A soft kiss on my cheek and a whisper in my ear woke me up. “Mummy.”
“Mmm…” I said, lifting my heavy eyelids. Erin wasn’t standing in front of me like I thought. I turned to face Peter thinking she must have been on the other side of me but she wasn’t there either. I looked at Peter. He was fast asleep, his mouth slightly open. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, giving him that sexy rough look that I loved so much. I smiled a little and kissed him lightly on the cheek. He didn’t wake up, he must have been in a deep sleep. He would usually stir when I started kissing him. I took a deep breath thinking I must have dreamt that Erin was by my bed. I lifted the duvet off my body feeling well rested and got up to put on my light pink flowery kimono.
I felt a slight chill as I walked out into the corridor and towards Erin’s room. She normally woke us up at least once per night. It was nice to have had a full night’s sleep though so I wasn’t complaining but now I was looking forward to cuddling my little girl. It’s strange how you could miss a person whilst you had been asleep but there it was. The strongest love of all, a mothers love.
I looked into her bedroom and noticed that her bed was empty.
“Where is my Erin?” I teased, making my voice a little slower and mysterious. I looked around the whole room but I couldn’t see her anywhere. “Erin sweetie?” I asked a little more serious. She must be in the bathroom, I thought to myself as I took a few steps down the corridor and opened the bathroom door to my right.
“Erin” I tried again, looking everywhere in the bathroom, as if she might have jumped into the toilet. I looked quickly behind the shower curtain and the bathroom door but there was nowhere else to look. I turned quickly and jogged into the kitchen and TV room, my eyes scanning the place quickly before shouting out her name. “Erin!!” I felt a panic rise inside of me. Where was she? I looked behind the couch, behind the curtains and the hallway to see if the door was open but it was shut and locked. “ERIN!” I yelled.
Peter came running through with messy hair having thrown on his dark blue nightgown. “Alex, what is it? What’s the matter. Why are you screaming?” Peter looked at me with concern in his eyes.
I couldn’t speak. I just stared at him unable to blink.
“Alex, you’re scaring me,” he said taking a couple of steps towards me.
“I can’t find her,” I said staring at him. After a second I shook out of my freeze-state and started running about looking in all kinds of places and again where I had already looked.
“What do you mean you can’t find her?,” Peter said as if I had been speaking another language. “ERIN!” I yelled. “I can’t find her! she isn’t here!” My voice screeching an octave higher than usual. Peter just stood there for a few seconds whilst I was messing up the place looking in silly places she couldn’t possibly be, like under blankets and behind toys. The penny dropped and Peter started doing what I was doing but he ran into her bedroom instead and then to our bedroom yelling out her name.
My eyes were moving so fast around the place it was like I was on speed. I was panting quickly. My brain felt like it was working out an impossible math equation. Think…think, I told myself. I gazed towards the kitchen counter where my mobile phone lay. I rushed over and grabbed it dialing 999 for emergency phone calls.
“Hello, emergency service operator, which service do you require ? Fire, police, or ambulance” I heard a female voice at the other end of the line say.
“She’s not here,” I heard myself say stupidly. “Who isn’t there,” the woman said with a kind and calm tone.
“My daughter Erin,” I burst out. It was hard to control my voice. Peter came running through to the kitchen with big worried eyes. I could tell he was in as much of a panic as I was.
“Madam, I’ll put you through to missing persons at the police station. Please hold,” she said as I heard a little click and then a ringtone on the other end.
“Police, detective McCarthy speaking, how can I help?” a deep voice answered.
“Our daughter is missing,” I answered.
“How long has she been missing?” he asked. “I don’t know. I put her to bed last night and this morning she wasn’t in her bedroom where she usually is.” I paused for a brief second. “She’s only five.”
“What is her name?” he continued.
“Erin Wallace Walker.”
“Can you describe what she looks like?” “She’s got long dark curly hair, like big curls down to her waist. Light blue eyes. Light skin but also slightly tanned from the summer…em..” I looked to Peter for support. He took the phone from me and held it to his ear.
“Hello, this is Peter Wallace, the father. Look, our daughter is missing. The last thing she was wearing was her pyjamas. She can’t have gone out of the door because it’s locked.”
I stared at Peter whilst trying to hear what the detective was saying but I couldn’t hear anything. I heard Peter give our address. He nodded whilst the conversation was going on. Then he held the phone away slightly. “They are sending a unit here now, we need to have recent pictures of her.” “I’ve got loads on my phone,” I told him. Peter nodded.
After a few seconds he hung up the phone. We looked at each other with panic in our eyes. “I’m going downstairs to check outside,” I said rushing to the door.
“I’m going to call our parents, maybe she’s with them. Maybe we just forgot?” he said questionably, knowing very well that that wasn’t the case. “Either way we’re going to need their help.
“Ok,” I said rushing out the door and down the stairs in bare feet. I bumped into our neighbour mrs. Olsson, a seventy year old little lady with grey curly hair, on the way down.
“Have you seen Erin?!” I almost shouted at her.
She looked taken aback at my outburst.
“No dear, I haven’t. Is everything alright dear? You seem tense, would you like a cup of tea?” she said and smiled at me. I couldn’t manage a smile back, I was too panicked to even be polite. “If you see her let me know immediately!” I said as I took off and stormed through the main entrance of the building.
