The Stirlings and the Missing Statue

Chapter Twenty-Five: Tlayudas On The Floor, E'rybody Do the Dinosaur

David Stirling had always wanted to be on television. His job, tedious and unfulfilling, paid the bills and helped supplement the family's income so that they could take a vacation or two a year. His off time was spent playing video games on teams made of old high school and college buddies, and, of course, watching every bit of consumable media that was available. There were hours spent watching Game of Thrones, Star Wars, Survivor, even the Bachelor when his wife was watching with him. Movies at the theatre, movies at home, reality, drama, true crime—nothing was out of the question for his viewing pleasure. All of the content he consumed simply fed his own imagination to the point where he had sent a few inquiries to a craftsman to weigh the expense of having a custom machete made (in case of zombie invasion). Those internet searches and an Etsy cart full of replica weapons and armor were back home on his work computer and in his previous life. The life before missing children.
The pleading he had made on television, however, was not at all what he had been imagining for himself in his wildest of dreams. He wanted to swing a halberd against a foe in battle, not choke back his own emotion over the feedback from a microphone.
"We're asking anyone who may have seen Declan to please call the number on screen for the consulate or to reach out to your local police," he had begged.
He was holding the microphone closely and reading from a statement that the lawyer they'd hired had prepared. They'd kept the language simple so it could be easily translated. Mr. Stirling had read from the paper while standing in front of the consulate with his wife. She had refused to speak, owing to the idea that she would not have been much help in making an understandable speech. She'd barely stopped crying after the third day without their son.
The translator, with her own microphone, read the statement again and added her own emphasis in the translation. She added another brief description of Declan, noting the boy's height, approximate weight, eye and hair color, and what he was last wearing. Finally, she summarized that Declan had disappeared from Cerro Gordo but no foul play was currently suspected.
The announcement, the plea for help, was recorded by one main camera, but at least half-a-dozen more were setup and recording around the consulate. After three days, the news of a missing American boy was top priority among news stations across not only the state of Oaxaca but most of the tourist-trap cities along the southern coasts. Declan's disappearance only fueled the existent rumors and fears for safety of Americans in Mexico and, as one small station out of Puerto Vallarta told its viewers, had sparked a mass early exit from the shorelines from Spring Break visitors.
* * *
Later in the evening, their parents returned from the city and the family patiently waiting by their phones for any word of Declan, the mood in the house had gone beyond fear and sadness. Everyone was on edge.
Mitchell noticed that Callum was acting especially odd. The three of them, Callum, Ez, and Mitchell, had been kicked outside onto the lavish patio by their parents and they'd each found a different spot in which to brood over their family's situation. Callum sat by the chimenea in one of the interior dining chairs he pulled from the table. He had retrieved his laptop from his room and was frantically searching for something, occasionally switching between the touchscreen monitor and the mouse scratchpad to scroll through some page that was apparently concerning. Ez had taken up one of the chaise lounge chairs that surrounded a large pond that was just beyond the cypress trees. She'd turned the pump for the water feature on and the pleasant sound of bubbling water drowned out the mumbles she was making while hidden by the drooping branches. Mitchell had planted himself at the dining table and had his tablet open to three different websites about dealing with missing persons in a foreign country. His apps for social media remained quiet with no notifications. Even the small group of friends he had back home didn't seem to care that his older brother was missing. Or perhaps they thought Mitchell was more relieved than worried and they were too afraid to say so.
Callum pounded his fingertips into the keys of his laptop in frustration and the scowl that showed mostly in his dark eyebrows intensified. He'd balanced his plate of tlayudas that their parents had picked up for them from a street vendor on the bar counter beside the chimenea. The already cold dish had further congealed into one solid piece. Mitchell's was sitting comfortably in his belly—cold or not, it had been delicious.
"What's wrong?" Mitchell asked.
Callum hadn't heard him or at least realized that his brother was even talking to him. When Mitchell asked him again, his chin snapped up and Mitchell saw his brother's normally soft caramel colored eyes sharpen, ready to bore holes into his.
