Place Last Seen
Synopsis:
From Publishers Weekly
"Maggie is lost." The matter-of-fact urgency of McGuinn Freeman's opening sentence sets the tone for her solid debut novel. The young Baker family is hiking in the Desolation Wilderness of California's Sierra Nevada when their six-year-old daughter, Maggie, who has Down's syndrome, goes missing while playing hide-and-seek. The ensuing drama unfolds from multiple points of view. Maggie's 30ish artist mother, Anne, her architect father, Richard, and her eight-year-old brother, Luke, are joined in their search by members of the official rescue team, and as the search progresses, the personal traumas of each character emerge. Steve, the middle-aged team leader, is under pressure to keep everyone focused, and Ed, a misanthropic search expert, uses a combination of intuition and expertise to find missing people. Ed hasn't seen his own son, a boy about the same age as Maggie, for three months, since his estranged wife took him away with her. As each night falls, as does the autumn temperature during the three-day search, all parties grow increasingly anxious. Anne and Richard replay the sequence of events that led up to Maggie's disappearance, and feel additional guilt because their daughter has special needs. Luke blames himself for not keeping a closer eye on his younger sister, and as they wait for developments, he sets about building a fort, "a place he can put Maggie in so she can never get out, never wander away." Attitudes toward the "mentally challenged," the intricacies of search and rescue, and the terrible randomness of fate are all poignantly explored here. With its evocative forest setting and unexpected ending, Place Last Seen (the official term for the spot where the missing person was last sighted) is a cinematic page-turner. Regional author tour. (Mar.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Book Excerpt:
Maggie is lost.
Anne crouches in the trail, listening to that sentence loop over and over through her brain. Her daughter is six years old, blonde, brown eyes, Down Syndrome, lost. Anne places her hands, palms down against the pebbled black and white earth and breathes deeply. She’s waiting for the white noise to die down in her head, waiting for the panicked shouting of the afternoon to quiet so she can figure out what has happened to Maggie, so she can feel her daughter’s presence through the rock, feel her as the dowser feels the tug, the twitch of the stick—this way, this way.
Richard is gone—hiking out for help. He’s worried about the dark, wants a Search and Rescue team, is afraid if they hesitate they risk hypothermia, or worse. Maggie’s only got a tee shirt and shorts on; it’s October, it will get cold when the sun goes down. He’s taken Luke with him and even as she’s scared without them, Anne is perversely glad they have gone, she can hear now, she can hear herself think. She thinks that maybe now she’ll be able to hear Maggie.
Anne runs her fingertips across the pebbled black and white surface of the trail—Maggie’s feet stood here. Maggie’s feet, white sneakers, pink Velcro straps. Hiking the trail this afternoon, they had to stop twice so Anne could cinch those straps tighter. Setting her on a boulder, Anne held Maggie’s foot and pulled hard on the straps while she twisted away, straining to see the Stellar’s jay squawking at them from a nearby branch. “Maggie, sit still. Mommy’s trying to fix your shoe.”
But now, with the sun beginning to slant long and gold in the west, Anne sees only her own hands—blunt nails, long fingers, the nick on her right hand where she slipped with the staple gun stretching canvases last week, her wedding band. Anne remains crouched in the trail, thinking that if her hands can be Maggie’s feet then maybe Anne can get a direction. Anne concentrates on Maggie’s feet. Those feet were here. Her ankles in white socks, lace trim dirty from the hike: her knees, the left one scraped from last week’s attempt at the two-wheeler. She fixates on the physical reality of Maggie’s body. Her hands seem to sculpt a phantom Maggie in the air—calves, knees, torso. Maggie’s body is real; it exists. She is somewhere. She may be lost but she must still have material existence. She occupies space. She can be found.
Maggie’s not lost, Anne tells herself, standing up. She’s hiding. She does that sometimes, out of crankiness, or when things aren’t going her way, and then she gets bored waiting to be found, falls asleep. It happens all the time. Only this time it happened up here, on the spine of the Sierra, in this jumbled landscape of broken granite and scrub oak instead of at home, in the house, where they know to look under the bed, in the closet, to listen for Maggie’s snoring coming from the clothes hamper.
One hand shading her eyes, Anne looks out over the landscape. She is in a high cirque, three small lakes behind her, jumbled talus falling off the peak to her right, a saddle where the trail goes up and over to Aloha lake, two smaller peaks to the left. Turning, she looks out over the broken landscape that stretches below her to Wright’s Lake, the campground. It’s a mess, descending in ledges, boulders scattered and heaped, falling into a scrubby forest of pine and thick underbrush. High on the west flank of the Sierra, she can see out over the foothills, nearly to the Coast hills. A great empty gulf of air yawning across the state of California. To Anne it’s terrifying and she feels fear, like some great wind, rushing up from the flatlands, roaring up the foothills, swirling into and around this high basin like some infernal force. ...
Topics/Categories:
Down Syndrome, Search and Rescue, Wilderness
Genre:
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BookSense San Francisco Chronicle Best Seller
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Original Publish Date:
2000-03-01
ISBNs:
0312242271, 0312254075
Formats:
Hardcover, paperback
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