Anyone think she might be going to that island in Delaware, where that singer went missing? Seems accessible, and i think CAP mentioned her before.

My heart skips but I quickly see there aren’t any replies.

Above me, the sun beats down like a promise, the ferry picking up speed now, my hacked hair whipping across my face. Sandown Bay grows and grows and grows until I can make out the pier, the boardwalk, each tree, each leaf.

Roxy, I say to the wind, the sea, the trees staring back in the distance. All I want from you is Roxy.

She is nothing but everyone else’s

Who is she if not everyone else’s?

HOW TO DISAPPEAR

Episode 21

Narrator: Your first need-to-know about Roxy Raines is that she was a musician. A singer-songwriter whose lyrics tended towards the narrative – very little I or ego, bounding with natural imagery. A Spotify cut of her first album, Glass Daughter, was re-released in the early 2010s and subsequently developed a cult following, thanks to her unusually modern sound.

[‘Glass Daughter’ plays quietly in the background.]

Those who knew her say she hated being photographed; in the few images that exist, there’s a certainty to her beauty almost too obvious to mention. And in every picture, there’s her rose-painted guitar slung over her back, attached like a limb. Or maybe, because of her inability to connect with others, a cord that fastened her to the rest of the human race. Or, rather, something lodged – a wedge that only pushed her further away.

That same guitar would be found two days after her disappearance on the first of September 1986, waterlogged after being fished from the bay.

Roxy had planned to move to Nashville the week after she disappeared.

That night she’d been performing her last set at The Indigo Lounge, her favourite haunt on Sandown.

She was twenty.

And this is all anyone knows of the night. At least from information that can be taken from the internet. But of course there’s someone who knows more – knew her. It’s just a matter of finding them.

And I was there, in the thick of it, surrounded by the only people in the world with the knowledge to break the whole thing open.

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 2

The ferry docks with a sickly lurch. A screaming mob of seagulls hail our arrival, hovering overhead with the floaty aimlessness of kites. Because I was the first to board I’m also the first off, and I start on to the island, the ferryman catching my eye from the harbour with an unreadable blankness as I do.