Missing Persons

7

If you don’t happen to be an inveterate shopper intent on milking the swollen teat of post-holiday sales-I am not-and if you aren’t required to be at work-it was a Sunday, and I wasn’t-the day after Christmas is a sleep-in day.

Or maybe-if the snow gods have conspired with the ski gods to dump ten powdery inches of flash-frozen Dom Perignon on the upper reaches of Beaver Creek and one of your wife’s friends has generously offered two free holiday season nights at her Bachelor Gulch ski villa-the day after Christmas is most definitely a play day.

Lauren and I had packed our ski stuff and winter clothing and an immense quantity of three-year-old paraphernalia the night before and were out of bed well before dawn in an almost certainly futile attempt to beat the pre-ski traffic that seemed to always clog I-70 West into the Colorado Rockies during the winter months. She was fixing some breakfast for our still-sleeping daughter, Grace; I was loading the car. While I was on a trip into the kitchen to grab a cooler to lug to the garage, Lauren said, “See that?”

“What?”

She pointed at the tiny kitchen TV, which was tuned to a local channel so we could hear the ski-traffic report. Why? I wasn’t sure. If the traffic was awful, we’d take I-70 into the mountains. If the traffic was light, we’d do the same thing. She said, “That thing at the bottom of the screen.”

I assumed she meant the crawl, the strip of text that I always seemed to be reading when I should be watching the screen and that I never seemed to be reading when news about some important update was moving across the screen that I should probably be reading. From the time that crawls first appeared on TV screens, I’d decided that I was genetically incapable of reading the moving words and simultaneously attending to what was happening on the rest of the screen. I’d long ago concluded that I did not possess a twenty-first-century mind.

I lifted the heavy cooler laden with God-knows-what and took a lumbering step toward the door. “Nope, didn’t see it.”

“It said that-”

“We have breaking news from our Boulder bureau,” interrupted one of the morning anchors. With that preamble I turned my attention back toward the TV, but my eyes immediately found the crawl and I couldn’t have told you which of the two anchors was speaking. “Apparently-and details are sketchy-apparently, and this is truly hard to believe, another little girl has disappeared on Christmas night in Boulder. We have a reporter on the way to the scene right now and should have more information momentarily. June?”

June said, “You’re right: This is so hard to believe, that it’s happening again. For those of our viewers who aren’t familiar with Boulder, it’s even the same neighborhood as last time. That was what, eight, nine years ago? We’ll get those details for you and we’ll be back with more right after a break.”

Lauren said, “I’m going to check on Grace.”

“I checked her when I got up, sweets. She’s fine.”

“So did I. I’m going to check on her anyway.”

She hustled toward Grace’s room. I set the cooler on the floor.

Another little girl has disappeared on Christmas night in Boulder.

Lauren was breathless when she tiptoed back into the kitchen. “Grace is fine,” she said.

“Yes.” I put my arms around her and planted my hands on her ass. Lauren and I were parents of a little girl who hadn’t disappeared on Christmas night. Somewhere else in Boulder another pair of parents couldn’t say the same.

“Are you catching? You’re not catching, right?” I asked. One of Boulder County ’s prosecutors was always on call for legal emergencies that might require the presence of a representative from the DA’s office. Infrequently, that meant that she was called to crime scenes. Like to the location of the disappearance of a girl.

“No, no,” she said, pulling away from my hug. “I couldn’t leave town if I was on call. You know that. Should I wake Grace?” she asked.

“Let me finish loading the car first. We’ll both get much more accomplished if she stays asleep until the last possible moment.”

An hour later we were climbing through Mount Vernon Canyon on I-70 into the mountains, sharing the freeway with at least a million other vehicles. Maybe two million other vehicles. Every one of the other vehicles carried skiers or snowboarders who had, like us, crawled out of warm beds before dawn in order to beat the traffic. I searched for irony, knowing it was there somewhere.

In back, secure in her high-tech car seat, Grace was flipping through a fat cardboard book about erudite dogs and talking to herself, while next to me Lauren was flipping through radio stations trying to find the latest news about what was going on with the missing girl back in Boulder. I wasn’t really listening to the radio, partly because Grace’s almost incomprehensible monologue was too cute to ignore, but mostly because none of the radio reporters seemed to know much about what was happening with this year’s missing girl, so they were using their airtime to talk about the other missing girl, the one who had disappeared eight Christmases before.

