All told, well over a hundred people came forward to help search.
They combed the woods.
Hide, nor hair, of Alice was found.
No ransom was requested.
No odd characters were seen about town.
An animal attack was ruled out as she might have been carried off, but the dogs would have discovered that trail and any location of attack.
Meaning no animal could make a child disappear into thin air.
But a human could.
Interviews with family, friends, teachers, neighbors, acquaintances all came up with the same thing.
Alice was a good kid. Sweet. Smart. A regular eight-year-old girl with no enemies or anyone who might wish to cause her harm. She was popular, her family was close, they were good stock, frequented church and involved with the community, and she was beloved by her parents and her big brother.
It came in a letter to the editor.
That little combination of a few of the myriad puzzle pieces that were floating in my mind fitting together before falling to the board.
A resounding censure of Sheriff Leland Dern, for his entire tenure, most recently his handling of the missing girl, Alice Pulaski.
The letter’s final line?
It’s time to call in Bohannan.
Six
Nightmare
When I woke from the nightmares, I didn’t do it like I suspected no one on earth did it.
Gasping in horror and sitting bolt upright in bed.
That was Hollywood’s interpretation of a nightmare.
Mine was sudden consciousness and deep paralysis, caused by extortionate amounts of fear.
I didn’t move a muscle.
See a shadow.
Hear even silence.
Taste a thing.
Was he there?
In that room?
Like the dream told me.
Or was he close?
Did he know where I was?
Could he get to me, without sensors blaring, his approach caught on camera, me being able to get to one of the seven panic buttons in the house, or behind the steel door that now protected my bathroom?
As the fear subsided and I was able to assess my environs and then found the courage to add sight to sense and sound, I got on an elbow, looked around the darkness of my room and saw nothing.
No one.
I was alone.
I was safe.
I rolled, threw off the covers and twisted out of bed.
It was cold. I had the habit of turning the heat down before bed. I liked to burrow, settle under the weight of more than one cover.
I moved across the room, reached for the throw across the armchair by the French doors that led out to my personal balcony and pulled it around my shoulders.
I then stood at the doors, gazing out.
The moon was behind some clouds.
The shadows ran deep.
I had not yet become accustomed to the landscape, but I saw dark outlines of pines, a muted shimmer on the water.
The very far away, diminutive triangle that was slightly lighter against the black shadows of the night.
The only bit of Cade Bohannan’s roof visible to me.
It’s time to call in Bohannan.
I had not only been a mother to teenage girls.
I’d been a mother to eight-year-olds.
Thus, it was also time to activate Delphine.
Seven
Doomed
I set aside the laptop after scanning the Tri-Lake Chronicle.
It was three days after I’d met Celeste and her father, she had gone, as had he.
The weekend had passed.
It was Monday, and I could only assume (and hope) that Celeste was back in school.
Try as I might, and I studied it often, that triangle of their roof that I could see told no stories.
The Tri-Lake Chronicle did, however, the prevailing one being that Alice Pulaski had not been found.
This was a curious mixture of horrifying and comforting.
It was horrifying, obviously, because Alice had not yet been found.
It was now more than clear that she had not wandered off, got lost, became scared and holed up in a cave where some intrepid deputy would run across her, dirty, hungry and dehydrated, but alive. News I’d been hoping I would wake up and read in a relieved article accompanied by a joyous photo of parents and child reunited.
It was comforting because this was still the top story in the local newspaper, splashed underneath the online masthead.
A community like this did not have girls missing, or, as I’d become accustomed to in spending so much time with the Chronicle, hardly any news at all…but good news. Bingo nights and bridge tournaments, boys and girls basketball league signups at the rec center and a local woman who still lived by herself and stitched stunning embroidery reaching the age of 105.
And whoever ran the newspaper did not feel that their readers would get Alice Pulaski fatigue.
This was not a sensational piece of news offered up for information and digestion in a digital landscape where people experienced sorrow or outrage but had no interest in follow-through. Their only craving being getting their hit of sorrow and outrage. Their only thought being, what was next to devour?
Alice Pulaski was important, and the community cared.
A video had been posted on Saturday—one I could only stand to watch for forty-five seconds before I had to shut it off.