Beckett: Lost

Tuesday 25 December

16.52

Much later that evening she would ask herself when the exact moment was that she realised something was wrong.

Maybe it was the quantity of brandy in the Christmas Pudding and the empty bottle of red wine she, Martha and Castle had shared, but time seemed to have disappeared. The chosen game of Who Am I? resulted in rounds of raucous laughter as Martha asked such absurd questions such as 'Am I a gemini?' and 'Am I an introvert or an extrovert?', riling Castle into repeatedly explaining the rules with ever increasing faux exasperation.

She fiddled with her mother's ring against her chest – it hung snuggly in the V-neck of the beautiful gown - as she laughed freely at the exaggerated arguing. The day has been better than wonderful. Castle had cast his magic spell and for the first time since her mother's death, Christmas wasn't something to survive or ignore. She had caught her father's eye several times; it had been so long since they had been part of a larger family. He too seemed content and at peace. They should take a photo when Erin gets back of the three of them: three generations of Becketts.

Everything was falling into place. Erin had welcomed her desire to adopt her and there was a new closeness between them. Wordlessly Erin now permitted spontaneous touch, the physical contact between them edging towards the ordinary and the normal.

Kate had avoided asking Erin her thoughts about Castle's adoption offer; it was a big decision, maybe it was too soon to ask? Castle badgered her about it each night before they slept, earnestly and nervously wondering how much longer she thought Erin would need. She reminded him that adoption was just a piece of paper and reassured that the way she behaved with him was more important. Erin had been only with them for two months; they should be realistic about what she might be able to cope with. Before she left, however, Erin had seemed to be on the cusp of saying something: there had been a moment, a pause, when Castle had handed Erin a Who Am I? name card; she was sure she had detected excitement in her body language as she asked to be excused briefly.

After Martha had finally realised that she was Martin Luther King, and Kate had, in only four guesses, identified herself as Eleanor Roosevelt, she glanced at Erin's empty chair. Frowning, she looked at her watch. She had been gone for over half an hour.

Craning her neck to Castle, seated next to her at the head of the table, she said under her breath, 'Shouldn't she be back by now?'

'What?' He glanced at his watch, by his face as he fiddled with the plastic headband to replace a name card with a new one. 'I'm sure she's fine. You know Erin, she probably got side-tracked.'

On the opposite side of the table, Jim, yet to learn he is Madonna, caught hold of the conversation and leaned forward.

'She is spontaneous and impulsive, that one,' he said, pointing at the four kittens who had been distracted from the table with a spare headband to fight over.

'Well, at least she now asks to go out by herself,' said Castle, chuckling, demanding the attention of the table as if he had said the punchline to a joke.

The silence was deafening. When he caught sight of Kate's fixed narrowed eyes, his face fell.

'What do you mean?' she said, slowly.

Under her withering stare, like a rabbit in headlights he considered his answer and then he dropped his shoulders in defeat. 'Just, on your birthday, before you woke up, she went to get bagels without telling me she was going out.'

'And when I took her to a soccer match,' – Jim jumped in, seamlessly taking the baton - 'after using the bathroom, instead of coming back straight away to the seat she wandered off to find a flag - which she never found.'

Perhaps he had thought he was offering Castle fatherly moral support? She stared at them both hard. Her father no longer looked as confident as his tone had suggested.

'Why didn't you both tell me?'

Aware of his misjudgement, Jim retreated into his chair. 'I told Rick.' The two men shared an injured, guilty look.

'Erm, well, I just…it never came up.' Castle held out placating hands. 'Erin promised not to go out without telling us again and I guess I didn't see the benefit of telling you, I had dealt with it. I wasn't hiding it,' he gabbled.

'Well, she did look after herself when she ran away,' piped up Alexis, rallying around her father.

Martha, whose turn it was, was about to ask another question but dropped her hands and closed her mouth, aware now that the game was paused. 'Darling, she probably ran into a friend. Doesn't she know a few girls on this block?'

Kate smiled gratefully at Martha, swallowing her irritation with Castle and her father. This was true, she conceded. Erin had persuaded them to let her take the school bus home because she had made friends with girls in her year getting off at the same stop.

'Or maybe the shop was closed, and she went somewhere else,' suggested Alexis looking at everyone in turn.