I’d long before decided that I despised hearing rehashes of that dreadful story.

“It’s a teenager. They think she’s fourteen,” Lauren summarized for me as the Denver station she was listening to faded away, its signal lost hopelessly in the mountain canyons. “Her father went to check on her early this morning. She wasn’t there. They were going to go skiing today, just like us. We did the exact same thing with Grace.”

I thought, But at our house Grace was in her bed, and felt a chill crawl up my spine and goose flesh spread across my shoulders and neck. What would it be like if she hadn’t…? I tried comforting myself with the fact that it wasn’t really as bad as the last time a girl went missing on Christmas night in Boulder. It wasn’t.

The last time the girl they couldn’t find was only six years old.

The last time a terrifying note was discovered on the stairs.

And I soothed myself with the obvious, the obvious being that six-year-olds don’t often run away from home, not for real, and certainly not on Christmas night. I reminded myself that a fourteen-year-old girl might run away.

Fourteen-year-olds do run away. Maybe this girl had just run away. Probably this girl had just run away.

Numerals representing the ages of the two missing girls lined up in front of my eyes as though they were symbols spinning on a slot machine. As the numbers came to rest, I did the math. Today’s fourteen-year-old missing girl was the same age-had been born the exact same year-as the tiny blonde who went missing eight years to the day before. If that other little girl had survived, the two children might be classmates, or friends, or sleep-over mates. They might go skiing on Christmas holidays with each other’s families.

I felt another chill.

“Their house is only a few blocks away from, you know,” Lauren said. She meant from the other house, the one where the little beauty queen’s dead body had been found by her father on the day after Christmas in an unused room in the basement, her head smashed, her neck cruelly cinctured with a homemade garrote.

“Where exactly?”

“On Twelfth, they said.”

Three blocks away. Just three blocks and eight years separated two little girls gone missing on Christmas nights in Boulder.

At that moment we were passing an overhead digital highway sign, the kind that in winter usually cautions motorists of icy and snowpacked conditions ahead. But this one had an even more sobering message-an Amber Alert. All concerned citizens were supposed to be on the lookout for a missing blond-haired, 115-pound, five-foot-six fourteen-year-old. No name was given.

My first reaction? Selfish. I hoped I didn’t know her. I hoped she wasn’t the daughter of any of my friends, or any of my patients. I wanted to feel the relief of insulation. I wanted her to be a stranger.

“Amber Alert,” I said to Lauren. “Look.”

She stared in the direction of the highway sign until we passed below it, then turned on her seat and faced our daughter. She said, “Your parents really love you, Gracie.”

Gracie laughed.

Obliviousness, I thought, can be a very, very good thing.

My detective friend, Sam Purdy, told me later on that it was as though a giant warehouse had been surreptitiously constructed nearby when the other case of the missing girl had finally faded into near oblivion and that all the satellite trucks, and all the microwave trucks, and all the flimsy network pop-up tents, and a few hundred cameras and microphones had simply been secreted away so they’d be ready for the next time.

The next time had turned out to be the massacre at Columbine and the time after that had been the Kobe Bryant circus up in Eagle County. After the Kobe invasion, all the equipment had apparently been returned to the secret warehouse to await the next, next, next time the almost-tabloid media would mobilize for a full-scale assault on a Colorado town. That was the only explanation Sam could concoct for how quickly the equipment reappeared on the streets of Boulder on the day after Christmas.

I was determined to miss it all.

By noon on that Boxing Day, Grace was either enjoying or enduring her first day ever in ski school and I was busy chasing Lauren, who was a much better skier than me, and a much, much better powder skier than me, through untracked down on the forest edges of the Golden Eagle run at the top of Beaver Creek.

In Boulder, three thousand feet below us in altitude-based on what Sam would tell me later-the cameras were already in place, the high-tech satellite and microwave trucks were bouncing signals around and through the atmosphere, and producers had already begun choosing locations for the stand-ups the on-air talent would do for that night’s news.

