying they were young and probably ran away to other places and other lives.

Six lives. Vanished without a trace. Now you see ‘em, now you don’t. They were strangers to me, but I felt a certain kinship to them. They had been living their lives and planning their futures when all of a sudden they were taken from them.
Poof.

I couldn’t help but draw a line between them and me. I had thought my life was completely worked out. I was going to live happily ever after with Jackson. Then,
poof
.

“Is this all there is?” I asked. “No more files?”

There was nothing on Felicity. Since nobody had reported her disappearance, she didn’t have a file. I felt I owed it to her to get a file started, but I didn’t know much. Felicity Jones, aged somewhere in her early twenties, my size, and a penchant for partying and piercings. I had seen a couple of photos of her, and I promised to bring one in to the police as soon as I could.

“I think she was Doyle’s girlfriend,” I said. My voice came out low and squeaky. I was almost scared to voice my suspicion, and I realized, wanted them to prove that I was wrong.

“They say Doyle has no girlfriend,” Nataniel said.

“He doesn’t?” I asked. “How do they know?”

“He’s married.”

“He’s what?” I saw stars, and I had to sit down.

“No. Excuse me my English. I mean he
was
married. He is very sad his wife died.”

“His wife?”

“He loved her very much,” Nataniel translated. “She was a local woman. Died of cancer last year.”

I tried to think of Doyle as the grieving widower. Then I thought about the bar sex and the beach sex. Was that normal behavior for a grieving widower? Perhaps Doyle was playing that role in public, but in private he was a sex-crazed serial killer.

The police had no problem with me snooping into the disappearances of the girls. I don’t think they thought I could get anywhere, and no harm could be done. But I was determined. For some reason, I believed I could help them, even if I couldn’t help myself.

Nataniel offered to drive me around all day and be my right hand man. He was pretty excited about investigating with me, and his attitude was a welcome change from Doyle, who didn’t think there was anything to investigate in the first place.

Our first stop was Maria’s house. Her father was home with his wife, finishing lunch. They invited us in and offered us cake and coffee.

“I remember you,” he told me.

He was pleased I wanted to help find his daughter. She had vanished off the face of the earth, and he didn’t know which way to turn to find her.

She had been a quiet high school student with a couple of close girlfriends. She helped out at home, and she volunteered at church. Her heart’s desire was to become a nun, and she had planned to enter a convent in a few months, but she disappeared.

“No man,” her father told me. “Maria did not have a boyfriend.”

Her mother wept and wiped her eyes with her napkin.  Maria was their only child, and she had been doted on. She was an angelic figure, and the loss was too much for them to bear. Worse than that, they had begun to lose hope of ever finding her.

“You must be very upset,” Nataniel said, stating what I thought was the obvious. “Pain. Her disappearance still gives you a lot of pain.”

“Our lives have been altered. Like our limbs were taken.”

“There is a lot of power in her disappearance,” Nataniel said, nodding.

Maria’s father offered to show us Maria’s bedroom. We passed through the little house, which was tidy and full of photos of their daughter. Her bedroom was small and neat as a pin. A single bed with a pink duvet cover was tucked against one wall, surrounded by walls of shelves and drawers.

Pressed flowers in homemade frames covered her desk. I picked up one with three pressed white roses, framed in blue with shells glued on the corners. Maria had scratched her name into the frame in tiny, exact letters, her concession to pride.

There was no huge trail of her existence like Felicity had left in her room. No diary or passport or pile of dirty clothes. Maria had taken very little space in the world, but that didn’t keep her safe.

I searched the room for about thirty minutes, but I didn’t come up with any clues. I started to feel ridiculous. What was I doing, searching for a girl who had nothing to do with me? Who did I think I was? I was hardly a detective. I knew nothing about solving mysteries.