Why these two boys.
Thomas and Andrew McKenzie. Cousins, thirteen and eleven.
They were average students, well liked by their teachers and classmates. Tommy’s father, John, owned a chain of discount mattress stores across the state, and his wife, Karen, was a stay-at-home mom. Andrew’s father, Mark, was a line cook at a fast-food chain and his wife, Sarah, did day care out of their basement. Her business was spotty, though, and most years she barely made enough to cover her license fees.
All four parents had been thoroughly investigated. Nine times out of ten crimes against children are perpetrated by close relatives such as parents, siblings, or an aunt or uncle. Although you’d never know it listening to the media, abductions, molestations, and murder at the hands of strangers are the very rare exception, not the norm.
The McKenzie families represented about as close to the average slice of life as you could hope to get in small-town America, circa 1985. John and Karen McKenzie were upper-middle class, not extravagantly wealthy but comfortable, especially for Cedar Valley. Mark and Sarah hovered somewhere much closer to the poverty line, but they made do.
Mark and John both smoked. Karen drank, mostly in secret, but sometimes at a ladies’ lunch in town in full sight of anyone who cared. Mark had three prior arrests. Sarah, the day care provider, had at one time been the star of an amateur porn video. All paid their taxes, owned their homes, and had two automobiles registered to each household. They spent Easter and Christmas together, and the rest of the time mostly ignored each other’s families. The boys, though, Tommy and Andrew, had gone up through elementary school together, and shared the same middle school. They were buddies, as close as John and Mark had once been.
Each of the parents was carefully and thoroughly exonerated in the disappearance of their children. They spent most of fall and winter of 1985 in meeting rooms across town, spaces that reeked of despair and curiosity, frequented by psychologists and detectives and reporters.
I pushed the papers away and stood and stretched. There was nothing here that hadn’t been looked at hundreds of times, by the best eyes the state was able to hire. I didn’t know what I hoped to find. I thought that if a sixteen-year-old kid could find an answer in these old papers, I could, too.
In the kitchen, I made a fresh pot of tea and watered the tiny pots of herbs we kept on the narrow ledge of the windowsill that lined the sink. Movement in the backyard caught my eye and as I lifted my head, I saw a fat rabbit hopping around in the grass. He must have crawled under the fence; there were a few spots where the wooden posts didn’t quite meet the ground. He snuffled along, his back quivering, his button nose twitching.
Above him, perched on a low-hanging tree branch, a crow watched too, his head cocked, his eye bright. I watched him watch the rabbit for a few minutes and then returned to the files.
I thought about the parents again.
I leaned back and stared at the files before me. I blinked at an irritant in my eye and for a second, my contact lens shifted, leaving the world before me a blur. Then I blinked again, and the table and files came back into clarity, and the thought crossed my mind how different things look when, even for the smallest of seconds, you shift your focus.
The parents. What if they were the link?
What if the children had been chosen not because of who they were, but because of who their parents were?
Somewhere in the other room, my cell phone buzzed against whatever hard surface I’d left it on last. I ignored it and doodled on the back of a file folder, drawing the same circle over and over, letting my mind wander. The phone was silent, then buzzed once more and was still. A voice mail I could check in a few minutes. Some thing, some thought, danced at the edge of my brain like a tiny gnat, big enough to draw my attention but too small for me to see it clearly.
It would have made so much sense… except.
Except in 1985 and again in 2011 every single one of them was cleared as a suspect. And if they weren’t suspects, what on earth would they have in common to cause someone to kill their children? Tommy had two younger sisters, Anna and Jennifer. You’d hope that if the parents had done something to earn the wrath of the Woodsman, whoever he was, they’d have copped to it and sought protection for their other kids.
But the parents had been as mystified as the police.
I skimmed through the first set of interview transcripts. The parents were interviewed multiple times, over the course of a year, until finally the police closed the file on the missing four in late summer of 1986. I paused at the transcript of Sarah McKenzie, Andrew’s mom.
I remembered reading these transcripts in 2011, when we reopened the missing persons investigation as a murder case.
I didn’t think I could stomach it again, especially now, the part of the transcript that describes Sarah screaming at God for taking her son. She’d lain on the floor of the interrogation room, facedown, and beat the concrete until her knuckles left brushstrokes of blood against the gray cement. It took three officers to get her out of the room and into the arms of a physician, who promptly sedated her.
The transcript indicated the interview had to be postponed until the following day.
Everything I’ve read says nothing can prepare you for parenthood, but nothing I’ve read yet prepares you for the scale of worry that begins the moment you discover you have life inside you. I felt the panic creeping in then, the quickening of my breath and heartbeat, the prickling of sweat on my skin. I forced myself to sit still and breathe deeply, and think rationally.
What happened to these children was not going to happen to the Peanut.
Brody and I talked, not seriously at first, then very seriously, when I hit the two-month mark in the pregnancy. The Peanut had been an accident; I’d gotten pregnant in between filling my birth control prescription. Kids-as in our kids-were always something on the horizon: when we had more money, more time, more trust, more stability.
It had taken me a long time to make peace with him after his affair with Celeste Takashima. Things were finally getting back to normal.
The bedroom was warm that night.
I had woken sweating and sobbing from a nightmare, a terrible dream in which the Earth was a series of scorched cities, burnt-out remnants of what had once been great societies. Men walked the land in despair: naked, hungry, crying, hateful.
I’d shaken Brody awake and told him I wanted an abortion, that I couldn’t handle bringing a child up in a world that showed as much whimsy in its cruelty as it did in its beauty. He asked me to wait one week, and if after that week I still wanted to terminate the pregnancy, he would support me.
Of course, by the end of the week I’d come to peace with keeping the baby. What else is a child, but hope? Hope for the future, hope for one’s own salvation, hope for a tomorrow that shines as bright and warm as the best yesterday you can remember.
Hope can be a rare thing. I think when you find hope you must embrace it. You must hold it close and you never, ever give up on it.
But I’m not naive and in my line of work, especially, I’ve seen how easily hope can be stolen. Hope can vanish as quickly and as quietly as it appears.
In the other room, my cell buzzed again, drawing me out of the melancholy that had crept over me like a fog. I checked the caller ID then answered.
Finn was agitated. “Jesus, woman, you on the can, or what?”
“Yeah, you want to hear all about it? What’s going on?”
His voice was high, strung-out. “I think you’re right.”
“Coming from you, that’s a first. Right about what?”
“I got a dead crow nailed to my front door, Gemma, with a ticket stuffed in its mouth,” Finn said. He coughed into the phone. “A goddamn ticket, one of those you grab from the dispenser at the deli, you know the kind? The kind that means your number’s up, baby… Did you get any special deliveries?”