Some of the reportorial faces would be familiar from the last time Boulder had endured this invasion. Others were recognizable because of what the country had endured in the intervening years because of the tragedies that had befallen Chandra Levy, or Elizabeth Smart, or Laci Peterson. Or because of the innocent lives ended by the Beltway snipers. Or because of Kobe Bryant and whatever happened at Cordillera. Or because of whatever Michael Jackson was accused of lately. Or because of some other crime du jour.

Or.

In America, there were always plenty of candidates.

As each fresh tragedy was anointed a mega-news event, I’d quickly grown fatigued of the relentless television and newspaper and Internet and magazine coverage afforded, or foisted upon, all the previous victims and all the previous perpetrators, and upon the unsuspecting but apparently ravenous populace.

Somebody had to be watching all this coverage, right?

I suspected that I’d fatigue of this latest criminal/media extravaganza, right in my hometown, even faster. I really was determined to miss it all.

I was. Honestly.

Lauren and I grabbed a late lunch at Spruce Saddle, the big mid-mountain restaurant at Beaver Creek. It wasn’t lost on me that I was only a couple of ridge tops away from the elegant resort where Kobe and a young woman had crossed paths, and was within shouting distance of the courthouse where that diseased melodrama played itself out.

Lauren chose a table close to an overhead television so she would immediately know if there were any updates being broadcast about the missing girl in Boulder. I was silently trying to discern whether her acute interest in the case was an indication of parental empathy-or a counterintuitive way to stem the flow of understandable parental dread-or whether it was a more uncomplicated professional prosecutorial curiosity. I was trying to grant her the benefit of the doubt and not even consider the possibility that my wife’s interest might be simply voyeuristic. Unsure, I headed for the bathroom. When I returned I spied Lauren folding up her cell phone. I took a chair that left my back to the television.

Which left me facing in the general direction of Cordillera.

“Who’d you call?” I asked.

“The office.”

“Yeah, what did you learn?” I didn’t really want to know, and wasn’t sure why I’d asked. Probably the same reason that I tried the door on Mary Black’s office.

“This is my job. I could be involved later on. I need to… you know, whether… the girl…”

Not too bad, only slightly defensive. “I know,” I said. I leaned across the table and kissed her lightly on her lips, tasting the waxy gloss of a fresh application of sunblock. “So, what did you learn?”

I’d done it again; I’d once again asked a question that I didn’t really want to know the answer to. I convinced myself that my question was an act of marital generosity: Lauren needed to talk.

“They don’t know what they have. But because of what happened last time-you can imagine-they’re being extra, extra cautious. They’re treating it like a crime scene, even though no one’s really sure what it is exactly. The girl’s family is cooperating, totally. So far the crime scene techs don’t think anything’s been unduly contaminated. That’s all good, considering.”

She meant, of course, considering what a total mess the crime scene had been the last time. The time with the little blond beauty queen, the one who sang and danced into our homes over and over and over again in her little sexy cowgirl getup.

“What do the police think? Was it an abduction of some kind?”

“Some of what they’re seeing says yes, some says no.” She gazed around to see if anyone in the crowded cafeteria was paying attention to our conversation, and she prophylactically lowered her already hushed voice a few additional decibels. “There hadn’t been any threats, and they didn’t find a note or anything like that. Nobody’s called the family about ransom. There’s no evidence of forced entry at the house. But there is some blood.”

“A lot?”

“More than a couple of drops. I’m just telling you what I heard from the office. It’s thirdhand, or fourth.”

“Could she have run?”

“It’s a possibility, apparently. The cops are trying to track down all her friends, to see what they know. Since the schools are on break, it’s complicated. Some of her best friends are out of town.”

“But her family thinks it’s possible?”

“I guess. Apparently, the family situation is complicated. The girl has had some emotional issues in the past. I don’t have those details.”

I couldn’t look my wife in the eye when I asked the next question. With the edge of my hand I moved salt that had been spilled on the table by an earlier diner into one long sodium mogul and pushed it to the side. “And they checked all the little rooms in the basement that nobody ever goes into?”

That’s where the other girl’s body had been found eight years before. In a rarely used room in a dingy basement. Her tiny body had been discovered by her distraught father, who had carried it up the stairs for all to see.

