Neighbors have joined in the search, examining their own backyards and pools and garages. Perhaps, police say, Jesse wandered off and injured herself and no one has heard her cries for help. That’s why, they say, it’s so important to find her quickly.
Today, police are asking for volunteers to meet them at Dailey Park at 9 a.m. From there, they intend to have teams of people walk shoulder to shoulder through the nearby ravine looking not only for Jesse herself, but any possible clues to her disappearance.
Randy Flaherty, a father of two who lives next door to the Shuttleworths, is among those who plan to be at the park this morning to help.
“We can’t imagine what might have happened. This is such a nice neighborhood, the families know each other, we all look out for each other, and we’re all thinking the same thing.”
Police still refuse to say whether they think Jesse’s disappearance is an abduction. They’ve already ruled out family abduction-Jesse’s father, who lives in Ohio, flew in yesterday to console his ex-wife and help in the search.
As for whether it could be an abduction by a stranger, Sgt. Dominic Marchi would only say, “We have to accept that that is a possibility. While we don’t know that it is at this time, it is one of the avenues we have to explore.”
The third-day story focused on the search and Carrie Shuttleworth’s continued anguish. And they kept finding new pictures of Jesse, at a community pool, on a nursery school trip to a petting zoo. It was for faces like hers that cameras had been invented. I knew. I had seen her at Angelo’s Fruit Market.
The ravine search turned up nothing. No Jesse. No scraps of clothing. No discarded shoe.
On the fourth day, the story went in the direction everyone feared most.
A woman about ten houses up from Jesse’s, who rented out rooms, had gone looking for some overdue rent from one of her boarders, a man named Devlin Smythe. She hadn’t seen him around for a couple of days, not since the news broke about that poor girl down the street. She had wondered if maybe he’d volunteered for the search, and that had made her hold off for a day on demanding the money she was owed. How would that look? she thought. A guy’s trying to help find some little girl and you throw him out on the street.
But she hadn’t seen Smythe around, not even at night, and she began to wonder whether he’d skipped out on her for good.
She went upstairs and banged on the door of his room, but there was no answer. So she used her passkey to go inside.
It was as she’d feared. There were no shoes or boots by the door, no clothes in his closet. He’d packed up and gone, but not without leaving her a mess. There were dirty dishes in the sink, cereal bowls filled with ashes from his smoking. The place reeked of cigarette smoke. It was going to take a few days to clean up before she could rent to anyone else.
How bad, she must have wondered, had he left the fridge?
Sears wrote:
She had been jammed in with a container of sour cream that had turned green, some wilted celery, and an open can of chicken noodle soup. It was a final resting place of such monstrous indignity that even hardened officers found themselves turning away.
Jesse Shuttleworth had been suffocated.
Subsequent stories yielded further details. The landlady was interviewed at length and put together with a police sketch artist. The man known to police as Devlin Smythe had a shaggy head of dirty blond hair, a moustache, strong chin. He was described as stocky and stood an inch or two under six feet.
They reproduced the sketch in the paper. I tried to imagine him without the hair and the moustache. How he might look with a shaved head.
He was a chain-smoker. “You never saw him without a cigarette,” the landlady said.
He did odd jobs. He was, according to one man, a talented electrician. He had rewired a house for someone in the neighborhood. “He was good at it, and quick, too. He liked to get paid under the table.”
He possessed the skills, I thought, to bypass an electric meter.
Another man came forward to tell police Devlin Smythe had done some landscaping work for him. It was from this man that police learned Smythe had a tattoo.
It was on his right shoulder. Small, police said. Of a melted watch, in the style of Salvador Dali.
I put the clipping down, went into the kitchen, and ran myself a glass of water from the tap. In the cupboard I found a bottle of Tylenol, shook out two caplets, and downed them. Standing there in the kitchen, where so much horror had transpired only a few days earlier, it occurred to me that maybe it wasn’t over yet.
SLEEP NEVER CAME TO ME that night. I kept running things through my mind, bits and pieces of conversation.
How Earl claimed never to have lived downtown, that he’d come from the East Coast, or the West, I was trying to remember. But there was that night, when I’d blundered into his house and discovered his growing operation, and I’d happened to mention that this sort of thing had never happened when we’d lived in the city, on Crandall.
Earl had said something along the lines of “You lived on Crandall? Nice area. There was that little fruit market down at the end of the street.”
The inconsistency hadn’t meant anything to me then. But it meant a lot now. Especially knowing that Carrie Shuttleworth used to take her daughter to that fruit market.
It didn’t have to mean anything, I told myself. There had to be at least a few guys in the world with tattoos of melted watches on their shoulders. Dali had pretty much made the melted watch an iconic symbol.
And the chain-smoking. Millions of people chain-smoked.
And the business about being skilled at electrical work. And the landscaping. That could all be coincidence, too.
You wouldn’t hang a guy based on evidence this flimsy.
So why couldn’t I sleep? Why did I have this terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach?
“WHY DON’T WE DO SOMETHING on the barbecue tonight?” Sarah said. I was walking her out to her car.
“That sounds good,” I said. It was also good to have my wife speaking to me again, even if it was only about menus.
“When did you come to bed last night?” she asked.
“It was late, sometime after midnight.”
“You working on something new?”
“Sort of. I was looking through some old clippings I’d kept, on the Jesse Shuttleworth case.”
Sarah frowned, shook her head sadly. “With all we’ve been through, I can’t even think about something like that right now. Why were you looking at those?”
Across the street, Earl was throwing some gardening tools in the back of his pickup.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I’m just trying to find some sort of focus.”
Sarah got in the car, did up her seat belt. She powered down the window. “Why don’t you pick up some burgers, stuff like that? For around six? And then, after, we can talk about that other thing you mentioned last night.”
I nodded. I leaned down, kissed her through the open window, a little peck on her cheek, up close to her eye. She backed out and drove off, but didn’t wave.
Earl did, though. And started walking across the street. Earl never came across the street to initiate a conversation. I was usually the one who drifted over there.
“Hey, Zack,” he said.
“Earl,” I said, smiling.
“I see things are getting back to normal, little bit more every day.” He put a cigarette between his lips, lit up.