Kate followed her gaze around the table taking in the eager nodding heads. They were right; Erin was spontaneous. She had found the kittens by following a tiny sound down an alley. Also, she was streetwise; she had even safely hidden herself whilst a double homicide had taken place. Then why couldn't she shake the sense of dread invading her lower gut? Erin had said she would only go downstairs; if she had gone somewhere else, why hadn't she called?

As if reading her mind, Castle pushed his chair back. 'You know what, I'll call her right now, and tell her to come home,' he said laying a hand on her shoulder.

As if by mutual agreement no one had brought their phones to the table during the meal, so Castle had to go to the office to retrieve his. While they waited, Kate hoped Martha would come up with a light distraction, but no one spoke. He was taking too long. She stood and wandered (despite her clunky cast, mostly covered by the floor-length of the gown, the silver material swished elegantly, like small waves lapping her legs) to the enormous, uncovered windows.

From the rarefied height of the highest apartment in the building, a landscape of SoHo's celebrated Art Nouveau architecture stood proudly before the skyscrapers beyond. The elaborate buildings were tightly packed together. Decoratively they each had their own personality yet many shared dividing walls so that they were interdependent. The contrast between the equally sized, evenly spaced windows and wrought iron balconies and the varying heights and distinct bright colours of the buildings emphasized the district's unique topography which bridged the early road layout of Lower Manhattan and the newer rigid block system of the rest of the island.

The sun had recently set; the city lights twinkled in the new darkness. Below her she could imagine the noise of the cars - the engines, the beeping – the city that never sleeps buzzing and swarming and ever moving despite the holidays. She leaned her forehead on the cool glass trying to see below as close to the apartment building as possible. The sidewalk immediately beneath, between the parked cars and the building, was hidden. People strode, wrapped against the cold, moving first from the periphery of one side of her vision and then a few seconds later popping up on the other side of her view, like they had entered and then reappeared from an invisible wormhole.

She sensed rather than heard Castle return to the room.

'I've tried three times; it goes straight to voicemail.'

The street of ornate buildings pulsed like a beast. She felt as if she was lifting off the ground. This was the world that Erin had come from, appeared out of nowhere. She strained her neck again; she still couldn't see the street directly beneath. Was Erin there, hidden just out of sight? She floated higher and higher.

'Maybe there's been an accident?'

The female voice sounded as if it was coming from far away.

There were no sirens, no emergency vehicles. No outside sign that anything untoward had happened.

Castle's voice brought her back to her body with a hard crash.

'I'm going downstairs to look.'

She turned to face the family. Their clothes were wrong. She removed the headband and let it drop to the floor.

Everyone now stood.

'I'll come with you, Dad.'

As Castle and Alexis solemnly put on coats over their finery, Martha and Jim crept closer, Martha unable to mask her concern despite her attempt to comfort. 'Let's not get ahead of ourselves and start worrying yet.'

That ship had sailed. The dread had spread across her body. Breathing only through her nose she detached herself from them. She had to get out of these clothes. She had to go and search too.

Maybe she was over-reacting. Erin was just being her independent, unpredictable self. Kate had seen Erin's irritation at being expected to always advertise her whereabouts. She couldn't even imagine what might have happened: no alarming scenario played itself out to her. It was just her oversensitive cop gut playing tricks. Maybe any second now, the front door would bang open, and Erin would saunter in, an excuse merrily on her lips, oblivious to their concern. Kate would be unable to resist hugging her then, even if she crushed her.

She changed into her regulation black turtleneck, putting on her armour.

xxx

17.13

Her hands were red and numb on the grey crutches; she had forgotten her gloves. She didn't notice the just-above-freezing temperature.

Leaning onto one crutch and tucking the other under an armpit, she held her phone, skin tightening around the bones in her fingers, in front of her. On speaker, she heard Erin's voice, the same words she had listened to five times. 'Leave a message!' it trilled gaily to the street.

'The shopkeeper saw her leave more than half an hour ago. She bought some coloured card and glitter pens. They were in a white plastic bag,' said Alexis breathlessly, rubbing her woollen-gloved hands together. Beckett stuffed the phone into a pocket of her knee-length black coat, shaking her head at the pair, her jaw clenched. The redhead stood in front of Castle who grimly returned Beckett's expressionless stare. He seemed to know the gravity as instinctively as she. There was no sign of a smirk, a raised eyebrow, a dismissal.

