‘Do you ever think it might be someone we know? Someone who thinks we have money from the restaurant, or the means to ship drugs, or … I don’t know, someone from my past?’ Simone asks, thinking that her parents had problems with addiction but they were not bad. They did not make nefarious connections.
‘But why would anybody … I mean, someone from the restaurant, like, why would they ever think you’d be a good target for drugs shipping?’
‘I mean, in a way, I was. I did it. And so many people knew about the trip,’ Simone says. She’d spent the whole summer telling punters about Lucy, and when Simone was going. ‘It’s impossible to narrow down.’
‘Maybe it’s the lodge. I don’t know,’ Lucy says. ‘Maybe someone was watching it.’
‘Can you think ofanyreason why we might have become a target?’
‘No,’ Lucy says.
‘You’ve been to Texas twice this year … anyone you confided in? Ask you strange things?’
‘Honestly, the Easter camp was full of do-gooders. Singingcamp was just – just singers. I can’t think of a single strange moment,’ Lucy says, in such a way that Simone knows the topic, temporarily open, is now closed.
By noon, it’s so hot that Simone wishes it were freezing again. They would never otherwise have spent an entire morning walking with no break, and they’re two bottles of water down. Of ten.
All around them is a flat vista. Mountains in the very distance. Nothing left and right except blinding sun, dried shrubs and dust. She can see the horizon in every single direction.
There is nowhere to hide from the sun in the desert. No shade, morning clouds burned off quickly and easily, only the occasional large tree or boulder to duck behind, but it’s hardly any cooler when they do. They have one tube of sunscreen. It’ll run out within days, the water sooner. They need to walk further and drink less, but the thirst is insatiable, a physical sensation at the back of Simone’s throat. As she lets Lucy drink but tries to limit her own consumption, she begins to fantasize about the cold and the wet. Sticking her tongue out to taste sleety cold rain or snow. A perfectly chilled lemonade from the back of the fridge …
The sun is almost vertical above them when the flip phone makes a sound in Simone’s pocket. She startles, not used to noise in the deathly quiet desert, thinking everything is threats that might come from anywhere: storms, wild animals, kidnappers, police. Lucy is up ahead; she hasn’t heard it.
Network Connected.
They’ve been in the desert for less than twenty-four hours, but it feels like days. But now the world sits once more at her fingertips –Network Connected– and Simone begins typing immediately.
She sends the Airbnb enquiry. The next thing she does isgoogle the Shafter waste management schedule, even though it would be so dangerous and stupid to return there. Nevertheless, her heart seems to deflate when she sees that it’s every week, and today. Those other burner phones will have been taken off this morning to some landfill.
And now to the news. Their names. She is walking as she types, stumbling over larger rocks that she doesn’t see.
Simone Seaborn. Lucy Seaborn. She knows before she finishes writing their names that she will find information she doesn’t currently have.
She presses Enter. Google takes a while to process and load, the signal sketchy, and then, suddenly, there it is, the first headline:
HUSBAND OF FUGITIVE WIFE SPEAKS OUT.
CHAPTER 39
Simone’s back shivers deeply, her spine a centipede. Lucy is striding ahead in the way that she does. Her rucksack on her back, hands holding the straps on her shoulders, sipping constantly at water, head perfectly upright. She still hasn’t noticed Simone using the phone, and thank God for that.
‘I’m going for a wee,’ Simone calls out, and Lucy throws out a hand behind her head in acknowledgement, but doesn’t really slow her steps. Simone will catch up. You can’t lose each other in a place where you can see two miles in every direction, where the only thing obscuring the view is the curvature of the Earth.
Simone heads behind a rock, the air above it quivering hot with sun, and opens the article in the shade. She will have only a few minutes.
DAMIEN SEABORN, 43, ORIGINALLY FROM LONDON, has today spoken out about his wife and daughter, believed to be on the run following a drugs exchange gone wrong.
Simone Seaborn, also 43, was captured on dashcam footage in a dispute with a local man, which ended in his brutal murder. Simone and her daughter Lucy, 18, quickly left the scene, leaving a bag full of cocaine behind, but not before Lucy shot at a nearby police car. County police say they are at large.
Husband and father Damien today hosted a press conference pleading for their safe return. He tells the world that this was not a drugs trade. Their daughter was kidnapped, and his wife received a ransom request from an organized crime gang operating in Texas.
‘Please, please come back – facing the consequences is the only solution,’ he told the world. ‘I know none of this is your fault, but …’
When Andrew Wilson, from theSun,asked him if he supported his wife’s actions, he replied, ‘Absolutely not. She has shot and killed a man, and has taken from me our daughter in reckless circumstances. Kidnap or no kidnap, she took the law into her own hands.’
Simone lets her arm fall to her side, the phone held loosely in her hand. She leans back against the rock, her head warm with the heat of it. She can’t breathe. She can’t think straight. What the fuck? Damien?
This is the third worst moment of her life. The first is the ransom. The second is the moment she had to shoot a man to save her daughter. And the third is this, except that this one feels like a true, pure and undistilled form of heartbreak. Damien, her safe space, her forever ally, her friend; her birth family a shitty hand, the second a full house. And they’re now divided because of a marital dispute they had in the most awful, most stressful of circumstances.
