never happier than when I had my girls all to myself.
I timed myself as the memories ebbed and flowed. Two hours. No more. No less. Then I carefully placed the pictures back into the box, closed the lid, and put them on the shelf for next year.
Next, as is my routine, I walked to the sheriff’s office. He stopped returning my calls long ago. I could see the dread in his eyes when he saw me through the glass partition.
I am his challenger. I am his failure. I am his pathetic pain in the ass who won’t accept the truth that his daughter walked away.
Our first birthday without you, I went to the sheriff’s office and calmly requested to read all of the files pertaining to your case. He refused. I threatened to call the newspaper. He told me to go ahead. I went to the payphone in the lobby. I slotted in a quarter. He came over and hung up the phone and told me to follow him back into the squad room.
We performed this same kabuki theater year after year until finally, this year, he gave up without a fight. A deputy led me back to a small interrogation room where they had laid out copies of all the files pertaining to your investigation. He offered me a glass of water, but I pointed to my lunch box and thermos and told him I was fine.
There is no clear narrative to a police report. Your file has no beginning, middle, and end. There are summaries of witness statements (most of their names unhelpfully blacked out), handwritten notes from detectives that use a language I have yet to master, statements that have proven to be false and others suspected to be false (again, blacked out) statements that have proven to be true (everybody lies to some degree when questioned by the police) and interview notes with a paltry list of suspects (yes, their names are all blacked out like the others).
Two different types of maps have been taped together, one showing downtown and the other showing the campus, so that your last known footsteps can be traced across town.
There are also photographs: your dorm room with favorite clothes unaccounted for, toiletries mysteriously gone, textbooks abandoned, reports half finished, a missing bicycle (though it was later found).
The first sheet of paper in your file is the same sheet of paper I saw on the first anniversary of your birthday, then the second, the third, and now the fourth.
CASE PENDING UNTIL FARTHER LEADS.
Your mother would’ve used a red pen to correct the word to FURTHER, but I take craven pleasure in knowing that from the very first page, they are wrong.
This is what the weather was like on Monday, March 4, 1991:
The high was 51 degrees. The low was 37. The skies were cloudless. There was no precipitation. The dew point was 34 degrees. Winds came out of the northwest at sixteen miles per hour. There were twelve hours and twenty-three minutes of visible daylight.
These were some of the items in the news that week:
The murder trial of Pamela Smart began.
Rodney King was beaten by members of the Los Angeles Police Department.
A United Airlines flight went down near Colorado Springs.
President Bush declared the Iraq War was over.
You disappeared.
Here are the sheriff’s explanations for why he thinks you left us:
You were angry with us because we wouldn’t let you live off campus.
You were furious that we would not let you drive to Atlanta for a concert.
You had been arguing with your sister about the provenance of a straw hat.
You had stopped speaking to your grandmother because she had implied that you were gaining weight.
The sheriff has no children of his own. He does not understand that these high states of emotion are simply a by-product of being a nineteen-year-old young woman. These disagreements were such minor storms in our family ecosystem that at the start of the investigation, we failed to mention even one of them.
Which, to his thinking, meant that we were trying to hide something.
In fairness, you were no stranger to the police. You had been arrested twice before. The first time, you were caught in a secure lab at the university protesting the research of genetically modified organisms. The second time, you were caught smoking pot in the back of Wuxtry, the record store where your friend Sally worked.
Here are the so-called clues the sheriff cites to support his runaway theory:
Your toothbrush and hairbrush were gone (or maybe you’d