"What?" Callum accused. "Nothing. Never mind."
Mitchell opened his mouth to say something but immediately closed it. Callum had returned to his aggravation over whatever was or was not on his screen. The youngest Stirling decided to leave the oldest Stirling to workout what he was feeling on his own. He left his tablet on the table and looked in on his parents as he crossed the courtyard in front of the open double doors. His mother was sitting at the kitchen's island counter, looking dazed and with an open bottle of wine next to an empty wine glass. Mr. Stirling was standing in the middle of the dining room with his disposable plate of foil-covered tlayudas hovering at a precarious angle in his hand.
"Hey Dad," Mitchell said with a wave.
It caught his dad off-guard and he nearly dropped his plate, but he corrected himself in time and nodded at Mitchell. "It might be time to turn in soon, kid," Mr. Stirling called after him.
It was getting late and the evening had cooled but it was still comfortable and a pleasant enough kind of night. If he didn't have a brother who was missing, he might've suggested a walk down through the agave farm if it was allowed. He left Callum in the courtyard and found Ez still sitting on a chaise lounge under the cypress trees, but she didn't hear him as he approached. Just like Callum, she seemed to be intently studying something, but she didn't have her laptop or tablet with her.
"What's that?" Mitchell asked her. He had started to lean over her shoulder from behind but she jumped and cursed at him in Spanish.
"Mitchell, what! What do you want?"
He was startled by her reaction and he didn't like that she was acting as if he didn't belong there, like she didn't want him around. Ez had never treated him like that. Only Declan did that. She'd even pulled the bottom of her zipped hoodie over whatever paper she'd been reading before.
"Was that..." Mitchell gasped. "Was that the...painting?"
He realized slowly that the part he'd seen had been familiar and, even in the poorly lit cave and out here on the patio lit with faux-tiki solar lamps, he could make out the creepy gilded statue depicted in the painting.
"But how did you get it?" he asked an increasingly bothered Ez. "Last I saw it, Declan had it and wouldn't let anyone else take it."
"He must have dropped it," Ez said quickly.
"In the cave? Let me see!"
Mitchell took a step forward and held out a hand toward his sister but he could have sworn that she hissed in response.
"No!" Ez spat as she recoiled. "It's mine!"
Mitchell snorted a tiny laugh. "Ok, Gollum."
Ez glared at him and turned her back toward him, still sitting on the chaise.
"Did he drop it climbing down the cave-in? He fell, right? Scraped up his hands?"
"I found it at the entrance. Where he—"
Mitchell could tell that she hadn't meant to disclose that. She pulled her lips into a grimace and snarled.
"If you tell Mom and Dad, I'll never speak to you again," she said. Her teeth were clenched and her words were forced through them with a powerful, hateful breath on each syllable.
"But what if it has something to do with—"
"It has nothing to do with that!" Ez was nearly growling.
Only a few feet away, their older brother remained where he was and did not so much as call over to them to tell them to shut up.
"Ez, you don't know that."
"And you're what, Declan's best friend now? You want him back that bad?" Ez snapped her chin over her shoulder and snarled.
Mitchell couldn't believe what she was saying. Declan is her twin and her only biological sibling, if that had ever mattered to any of them. They weren't close, but there was never any escaping the fact that they still shared so much. Even Mitchell, Declan's regular punching bag, would admit that he truly loved his brother. He cheered for him at his games, got mad at the same Fortnite challenges, and even, from time to time, binged the same show with him on the couch at home and freaked out with him over cliffhangers. Declan was an ass almost all the time, but he's family. He's a brother. He needed to come home with them.
"I'm maybe not his biggest fan, but I'm pretty sure Mom and Dad would want to know that the last thing he touched ended up on the floor of that cave and now you've got it," Mitchell said in one breath. He turned away quickly, not listening to Ez's attempts to stop him. Callum, now just staring at a blank, white screen, didn't even look up at him as he passed. "Thanks, Cal." Mitchell wasn't sure if his remark carried the weight of telling Callum he'd failed hard at being the oldest and wisest sibling.
