“Rhianna slipped and I tried to grab her, but I fell after her.” Mardi Aplin is not a panicker, but at four o’clock, as the first chill of evening descended, she was struck by that fierce black hole that opens in a mother’s belly when her child is missing. “My heart sank, I began to panic and all hell broke loose. I’m a pretty positive person, but this pushed me to my brink.”
Mardi’s daughter, Marley, and her school friend, Rhianna, had walked into bushland in Australia’s NSW central-west and, as the sun began to dip behind rugged hills, Mardi knew that the girls were lost. The area is honeycombed with old mining shafts and even though they’ve been largely covered over, it’s steep, rocky terrain – no place for…
