Nix spoke to the officers as she recovered from her surgery. Doped on morphine, she claimed memory loss, like Berliner. Her doctors told the officers Nix’s memory loss was most likely from both head trauma and excessive inebriation. Neither Nix nor Berliner remembered if Taer was on the boat with them when it broke apart, and they couldn’t remember how it broke apart in the first place. None of Taer’s clothes were taken from her home; none of her meager savings were removed from her Bank of America account.
Investigators packed the facts into a neat conclusion: after a night of heavy drinking, Berliner, Nix, and Taer stole the boat for a joyride. Because none of them had any experience driving a boat, they steered themselves too far from shore, and then an early morning fog rolled in. Lost, they drifted until rough waves pushed the boat into a rock on the shoreline, then pulled them back into deep water on a breaking boat. All three passengers hit their heads during the collision, and while Nix and Berliner managed to cling to consciousness and a piece of the boat, Taer lost consciousness and drowned. Or perhaps, after the fog rolled in, they passed out in the boat and when the boat collided with a submerged rock, Nix and Berliner were revived by the suddenness of their head trauma and floated, while Taer drowned. Or perhaps, after the collision with the submerged rock, the rough current pulled parts of the broken boat in two directions. While Nix kicked Berliner to shore, Taer floated toward Canada until she became hypothermic, lost consciousness, and sank.
When I spoke with Officers Holt and Burns, they presented these three theories as only a few of many. While the conditions of their stories changed, the conclusion never did: a drunk girl drowned.
Nix and Berliner were charged with the theft of the boat. After a brief negotiation between Berliner’s lawyer and the state prosecutor, Berliner and Nix agreed to perform one hundred hours of community service each to atone for the theft of the property. The felony was then expunged from their records. They were granted this leniency despite Berliner’s prior legal troubles and his close ties with an incarcerated domestic terrorist named Marie-Hélène Kraus.
Three months later, on July 14, 2010, in response to a petition from her immediate family, the state declared Taer legally dead, and the Chicago Tribune published a short news story/obituary:
Possible drowning victim Caitlyn [sic] Taer, 24, was declared dead yesterday. Taer had disappeared after a boating accident on Lake Michigan in late April. Maritime police were unable to recover a body but investigators concluded that she died in the incident. The District Attorney’s office has no current plans to pursue manslaughter or wrongful death charges on behalf of the deceased. Taer is survived by her parents, Natasha Tenanbaum and Andrew Taer. Taer’s friend Regina Nix remembers her as a “passionate person, who never doubted herself.” Private services will be held.
A coffin filled with keepsakes, sandbags, and her favorite records was buried in place of a body.
Compared to Chicago’s other disappearance that year, Taer’s was small potatoes. Taer was actually a footnote* in the larger disappearance of Miranda Young, better known by her stage name, Molly Metropolis.
Four months before Taer’s disastrous boat trip, Molly Metropolis disappeared in Chicago during her Apocalypse Ball tour. She performed to a sold-out crowd on January 8 and was gone before sound check on January 9. As of this writing, she hasn’t yet publicly reemerged. Her disappearance and Taer’s are inextricably linked.
Why begin to write a book about an unfortunate girl who probably drowned and a gone-but-not-forgotten pop star?†
Social associations helped jump-start the process of writing this book; if my partner at the time, David Woodyard, hadn’t written an article about Molly Metropolis and Taer, my reciprocal interest wouldn’t have developed. At the time of Taer’s disappearance,Woodyard wrote for The New Yorker, often focusing on topics at the intersection of popular culture and politics. He noticed that both of the people pulled out of Lake Michigan on the morning of Taer’s disappearance were connected to Molly Metropolis. Nix, the eight-fingered hypothermic, was Molly Metropolis’s former assistant; Berliner had been friends with the pop star since before her rise to fame in 2008. Woodyard conceived of a piece about cultural obsession with mystery stories and disappearing women, critiquing the morbid curiosity in the tenor of the national response to Molly Metropolis’s disappearance, as well as the anemic Chicago-area broadcast news coverage of Taer’s story. The New Yorker wanted to publish the article the same week as the U.S. release of a new novel by Haruki Murakami, whose work frequently features disappearing women. Though in the original concept for his piece, Woodyard planned to use Taer’s disappearance as a persistent metaphor for the dangers of “mystery-mongering,” Woodyard’s final article mentioned Taer only briefly:
In Chicago, over 200 missing persons reports are filed every year. Any number of these disappearances are runaways or murders quickly solved. Very few missing persons are actual disappearances. In Chicago, we are surprised to have two so far this year. The pop star Molly Metropolis disappeared halfway through her concert tour. Then a girl named Caitlin Taer, who was friends with Molly Metropolis’s former personal assistant, vanished a few months later. No one outside of Chicago talks about Taer’s disappearance because no one knew her name before she disappeared, but they still talk about Molly.
There, Woodyard’s investigation into Taer’s disappearance stopped. If he had pushed harder, he might’ve been the one writing this book.
During Woodyard’s relatively brief period writing about Taer and Molly Metropolis’s cases, he noticed that in Nix’s statement to the police, she mentioned Taer had kept journals with detailed notes on her day-to-day life for more than a year before the incident in Lake Michigan. Intrigued, Woodyard attempted to acquire Taer’s journals; he sent requests to the investigating police officers and Taer’s immediate family. Unfortunately, he didn’t receive the journals before his deadline.
A few weeks after Woodyard’s article ran, a small but heavy Fed-Ex box arrived at our door with a polite note from Taer’s mother apologizing for the delay. Inside, we found the journals, neatly stacked. Woodyard no longer had any interest in Taer’s journals but he had always been lazy about getting to the post office, so instead of sending them back immediately, he left the box in the corner of the living room, where they briefly became an unfortunate fixture of our decorating scheme. One evening, succumbing to a mild curiosity, I picked up a journal began to read.
The first entry was dated almost a year before Molly Metropolis (sometimes “Molly,” “Metro,” or “Molly Metro,” to her dearest friends and her closest fans) disappeared. The prose was neither stirring nor poised:
I’m totally disgusted with this carpet, and basically my whole life. I know I’m using the carpet as a metaphor for my whole life, but I can’t help it. It’s so gross. I can’t afford a steam cleaner. Maybe I’ll save up. Charles [Taer’s landlord] won’t do it, but he’s a fucktard. Listening to “New Vogue Riche,” and it’s cheering me up. I could use a dance partner.
Taer’s love for “New Vogue Riche,” a track from Molly Metropolis’s first album Cause Célèbrety (pronounced Cause Celebrity) was nothing compared to her deep affection for Molly’s debut single, “Don’t Stop (N’Arrête Pas).” The verse that introduced Molly Metro to the world and captured Taer’s imagination is as follows: I can’t work during the daytime / Save my en-er-gy for night lights / The dark city is the place for more / Work, work, work the floor.