"Mom," Mitchell said the moment he stepped over the threshold.
She was still at the island counter and the glass was full again and beaded with condensation. But she was on the phone. Mr. Stirling had joined her and the two of them hovered over her open palm that held her smartphone, which was showing an ongoing call on speakerphone.
"Mom," Mitchell repeated. "I have to talk to you."
Dr. Stirling held up the index finger of her free hand and waved it at him. There was a look of worry that was carved onto her face. Mr. Stirling's face showed the identical emotion.
"Ez has something. It's from the cave," Mitchell said in a full voice, not caring to whisper for anyone's benefit.
"Mitchell, not now!" Mr. Stirling snapped.
Strangely, Mitchell thought that there was a twinge of excitement in his dad's voice, or perhaps just a hint of the worry had cracked and instead of despair showing through, it was hope. He hesitated, but he knew what Ez had was important.
"Declan had this painting and now Ez has it. But he had it before he—"
Dr. Stirling screamed. A man's voice had been coming through the speaker but sounded tinny and far away. He was speaking over crackles and snaps of reception breaks. It also sounded as if the man were running and bouncing over unsteady footsteps.
Mr. Stirling grabbed the phone from his wife's hand before she could either squeeze it so hard that it broke or drop the thing. He had also screamed at the man on the phone's last communication but the sound had caught in his throat.
"Are you sure?" Mr. Stirling asked.
"Dehy...ed, but wa...ing. Scratches and bru..." the man on the other end of the phone was cutting in and out so badly and Mitchell wasn't exactly within earshot of the phone's small speaker. But it sounded like someone had...
"He found him!" Mr. Stirling announced with a booming shout. "Callum! Mitch—oh. Ez! He found him! He's...alive." Another choke on that last word, acknowledging that Mr. Stirling had probably never thought he'd have to utter such a phrase in regard to one of his own children. His face, full of happiness, dropped for a moment and Dr. Stirling waved at him to quiet down anyway.
"Mr. Foley, can we speak to him?" she begged.
The private detective they'd hired and only spoken to over the phone so far gave some kind of grunt through the speaker and a series of rough sounds and crackles followed.
"Mr. Foley?" Mr. Stirling called.
"David, do something," Dr. Stirling begged her husband.
Mitchell stood by helplessly as his parents resorted back to panic when Mr. Foley did not respond. Callum slinked into the room from outside and carried his open laptop with one hand at his side. The screen was still blank, as was Callum's face.
"What can I do, Harriet?" Mr. Stirling snapped. An expression of desperation had taken over but he looked to his wife apologetically. "I'm sorry," he said without waiting for a response. "I don't know what—"
"Hello, I'm here," Mr. Foley's voice said clearly from the phone. "I'm sorry. I dropped my phone there, but I'm back now. Got to a high point. Good reception here."
Mitchell was surprised that his mom allowed the man to rattle off as much information as that before she started screaming.
"PLEASE LET ME TALK TO MY SON, MR. FOLEY!"
The words made Mitchell and Callum jump simultaneously. Callum's laptop clattered to the ground.
The sound of Declan's voice through the phone's speaker took the power right out of their father's legs. The man crumpled to the ground and he clung to his wife's torso as she took the phone from his hand again.
"DECLAN?" She cried out, drowning out a question from her formerly missing son that asked for her.
"Mom?" Declan repeated. "Mom, are you there?"
The amount of relief that filled the room would have forced the roof off its timbers had the doors to the patio not been open. Declan repeated the same greeting for their dad and the three began to cry in unison while Mitchell and Callum stood, more or less stunned, nearby. After a moment, their dad noticed and beckoned them to come hover around the phone as they were.
"Callum, Mich....Mitchell," Declan named them, properly. "I couldn't..."
