Chapter 35 Lee
Lee
Days passed—why was the warrant taking such a long time to reveal any information from the flight manifests?
When Lee complained, Markos told her Greece was a slow-moving bureaucracy.
Lee suspected, too, that a missing, middle-aged American just wasn’t a priority.
Crime shows implied that police departments dropped everything to focus on a single case, but Markos was not Mariana van Zeller; Regan’s disappearance not a Trafficked episode.
Lee discovered a dull and exhausting sense of purpose trying to take care of the girls, her admiration for Regan growing by the hour.
How had Regan tackled the sink full of dirty dishes day after day?
The trash bag full to bursting, teenaged dirty clothes everywhere, counters somehow splattered with tomato sauce and spilled milk?
No wonder Lee’s sister had craved an internet thrill!
—
After dragging the garbage to the street one night, Lee sat on the couch next to Flora, who was clicking through her mother’s camera roll on her own computer.
(Flora and her crew had accessed the images as soon as Regan didn’t return home; they’d been poring over them since, to no avail.) Lee winced, gazing at Regan’s badly lit selfies.
Regan had lost weight; she looked wan and desperate.
In many of the photos, she was holding her hair back to show a pair of diamond earrings.
“What’s the deal with the earrings?” muttered Lee, thinking of the empty jewelry box in Regan’s bedside table drawer.
“She got all these stupid gifts from him.” Flora’s shoulders fell forward a bit. “I talk about Francois like he’s a person,” she said, disgustedly.
Lee had often wondered if she were really a person—or just the character named Lee Perkins that she played on her “reality” show.
For example: Right now, Lee felt as if she were in some sort of crime drama, playing a concerned aunt helping a worried child find her mother.
Yet putting her arm around Flora had been instinctual; Flora’s head on Lee’s shoulder was true.
But it also would have looked good for the television crew.
“I should have asked more questions when she said she’d met someone,” sighed Lee.
“It’s not like you guys are close,” said Flora.
“Ouch,” said Lee.
“But it’s true, Auntie Lee, right?”
Lee shrugged. “I guess,” she said. “Yeah.”
Flora looked vulnerable, despite her brash tone. Lee knew the feeling of wishing fervently for an adult, then realizing you were the only adult in the room. What would teenaged Lee have wanted, during all the years she only had selfish Charlotte for a parent?
“You’re not alone in all this,” said Lee.
Flora’s eyes were wary.
“Come on, let’s tuck you in.”
“I’m sixteen, Aunt Lee,” scoffed Flora. Still, she followed when Lee headed to the room Flora shared with her older sister, who was not in her bed.
“Where’s Isabelle?” said Lee.
“Probably with Anastasia,” said Flora. “Or her boyfriend. She’s pansexual.”
This was more than Lee felt capable of parsing at the moment. She folded back Flora’s covers and Flora climbed in. Lee tucked the blankets around Flora as she had once done with Regan and Cord. “Little burrito,” she said.
Flora closed her eyes and smiled.
—
Lee went into Regan’s kitchen, where the Acropolis was visible from a window above the sink: golden-hued columns above a rocky plateau, surrounded by ancient fortifications. She had never felt so far away from Savannah, which was (Lee knew) what Regan had been going for.
How had Regan’s new life gone terribly wrong?
“Are you alive, Reeg?” Lee whispered.
There was no answer.
Lee made a cup of tea and went out on the balcony.
The Athenian dusk was beginning—that magical hour when the city transformed from blazing white to rose gold.
The marble columns of the Parthenon caught the last rays of sun, glowing like lit candles against the deepening sky.
Church bells rang across the neighborhood, mixing with the call of swifts diving between buildings.
Even the air was changing, the day’s heat lifting to reveal the cool breath of the sea.
Lee sat in one of three primary-colored chairs and heard a loud bark.
Across the street, she saw a medium-sized dog, a Samoyed…
or maybe a husky. The dog’s abundant coat—once pure white, she imagined—was grayish near the paws, yellowed along its back.
The corners of its mouth were slightly upturned and its triangular ears perked up.
The dog was staring intently at Lee, as if it were trying to convey a warning.
Beneath its fur, the dog was way too thin.
The animal’s fixed scrutiny cast a spell on her—there was a message she wasn’t understanding.
Yet.