The Phone Call From Spain

In October 1997, a phone rang in San Antonio, Texas.

The call was from Spain.

A police officer in the city of Linares was on the line, and what he had to say was exactly what the Barclay family had spent three years hoping to hear: Nicholas had been found.

Nicholas Barclay had been missing since June 1994, when he was thirteen years old.

He had been playing basketball with friends and had never come home.

His family, his neighborhood, and the San Antonio Police Department had spent three years with no answers — no body, no confirmed sighting, no explanation for why a thirteen-year-old boy from a San Antonio trailer park had simply ceased to exist.

Now a police officer in southern Spain was saying that Nicholas was there.

That he had been held by traffickers, that he had suffered terrible things, and that he was asking for his family.

Carey Gibson, Nicholas’s older half-sister, flew to Spain to see her brother.

She came home with a teenager.

He spoke with an unusual accent and seemed changed in ways that were difficult to describe but easy to attribute to trauma.

He had dark brown eyes where Nicholas had had blue ones.

He was two inches taller than Nicholas had been.

He spoke with something that sounded distinctly like a French accent.

But Carey had looked into his eyes, and she had believed.

She brought him home to San Antonio.

For the next several months, this stranger — this young man with the wrong eye color, the wrong accent, the wrong face — lived with the Barclay family.