“Erin!” I yelled. I ran around the building and continued yelling out her name like a mad person. The pavement was damp and chilly. It must have rained during the night. A couple of teenaged boys were giggling and pointing at me from a distance. I gave them a dirty look. They mocked me slightly by laughing even louder but I managed to wipe their grins right off their faces as I took a couple of steps towards them and then they ran off at full speed. One of them tripping over in the rush to get away from me. He got up fast and ran on with his friend, turning around once to make sure that I wasn’t behind them. I must have looked crazy running around in my nightgown with bare feet and basically screaming but I couldn’t have cared less. My little girl was missing, I couldn’t think straight. From a distance I saw a police car driving towards our building. I ran back upstairs. My feet were dirty from having run in bare feet outside. Peter and I looked at each other, both hoping that the other had managed to find Erin but all hope was lost with that one look. I felt empty. The polis car was outside and even though I knew they were here to help I didn’t want them to come up. If they came up it really meant that my little girl was missing and I would have to except what was happening, and that scared me more than anything ever had. Maybe I was dreaming? A glimpse of hope ran through me. Oh please God, let me be dreaming. I tried to will myself to lift off the ground to see if I could fly or if anything felt off. I could usually tell when I was dreaming just by asking that question…am I dreaming? But everything felt normal. I looked around for any sort of clue as to weather this was a dream or not but I was kidding myself. There was nothing even remotely strange about my surroundings apart from the nightmare of my missing daughter. That didn’t feel real at all. I jumped as there was a knock on the door. Peter went over to let them in. Two male police officers, both quite tall, came through the door as Peter welcomed them in. I was holding my breathe as they walked through the hallway. One of the police officers held out his hand to greet me. I looked at it for a second before holding out my hand to shake his but my hand felt numb. It felt like a robotic gesture.
“Hi, I’m detective McCarthy, this here is officer Burton. Mr and Mrs Wallace, we have a few questions we need to ask you regarding your daughter. We will do everything in our power to find her but we are going to need your full cooperation to do so,” he said looking at us both while grabbing a notebook and pen from his jacket pocket.
Peter put his arm around me. “Yes of course, anything you need,” he answered them. The police officer wrote down something before starting the questioning. A header perhaps. The other police officer had started inspecting the apartment, checking the windows and locks. “What is your daughter’s full name?” Peter was the one who answered. I think I might have been in shock because I couldn’t seem to move or talk.
“Erin Wallace-Walker.”
“Any nicknames?”
Peter shook his head. The detective looked at us both but I still felt unable to move.
“How old is she?” he continued.
“She just turned five,” Peter answered. The detective continued asking lots of questions such as her hight, hair and eye colour and lengths and other questions regarding her appearance. He asked all about the night before. Were there any arguments or anything that Erin felt uncomfortable with? What time did she go to bed and was there any chance she could’ve gone out of the apartment without us knowing about it? He asked if anything was off or if we had noticed anything out of the ordinary lately. He asked about her family and friends. Who was she close to? Was there any friction in the family? Who was her closest friend? Would she talk to strangers? And so on.
“Who else has the key to your flat”
“Just Alex’s mum and dad,” Peter answered.
The police officer looked up.
“Is there anyone you can think of who would want to take her away somewhere or someone that she would want to run away with, even if just for the night?” he asked.
I looked down and frowned. Peter noticed. “Alex?” he said my name like a question, knowing I was thinking of something. I looked up at his beautiful blue eyes, the same eyes our daughter had.
“It’s probably nothing,” I said looking down again.
“Any information you can give us, however small, is good,” the police officer cut in.
“Well,” I continued pausing briefly, “I just got the feeling somebody was watching me yesterday. Once during lunch when I was out with Chris and once on the bus on the way home, but I didn’t see anyone.” I felt silly telling them about an eery feeling. Even if it was relevant I had zero description of the person or whatever it was. I had nothing to go on, just a spooky feeling.
“If you can remember anything about this person let us know,” the detective said looking at me with a sympathetic smile.
“Now I need you to call everyone you know, and I mean everybody. Your friends and family, her preschool, her friends’ families, your neighbours, everybody, and ask them if they have seen her or if they have noticed anything out of the ordinary, like have they seen any people around that they don’t usually see? It could be at the park or at the supermarket. Has a stranger been extra kind to Erin? That sort of thing. First I’m going to need a couple of recent photos of her and something that smells like her. If she isn’t with any of your friends or family we will get the dogs in to smell her scent. Then I suggest that you get one of your friends or family members to come over and stay at the flat whilst you go out and look for her in all the places that you would normally go to. We will start looking at surveillance cameras as soon as we get the pictures. You can send the pictures to this email address”, he said and handed me a little contact card, “and I will send it to the surveillance team so they know who to look for.” He took a deep breath and looked at us seriously. “We will do everything in our power to find your daughter. Please let us know of anything else that could be of value.” Peter and I nodded and Peter thanked the detective. I was looking through the photos in my phone. I had so many of Erin. There was a lovely picture of her eating the ice cream that I had bought her the day before. She had ice cream on her nose and she was laughing out loud as I had pointed it out to her. Then there was the one at her party where she was dressed in a fairy costume, paper was flying around her as she couldn’t get the presents opened fast enough. I had also taken a lovely photo with Erin and Peter, they were smiling at each other with there foreheads touching, it really captured the moment. I ended up picking a picture where she was in her preschool clothes walking back home smiling as usual, and a picture that I had taken at the Royal botanical gardens a few weeks earlier. She was admiring some beautiful flowers with a couple of amazingly colourful butterflies fluttering above. She was so focused. You could have almost imagined that she was communicating with them.
Peter had started calling everyone we knew and ticking them off a list. The police officers were also making phone calls and following whatever procedure they were up to. I wasn’t paying too much attention to them. It all felt surreal, like a bizarre scary circus was taking place in my apartment, in my life. What kind of horrible joke was the universe pulling? I felt sick to my stomach.
Where was our little girl?