Firewatch Ch 4

Ontario, Idaho
March 2, 2017

Mr. and Mrs. Siegel are understandably in rough shape. Their daughter has been missing for the better part of a month, and they have nothing to go on. They’ve seen movies and TV shows where serious-faced law enforcement professionals inform people that if the missing party isn’t found within the first two or three days, they won’t be.

The house is modest and suspiciously clean. Flores tries not to picture a panicked Mrs. Siegel up at all hours, scrubbing ferociously because she can’t sleep.

Agent Wilde’s tall, slightly scarecrow-like appearance in a charcoal pantsuit arrests everyone’s attention. Flores feels invisible as she sits beside Wilde’s jagged knee on a sofa in the spotless living room.

Wilde speaks gently. “You reported that you saw your daughter with a woman you didn’t know. Can you add anything to your description of her that might not have made it into the initial report?”

Mr. Siegel shakes his head. “Sunglasses. Big hair. Curly, frizzy. I don’t know. Seemed put together, I guess. I don’t think she was from around here. She had an accent.”

“OK, now I need to rule some things out,” Wilde says gently. “Are you very religious? Is it possible that she might worry about blowback if she took off with a woman or something?”

The Siegels shake their heads. Mrs. Siegel speaks up first. “No. We know that she’s bisexual, or whatever they call it these days. We don’t care. She never dated a woman that we know of, but she was interested in, um, ones with things. Like you,” she says to Wilde, blushing.

Wilde smiles and crosses her legs. “I know it’s uncomfortable stuff.”

The father grimaces. “Things were going OK. About the only thing we didn’t see eye to eye on was that sometimes she’d be kind of… not exactly nihilist, but she would say stuff that doesn’t really go with who we are.”

“Not nihilist,” Mrs. Siegel cuts in. “They call them doomers on the internet, but that wasn’t really her. She’s popular. She’s outgoing. It didn’t make sense.”

“OK, bear with me in a hypothetical,” Wilde says, leaning forward. “I know this sounds cliched. But if she met new friends, and those friends influenced her, and then she took off with them, would this disagreement be enough to stop her from contacting you?”

“It’s not like we’d disown her or something,” Mr. Siegel says.

“But?” Wilde presses. Flores sees the hesitation on the father’s face as well.

He grimaces. “But I like that theory of kids on the internet putting stuff in her head. She spends too much time online, and it’s gotten worse. She hardly goes out with her friends.”

Wilde keeps her smile in place. “I need to see her room and her computer.”

“You aren’t going to like publicly release her browsing history, are you?”

Wilde smiles. “I know the FBI hasn’t always been the good guys historically, Mr. Siegel. But we aren’t monsters.”