KHAO LAK, Thailand — If he can just follow the trail of Kali's belongings, if he can keep uncovering more of those shoes with the pointed toes she loves so much and the "Abercrombie and Fitch everything" that seem to make up her whole wardrobe, Stu Breisch believes, the sodden clues will lead to his missing 15-year-old daughter.
"My daughter is here someplace," the Salt Lake City doctor says, convinced.
The place is a mess, though, a wasteland of shoe-sucking mud, toppled trees and smashed wood, accompanied by the odor of uncounted bodies still buried under the wreckage.
Breisch and his other daughter, Shonti, 18, are standing on a tiled floor of a beachfront bungalow that has been jarred from its foundations and tilts at a wild angle.
"We just want to go home," Shonti says, tugging at one of her sister's bathing suits she finds pinched between two blocks of concrete. "But we can't go home without her."
Kali was sleeping in the bungalow next to her brother Jai, 16, on the morning after Christmas when the tsunami hit the just-opened Emerald Resort on Thailand's Khao Lak beach.
Jai is alive, having ridden the torrent of water and debris until the wave stopped its push inland and receded, mercifully without him. He's in a hospital in Bangkok, where Sally Nelson, Breisch's partner, watches over his recovery from a badly cut knee.
Breisch and Shonti are almost alone in this jungle of rubble. A few Thais drift past occasionally, snapping pictures and shaking their heads in amazement. But no relief workers are here to haul away capsized roofs or dredge the pools of stinking brown water on the beach. No police or soldiers have come to search for bodies or to test the long odds of finding survivors.
There is just a father and daughter, silhouetted against the destruction in their shorts, sneakers and hats, picking through the damage in search of anything familiar that might lead them to Kali.
Khao Lak may be the worst-hit beach in Thailand. The water swallowed everything -- people, beds, Jai's precious Martin guitar -- and hurled it against any tree or building that stood in its path. Breisch, 53, is an emergency room doctor in Salt Lake City. He sees the dead on the beach and knows how vulnerable the victims were to massive trauma injuries, the water tossing them about like dolls until they hit something that didn't give.