“Yeah, twice at least. It’s different this time. The circumstances. It sounds like it’s a nice house, but it’s not huge and fancy like the other one. And it only has a small basement, a partial, like ours; underneath it’s mostly crawl space. They checked.”

“Twice?”

“Three times.” She smiled sadly.

“Who’s on it?”

“From my office? Andy.”

“From the cops?”

“It’s a big team for now. And, yes, it includes Sam and Lucy.”

“Sam won’t be happy. It was one of his claims to fame that he never had a thing to do with the other one.”

“I doubt if any of them are happy,” Lauren said. “There’re so many reporters chasing everyone around that they’ve had to block off the street. You know that all the detectives will be under a microscope.”

Or a microphone. “Is Jaris Slocum on it?”

She slapped my wrist to shush me. “Babe, we’re on vacation. Let’s not go back there.” She held up her cell. “I want to call and see how Grace is doing in ski school. Am I crazy?”

“You’re a mother. You get special dispensation.”

She made the call. Grace, it turned out, was enjoying ski school. I wasn’t surprised. As she aged and I got a chance to experience the wonder of really beginning to know her, I was learning that my daughter rolled well with the punches.

Lauren closed up the phone. I asked, “How’s your energy?” That’s as close as I would get to finding a safe way to inquire about the current state of Lauren’s multiple sclerosis. I knew from experience that on rare good days a couple of hours of skiing was often all that she could manage before her legs began to feel like overcooked asparagus. We’d already done a long drive up to the mountains and spent a couple of energetic hours cutting powder.

For Lauren, that was an awful lot of activity.

“Good, I’m fine. I’ll wriggle out of these boots and put my feet up over lunch. That will help.”

Was I convinced? Hardly. “We can go down the hill and eat if you want. We have all day tomorrow to ski, you know. And Tuesday morning, too. No need to press it today.”

“I’m good, Alan. I want to do the top of Bachelor’s Gulch before all the powder is skied off. I love it up there.”

Arguing with her was an option. Prevailing was not. Across the room, the food-court lines were long. I stood. “You rest, I’ll go get you something to eat. What would you like for lunch?”

We drove down the hill to Boulder after a late breakfast two days later, on Tuesday.

The skiing had been a joy, Lauren’s atypical stamina on the slopes was a holiday gift, and by late Monday in ski school tiny Grace had managed-for about eleven horizontal feet of a two percent grade-to comport her stubby little legs into something resembling a snowplow. Lauren and I gladly forked over $24.95 for a DVD that proved our daughter had accomplished the dubious feat.

Midday mountain traffic wasn’t bad over Vail Pass, and the Eisenhower Tunnel approach was merely aggravating, not paralyzing. On the eastern side of the Divide I kept my eyes peeled on my rearview mirror for out-of-control big-rig truckers who had already fried the air brakes on their rigs on the highest stretches of the seven percent grades.

Grace and Lauren both slept all the way from Copper Mountain to Golden.

For the forty-eight hours plus we’d been up skiing I had managed to avoid-almost completely-the media saturation coverage about the girl who had disappeared on Christmas night. Lauren had told me a few new things, but with concerted effort on my part I knew almost nothing about what had transpired while we were gone.

And I was proud of it.

But as I-70 bent to follow the final contours of the Front Range, and as the beige winter haze of the Denver metropolitan area became visible in the distance, it was clear that my brief holiday was coming to an end, and I decided, reluctantly, to reenter the real world. I killed the Otis Redding CD and tuned to KOA, a Denver AM station with enough brash watt-power to push its often dubious signal up into the crevices of the Front Range foothills. I didn’t have to listen long to hear an update-“the absolute latest on the tragedy in Boulder”-that informed me that the girl, Mallory Miller, was still missing and that the Boulder Police continued to refer to the event as a “disappearance,” not a “kidnapping.”

Fifteen minutes later, as I drove Highway 93 just shy of the entrance to Coal Creek Canyon, Mallory Miller’s father-his first name was William-came on the air-LIVE!-with a plea for his daughter to come home, or for whoever had her to release her, or both. Whatever the problem is, he told his daughter, we can solve it.

His plea was poignant, but I didn’t hear too much of it. I was distracted by something else: his name.

Gosh, I was thinking, I once knew a guy in Boulder named Bill Miller.