His voice sounded weak and incomplete, like the ache and worry the whole family had been feeling over the past (nearly) four days was crushing him. He tried to explain that he couldn't find them, that he'd gotten lost, but the last bits of strength in his voice were fading. Mr. Foley took the phone from the missing Stirling sibling.
"He's got to get some rest, I think. I've got him and the federales are here too. They'll want some answers, of course, so y'all better get on up here."
Mitchell, still trapped in a bear hug between Callum and his father and fully enveloped by his mother on the side, noticed the southern drawl to Mr. Foley's voice and found himself wondering if the man had come all the way down from some southern state to help out such poor, clueless Americans as his parents. Maybe he's a Texan, Mitchell wondered, distracted. His thoughts snapped back to the painting that Ez had.
"Oh!" he said suddenly and trying to break out of the hug. "Ez, you can show them the—"
The whole clump of distraught Stirlings froze. Mr. Foley asked a few times if they were still there, or if he'd lost them again. "Damned hell-phones," the man cursed.
"No, Mr. Foley, we're still here. Declan, are you okay?" Dr. Stirling called out.
"He's right here, ma'am, but y'all better get on up here, quick. He'll need his momma and daddy to get him clear a' this."
The rest of the family had broken from their embrace and begun to look for yet another missing member—the second of the twins.
"Ez!" Mitchell called into the back. "Ez, I know you can hear me!"
Callum stepped over his broken laptop and jogged out onto the patio. He called for Ez excitedly and pulled apart the cypress branches that hung low enough to brush against his eyes.
"David, let's get cracking. If we can get everything packed—what's that Mr. Foley?" Dr. Stirling pointed the side of her face back to the phone and listened as their private investigator began rattling off instructions.
Mitchell held his place in the doorway and called for his sister again.
Callum returned to the courtyard and shrugged. "She was by the pond, right?"
"Yeah," Mitchell confirmed. He took a few steps onto the patio and beckoned Callum to meet him halfway. When Callum was close enough, Mitchell whispered, "She had Declan's painting. You know."
"Yeah, there was only one painting, Mitchell. What does that—" The realization on his face dawned and he pressed his lips together. "Did she take it from him?"
"I don't know, Cal. She didn't want me to see it. She acted like she was possessed or something."
"A lot of that going around," Callum muttered.
"Huh?"
"Never mind."
"What's up, boys?" Mr. Stirling asked as he stepped out onto the patio and joined them. "Where's Ez? Did she sneak up to her room?"
"David, Mitchell, Callum. Let's go! We have to get everything packed up and ready so we can drive up there and get Declan," their mother shouted from the kitchen.
They all turned and saw that she'd hung up with Mr. Foley, let some good, happy tears fill her cheeks, and was proceeding to dump the remainder of her wine down the sink at the island.
"She couldn't have gotten by us to her room...there's no outdoor staircase up to her room. She'd have to have come through here," Callum said in a serious, detective-mode voice.
Mr. Stirling laughed. It was a short snort, like Mitchell had learned to do when he'd heard something incredulous. Their father snorted again, but the laugh had turned into a panicked smirk. "Absolutely not."
"David! Get. Moving!" Dr. Stirling emerged from the kitchen and met them at the patio. "What is the frigging hold-up? Get your butts...one, two, thr...There should be a third butt out here."
She'd said it in her usual, laid-back mom tone, the kind of tone that said she didn't need to know where all of her kids were at every given moment, that she trusted them to make good choices, show up to school on time, come home for dinner, and not stay out all night with girls, boys, or whoever they chose. She'd received the best news she could have hoped for in the last week and had allowed herself to become complacent again, for just a moment—though, truly, she wouldn't be the same ever again, and especially not until her baby was in her arms. But her headcount stopping at two brought her right back into reality and plunged her back into the state of panic she'd lived in with hardly any rest, food, or hope for over seventy-two hours.
The girl was nowhere to be found.