They had already confirmed with the green-suited doorman that she had left the building alone and had not returned. With it being Christmas Day, it had been quiet with little coming and goings so with the weather so cold he had huddled up in the entrance atrium and not seen where she went. On another day, Kate might have stopped to speak to him, to make small talk, sensitive that there would be, like Castle would guess, a story behind this man's choice – is it a choice? - to work on Christmas Day.

'We should go in different directions,' she instructed.

'Beckett, you can't walk in those.'

'I'm fine.' With the ankle on its way to healing, the pain had subsided; the cast was now more of an inconvenience. He had a point that she couldn't move quickly with crutches. She indicated, however, that she would go one way, Alexis pointed across the road and Castle headed in the other direction.

Her daughter was at a friend's house. Her phone had run out of charge, she told herself, swallowing the excess saliva pooling in her cheeks. Why didn't she have any names, any addresses? She remembered how appalled she had been that Castle had added a tracker app to Alexis's phone behind her back. Castle had told her how upset and angry she was, and she recalled her own defence of the teenager's right to privacy and freedom. But Alexis had been older, Erin was only 12. All her values went out the window as she tried to suppress, along with rising nausea, the regret that she hadn't tagged the phone.

Two blocks away was one of SoHo's rare alleys, a corridor just wide enough for a car to pass through. It was where Erin had found the bagful of kittens. She paused as she reached the kerb. Should she continue ahead or turn down the alley? Maybe Erin had seen something again, or had purposely explored hoping to perform another animal rescue?

Lightheaded, she turned down the unlit alley unable to make out anything more than a few large shapes, maybe dumpsters. A ladder's rungs were silhouetted against the streetlights at the far end where the alley opened onto another street. As she half walked, half hopped, the rubber base of the crutches firm on the ice just starting to solidify on the tarmac, in the middle of the street ahead she caught sight of something white and small fluttering against the darkness. She stopped. The walls of the narrow alley seemed to close in.

It was on an alley just like this that Erin had appeared, found by Espo and Ryan. In the months since, Beckett had learnt no more about how or why Erin had been there. In the absence of knowledge, she had thanked New York City for having kept her child safe. It appalled her that Erin had had to survive alone, on the streets. Yet she had. Her boisterous, cantankerous city, her home that she loved but also often disgusted her, had taken care of her daughter for several weeks. Now, had the city reclaimed her, sucked her back in? Had her return been a cruel tease, like the carriage returning to a pumpkin at midnight, or a coma patient waking only to say their final goodbye?

Barely able to breathe, she inched towards the object. She couldn't make out the detail until she was only a few feet from it. A thin almost see-through white plastic bag weighted down by something inside. There was something just to the side of it. A phone.

Trembling she picked it up. The screen was smashed. Not simply cracked, the phone itself was dented, broken with force.

Erin's phone.


A/N

Beckett might put her extremely quick jump to 'something is really wrong' down to being a cop but as any parent out there can attest, if you're a parent and your kid isn't where they're supposed to be, it is alarming how quickly you react (I like that Beckett doesn't realise she's reacting this way because she's a mother). One of my sons did this to us a few weeks ago and he was only 'missing' for 15 minutes but I was one breath away from calling the police and was verging on hysterical the moment we realised no one knew where he was. I have known from early on in the plotting of this story that this event was going to happen, and it's now far harder to write it emotionally having been through that fear recently with my son! Unlike Beckett, I was imaging all kinds of scenarios, it was horrific!

Unlike my son, something HAS happened to Erin. I don't want to give spoilers but there are a range of readers with different hopes and expectations for this story. Because you have to wait for me to write it, I think, it's only fair to manage expectations by saying that happy endings are what I want to read, and I have no intention of going down any dark, gory paths with child torture etc. When I conceived this story, I loved the idea of seeing Beckett emotionally in the kind of position that Castle is in with Alexis in Hunt. So, nothing worse than what happened to Alexis will happen to Erin. What I wanted to write and to see is Bad Ass Mama Beckett!

As ever, thank you for your reviews and comments xx