These are the facts and theories I gathered from marathon phone conversations with family members during the first week following my return from New Mexico. Fortunately I had no other pressing obligations at the time and could devote all my energy to the Susan case, as we soon began calling it. The research and writing activities that as a college English professor I normally did during my summers paled in importance next to the urgent need to find my sister, and I threw myself into this task. Part of me clung to the tiny hope that she was alive, in hiding somewhere from Jim, and so I scoured my memory for the names of friends and acquaintances she had mentioned, besides those I knew the police had already interviewed, tracked down their phone numbers, and called them to ask if they’d seen or heard from her. I called women’s shelters in the Baltimore area, national missing persons organizations, the Polly Klaas Foundation in California, and any other such source that popped into my head. Formerly frugal about making long-distance calls, I now thought nothing of picking up the phone at any time of day to call anywhere in the country if there was a remote chance I might obtain a lead. By week’s end, I’d filled the pages of several legal pads with phone numbers, names, notes, and ideas.

   One of the reasons I hurled myself into this frenetic activity is that it was a way of staving off pain. While focussed on the sleuth work, I would be temporarily distracted from the debilitating sadness that would otherwise overwhelm me. But it was impossible to avoid the pain entirely, for every day brought hundreds of reminders of my sister and of her sudden eerie absence from the world. Getting through each day was like making my way across a field of land mines. I would take detours through my home to avoid walking through the living room, where Susan at various ages stared out at me from family photos on the mantel. These photos made me feel her presence palpably, in a way that they hadn’t done when I knew she was alive, and each time I looked at them I experienced anew a sense of disorientation: That pigtailed eight-year-old playing on the Cape Cod beach in front of our childhood summer home; that suddenly sophisticated teenager, home from boarding school with talk of debutante parties and dances at Exeter; that glowing young mother holding her first baby in his Christening dress—where had she gone? Similarly, thumbing through my recipe box I would come across a card written in Susan’s handwriting and would experience a jolting sensation: the backward-slanting 1950’s prep-school girl penmanship; the characteristic misspellings—raisons for raisins, for example ("Geniuses are often poor spellers," she would retort when I, her jealous little sister, would delight in pointing out a spelling error she’d made—spelling being one of the few skills I could hold over Susan, whose artistic talent I could never hope to emulate); the recipe itself, always something elegant, something difficult, involving ingredients like bouquets garni and fresh herbs—these intensely concrete reminders would conjure her up so powerfully that I would gasp and sometimes have to grab on to a piece of furniture to steady myself.

  At the end of that first, surreal week following our return from New Mexico my husband went out to have our vacation photographs developed—one of the many routine tasks, along with cooking and grocery shopping and car-pooling our thirteen-year-old, that we formerly shared but that he took over while I was preoccupied with the crisis. When he returned with the batch of prints, I began halfheartedly to rifle through them, my mind as always elsewhere, on the case. But then my attention was suddenly caught when I came upon a picture taken on what I now knew to be the same day my sister was probably murdered. Mike and Alison and I had spent the afternoon of August 5 hiking in the beautiful mountain range north of Taos. On our request, a passing hiker had snapped a shot of us—a picture that I had no way of knowing at the time would become an emblem of tragic irony: there stand the three of us, a happy family on a bright summer day, oblivious to the fact that two thousand miles away a tragedy was unfolding that would forever change our life. Two weeks later, on August 19, I stared at that sunny photo superstitiously. I began to scrutinize it for some indication that all was not right in the universe, for some sign of the catastrophe that was happening offstage. How could I have felt so carefree? I yearned to step into the frozen time frame of the photograph and divert the course of the next few hours. I felt guilty that I hadn’t even been thinking of my sister that day.

   In fact, I’d been keeping an emotional distance from Susan all summer because I suspected she might be slipping back into her relationship with Jim, and if that were the case, I didn’t want to know about it. For the ten years that Susan had been involved with Jim, I’d witnessed her crying "wolf" innumerable times—claiming he abused her, working the family up into a state of alarm about her situation, and then retracting her claims—and I’d grown cynical. Although for the first few months after she left Jim I was sure she was going to stick with her decision, I began to have my doubts in the late spring when she stopped talking so persistently about the rightness of the decision in her phone conversations with me. Now I realized I should have pointedly asked her what was going on; I should have challenged her if she said anything that gave me the impression she might be seeing him again. I should have warned her that she was playing with fire. But I didn’t fully realize, until it was too late, that she had been playing with fire. Looking back at Susan and Jim’s relationship from the present vantage point, I deeply regretted not having taken more seriously the signs of trouble, signs that had been there from the beginning.