Before She Disappeared

The next morning, Emmanuel meets Frankie at Stoney’s and show her a digital collage of pictures of Angelique on his laptop. He tells her how the police initially dismissed Angelique as a runaway. He remarks that Officer O’Shaughnessy is all right, but he doesn’t really understand—he is Irish and Haitian, an American whose family came from Haiti. Emmanuel and Angelique are Haitians who live in America. They live with an uncertainty about their future that he doesn’t experience.

Emmanuel emphasizes that Angelique has a strong urge to help others. She protected and comforted him when their father abused their mother. On the night of the earthquake, Angelique pulled him outside to safety. She went back inside and brought their mother out, but she didn’t bring their father. Before she disappeared, she was trying to protect Emmanuel from deportation. Her plan was to finish high school early so she could apply to college and get a student visa, which might make it easier to renegotiate an extended visa for Emmanuel.

On their shared laptop, Emmanuel logged into one of Angelique’s online classes and found that two weeks earlier, she submitted a final paper; Angelique is still alive and has internet access, but for some reason, she hasn’t come home.

Frankie calls Detective Lotham while Emmanuel gets a copy of the assignment. When he receives it, he recognizes the string code of a cybercafe. The assignment is a scan of a handwritten essay in Angelique’s handwriting. Emmanuel recognizes a code devised by his sister: Hidden in the essay are the words, “Help us.”

While Detective Lotham paces the bar, barking orders into his phone, Frankie takes Emmanuel to help her wash dishes. When he is calmed by the mundane task, she talks him through the ramifications of his discovery; his sister is alive, she’s been kidnapped, but she has enough autonomy to make contact. The question is who she means by “us.” Emmanuel doesn’t understand any of it. Taking his hand, Frankie tells him they don’t know enough to even ask the right questions yet.

Guerline arrives in response to Emmanuel’s call. Sometime later, Officer O’Shaughnessy arrives. Lotham reports that the staff at the cafe has been questioned. They remember a Black girl wearing a red baseball cap who gave her name as Tamara Levesque. A photo of Tamara’s ID card shows Angelique’s face. Angelique had logged onto the internet, but she received a phone call and had to leave immediately. She asked the attendant to post the assignment for her and handed over instructions for how to do it.

Emmanuel asks why, if she had a phone and entered the cafe alone, she didn’t come home or call for help. Lotham tells him Angelique may have been protecting someone else. The “help us” message suggests there is something much bigger going on than a runaway teenager or even a kidnapping.

Frankie points out that the cafe is in Roxbury, not close to Angelique’s home or school or friends, but it might be close to someone she met at the rec center over the summer.

Frankie goes to search Guerline’s apartment. Trying to think like a teenage girl who had something to hide, Frankie notices the lamp beside the sofa where Angelique habitually sat. She turns it upside down and opens the bottom. Rolls of money fall out.

Leaving the police to process the money, Frankie returns to work at the bar. She asks Stoney about options for illegal income in the neighborhood. They discuss and discard several possibilities, including human trafficking, drug trade and credit card fraud, but none of them seem right.

As they are closing up for the night, Stoney sits down with Frankie and asks what she has been doing. She explains that she finds missing persons and that she got into it through AA. One of the members talked about her daughter’s disappearance. Frankie became obsessed with the case and tracked the daughter down, but the girl’s boyfriend killed the young woman before the police arrived.

Frankie dreams about Angelique, Lani Whitehorse, and Paul. Paul is covered in blood, screaming at her, “Dear God, what did you do?” (152). She hears a gun booming and a child screaming. The dream ends in an explosion of light.

Frankie visits the rec center where Angelique attended fashion camp over the summer. Frederic, the executive officer, tells her Angelique was an excellent artist. He saw no sign of Angelique having a love-interest, but he remembers another girl who often watched Angelique. The girl habitually wore a red baseball cap. He gives Frankie a list of some of the other kids in Angelique’s fashion class.

Frankie thinks about the frustration of Frederic’s job where he tries to shepherd at-risk kids toward success in life, knowing there are limits to what he can do.

As Frankie is leaving the rec center, Detective Lotham pulls over and tells her to get in his car. When she does, he asks her what she knows about counterfeiting. Many of the bills in Angelique’s stash are fakes. They are older bills, printed in Russia. At the moment, they are speeding toward a sighting of a girl matching Angelique’s description who was trying to buy a burner phone using a fake ID. He is bringing Frankie because one of the witnesses is Charlie from the AA meeting, who asked for her specifically.

Charlie reports that Angelique came in alone wearing a red baseball cap. She tried to buy a phone but noticed Charlie staring at her and bolted, dropping her fake ID as she ran. He tells Frankie that he would have helped Angelique if she had asked. Frankie answers that Angelique might not have been able to ask if her family or friends were under threat. Charlie replies that if someone had gotten her hooked on drugs, she might not want to get away, but she didn’t strike him as an addict. Frankie shows him her list of students in Angelique’s class, and he recognizes the name “Livia Samdi” as a girl whose mother had been at an AA meeting and mentioned that her daughter had disappeared three months after Angelique.